109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  But at the same time, Kitty was burdened with the knowledge that she was closely related to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht. Keitel was with Hitler when the German army marched into Poland in September 1939 and was prominently by his side again at the Führer’s triumphant victory over France. It was Keitel who personally presented the humiliating terms of the armistice to the defeated French government at the railway coach at Rethondes, near Compiègne, on June 21, 1940, where twenty-two years earlier Germany had been similarly beaten and humiliated at the hands of the French. Kitty had told friends that when the war broke out, she had taken quite a punishing from some of her college classmates. With anti-Nazi propaganda flooding the airwaves and American popular opinion, so recently isolationist, now whipping itself into a fever pitch in its campaign against the “murderous Huns,” it would have been no small wonder if at times she felt embattled and alone.

  Dorothy considered Kitty to be as trying as everyone else did, but for Oppie’s sake, she exercised patience. She knew he worried about Kitty, who had suffered through a difficult first pregnancy and was expecting a second child. It touched her that their director, who was such a towering figure in his field and had such powers of persuasion, was at such a loss as to what to do or say when it came to his own wife. That humanized him in her eyes. He was a man who appeared trapped in a difficult marriage, and there were times it hurt her to see him so troubled. Everyone drank at Los Alamos, but Kitty drank with an abandon that was disturbing to watch and which clearly destined her for the alcoholism that took hold as the war came to a close. She hardly bothered to eat, and judging by the way clothes hung loosely off Oppie’s bony frame, Dorothy hated to think what passed for meals in their household. More than one Los Alamos wife who could recall staggering home from Kitty’s bungalow blind drunk would later comment on the meager fare that accompanied the liquid lunch.

  Dorothy, well aware of the strain in the Oppenheimers’ domestic life, was far too discreet to talk about it. She made it her business to be useful, to be there when she was needed, and to quickly absent herself when the crisis had passed. As the project consumed more of Oppenheimer’s time, and the pressure and isolation took its toll, she increasingly functioned as Kitty’s confidante, and a crutch to lean on. Though trained as a biologist, Kitty never worked more than sporadically at the lab. She filled the days by going on long rides with her neighbor Martha Parsons, but, apart from a handful of avid horsewomen, she had few friends. Dorothy was direct and down to earth, and her sensible, lowbrow advice must have been a good antidote to the elaborate, overwrought debates Kitty had with Oppie. Dorothy’s independence, along with her bohemian air, had a certain appeal for Kitty, who fancied herself something of a free spirit. Not one to be easily flattered, Dorothy understood the relationship was largely one of convenience and, within limits, tried to be accommodating. Kitty was in desperate need of diversion, and Dorothy would organize Sunday hikes or take her off to visit small villages to look for Indian pots and Spanish rugs. But she stopped short of being her nursemaid. “Kitty made Dorothy very nervous,” said Shirley Barnett. “She had to walk on eggshells all the time around her. Everyone did. Dorothy was extremely fond of Oppie, and her whole feeling about him and the project was starry-eyed. She would have done anything for him. She was absolutely loyal. But the closeness was something Kitty decided on. Dorothy was never really Kitty’s friend.”

  Kitty would take pains to praise Dorothy in front of Oppie and the others and say how much she liked her, but her comments were always barbed, as they were whenever she talked about any woman who was close to her husband. According to Shirley Barnett, Kitty would point out that Dorothy, given her fine Smith education, had never fulfilled her potential and was stuck performing “a journeyman’s job.” On other occasions, she would object to inviting Dorothy to a dinner party, complaining that her position was really a secondary one and she did not belong at a gathering of senior staff. Kitty never lost an opportunity to slight Dorothy or voice some minor complaint. “Kitty looked down on Dorothy,” said Shirley Barnett. “But then she looked down on most people. She was a snob.”

  In the end, Kitty was her own worst enemy. Though her marriage to Oppenheimer offered her some measure of respect and protection while she was at Los Alamos, her callous treatment of so many of his friends and colleagues earned her their lasting enmity. Even independent of her drinking, many people remember her as a cold and manipulative person. After the war, the Dutch physicist Abraham Pais recalled seeing Kitty at Princeton at the spring dance she and Oppie were hosting for the Institute of Advanced Study. Kitty was berating a young secretary, coldly instructing the poor girl that for her next evening dress she should choose blue because pink did not “suit [her] at all.” The encounter left Pais, one of the world’s leading theoreticians, shaking with anger and led him to describe Kitty as “the most despicable female I have ever known, because of her cruelty.”

  Despite all his skirmishes with G-2, by early September, Oppenheimer comforted himself that he had finally disposed of his security problems. During a sixteen-hour train trip with Groves and Lansdale, the three of them had reviewed a variety of security issues in detail and Oppenheimer had expressed regret at being drawn into the political quagmire created by his former student Lomanitz. They had also discussed Oppie’s meeting with Pash and Oppenheimer’s discomfort in giving up the name of his contact, and thereby dragging an old friend into a situation into which he was sure his friend had no involvement. Oppenheimer wanted to behave honorably, he told Groves, but he said he would divulge the name only if he were ordered to. Not wanting to stir up a hornet’s nest, and reassured that Oppenheimer had meant well when he reported the espionage attempt to security in the first place, Groves had let the issue go.

