by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Four decades of heavy tobacco smoke had taken its toll on his throat. When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., heard the “dreadful news,” he immediately wrote him, “I can only dimly imagine how hard these next months will be for you. You have faced more terrible things than most men in this terrible age, and you have provided all of us with an example of moral courage, purpose and discipline.”
Though no longer a chain-smoker, Oppenheimer was still seen puffing on his pipe. In March, he underwent a painful and inconclusive operation on his larynx—and then he began receiving cobalt radiation therapy at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York. He talked quite candidly about his cancer with friends. He told Francis Fergusson that he had a “faint hope that it could be stopped where it was.” By late May, however, all could see that he was “wasting away.”
On a beautiful spring day in 1966, Lilienthal went by Olden Manor and found Anne Marks, Robert’s Los Alamos secretary, visiting the Oppenheimers. Lilienthal was shocked by Robert’s appearance. “For the first time Robert himself is ‘uncertain about the future,’ as he says, so white and— scared.” Walking alone with Kitty around the garden, Lilienthal asked her how he was getting along. Kitty froze, biting her lip; uncharacteristically, she seemed at a loss for words. When Lilienthal bent down and gently kissed her cheek, she uttered a deep moan and began to cry. A moment later, she straightened up, wiped her tears away and suggested they should go back inside and join Anne and Robert. “I have never admired the strength of a woman more,” Lilienthal noted in his diary that evening. “Robert is not only her husband, he is her past, the happy past and the tortured one, and he is her hero and now her great ‘problem.’ ”
In June 1966, Robert accepted an honorary degree at Princeton’s commencement, where he was hailed as a “physicist and sailor, philosopher and horseman, linguist and cook, lover of fine wine and better poetry.” But he appeared exhausted and spent; suffering from a pinched nerve, he couldn’t walk without a cane and a leg brace.
Frail and clearly battered by his illness, Robert nevertheless somehow seemed to grow in stature. Freeman Dyson observed that “his spirit grew stronger as his bodily powers declined. . . . He accepted his fate gracefully; he carried on with his job; he never complained; he became quite suddenly simple and no longer trying to impress anybody.” He had been a man with a talent for self-dramatization, but now, Dyson noticed, “he was simple, straightforward, and indomitably courageous.” At times, Lilienthal noted, Robert seemed “vigorous and almost gay.”
In mid-July, his doctor found no traces of the malignancy in his throat. The radiation treatment had tired him out, but it appeared to have done the job. So on July 20, he and Kitty returned to St. John. Friends on the island who had not seen him in a year thought he looked like a “ghost, an absolute ghost.” He quietly complained that while he wanted to go swimming, the always warm waters around St. John now made him feel cold. Instead he managed some walks along the beach and was courteous and patient with everyone whom he met—even strangers. Learning that Sis Frank’s husband, Carl, was recuperating from a serious heart operation, Robert went to visit him. “Robert was so kind to him,” recalled Sis, “trying to get him over this terrible trauma.”
Robert was on a liquid diet at that point, supplemented with protein powder. He told Sis Frank, “You don’t know what I would give you if I could have that chicken salad sandwich.” Invited to dinner at Immu and Inga Hiilivirta’s new home, Robert couldn’t eat the lamb chops and managed to get down only a glass of milk. “I felt very sorry for him,” Inga said.
After nearly five weeks, he and Kitty returned to Princeton in late August. Robert felt better. He still had a sore throat, but he thought himself stronger. His doctors again examined his throat and found no trace of cancer. “They were, in fact, convinced that I was cured,” Oppenheimer wrote one friend. After only five days back in Princeton, he flew out to Berkeley and spent a week seeing old friends. Upon his return in September, he complained to his doctors of continued soreness, “but they were not very thorough and attributed my discomfort to radiation. . . .”
Early that autumn, the Oppenheimers had to move out of their beloved Olden Manor to make way for the Institute’s new director, Carl Kaysen. Temporarily, Robert and Kitty decided to move into a house at 284 Mercer Road formerly occupied by the physicist C. N. Yang. Unoccupied for some years, it was a rather dreary place. Their neighbors were Freeman and Imme Dyson. The Dysons’ young son, George, recalled growing up on the grounds of the Institute during the years of Oppenheimer’s directorship: “He [Oppenheimer] was a very, very strong presence—a benevolent but mysterious ruler of the world in which we lived.” But when Oppenheimer moved next door, “To us children he seemed like a ghost, deprived of his kingdom, pacing around the yard next door, very pale and thin.”
Robert didn’t see his doctor again until October 3. “By then,” Oppenheimer wrote “Nico” Nabokov, his friend from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “the cancer was very manifest and had spread into the palate, the base of the tongue, and the left Eustachian tube.” It was not operable, and so his doctors prescribed thrice-weekly radiation treatments, this time with a betatron: “Everybody knows that reradiation with a still ulcerated throat is no great joy. It is not bad yet, but I cannot be very sure of the future.”
