109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Fortunately for the scientists, Dorothy knew every road, pueblo, village, rancher, shopkeeper, carpenter, and craftsman for miles around. In her ten years with the Spanish and Indian Trading Company, she had dealt with merchants from all the neighboring pueblos and villages. There was no nook or cranny of the region where she did not have a contact or friend to call. She was, in her own modest way, a well-known and respected local personage. With her Girl Guide forthrightness, and a calm demeanor that allowed none of the surrounding bedlam to fluster her, she was exactly what they needed. She pitched in immediately and got on the phone to a small dude ranch in the Nambe Valley. In her fine, educated Smith voice, underscored with an irrepressible Missouri twang, she politely informed the owner, “I’m sorry, you cannot accept any reservations. We are taking this over.” She offered no explanation, brooked no argument, and in short order had rented out three more ranches only ten to twenty miles outside town.

  “No one quite knew what was going on or what to do,” recalled Ben Diven, a graduate student from Berkeley, who was among the handful of project members who were already on the scene when Dorothy opened the office at 109 East Palace. “The contractors were late, so Dorothy sent Hugh Bradner all over hunting for housing. She was just wonderful and wanted to do whatever she could to help. We all had to figure it out as we went along, but she learned very quickly.” Bradner, a young Berkeley physicist who served as Oppenheimer’s gofer and jack-of-all-trades, remembered that people soon took to calling Dorothy their guardian angel. “She took care of all of us,” he said. “She would always say how lucky she felt being that she was just this little girl from Kansas City, but Oppie was lucky to have found her.”

  As the bewildered scientists arrived at the small adobe train station in Lamy, blinking in amazement and dismay at the deserted landscape and the tumbleweeds that blew back and forth in the high wind, Dorothy greeted them with a bright smile and did her best to soften their disappointment. After consulting with Oppie, she farmed each of them out to the different locations. Scientists without families or where both were employed were put up in relatively comfortable quarters such as the Ancon and Del Monte Ranches. Those with children, and wives who could help prepare meals and contribute to the maintenance of the facility, were assigned to the less-expensive Cable and Schuyler spreads and got a quicker immersion in the hardships of ranch life than Dorothy reckoned they had anticipated. She hired local managers to help operate each location and ran around making sure the newcomers had everything they needed. When Greene stumbled into the office one day later looking pale and exhausted, Dorothy packed her off to the Del Monte Ranch for a rest. “I felt terrible and everyone, including me, thought I was having a nervous breakdown,” recalled Greene. It was the measles. “I was very relieved when I was diagnosed, even after I started to itch.”

  Despite the outbreak of German measles, Ed McMillan’s wife, Elsie, arrived a few days later with their baby daughter, Ann. In a book about her wartime experience at Los Alamos, Elsie described the kind reception she received after the long, uncomfortable journey on a packed train: “At the Santa Fe office, Dorothy McKibbin welcomed me and answered the few questions I had at that hour before the drive to our temporary, luxurious quarters.” Dorothy had secured them a room and bath in the guesthouse of the Ancon Ranch, which was owned by Major John Post, and his wife, Marian. Two other families, Pat and John Wieneke and Dorothy and Ken Jensen, who were newlyweds, were also boarding there. The Posts were ex-service and so knew there was a military base being built at Los Alamos. Never asking what so many scientists were doing there, the Posts wined and dined their guests in style and lent the women a car so they could explore the Rio Grande Valley. Dorothy “smoothed the way for us all,” wrote Elsie, “especially the soldiers sent to guard us, and often completely lost in Lamy, unbelieving that they had landed at the right spot for their already puzzling assignments. Only a Mrs. McKibbin could have assured and helped them on their way up the forty miles into a strange land inhabited by ‘crazy’ scientists and their ‘crazy’ families.”