  Shortly after the train trip, however, the two highly critical memos from Pash and de Silva landed on Groves’ desk. The general realized he now had little choice but to pursue the matter to the bitter end. Groves authorized Lansdale, whom he had promoted to colonel and made chief of security for the entire atomic project, to conduct his own investigation. While only thirty-five, Lansdale was a lawyer by training, and consequently a cut above Pash, and would be a far more skilled and subtle interrogator.

  On September 12, 1943, Oppenheimer was summoned to Washington, where he was formally interviewed by Lansdale in Groves’ office. Only this time, the questioning took the form of a cross-examination, with Lansdale systematically going through the list of Oppenheimer’s friends and associates who were suspected to be Communist sympathizers in hopes of flushing out Eltenton’s mysterious contact. Oppenheimer again declined to give Lansdale the name he was looking for, but in the course of being questioned volunteered that Lomanitz was probably a party member and named another former student, Joseph Weinberg, along with Serber’s wife, Charlotte, and, last but not least, Kitty. By that time, Oppenheimer was probably confident that the FBI had open files on all of them and he was not telling Groves anything the FBI did not already know. Lansdale brought up Steve Nelson, Joe Dallet’s former comrade, who had renewed his friendship with Kitty in 1941 and visited their home at Eagle Hill. He also asked about Haakon Chevalier, inquiring if he was a member of the party. Oppenheimer again chose not to disclose everything he knew, stating somewhat cagily, “He’s a member of the faculty and I know him well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were a member. He is quite Red.” They continued to dance around the matter for two hours, with Lansdale using every trick in the book to see if he could get Oppenheimer to crack and reveal the name of the intermediary and the three scientists he had approached. At one point, Oppenheimer asked Lansdale, “Why do you look so worried?”

  “Because I’m not getting anywhere,” he said.

  “Well,” Oppenheimer replied sanguinely, “except on that one point, I think you’re getting everywhere that I can get you.”

  The questioning continued, with Lansdale repeatedly circling back to the Eltenton affair in an effort to
pressure Oppenheimer to reveal his source, but to no avail. At the end, Lansdale told Oppenheimer that he liked him personally and had “no suspicions whatsoever,” but at the same time advised him that his investigation of the matter was far from over. “Don’t think it’s the last time I’m going to ask you, because it isn’t,” he added.

  Before taking his leave, Oppenheimer seemed to put forward a theory for his refusal to cooperate. “Well, I know where I stand on these things,” he told Lansdale. “At least I’m not worried about that. It is, however, as you have asked me, a question of some past loyalties. … I would regard it as a low trick to involve someone where I would bet dollars to doughnuts he wasn’t involved.”

  Lansdale replied, “OK, sir,” and brought the grueling session to an end. But it was not OK, not by any measure, and in his subsequent memorandum to Groves, Lansdale indicated his firm belief that the director of Los Alamos should be made to reveal the name of the man suspected of a serious espionage attempt on behalf of a foreign power. Lansdale liked Oppenheimer, as he had commented more than once during the interview, but the physicist’s obsession with retaining his own self-respect and private code of honor struck him as a kind of inverse vanity, and quite trivial in a time of war.

  Even Oppenheimer, with his enormous gift for opacity, and a fastidious intellectualism that often left him completely blind to the political realities facing him, must have realized that he had only been stalling and that he could be compelled at any time to tell the army exactly what they wanted to know. What he could not have anticipated, however, was that his stubborn impeding of the Eltenton investigation, together with a number of concurrent security investigations into his activities and those of several former students, would raise so many troubling questions about his own loyalty.

  On December 12, Groves returned to Los Alamos. During his visit, he once again took up the matter of security risks with Oppenheimer, only this time he was determined to get to the bottom of the matter. It was almost Christmas, three months had passed since Groves had confronted Oppenheimer in their shared Pullman compartment, and far from going away, the doubts and concerns about Oppenheimer’s unwillingness to cooperate had festered and spread. This time, Groves was not going to be put off, however noble Oppenheimer’s intentions toward his friend. Before he left Los Alamos, Groves ordered Oppenheimer to make a full disclosure. The next day, Colonel Nichols sent out three telegrams to the chief security officers of the Manhattan Project. The wire to Peer de Silva at Los Alamos read:

  HAAKON CHEVALIER TO BE REPORTED BY OPPENHEIMER TO BE PROFESSOR AT RAD LAB WHO MADE CONTACTS FOR ELTENTON. CLASSIFIED SECRET OPPENHEIMER BELIEVED CHEVALIER ENGAGED IN NO FURTHER ACTIVITY OTHER THAN THREE ORIGINAL ATTEMPTS.

