109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  A month later, on June 28, 1963, Dorothy closed the wrought-iron gate in front of 109 East Palace for the last time. At the age of sixty-five, after suffering a mild heart attack, she decided it was finally time to relinquish her post. The closing of the office coincided with Dorothy’s twentieth anniversary as the “front man” for Los Alamos and as the beloved link between the laboratory and the outside world. Unbeknownst to her, the gate to 109 had been replaced with a duplicate, and the original taken to the Hill for safekeeping, later to become part of a permanent museum exhibit telling her story and of the legend that was wartime Los Alamos.

  In a brief ceremony attended by the remaining members of Oppenheimer’s old staff, Norris Bradbury explained that it was only fitting that the office be closed by the same woman who had first opened it in March 1943, for to all those displaced scientists who had passed through it on their way to the secret city on the Hill, Dorothy McKibbin and 109 East Palace were synonymous. He then took wire cutters and removed the sign identifying the office—the old wooden board had long ago been discarded—to reveal a bronze plaque commemorating the historic building:

  109 EAST PALACE

  1943 SANTA FE OFFICE 1963

  LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC

  LABORATORY

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

  ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO

  MADE THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB

  PASSED THROUGH THIS PORTAL TO

  THEIR SECRET MISSION AT LOS ALAMOS

  THEIR CREATION IN 27

  MONTHS OF THE WEAPONS THAT ENDED

  WORLD WAR II WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST

  SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF ALL TIME.

  Not long afterward, Oppenheimer’s health started to fail. The physicist, who was never without a cigarette or pipe, heard confirmation of what he had probably known for some time. “He called me up in the summer of ’66 from Princeton and said he had cancer of the throat,” recalled Dorothy. He told her doctors were using cobalt to treat the tumor, and they discussed it in clinical terms. Later, when he underwent radiation, he told her about the electrons from the betatron. It had always been his way to talk like that, without too much fuss or show of sentimentality. Oppenheimer had lost all his fight years ago, and he faded fast. He died on February 18, 1967. He was sixty-two. More than six hundred people attended his memorial services at Princeton and listened to the eulogies by Hans Bethe, Henry DeWolf Smyth, and George Kennan. Afterward, Kitty took his ashes to St. John and scattered them over the ocean near their house.

  The next few years visited a great deal of tragedy upon a family Dorothy thought had already suffered enough. Kitty rapidly deteriorated and lasted only another five years. The harrowing years of investigations, subpoenas, and hearings proved too much for her. She had suffered from painful stomach ailments for years, and had a diseased pancreas, which required medication. Her drinking had never abetted, and after too many rounds she became difficult and erratic. “She was always a brittle person, and eventually she just broke,” said Priscilla Greene Duffield, who remembered that Kitty, in a fit of depression, once asked Dorothy to buy her a gun. Kitty had never been without a man in her life, and it was somehow fitting that she ended up with Oppenheimer’s most faithful student, Bob Serber, who was estranged from his wife, Charlotte. In the spring of 1972, Kitty bought a new sailboat, a fifty-two-foot ketch named Moonraker, and she and Serber planned an extended transpacific trip beginning in the Caribbean, passing through Panama, and sailing on to Japan via the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti. Their trip was cut short, however, when Kitty, the ship’s captain and navigator, came down with a severe intestinal infection. On October 17, she entered the hospital in Cristobal, at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, and died ten days later of an embolism. Like Oppie, she was just sixty-two at the time of her death. In his memoir, Serber noted that the name of Kitty’s boat had two meanings: the topmost sail on a full-rigged ship, or “someone touched with madness.”

  The Oppenheimers’ twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Toni, took Kitty’s ashes back to St. John and scattered them in the sea, in the same place they had bid good-bye to her father. The Oppenheimers’ two children did not have an easy time coming of age in the midst of such turmoil, and it left indelible scars. Toni, the apple of her father’s eye, grew up to be a beautiful but troubled girl. After her mother’s death, she remained on St. John, left her husband, and filed for divorce. She later remarried, but it did not last. In January 1977, three months after the breakup of her second marriage, she committed suicide. Her body was found hanging by the neck in one of the bedrooms of the house her father had built on St. John, along with several notes. As there was no phone at Perro Caliente, Dorothy drove up to the ranch in a heavy snowstorm to break the news to Peter.