  Some of the early arrivals could not believe that Oppenheimer had chosen such a godforsaken place, and it felt as if they were sneaking off to the ragged edge of the world to complete their sinister task. It took nearly two hours of driving on State Highway 4, a narrow, two-lane roller coaster, full of dips and hairpin turns, to reach the guarded military gate, beyond which the 54,000-acre Los Alamos compound sprawled. The final ascent up to the site was so steep and boulder-strewn as to give pause to all but the most stalwart. One look at the “sheer drop right beside us,” recalled Elsie McMillan, and “I was scared.” It was not reassuring to know that the Otowi Bridge, the old railroad trestle spanning the Rio Grande, was considered “too fragile” to carry the army’s trucks and buses, which were forced to take State Highway 30, an even more circuitous route, by way of Espanola. Even Groves was unnerved and ordered the road paved, but the steady traffic of army trucks soon reduced it to rubble.

  Others were left slack-jawed by their first glimpse of the barren mesa, only six miles by two, which the bulldozers had churned into a sea of mud. Joe Stevenson had unintentionally made things worse by sending out a fact sheet to all the senior laboratory people that, in language worthy of a chamber of commerce, claimed, among other things, “Los Alamos is situated on the shores of a small lake” and featured commissaries beer halls, theaters, and other attractions. If Ashley Pond had once been a scenic attraction, after the long winter and months of construction, it was now little more than a brown puddle. The crude timber buildings and ramshackle Quonset huts looked as far removed from a modern research facility as anything they could have imagined.

  Despite his lucidity in the classroom, Oppenheimer was hardly the most sensible of men, and he had a dreamy, scattered side that over the years had led to legions of absent-minded-professor stories of lost cars and forgotten dates. This was a man who by his own admission was so out of touch with everyday life that he never read a newspaper or listened to the radio, and only heard of the stock market crash of 1929 long after the event. He struck even his most ardent admirers as singularly ill-equipped to handle such a daunting administrative and organizational challenge, and the sheer folly of the Los Alamos setting confirmed their worst fears. Robert Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old physicist from Wyoming who had achieved a reputation for brilliance in only a few short years at Princeton, remembered being troubled at the outset by Oppenheimer’s naïveté. Wilson had just finished reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and while he thought the whole idea of disappearing to a mountaintop laboratory sounded incredibly romantic, some of Oppenheimer’s ideas struck him as impractical. When he would question the wisdom of a particular strategy, such as that of scientists becoming soldiers in uniform, Oppie would get “a faraway look in his eyes.” Then he would wax philosophical about how “this war was different from any war ever fought before,” that it was being fought for “the principles of freedom” and being fought by the “people’s army.” When Oppie “talked like that,” Wilson recalled, “I thought he had a screw loose somewhere.”

  In the months leading up to the project, a number of the physicists who had signed on to the project had already begun to have serious doubts, not only about Oppie’s choice of location, but also about the lack of planning and thought being given to basic concerns, everything from the number of people required to staff the laboratory and the division of labor to a reasonable operating schedule. John Manley worried that Oppenheimer failed to grasp just how big a job he had taken on: “What we were trying to do was build a new laboratory in the wilds of New Mexico with no initial equipment except the library of Horatio Alger books or whatever it was those boys in the Ranch School read, and the pack equipment that they used going horseback riding, none of which helped us very much in getting neutron-producing accelerators.”

  All during the early months of 1943, Manley tried to rustle up vital equipment from university laboratories around the country. He
arranged for many pieces to be packed up and shipped to Los Alamos, including two Van de Graaff generators from Wisconsin and the cyclotron from Harvard, as well as his Cockcroft-Walton accelerator from Illinois. These were enormous, heavy machines, and getting them was not a simple task. He could not help wondering whether, “if Oppenheimer had been an experimental physicist and known that experimental physics is really 90 percent plumbing and you’ve got to have all that equipment and tools and so on, he would ever have agreed to try to start a laboratory in this isolated place.” But there was another matter than bothered him as much, if not more: the organization of the new laboratory. “There were several reasons for concern,” he reasoned. “People would tire in a very isolated place. They would be working under extreme time pressure and if there was not good organization from the point of view of the technical work, all of the services, the responsibilities, the whole enterprise could just really go flop.”