He faced the prospect of an early death with resignation. In mid-October, Lilienthal dropped by and learned the news. Robert’s once brilliant blue eyes now seemed bleary with pain. “The last mile for Robert Oppenheimer,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary afterwards, “and it may be a very short one. . . . Kitty had all she could do to suppress the tears.” In November, Robert wrote a friend, “I am much less able to speak and eat now.” He had hoped to visit Paris in December, but his doctors insisted they wanted to continue with regular radiation treatments until Christmas. Instead, he stayed at home, seeing such old friends as Francis Fergusson and Lilienthal. Early in December, Frank visited from Colorado.
In early December 1966, Oppenheimer heard from his former student, David Bohm, who had spent most of his career in Brazil and later, England. Bohm wrote to say that he had seen the Kipphardt play and a television program on Los Alamos in which Oppenheimer had been interviewed. “I was rather disturbed,” Bohm wrote, “especially by a statement you made, indicating a feeling of guilt on your part. I feel it to be a waste of the life that is left to you for you to be caught up in such guilt feelings.” He then reminded Oppenheimer of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre “in which the hero is finally freed of guilt by recognizing responsibility. As I understand it, one feels guilty for past actions, because they grew out of what one was and still is.” Bohm believed that mere guilt feelings are meaningless. “I can understand that your dilemma was a peculiarly difficult one. Only you can assess the way in which you were responsible for what happened. . . .”
Oppenheimer replied promptly: “The play and such things have been rattling around for a long time. What I have never done is to express regret for doing what I did and could at Los Alamos; in fact, on varied and recurrent occasions, I have reaffirmed my sense that, with all the black and white, that was something I did not regret.” And then, in words he edited out before mailing the letter, he wrote, “My principal remaining disgust with Kipphardt’s text is the long and totally improvised final speech I am supposed to have made, which indeed affirms such regret. My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me.”
Oppenheimer may well have had this exchange with Bohm in mind when Thomas B. Morgan—a Look magazine journalist—dropped by to interview him at his Institute office in early December. Morgan found him gazing at the autumn woods and the pond outside his window. On the wall of his office there now hung an old photograph of Kitty jumping her horse gracefully over a fence. Morgan could see that he was dying. “He was very frail and no longer the lean, lank man who impressed you as a cowboy genius. There were deep lines in
his face. His hair was hardly more than a white mist. And yet, he prevailed with that grace.” As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word “responsibility”— and when Morgan suggested he was using the word in an almost religious sense, Oppenheimer agreed it was a “secular device for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word ‘ethical’ here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before—although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now, I don’t know how to describe my life without using some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do. . . . There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself—but increased knowledge, increased wealth, leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable.”
After this soliloquy, Morgan wrote, “Oppenheimer then turned his palms up, the long, slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘neither of us is rich. But as far as responsibility goes, we are both in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.”
This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica: that “indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.” Far from being indifferent, Robert was acutely aware of the suffering he had caused others in his life—and yet he would not allow himself to succumb to guilt. He would accept responsibility; he had never tried to deny his responsibility. But since the security hearing, he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the “cruelty” of indifference. In that sense, Rabi had been right: “They achieved their goal. They killed him.”
On January 6, 1967, Robert’s doctor told him that the radiation therapy was proving ineffective against his cancer. The next day, he and Kitty had some friends over for lunch, including Lilienthal. They served a very expensive goose liver, and Kitty acted like a perfect hostess. But as Lilienthal was leaving, Robert helped him with his coat and confided, “I don’t feel very gay; the doctor gave us bad news yesterday.” Kitty then walked Lilienthal outside the house and suddenly broke down into sobs. “Impending death is no new story,” Lilienthal recorded that evening, “but this is one that seems so wasteful and cruel. But Robert, in my presence at least, looks at it with those eyes of the doomed, that seem to look inward, rigid, caught up in the final reality.”
On January 10 he wrote Sir James Chadwick, a friend from the Los Alamos years, to acknowledge that he was “battling a cancerous throat . . . with only indifferent success.” He added, “It reminds me of the virulent strictures of Ehrenfest on the evils of smoking. We did live in a lucky time, didn’t we, to have even our critics so full of love and light?”
One day late that January, Robert called in his secretary of fourteen years, Verna Hobson, and gently encouraged her to leave Princeton. Hobson had intended to retire when he stepped down as director. But she had delayed, knowing that he was sick and that Kitty was still very dependent on her. “I knew what he was saying was that he was dying soon,” said Hobson, “and that if I didn’t go then, it would be so difficult for me to leave Kitty that I’d never make it.”
By mid-February 1967, Robert knew the end was near. “I am in some pain . . . my hearing and my speech are very poor,” he wrote a friend. His doctors had decided he couldn’t take any more radiation, so they ordered a strong regimen of chemotherapy. But he remained at home, and sent word to a few friends that he would welcome a visit. Nico Nabokov came by the house repeatedly and urged other friends to visit Robert.
