109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  There was an almost constant round of parties as Oppenheimer threw himself into courting the very best men for the Los Alamos laboratory. It was not an easy task, and Oppie chased all around the country wooing potential staff members. By late 1942, unemployed physicists were hard to find. Ernest Lawrence had already raided the universities and recruited the cream of the crop for the secret Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) at MIT. Oppenheimer knew if he were too aggressive in luring away the Rad Labs supply of talent, he would raise the hackles of his old friend and ally. On the other hand, now that he was focusing on the technical difficulties of actually engineering an atomic weapon, it was becoming increasingly clear that he would need a “very large number of men of the first rank.”

  On November 30, 1942, Oppenheimer sent a detailed report to Conant, who was already familiar with Los Alamos, having once considered sending his youngest son to the elite preparatory school, which was known for taking sickly city boys and toughening them up with a strenuous regimen of academics and outdoor activity. Oppenheimer caught Conant up on the latest developments at the Met Lab and then launched into the main purpose of his letter, namely, the recruitment of his key staff. It was a tricky area, and he confessed he felt himself “on less secure ground.” At the same time, he warned Conant that he could not afford to proceed too cautiously: “The job we have to do will not be possible without personnel substantially greater than that which we now have available.”

  Conant promised his support and said he would look into getting some top people released from the MIT Rad Lab. Observing Conant’s skillful behind-the-scenes politicking, Oppenheimer realized he had much to learn about maneuvering within the treacherous Washington political and military establishments, and that the shrewd, businesslike Harvard president would be an ideal mentor. “Oppenheimer saw this faculty of Conant and wanted to learn from it,” said John Manley, who watched their relationship develop into one of mutual fondness and trust. “[Oppie] relied on him a great deal.”

  Bolstered by Conant’s assurances and advice, Oppie flew to Cambridge and succeeded in convincing Hans Bethe, and his wife, Rose, to come out west with him. Securing the participation of Bethe was a coup. Not only was the thirty-six-year-old Bethe an exceptionally gifted theorist, but since moving to the United States in 1935 and joining the faculty of Cornell University, he had earned a reputation as a singularly energetic, confident, and productive scientist. A bull of a man, with an affable manner and a booming laugh, he was married to the lovely daughter of a famous German physicist, Peter Paul Ewald, who like Bethe had left Nazi Germany when the climate became threatening to those with Jewish ancestry. Bethe was as close to being a natural leader as anyone in the field and was well liked and respected by both his colleagues and competitors—all of which made him invaluable to Oppenheimer’s cause.

  While in Cambridge, Oppenheimer had also hoped to recruit I. I. Rabi and even offered him associate directorship of the laboratory. In those early months, however, Rabi believed the project’s overall odds for success were fifty-fifty at best. “I thought we could lose the war because of the lack of radar,” he wrote later, explaining why he felt he could not leave the MIT Rad Lab. “As far as the fission bomb was concerned, it was very iffy.” His wife, Helen, had also made it clear she did not want to go, telling him, “That’s no place to raise children.” The Rabis were not alone in their reluctance to become involved in building a bomb. According to Robert Bacher, whom Rabi eventually sent in his place, “People at the Radiation Laboratory thought that this was just absolutely crazy to take people off radar and put them on this fool’s project out there.”

  Oppenheimer was painfully aware of the skepticism with which a great many physicists regarded the bomb project. “There was a great fear that this was a boondoggle, which would in fact have nothing to do with the war,” he admitted later.

  As a consequence, Oppenheimer felt he badly needed Rabi on his side and attempted to persuade him again. Failing that, he called on Rabi often for his help and counsel during the formative stages of the project. Of all the various matters that had to be settled that winter, perhaps none was more important, or more controversial, than the proposed “militarization” of the laboratory. Oppenheimer had been so eager for the top job that he had readily agreed to Groves’ demand that the laboratory be run as a military installation, with the scientists all outfitted in army green and assigned rank. From the laboratory’s opening day on, Oppenheimer would be a lieutenant colonel. He had already ordered his uniforms. “I would have been glad to be an officer,” Oppie said later. “I though maybe the others would.” But Rabi was appalled at the prospect of scientists becoming commissioned officers in the army, and after talking it over with three other Rad Lab recruits—Bob Bacher, Ed McMillan, and Luis Alvarez—he was convinced the plan would not work. He was adamantly opposed to the whole idea. If Oppie went along with Groves’ plan, Rabi told him in no uncertain terms, “none of [them] would come.”

  Caught between Groves’ orders and Rabi’s refusal, Oppenheimer wrote Conant on February 1, 1943, that he feared he was facing insurrection from the best scientists if he did not meet their “indispensable conditions for the success of the project.” After summarizing their demands in detail, Oppenheimer worriedly told Conant that he was uncertain how Groves would respond to the scientists’ ultimatum that the project be demilitarized. “I believe that he realizes the seriousness of these requests, but I am not sure that he feels that they can be met.” But by the end of the letter, Oppenheimer mustered his confidence and argued firmly and eloquently that their services were needed too urgently to risk losing them, and ignoring their concerns would certainly result in further problems and delays:

  At the present time I believe the solidarity of physicists is such that if these conditions are not met, we shall not only fail to have the men from MIT with us, but that many men who have already planned to join the new Laboratory will reconsider their commitments or come with such misgivings as to reduce their usefulness. I therefore regard the fulfillment of these conditions as necessary if we are to carry on the work with anything like the speed that is required.

