Almost everyone knew if it were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be a part of history. The sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed. Most of those with whom I talked came to Los Alamos.
FOUR
Cowboy Boots and All
WHEN DOROTHY MCKIBBIN reported to work at 109 East Palace Avenue on March 27, 1943, the morning after the meeting in the lobby of La Fonda, she found Robert Oppenheimer waiting for her on the other side of a shabby screen door. He was as polite and disarmingly solicitous as he had been that first day, but his face was pale beneath the sunburn, and on close inspection, he appeared tense and drawn. She had sensed from the beginning that this was going to be no ordinary job, but that impression was powerfully reinforced by the presence of two Spanish Americans standing guard by the door armed with rifles. From his few comments, it was also clear that Oppenheimer already knew all about her, which was why he had been able to hire her so casually on the spot, without any question or hesitation. Much later, she realized that he had probably already reviewed a full security dossier on her and had strolled across the lobby for the express purpose of looking her over.
The ground-floor offices, which Joe Stevenson had leased the previous week, were housed in a venerable adobe building one block north of La Fonda, in one of the most ancient sections of the old city. The faded blue portal and three-foot-thick walls dated back to at least the late 1600s, when the property was deeded to a Spanish conquistador, Captain Don Diego Arias de Quiros, as a reward for his part in the conquest, and reconquest, of New Mexico. The residence was built to be a fortress, with the stables behind it and a walled garden running nearly two blocks long. There was once a secret subterranean passage that had led to the Governor’s Palace. Legend had it that the scalps of Indians had once hung on the weathered vigas outside, proudly displayed by the Spanish settlers who paid a bounty for every head. Nevertheless, Dorothy suspected the office was selected less for its historic value than for its location. While it was just steps away from the main Plaza, the building was somewhat inconspicuous, set back behind a long, narrow courtyard and a shaded grass patio. A heavy, wrought-iron gate at the entrance of the cobblestone passageway discouraged the curious from wandering in. For security reasons, the project’s presence was unobtrusively marked by a small blue sign with red lettering:
U.S. ENG-
RS
The wooden placard was so short that the abbreviated form of “Engineers” had apparently not fit on the first line, so the remaining “rs” rather incongruously occupied the line below. If obfuscation was the army’s main purpose, Dorothy thought the sign succeeded admirably—she had almost walked right by it. In the coming months, she was often reminded of her first impression of the secret headquarters, as dozens of the worlds top scientists failed to notice the tiny sign and passed by the centuries-old courtyard without stopping, blundering around the Plaza for hours in search of the designated contact point where they were to receive their marching orders.
Oppenheimer and his wife had arrived by train on March 15 and were staying temporarily at La Fonda. Priscilla Greene had followed a few days later, accompanied by the Oppenheimers’ two-year-old son, Peter, and his nurse. A few other members of his team were also in town, staying at La Fonda or spread among several small area inns. They had been working around the clock to get the project off the ground, but were shorthanded and needed all the help they could get. A quick glance at the chaotic state of their surroundings confirmed as much. The old adobe walls had been freshly whitewashed, the calcimine so new it came off on people’s coats. The rooms were sparsely furnished with an odd assortment of tables and kitchen chairs and piled high with oversized crates and partially unpacked boxes. The whole place resembled the luggage storeroom of a large train station more than an official U.S. government office.
There were five rooms in all, with Dorothy soon installed east of the gate, next to Joe Stevenson, in a cramped space designated as the “housing office.” Duane Muncy, the director of the business office, was set up on the west side of the patio. Also on the west side were the lawyer’s office and that of the procurement manager, Dana Mitchell, whose services, Dorothy would soon learn, were of the utmost importance to the project. Mitchell was revered for his stores and stocks of equipment, without which the scientists could not work, and his almost magical ability to find and obtain obscure and scarce supplies. The two rooms on the north were occupied by Priscilla Greene, in the small outer office, and Oppenheimer, in the larger back room. Oppenheimer’s office had double French doors that led back to a walled garden. When the personnel manager, Edward U. Condon, and his assistant, Mrs. Isabel Bemis, arrived from Berkeley, they were squeezed into the last few feet of space on the rectangle.
All the offices were overcrowded. This was an old adobe, after all, and Dorothy knew the diminutive scale of the rooms was by design because the only source of heat came from the small corner fireplaces. Oppenheimer and company had wedged the maximum number of desks into each room, so they sat elbow to elbow, literally. When the office was really going, it was impossible to hear oneself think, but Dorothy was assured that it would only be a few weeks before they moved into their permanent quarters. They had only two typewriters between them, a small portable Corona that Greene had brought from Berkeley and a somewhat sturdier machine that Stevenson had purchased at Santa Fe Book, the last one the store had in stock. More had been requisitioned, but in the meantime they would have to make do. For the first few days, Dorothy could not make out exactly what she was supposed to be doing. “There was no agenda,” she recalled. “No one knew what was to be done or how to go about doing it.” She asked Joe Stevenson for directions, and his answer was quick and direct: “Your instructions are never to ask for a name to be repeated, and never to ask a question.” The scientists alone knew the exact purpose of the project. The less said about it, the better. At the end of the first week, Stevenson paid Dorothy out of petty cash. As soon as all the paperwork was put through, he told her, she would become an employee of the University of California, which was administering the project. That arrangement enabled the project to issue contracts and pay salaries without ever revealing the exact nature of the undertaking.