  Peter was always Dorothy’s favorite. She treated him as a second son and tried to lavish the love and attention on him she knew his distracted parents did not always have time to give him. Peter had doted on his father and at the height of the trial had angrily scrawled on his classroom blackboard:

  The American Government is unfair to Acuse [sic] Certain People that I know of being unfair to them. Since this is true, I think that Certain People, and may I say, only Certain People in the US Government, should go to HELL.

  Yours truly, Certain People

  His problems were compounded when, as a moody teenager, he began having real conflict with his mother. Although he was aware of the problems, Oppenheimer sided with Kitty, causing a serious breach that never completely healed. In the spring of 1958, in retaliation for Peter’s poor marks and failure to gain entrance to Princeton, Oppenheimer refused to allow him to accompany the family on a grand tour of Israel, Greece, and Belgium. Before that summer term was over, Peter had dropped out of the prestigious George School in Pennslyvania and escaped out west, staying at Franks ranch in Colorado and visiting Dorothy in Santa Fe. In late July, Dorothy wrote to Oppie, knowing now much he regretted Kitty’s failures as a mother and that he blamed himself for any pain they might have caused their son. “Yesterday into this office walked Frank and Pete,” she wrote. “I could not take my eyes off Pete. He is truly beautiful. Made me think of paintings by Renaissance masters. The cut of his face, his color, his eyes, his lovely shy and grave manner. I thought of you and Kitty, and of what you have created.”

  Peter eventually settled in Santa Fe, and Dorothy helped find him carpentry work and recommended him to all her friends. When it came time for him to be married, it was only natural that he asked that it be at her adobe farmhouse, with the yellow roses blooming in the courtyard. Nothing could have pleased her more. When Peter’s oldest daughter was born, he named her Dorothy, he said, in honor of the woman he admired for her “tremendous good cheer, courage and good will.”

  In the last years of her life, Dorothy set out to write a book. After several cataract operations, she was hampered by failing eyesight and knew she could not tackle the project on her own. She called on a close friend, Dorothy Hughes, who was a noted local author, and the two agreed to collaborate on the project. Dorothy had accumulated boxes of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and photographs about the atomic bomb project, and over a period of two years she sorted through the material, reading aloud relevant bits, while Hughes taped her remarks. Dorothy had high hopes for the manuscript, entitled “Under a Piñon Tree: The Story of Los Alamos,” but after close friends advised her to scrap the rather dry, impersonal compilation of clippings in favor of a more personal account, she abandoned the project. It was never published.

  Dorothy, who had not expected to live to see thirty, died on December 17, 1985, five days after her eighty-eighth birthday. She was asleep when the end came. She had already slipped away, wandering into the hills with a man in a porkpie hat, shrouded in the alkaline mist that reduces all desert shapes to ghosts.

  At her memorial service, her old friend Peggy Pond Church read a poem she dedicated to Dorothy.

  She yields her hair to the wind;

  she yields her fa
ce to the sun;

  her love, like the evening star,

  shines clear for everyone.

  Love is a light for her.

  Love is a warming fire.

  The hungry, the sad, the cold

  she heals of their long desire.

  Men have gone down to death

  wearing her love like a rose,

  and the tears that her own heart sheds

  only her own heart knows.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES

  Dorothy McKibbin’s recollections of Los Alamos were taken from the following sources:

  MANUSCRIPTS AND LETTERS

  Manuscript of a brief reminiscence by Dorothy McKibbin, “The Santa Fe Office: 109 East Palace Avenue,” 1946. It was printed with permission by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory News and reprinted in 1963. In 1946, the manuscript was reshaped and edited into chapter form by Jane Wilson and Charlotte Serber, and compiled along with eight other women’s tales into a book. The book never found a publisher, and thirty years later, Jane Wilson gave it to the Los Alamos Historical Museum. In 1987, the Los Alamos Historical Society (LAHS) published the collection of short essays in Standing By and Making Do: The Women of Wartime Los Alamos. I chose to quote from the original manuscript, before Dorothy McKibbin’s words were edited by numerous parties over the years.

  Text of a speech written by Dorothy McKibbin, November 23,1959; courtesy of LAHS.