  It is impossible to calculate what it must have cost Oppenheimer to give up the name of his old friend, knowing full well that implicating him in Eltenton’s espionage plot would at the very least turn his life upside down and damage his career. As for the names of the three other scientists, he reportedly admitted to Groves that he had embroidered the story somewhat, and there were not three but one. (Although accounts differ, Lansdale later maintained that in exchange for Groves’ word that he would not tell security, Oppenheimer admitted that Chevalier had tried to approach him through his brother, Frank, whom he hoped to enlist as a spy. But three years later, in 1946, Oppenheimer would tell the FBI yet another story, claiming the tale he had told Pash was a complete fabrication, and that Chevalier had never solicited anyone but him. At the security board hearing in 1954, he would stick to this line, saying that it would not have made sense for Chevalier to go through his brother since Chevalier was his friend and this would have been “a peculiarly roundabout and unnatural thing.” Which version, if any, is the truth remains unclear.) But one thing is certain: by the end of 1943, Oppenheimer’s own security file contained a tangle of lies. And as Oppie well knew, scientists were being investigated and dismissed from service for far less than the accusations that had been raised against him.

  Groves was no fool, and it did not escape him that Oppenheimer was being evasive. The physicist’s memory, which for myriad small details on the all-encompassing bomb project was always vivid and reliable, suddenly seemed to be playing tricks on him. His answers were often vague and inconsistent, and inevitably created the impression that he was being deliberately misleading. But it is likely Groves assured himself that the worst Oppenheimer could be accused of was dissembling about an espionage attempt that he had foiled, and that his actions had probably been motivated by a desire to protect his brother, his friend, or the lot of them. His reluctance to cooperate with security was understandable under the circumstances, if not admirable. The whole truth was impossible to determine, and what was known did not seem to warrant extreme action. Overriding security’s objections, Groves did not withdraw his support of Los Alamos’s director. The two men parted cordially, but the episode left the door open for security to wreck havoc on Oppenheimer’s life in the years to come.

  If Oppenheimer had once relished power, he was now learning that it could be a hard and lonely position. Burdened with the weight of the bomb project, and the guilt of handing Chevalier to the FBI on a silver platter, he passed his first grim Christmas at Los Alamos. Not long afterward, on a cold blue January morning, Charlotte Serber walked into her husband’s office in the T building and informed him she had just heard from old friends in Berkeley that Jean Tatlock had committed suicide the night before. She had taken a fistful of sleeping pills and drowned herself in the bathtub of her studio apartment on Telegraph Hill. By the time her father had discovered her body, she had been dead several days. She had left a hastily scrawled note, her shaky writing already showing the effect of the drugs:

  … To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t…. At least, I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world. …

  Oppie needed to be told, and Charlotte asked her husband if he would break the news. By the time Bob Serber got to Oppie’s office, he realized at once that he was too late. “I saw by his face that he had already heard. He was deeply grieved.” Tatlock’s untimely death was a sad coda to those idealistic days when she had first introduced Oppie to political activism and the principles of communism, and to many of the left-wing colleagues who were now listed in his FBI file as fellow travelers and possible collaborators. As Oppenheimer walked out of his office and headed for the silent wilderness, he must have mourned the loss of an old flame, and of a former innocence—both his and the country’s.

  ELEVEN

  The Big Shot

  THE LAST MONTHS of 1943 had brought a great rush of activity at Los Alamos with the much-anticipated arrival of the British Technical Mission. As if there were not enough to do already, Dorothy had to see to many of the preparations for the newcomers, who would need instructions, passes, housing, furnishings, and transport ready and waiting. It would also mean that there would be more mail, telegrams, phone calls, laboratory equipment, and lost luggage. Everything would be marked “Urgent” and required yesterday. While the authoritarian Groves was a great believer in the chain of command, Oppie was much more informal, and thought nothing of picking up the phone to make additional requests or last-minute suggestions himself. On top of this, Dorothy had to attend to all the regular business that naturally emanated from the Housing Office, daily dispatching all the new arrivals up to the mesa, along with two vans of furniture and at least one truckload of freight and laboratory equipment. Friends from the Hill stopped by to drop off packages bearing advertisements like “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” which she would promise to post. There were also all the security passes that needed to be collected from, or reissued to, traveling staff members. At any given moment, the project had enough people on the go that they kept at least one double berth reserved daily on both the east- and west-bound trains, and a drawing room twice a week.


  Dorothy, now universally recognized as indispensable, operated on a grander scale from her humble command post than the Spanish viceroys who had occupied the adobe fortress centuries before. She was given an assistant to help answer her phone, which had been known to ring in over a hundred calls in a single day, and assigned her own small battalion of WAC couriers and uniformed drivers, anything she needed to get the job done. She marshaled her forces and prepared for the incoming. Because of the general lack of organization at Los Alamos, which was further compounded by wartime contingencies, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything was flexible. The British mission’s arrival dates and the numbers expected changed from one hour to the next. Groves’ refusal to allow key project members to travel by air meant that the British had to come by train, and the Super Chief, which would be bringing them west after they changed trains in Chicago, was so chronically late that when it actually pulled into Lamy on time one afternoon no one was surprised to discover it was the previous day’s train. All Dorothy knew with any certainty was that roughly two dozen scientists would be coming from the United Kingdom in December, and that among them was someone who warranted all kinds of special attention and far more than the usual security protocol. Whoever it was, he must be a big shot.