Dorothy’s job, as it evolved, was to be Oppenheimer’s assistant in Santa Fe and operate the small, benign-looking “housing office,” which was actually a front for a classified laboratory under construction on a sparsely populated mountaintop thirty-five miles outside of town. She was to meet the arriving scientists recruited to work on the project and brief them on the details of their mysterious final destination, which would not have been disclosed to them when they were issued their travel orders to Santa Fe. Most importantly, using one of two pass machines that would be kept under lock and key in her office, she was to supply them with security passes, without which they would be turned back at the first guard station. Until the pass machines arrived, however, she would have to supply everyone with typewritten letters issued on heavy-bond University of California stationery, complete with three onionskin carbons, each personally signed by Oppenheimer. Last but not least, she was to give them directions and arrange for their safe passage up to “the Hill,” the office shorthand for the top-secret installation at Los Alamos.
It was not the first time Dorothy had heard the name Los Alamos. Like Oppenheimer, she was no stranger to that high mesa. Over the years, she had been up the mountain a number of times, though she had difficulty imagining the boarding school with its scattering of rustic buildings as the site of an advanced scientific laboratory. She was great friends with Peggy Pond Church, a fellow Smith alum and well-known Santa Fe writer, who was the daughter of the school’s founder and was married to Fermor S. Church, a Harvard graduate who w
as a former headmaster. The Ranch School had been the dream of her friend’s father, Ashley Pond, an idealistic businessman who had established the school in 1917 as a place where affluent city boys could “learn by doing” and receive a rugged, outdoor-oriented education that would teach them to ride horses, hunt, and fend for themselves in the wilderness in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt’s ideal of the vigorous life.
Pond had grown up in Detroit, Michigan, and had been afflicted throughout his school years by chronic bronchial infections that had disrupted his education and exacted a toll in poor marks and failure. As the only surviving son of an accomplished man, Church wrote that Pond “carried the burden of his father’s disappointment through his boyhood.” After contracting an almost fatal case of typhoid during the Spanish-American War, he was sent out west to regain his health. While in New Mexico, he became an active outdoorsman and was inspired by the wild, beautiful countryside to use his inheritance to create a school dedicated to the mental and physical well-being of boys. After a failed first attempt, he finally managed to raise the capital to acquire a distant settlement situated on the Pajarito (“little bird”) Plateau, at the edge of a pine forest. At the time, it consisted of little more than a homesteader’s farmhouse, some four hundred acres of pasture, and a large watering hole used for cattle, which was later named “Ashley Pond” in honor of the school’s founder. In the “Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report of the Harvard College Class of 1921,” Fermor Church wrote: “The unique features of Los Alamos School were those which were indigenous—its program and its spirit stemmed from its surroundings. No circumscribed artificial campus life could develop here before the beckoning attraction of forest, stream, canyon, mesa, and mountain peak—with horse at hand. And amid the ruined cities of early pueblo and cliff-dweller we felt we knew that the thing men live for never dies.”
By the summer of 1932, when Dorothy and her son first went up to Los Alamos for a two-week holiday with Peggy Pond Church and her family, the school was a thriving community, with an enrollment of forty students. Staff members, their families, and ranch employees accounted for another hundred or more people living on the plateau. It could not have been a more picturesque setting, framed by the hazy purple cardboardlike mountains in the distance and, in the foreground, the brimming pond and massive main school building, the Big House, rising impressively from the carefully tended green lawns and tennis courts. Across the way, the handsome, three-story Fuller Lodge, designed by Dorothy’s old friend John Gaw Meem in 1928, had been constructed from eight hundred handpicked ponderosa pines, with massive vertical logs forming the columns for the stately balcony that flanked two sides of the building. The lodge’s large dining hall boasted a nineteen-foot-high beamed ceiling and wrought-iron chandeliers, and gazing down from above the enormous stone fireplace was the mounted head of a New Mexico elk. The only other landmarks were the tall, wooden water tower and the Trading Post, a Western-style building, made of rough, stained lumber, that served as the local store and carried canned goods and other staples, in addition to school supplies, lanterns, blankets, hardware, sacks of feed—almost everything the self-sufficient little community required. The school grounds also included a stable for horses, corrals, grazing fields, and, stretching eastward across the mesa as far as the eye could see, hundreds of acres of growing crops, including alfalfa, barley, corn, oats, and beans. At one end, just north of an old Indian ruin and near the edge of the canyon, was a row of faculty residences with the forest at their back door.
Dorothy had been saddened to hear that the school had been closed by order of the War Department and that its buildings and the surrounding public land, 54,000 acres in all, had been cordoned off by miles of steel fence and barbed wire as a military reservation. She remembered her visits there fondly, and the cheerful sight of the young boys in their khaki uniforms, jaunty bandannas, and Dakota Stetsons. They looked brawny and browned by the sun, and she knew from firsthand experience the heartening effects of sleeping outside year-round on screened porches, as they did in the Big House, with only those striped awnings to protect them from the rain that poured in through the open windows. She realized that all this would end now and that Peggy Pond Church, along with all the other ranch families, would have to surrender her home and abandon the mesa where she had lived for the better part of her life.
She later learned that on December 7, 1942, exactly one year after Pearl Harbor, the school had received a letter from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that was in effect a blunt notice of eviction. A. J. Connell, the school’s director, had read it aloud at a special meeting at the Big House: “You are advised that it has been determined necessary to the interests of the United States in the prosecution of the War that the property of Los Alamos Ranch School be acquired for military purposes.” They were further asked “to refrain from making the reasons for the closing of the school known to the public at large.” Even so, most of the heartbroken students promptly told their parents the school would be used as a military reservation and demolition range. The Christmas holidays that year had been canceled, and the boys had to cram the full year’s course of study into the remaining weeks, so that the last four graduates could be awarded their diplomas before they had to vacate the premises.
The school officially closed on February 8, 1943, barely a month before the first scientists arrived. But as Peggy Pond Church wrote in a poignant memoir of prewar Los Alamos, which she dedicated to Dorothy, in the days before they left, the sounds of planes buzzing overhead disrupted classes and men in military uniforms had begun to defile the unspoiled plateau:
Bulldozers moved in, and other weird machines roared up and down digging ditches for the foundations of future buildings. Everything was conducted in an element of extreme haste and mystery. Civilian visitors were conducted on tours of inspection everywhere, even through our homes. One day I recognized Dr. Ernest Lawrence, whom my husband and I had met one summer in California. He seemed strangely different when I questioned him about mutual friends, and broke away as quickly as possible from my attempts at conversation.
Another afternoon I was introduced to a young looking man by the name of Oppenheimer. Cowboy boots and all, he hurried in the front door and out the back, peering quickly into the kitchen and bedrooms. I was impressed, even in that brief meeting, by his nervous energy and by the intensity of the blue eyes that seemed to take in everything at a glance, like a bird flying from branch to branch in a deep forest.
The present was rudely imposing on the past, but there was no time for regret. Three thousand construction engineers had been working since mid-December to build the new laboratory buildings and living quarters, hastily slapping together the structures using rough lumber and building paper. The buildings were contracted as piecework, so no one builder knew the size of the project or the entire construction plan. The working conditions were confusing and difficult, and hampered by the freezing weather, the project was running behind schedule. In Priscilla Greene’s blunt assessment, the site was “a mess.” She had accompanied Oppenheimer on an inspection tour just after they arrived in Santa Fe and was stunned by the dismal spectacle that greeted them. Plumes of smoke marked the town site, and a layer of the soft New Mexico coal the workers burned for heat blackened the snow. The building crews’ temporary huts stood to one side, like a row of dreary tenements. “It was a pretty appalling place,” said Greene. “It was windy, dusty, cold, snowy a little bit at that point, and nothing was finished. It looked kind of amazing, though not as if one was ever going to be able to move into it.”
The Bethes, who had come early by request—Rose arriving a week before her husband because Oppie had asked her to help assign living quarters to the incoming personnel—were similarly dismayed. “It was a shambles,” recalled Hans Bethe. “It was a construction site. You stumbled over kegs of nails, over posts, over ladders.”
Their immediate crisis was housing. Dozens of scientists were due to arrive imminently, and there was no place for
them to stay. Many of them had wives who were pregnant or had babies and small children in tow. A handful of bachelors, along with the Serbers, had moved straight up to the Hill and were making do in the Big House, formerly the school dormitory. It was “a little rough,” Serber noted, adding in his usual droll understatement, “There was only one big bathroom in the entire house, and two or three fellows were embarrassed by walking in on Charlotte while she was taking a shower.” One of Rose Bethe’s first jobs was trying to find locks for all the doors, so they would not all have to live quite as communally as the schoolboys had. The makeshift arrangements on the site would clearly not suffice for the more senior physicists Oppie had cajoled into joining his secret venture, and it was imperative the staff find lodging for them soon, preferably places large enough for several families, so the laboratory personnel would not be scattered far and wide and the whole county alerted to their presence. As a March 24 memorandum from Oppenheimer instructed, “considerations of security require that the housing be carried out according to a plan and not left to the individual.” There were not enough hotels in town, and a visitor who ventured into the outlying valleys would soon find Mexican villages where the basic scheme of existence had not changed much in two centuries. Greene, who had never been to Santa Fe before, was overwhelmed and turned to Dorothy for help. “We were desperate,” she said. “I don’t know what we would have done without her.”
At first, Dorothy found it somewhat unbelievable that all these topnotch scientists would need her assistance, when at Smith she had managed to earn not one but two zeroes in physics. Yet there was an amateurism about the whole enterprise that seemed distinctly at odds with an important government project. Pandemonium was the order of the day. “This quality may have been dangerous, and frequently was,” she reflected in her memoir, “but there was something endearing about its lack of sophistication. Most of those who came to the Hill were boys, brilliant boys, but boys nonetheless. The average age was 24 years old. At 38, Oppenheimer was one of the old ones.”
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