  Unpublished manuscript, Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin and Dorothy Bell Hughes, “Under a Piñon Tree: The Story of Los Alamos,” Santa Fe, NM, circa 1993. Reprinted with permission from Kevin McKibbin.

  Letters written by Dorothy McKibbin, as well as those written to her by J. Robert Oppenheimer; courtesy of the J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, Library of Congress. Reprinted with permission from Kevin McKibbin.

  The poem by Peggy Pond Church is courtesy of Peggy Pond Church Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico. Permission to reprint poem, courtesy of Kathleen D. Church.

  PUBLISHED INTERVIEWS

  Documentary: The Woman Who Kept a Secret, interview by Hal Rhodes; edited and produced by Dale Sonnenberg; Albuquerque, NM; KNME-TV, 1982.

  Oral history interview: transcript of interview with Dorothy McKibbin, conducted by Los Alamos National Laboratory, January 13, 1982; Historical Perspectives Educational Films, Santa Fe, NM; courtesy of LAHS.

  Oral history interview: videotape of interview with Dorothy McKibbin, no. 33, “World of Enrico Fermi”; courtesy of the Center for History of Physics, the American Institute of Physics, New York.

  QUOTATIONS FROM NEWSPAPER ARTICLES AND MAGAZINES

  “Baggage, Babies and the Atom Bomb: The Unique 20 years of Dorothy McKibbin.” Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory News, June 28, 1963.

  Corbett, Peggy. “AEC Office in SF Closes.” The New Mexican, July 30,1963.

  ———. “Oppie’s Vitality Swayed Santa Fean.” The New Mexican, June 26, 1960.

  Hall, Rosanna. “Dorothy McKibbin Remembers Early Days in NM.” The New Mexican, June 11, 1981.

  McMaho, June. “‘109’ to Close: Dorothy McKibbin Retirement Told.” The Los Alamos Monitor, June 27, 1963.

  McNulty, William. “World’s Most Famed Scientists, En Route to Los Alamos Project, Go Through Ancient City Office.” Santa Fe New Mexican, May 10, 1946.

  Pillsbury, Dorothy L. “The Adobe House That Helped Build the Atom Bomb.” New Mexico Magazine, March 1962.

  ———. “Santa Fe Woman Serves in War and Peace.” Christian Science Monitor, July 14, 1958.

  Poore, Anne. “A Special Lady Creates Special Memories.” Los Alamos Monitor, June 5, 1983.

  “She Was Den Mother to Early Los Alamos.” Associated Press, July 16, 1985.

  “Smiling ‘Front Man’ for Atomic Bomb.” The New Mexican, June 30, 1963.

  Staley, Elizabeth. “Close to Oppenheimer: ‘Gatekeeper’ Kept Secret for 40 Years.” Albuquerque Journal, April 9, 1982.

  Ward, Eugene. “Los Alamos: Then and Now.” Albuquerque Journal, August 14, 1977.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

  Hans Bethe, Philip Morrison, and Edward Teller: transcripts of 1999 oral history interviews for the documentary The Moment in Time, Los Alamos National Laboratory; courtesy of Los Alamos Historical Society, P.O. Box 43, Los Alamos, NM.

  Marge Bradner: written reminiscences, correspondence with Dorothy McKibbin, Bradner family papers, San Diego, California.

  Vannevar Bush: transcripts of oral history interviews, courtesy of the Niels Bohr Library, the American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland.

  Kathleen D. Church: poems of Peggy Pond Church, Albuquerqe, NM.

  James B. Conant: papers and correspondence; courtesy of Harvard University Archives, Cambridge. Conant family papers, Hanover, NH.

  Priscilla Greene Duffield: transcript of oral history interview, conducted by LANL; courtesy of LAHS, P.O. Box 43, Los Alamos, NM.

  Ernest O. Lawrence: letters and papers; courtesy of Ernest Orlando Lawrence Papers, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin: biographical material and papers; courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

  Dorothy McKibbin, Robert Oppenheimer, Katherine Page, and Edith Warner: correspondence; courtesy of Papers of Robert Oppenheimer, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Also, for their invaluable assistance, the archives of the American Institute of Physics, Children of the Manhattan Project/Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Kansas City Public Library, the Museum of New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico.

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