  Conant was not entirely persuaded, as he had served as a chemical officer in World War I and regarded enlisting in the army as a mere formality. But at Oppenheimer’s insistence, he helped negotiate a compromise with Groves to leave the laboratory under civilian administration during the early experimental stages of the work. The military was to assume control at a later, more dangerous stage, at which point the scientists would become commissioned officers (a transition that ultimately was deemed unwise and never came to pass). This setup was formally communicated to Oppenheimer in a letter of February 25, 1943, from Conant and Groves. To help Oppenheimer with his recruiting, the letter was written in such a way as to assure scientists that there would be no military censorship of information. It stipulated that not only would Los Alamos researchers be exempt from the usual wartime restrictions that prevented them from learning what was going on at other laboratories, but Conant would serve as Groves’ technical advisor and liaison: “Through Dr. Conant complete access to the scientific world is guaranteed.”

  With the crisis thus defused, Oppenheimer wrote to Rabi the next day, this time asking him to compromise and come out to Los Alamos only for the opening session in April. Clearly cognizant of the extent of Rabi’s doubts, about both his leadership and the project, Oppenheimer makes, in his letter of February 26, an abject appeal for help. Admitting that he did not know if the arrangements outlined in the Groves-Conant letter would work, Oppenheimer asserted that he was going to make a “faithful effort” to go forward with the project, as he did not feel the Nazis allowed him any other option:

  I think if I believed with you that this project was “the culmination of three centuries of physics,” I should take a different stand. To me it is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence. I know that you have good personal reasons for not wanting to jo
in the project, and I am not asking you to do so. Like Toscanini’s violinist, you do not like music.

  Since he could not win him over, Oppenheimer continued, he was asking for only two things, “within the limits set by [Rabi’s] own conscience”—first, that Rabi agree to give the project “the benefit of [his] advice at a critical time” and, second, that as he exercised a great deal of influence over Bethe and Bacher, he “use that influence to persuade them to come rather than to stay away.” The last line of the letter reveals just how unsure he was of Rabi’s support: “I am sending a copy of this letter to Dr. Conant and General Groves to keep the record straight.” In the end, Rabi acquiesced to Oppenheimer’s requests. He agreed to participate in the opening physics conference at Los Alamos and saw to it that the Rad Lab sent a half dozen of its most productive physicists out west to work on the project, including Bethe, Bacher, Alvarez, Kenneth Bainbridge, and Norman Ramsey.

  Throughout those rushed months of planning, Rabi and Bethe, among the wiser, more experienced hands, worked on Oppenheimer, urging him to convert his abstract thoughts about the project into a workable plan on paper. Without Rabi’s practical advice, Bethe said, “It would have been a mess”:

  Oppie did not want to have an organization. Rabi and [Lee] DuBridge [head of the physics department at the University of Rochester] came to Oppie and said, “You have to have an organization. The laboratory has to be organized in divisions and the divisions into groups. Otherwise nothing will ever come of it.” And, Oppie, well, that was all new to him.

  Rose Bethe, whom Oppie asked to run the housing office at the new installation, probably had a better idea than most about what they were getting themselves into, having already toured that part of New Mexico and having received in late December a long letter from Oppie addressing some of her questions about the living conditions. His warmth and concern were touching, but his rough sketch of their hypothetical mountain hideaway, which read in places like something out of Boy’s Life, was hardly reassuring, nor was his airy promise to keep her list of questions “as a reminder of what we shall have to do”:

  There will be a sort of city manager. … There will also be a city engineer and together they will take care of the problems outlined by you. We hope to persuade one of the teachers at the school to stay on to be our professional teacher. It is true that both Kay Manley and Elsie McMillan are professional school teachers and there will no doubt be others, but it seems to me very unlikely that anyone with a very young child will be able to devote very much time to the community. There will be two hospitals, one in town and one in the M.P. camp….

  Room is being provided for a laundry; each house will have its washtub; and we shall be able to send laundry to Santa Fe regularly. It may be necessary for us to provide the equipment for the group laundry since this is now frozen, but this is a point that is not yet settled.

  We plan to have two eating places. There will be a regular mess for unmarried people which will be, when we are running at full capacity, just large enough to take care of these. The Army will take care of the help for this and I do not know whether the personnel will be Army or civilian. We will also arrange to have a café where married people can eat out. This will probably be able to handle about twenty people at a time and will be a little fancy, and may be by appointment only. We are trying to persuade one of the natives to do this and we have a good building for it.

  There will be a recreation officer who will make it his business to see that such things as libraries, pack trips, movies, and so on are taken care of…. The store will be a so-called Post-Exchange which is a combination of country store and mail order house. That is, there will be stocks on hand and the Exchange will be able to order for us what they do not carry. There will be a vet to inspect the meat and barbers and such like. There will also be a cantina where we can have beer and Cokes and light lunches….