On Wednesday, February 15, Robert made a supreme effort to attend a committee meeting at the Institute to select the candidates for the following year’s visiting fellows. It was the last time Freeman Dyson saw him. But like everyone else, Oppenheimer had done his homework, reading through scores of applications. “He could speak only with great difficulty,” Dyson later wrote, but he nevertheless “remembered accurately the weak or strong points of the various candidates. The last words I heard him say were, ‘We should say yes to Weinstein. He is good.’ ”
The next day, Louis Fischer dropped by. In recent years, Fischer and Oppenheimer had become casual, respectful friends. An acclaimed, globe-trotting journalist, Fischer was the author of more than two dozen books— including such popular volumes as The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) and The Life and Death of Stalin (1953). Robert particularly liked his 1964 biography of Lenin. Kitty had encouraged Fischer to bring along some chapters from his current book project to divert Robert.
But when Fischer rang the doorbell, he waited in silence for several minutes—and, giving up, started to walk away when he heard knocking on an upstairs window. Looking up, he saw Robert motioning for him to return. A moment later, Robert opened the front door. He had lost much of his hearing and so hadn’t heard the ringing doorbell. Robert tried awkwardly to help Fischer out of his coat, and then the two friends sat down on opposite sides of a bare table. Fischer remarked that he had recently talked with Toni, who was using her Russian-language skills to do some research for George Kennan. When Robert tried to talk, “he mumbled so badly that I suppose I understood about one word out of five.” But he managed to convey that Kitty was napping—she had been sleeping badly at night—and no one else was in the house.
When Fischer handed Robert two chapters of his manuscript, he began reading a few pages and asked a question about Fischer’s source material. “From Berlin?” he said. Fischer pointed to a footnote on the page. “He gave me a very sweet smile at this point,” Fischer later wrote. “He looked extremely thin, his hair was sparse and white, and his lips were dry and cracked. As he read, and at other times too, he kept moving his lips as if to speak but did not speak, and, probably realizing that this made a bad impression, he held his bony hand in front of his mouth; his fingernails were blue.”
After some twenty minutes, Fischer thought it time for him to leave. On his way out, he spotted a packet of cigarettes lying on the second step of the stairs leading to the second floor. Three cigarettes had fallen out of the pack and were lying on the carpet nearby, so Fischer reached down to put them back in the pack. When he stood up, Robert was by his side; reaching into his pocket, he brought out a lighter and lit it. He knew Fischer didn’t smoke and was on his way out of the house, but the gesture was instinctive. He had always been the first to light a guest’s cigarette. “I have a strong impression,” Fischer wrote a few days later, “that he knew his mind was failing and that he probably wanted to die.” After insisting on helping Fischer with his coat, Robert opened the door and said with a thick tongue, “Come again.”
Francis Fergusson dropped by the house on Friday, February 17. He could see that Robert was pretty far gone. He could still walk, but he now weighed under a hundred pounds. They sat together in the dining room, but after a short time, Fergusson thought Robert looked so feeble that he ought to take his leave. “I walked him into his bedroom, and there I left him. And the next day I heard that he had died.”
Robert died in his sleep at 10:40 p.m. on Saturday, February 18, 1967. He was only sixty-two years old. Kitty later confided to a friend, “His death was pitiful. He turned into a child first, then an infant. He made noises. I couldn’t go into the room; I had to go into the room, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Two days later his remains were cremated.
LEWIS STRAUSS sent Kitty a cable, claiming that he was “grieved at the news of Robert’s death. . . .” Newspapers at home and abroad published long, admiring obituaries. The Times of London described him as the quintessential “Renaissance man.” David Lilienthal told the New York Times: “The world has lost a noble spirit—a genius who brought together poetry and science.” Edward Teller had less fulsome
remarks: “I like to remember that he did a magnificent job and a very necessary job . . . in organizing [the Los Alamos Laboratory].” In Moscow, the Soviet news agency Tass reported the death of an “outstanding American physicist.” The New Yorker remembered him as “a man of exceptional physical elegance and grace, an aristocrat with an enduring touch of the intellectual bohemian about him.” Senator Fulbright gave a speech on the floor of the Senate, and said of the late physicist, “Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him.”
After the memorial service in Princeton on February 25, 1967, Oppenheimer was memorialized once again in the spring at a special session of the American Physical Society in Washington. Isidor Rabi, Bob Serber, Victor Weisskopf and several others spoke. Rabi later wrote an introduction for the speeches, which were subsequently collected and published in book form. “In Oppenheimer,” he wrote, “the element of earthiness was feeble. Yet it was essentially this spiritual quality, this refinement as expressed in speech and manner, that was the basis of his charisma. He never expressed himself completely. He always left a feeling that there were depths of sensibility and insight not yet revealed.”
KITTY TOOK her husband’s ashes in an urn to Hawksnest Bay, and then, on a stormy, rainy afternoon, she, Toni and two St. John friends, John Green and his mother-in-law, Irva Clair Denham, motored out toward Carval Rock, a tiny island in sight of the beach house. When they got to a point in between Carval Rock, Congo Cay and Lovango Cay, John Green cut the motor. They were in seventy feet of water. No one spoke, and instead of scattering Robert’s ashes into the sea, Kitty simply dropped the urn overboard. It didn’t sink instantly, so they circled the boat around the bobbing urn and watched silently until it finally disappeared below the choppy sea. Kitty explained that she and Robert had discussed it, and “That’s where he wanted to be.”