  Manley and Wilson kept needling Oppenheimer to focus on the organization of the laboratory so when they all assembled on the mesa, it would not be a madhouse. Each of them knew from separate visits to the site that the lack of planning was affecting the pace of construction, which was way behind schedule. Finally, after their repeated entreaties and pestering phone calls failed to illicit a response, they decided to team up and together present their concerns to Oppenheimer at Berkeley:

  We insisted that decisions had to be made, that people had to know what to do, when to come to Los Alamos, that priorities had to be established, that we had to come to a realistic understanding of where we stood with the Army people. We wanted a little organization, we wanted to know who was to be in charge of what, not just vague talk about the scientific problems nor the even vaguer ideas about democracy. There were immediate problems to be faced and, from our point of view, Oppy was not facing them.

  After nagging him all day about his “indecisiveness,” they continued to bug him for the better part of the night during a party at his home on Eagle Hill Road. “Typically,” recalled Wilson, “the day’s technical discussion drifted into the evening’s socialities. The driest of dry martinis mixed by the hand of the master, sophisticated guests, gourmet food (but on the scant side), an amorphous buzz of conversation, smoke, alcohol, all these were the inevitable ingredients of an evening at the Oppenheimers. Manley and I never let up for a moment, and eventually we got to him. He exploded into a fit of cursing, acrimony and hysteria that left me aghast.” Wilson departed, fearing that their critical assault had backfired, and that he had seen the end of his relationship with both Oppenheimer and the project, “that all was lost.”

  As was so often the case with Oppenheimer, the contrary proved to be true. One day in January, Manley, still frustrated at not having heard from Oppenheimer about the organization of the laboratory, decided to fly to Berkeley and confront him one last time. When he walked into his office in Le Conte Hall, Oppenheimer barely uttered a greeting and, without looking up from his desk, shoved a piece of paper at Manley and said, “Here’s your damned organization chart.”

  Manley’s eyes passed down the paper in some astonishment. “I checked through it and saw it not only covered big names in physics like Bethe and [Emilio] Segrè, but also practical things like organic chemistry and the stockroom,” he recalled. “About the stockroom, he had got Dana Mitchell of Columbia for it, absolutely the country’s best. I still don’t know how he did it or what persuasion he used.” For the first time, Manley believed it was just possible that Oppenheimer knew what he was doing.

  The physicist Samuel Allison was not so easily persuaded. He was wary of Los Alamos’s director from the start, recalling that when as a graduate student he had first encountered Oppenheimer at Berkeley, Oppie had been immersed in the Mahabharata, a story in the epic Bhagavad Gita, which he was reading with Arthur Ryder, the chairman of the Sanskrit department. Among the first to be recruited for the project, Allison had accompanied Oppenheimer to Los Alamos in late December to plan the layout of the technical buildings that had to be erected and was taken aback by Oppie’s quixotic view of the project:

  On the Mesa he and I sat down and planned the laboratory. He showed me what he called an organization chart for a hundred personnel. I looked at it and felt sure that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. The best I could do was poke at random.

  “Where are the shipping clerks,” I asked.

  He gave me a thoughtful sympathetic look, “We’re not going to ship anything,” he answered.

  Allison concluded that not only had Oppenheimer “completely underestimated the size of the installation,” he also suspected that Oppie had allowed sentiment, rather than common sense, to dictate his selection of the site. “I thought the idea of a desert center was a mistake,” he noted. “It would have looked more sensible to me to put it in a big industrial district. Certainly it would have been more sensible economically, but there was Oppenheimer’s love for that country.”

  It was a topic of wry humor among Oppie’s close friends and associates that he had ever managed to talk Groves and the Army Corps of Engineers into approving the Los Alamos site in the first place. The Serbers were better acquainted with Oppie’s long love affair with the desert than most, having first visited his primitive ranch in the Pecos Valley in 1935 and having learned then of the health problems that had driven him out to the desert in his youth. During a holiday in the Harz Mountains in Germany after high school, Oppie had come down with a severe case of trench dysentery that over time became aggravated colitis. Too sick to enter Harvard in the fall of 1921, he passed a gloomy year at home, after which his parents hired Herbert Winslow Smith, a strapping young English teacher from his private New York day school, the Ethical Culture School, to chaperone the wan and melancholy teenager on a restorative sojourn out west. Smith suspected that some of the bright young boy’s ailments might well be psychosomatic and dispensed with the prescribed treatment of rest in favor of camping and horseback riding.

  While traveling through the mountains in New Mexico, Oppenheimer and Smith stayed at the fashionable Los Pinos Ranch in the Pecos Valley, north of Santa Fe, which during the heyday of dude ranches was known as a particularly elegant establishment with a high-class clientele. Los Pinos’s appeal lay in its rustic lodge, glorious setting, and lovely proprietress, Katherine Chaves Page. The beautiful, aristocratic, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of an old Santa Fe family and prominent statesman, Page had studied in the East, held a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and was newly married to a New Yorker named Bernard Winthrop Page. An accomplished horsewoman, Katherine Page knew the high country like the back of her hand, preferring to get off the beaten trails and explore out-of-the-way places. She utterly captivated the impressionable eighteen-year-old Oppenheimer, encouraging his interest in riding, as he showed an unusual feel for horses. Together, they went on long excursions into the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo Mountains. On one leisurely trip, the two came across a beautiful blue-green lake hidden high in the upper Pecos, and at the urging of the smitten teenager, they called their discovery “Lake Katherine,” as it has been known to hikers ever since.

  In the intimacy of quiet trails and campfires, Oppenheimer and Page struck up a close friendship, and for the rest of her life they would keep up a warm correspondence and he would return to the mountains, and to her, as often as he could. It was on one of their most memorable rides that Katherine Page took Oppie up to the Los Alamos Ranch School. “I first knew the Pajarito Plateau in the summer of 1922,” he recalled later, “when we took a pack trip up from Frijoles and into the Valle Grande.” It was a trip he would make again and again in the years to come, perhaps feeling some connection to the frail boys he saw playing on the fields.

  During that trip to the Southwest, the solitary Oppenheimer permitted himself his first really close friends. He solidified his budding friendship with a high school classmate, Francis Fergusson, who was also bound for Harvard, and whose family was from Albuquerque. Durin
g his visit with Fergusson, he met another gifted student, Paul Horgan, and they instantly became “this great troika,” as Horgan remembered, all “polymaths,” precocious and driven to excel in their chosen fields—Oppie as a physicist, Fergusson as a literary scholar, and Horgan as a novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “[Oppenheimer] was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known, the most brilliantly endowed intellectually,” said Horgan. “He had this lovely social quality that permitted him to enter into the moment very strongly, wherever it was and whenever it was. So one didn’t see him as eventually the incredibly great scientist or the celebrity at all. He had a great superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity at that time.” Even in the early days his young companions were aware that Oppenheimer battled “deep, deep depressions,” during which he would withdraw and become incommunicado for a day or two. To Fergusson, it seemed that out west Oppie found some release from the pressures back home, “his Jewishness and his wealth, and his eastern connections, and [that] his going to New Mexico was partly to escape from that.”

  The change in Oppenheimer’s outlook wrought by his time in the desert was evident in the witty, confident tone of a letter to Smith written during his freshman year at Harvard. Noting that he was amused to hear that his old teacher had decided to go west with “two new neurotics,” he added wistfully, “I am of course insanely jealous”:

  I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos “in September, when I’ll want my friends to comfort me, you know,” spending the moonlight on Grass mountain; I see you vending the marvels of the upper Loch, of the upper amphitheater at Ouray, of the waterfall at Telluride, the Punch Bowl at San Ysidro—even the prairies of Antonito—to philistine eyes.