  Oppenheimer concluded by saying that he was “a little reluctant to do too much writing about the details of our life there until people are actually on the job.” He added that he had done his best to provide some rudimentary information in the enclosed sheet and that she should let him know “if any of the arrangements that we have made so far are definitely unsatisfactory.”

  All that winter, Oppenheimer’s home at One Eagle Hill Road, just north of Berkeley, became the project’s informal headquarters, where he and Kitty played host to a steady stream of visiting scientists. Their house was a handsome, Spanish-style ranch, perched on a steep incline high above the city, with lush gardens and a sweeping view of San Francisco Bay below. The home was expensive and tasteful, decorated with fine oriental rugs and art, and bespoke a lifestyle few academics could afford. Oppenheimer might have calculated that this would play to his advantage, making him appear to be more of a strong, established leader as he surged ahead in his new role as Los Alamos’s director. Serber, who had moved back to Berkeley with his wife, Charlotte, to help with the bomb project, had taken up temporary residence in Oppenheimer’s garage apartment, and so after office hours, Eagle Hill became the place to gather. Much of the early planning for the new laboratory was done there over Oppie’s superb “Vodkatinis,” which were expertly prepared and generously distributed.

  Standing in front of the fireplace, jabbing at the air with his large pipe to emphasize a point, Oppie would expound on his plan to have about thirty physicists go off together to the desert to build the bomb. According to his utopian vision, most of the support jobs, such as the secretarial and administrative positions, would be filled by the scientists’ wives, to keep outsiders to a minimum and assure security. “We shall all be one large family doing vital work within the wire,” he assured them, sounding uncomfortably like the army propaganda films running in the local movie houses. Greene recalled late nights and long, rambling conversations between Oppie and Serber about whom he should invite to join the team, which physicists were talented and resourceful enough to tackle the obstacles ahead, and whose intellectual powers might have a catalytic effect on the less qualified. Oppie might as well have been Noah lining up exotic creatures for his ark. When Charlotte Serber overheard them making plans one night, she told them, “You aren’t really serious? You fellows don’t think you’re going to run a project like this, you must be out of your minds!”

  Back in Washington, Groves’ bright young assistant, Anne Wilson, asked him to tell her what the newly appointed director of Los Alamos was really like as a person. Groves’ office was run with steely efficiency by his administrative assistant, Mrs. Jean O’Leary, but Wilson’s desk was just outside the door to Groves’ office, and as Anne was very good-looking, Oppenheimer had often stopped to chat her up. She found him fascinating. His reputation as a dashing and urbane ladies’ man was already legend within the War Department, but she wanted to hear Groves’ blunt appraisal. They were traveling to work together that morning as usual, and as was his custom, the general drove while she read the papers aloud to him. He always insisted on beginning with “Mary Haworth’s Mail,” the Washington Post’s high-class advice-for-the-lovelorn column, followed by the sports pages, so that they did not get to the front page until they were practically pulling up to the office. Wilson knew her question was a little impertinent, and had Groves decided to ignore it completely, she would not have been surprised. At the same time, theirs was not the usual secretary and boss relationship: her father was an admiral, and she had grown up around the corner from Groves in Cleveland Park, in D.C., and she often played tennis with him at the Army-Navy Country Club. Groves was used to her boldness, and he teased her about it incessantly. He drove in silence for a few minutes, and when he finally answered, Wilson was so taken aback by what he said she never forgot it. “He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,” Groves told her. “He looks right through you. I feel like he can read my mind.”

  No matter what one person saw in Oppenheimer, another would assert the opposite was true. But that he possessed a certain brilliance, and a signal capacity for lea
dership, few would deny. Almost no one was neutral about him. “Oppenheimer was a very clever politician,” said Teller grudgingly. “He understood people. He essentially knew how to influence them.” He may have been the consummate actor, as his critics contend, questing after power, and calculatingly turning to Groves a face he knew the general would favor. Or he may have had so many masks that he lost track of his true self somewhere along the way. But for all of his intellect and ambition, he could be maddeningly obtuse at times, even careless, as if somehow unaware that the same rules applied to him as to everyone else. It may simply have been that the Manhattan Project was too big an adventure for Oppenheimer not to take part in, no matter his qualms or private misgivings. He had always hankered after a certain kind of authenticity, a defining experience. He had to be “near the center” of things; that very impulse, he once admitted to a friend, which had originally moved him to leave chemistry and Harvard for Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, mecca for bright young physicists.

  Pressed into service, Oppenheimer rose to the challenge. Eloquent, inspiring, and elusive, perhaps deliberately so, he became the pied piper of Los Alamos. By the end of 1942, he had passionately embraced the bomb project as a means of ending the war, and was using all his wiles and powers of persuasion to entice the most important physicists in the world to leave their jobs, uproot their families, and join him on that lofty mesa in New Mexico. “Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking,” he later wrote of the hundreds who followed him into the desert: