An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Sen. Joseph McCarthy: junior senator from Wisconsin; led virulent campaign against supposed Communists and Communist sympathizers

  Kenneth Nichols: general manager of the AEC

  Lewis Strauss: businessman and investment banker; Rear Admiral in the Naval Reserve; chairman of the AEC, 1947–1950, 1953–1958; worked with Hoover to remove Oppenheimer from consulting position with the AEC; trustee of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton

  Oppenheimer Security Clearance Hearing

  Lloyd Garrison: Robert's "defense" attorney at the hearing

  Gordon Gray: chairman of the panel appointed by the AEC; president of the University of North Carolina

  Herbert Marks: Robert's "defense" lawyer at the Hearing; worked with David Lilienthal at TVA and then at AEC; with wife Anne became close friend of the Oppenheimers

  Roger Robb: the "prosecuting" attorney chosen by Lewis Strauss to represent the AEC

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT ROBERT?

  Almost everyone who knew the adult Robert Oppenheimer found him enormously appealing. They gathered round him, warming themselves in his light. Women wanted to be part of whatever he was doing. A secretary at Los Alamos admitted to being "more than a little in love with him." His graduate students adopted his mannerisms, even his walk. What was the man's appeal?

  "He was the most brilliantly endowed intellectually of anybody I've ever known . . . He combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . a superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity . . . great simplicity . . . I've rarely known anyone with more beautiful manners."

  —Paul Horgan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and close friend since boyhood

  "He was interested in almost anything you could think of. His mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him—male, female, almost everybody. . . . He was terrifically attractive."

  —Dr. Harold Cherniss, professor of ancient Greek philosophy, longtime family friend, and colleague at Berkeley and Princeton

  "He was such an extraordinary man, his presence—and so verbal . . . and so sensitive to other people and their feelings; there was just an aura around him."

  —Dr. Robert Serber, physicist, Oppenheimer's assistant and alter ego

  "One of the most important characteristics of my brother . . . involves the way in which he made people into heroes. He could like all manner of people but in liking them they became special and exceptional. And his own sense that they were special was transmitted both to the people involved and others . . . Anybody who struck him with their wisdom, talent, skill, decency, or devotion became, at least temporarily, a hero to him, to themselves, and to his friends."

  —Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, physicist

  PROLOGUE

  After Hiroshima and Nagasaki; after having his face splashed on Time magazine's cover as the Father of the Atom Bomb; after being excoriated during the McCarthy era as a Communist dupe and probable traitor, humiliated by a bogus hearing, then resurrected by a government that attempted to find its conscience, J. Robert Oppenheimer, an elegant puzzle of a man, was left to the historians.

  Had he not been married to one Communist Party member and loved another, he might never have become embroiled in the political and social movements of those times. Like many of his peers, he could have fulfilled his destiny in the Second World War, then returned safely to the ivory tower.

  Three women gave shape to his life, and together defined the promise and the tragedy of their times. Jean Tatlock, Katherine (Kitty) Oppenheimer, and Ruth Tolman exist in the historical accounts—but always in the background, there yet unformed, unexplored. In the 1930s, women were going to college in increasing numbers, but it was the extraordinary woman who chose higher education and a professional career. Jean Tatlock became a medical doctor and a psychiatrist; Kitty Oppenheimer wanted desperately to complete a doctorate in botany; Ruth Tolman had a Ph.D. and was a practicing psychologist.

  The three were intellectually engaging and wholly involved in their times—ambitious, earnest, risk-taking. Each loved Robert until the end of her life; he, in turn, remained devoted to each until the end of his. Their story would begin just before the turn of the twentieth century and last through two tortuous world wars, a global depression—in all, somewhat more than half of that brutal century.

  No man of science, with the possible exception of Albert Einstein, has received more attention than the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. His early life seemed to embody the promise of the new century. His parents were wealthy and doting, their first child was extraordinarily bright. He went to exclusive schools, read widely and well, discovered the thrill of mathematics and what he would call the "sweetness" of physics. He would write his younger brother, "I know very well surely that physics has a beauty which no science can match, a rigor and austerity and depth."1 He was a beautiful, obedient child who, after a difficult and prolonged adolescence, became a remarkably attractive young man. He would finish Harvard in three years, then go on to Cambridge in England and Gottingen in Germany at exactly the right time to catch the incoming tide of the new nuclear physics. In the next decade, he would find himself at a critical place in the midst of a desperate time.

  For a few years after the war, Oppenheimer was publicly lauded as a savior, but then he was accused by his own government of being a threat to the American people. This made him the most illustrious victim of McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade. After the Hearing, even people who knew Oppenheimer well saw him as broken, defeated. Yet had he not gone through the ordeal, at least one of his principal biographers believes, he might today be regarded as no better known than any of the other extraordinary physicists of his time.

  JUNE 14, 1943

  The light was fading by the time Robert Oppenheimer left Le Conte Hall. He walked across campus at his usual fast clip, heading for the streetcar that would take him into San Francisco. He would have allowed his mind to skim over the consequences of what he was about to do. Not that he was weighing them; he had already made the decision to see Jean Tatlock. It would be more of an exercise to keep his mind occupied, to block the uncertainty of how he would find her. Radiant or remorseful. Perfect or flawed.

  There would be hell to pay, that he knew. He would have stopped to light a cigarette, maybe taking the opportunity to glance around for the Army security agent he knew would be there. He was too important to the war effort to be allowed to go loose in the world. His slender, six-foot frame and his signature porkpie hat made him an easy target to tail. The security agents would inform Pash, and Pash would be delighted to inform General Groves, and the general would be livid.

  Oppenheimer was the new scientific director of the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project, hidden on a mesa high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. It was possible that seeing Jean could cause him to be removed from the project altogether. The idea was so disturbing that it would have had to be put out of his mind, along with the wife and two-year-old son he had left behind in Los Alamos.

  After one last deep drag of his cigarette, he would have flicked it away, then swung onto the Key System train that would carry him over the Oakland Bay Bridge and into the city. He was thirty-nine that June. Jean was twenty-nine. They had known each other, loved each other, for seven years. He would always want her; twice he had come close to marrying her.

  Three months before, when he had been about to leave Berkeley for Los Alamos, Jean had asked to see him, but he had not gone to her then. Too much was happening, too fast. He wasn't allowed to tell her why he was leaving or where he was going, could not confide what he and a remarkable band of scientists were attempting to create. Probably he was glad for that; Jean would not have approved. She was one of the most principled people he had ever known; she believed above all else in the sanctity of life. She was a physician now, a resident in psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, working with troubled children. She did not know that ending World War II might depend on his group's ability
to develop a weapon of mass destruction so horrific it would defeat America's enemies, unless the Germans got it first. That grim possibility played on his mind. The Germans were intent on conquering all of Europe, the world. Would Jean, with her kind and open heart, be able to grasp the enormity of such a catastrophe?

  It was dark by the time the train rattled over the bridge. The FBI would have a file on Jean, on their relationship. What could they know about that relationship? All those years later, he would try to explain to strangers in a Washington, D.C., hearing room: "We had been very much involved with one another and there was still very deep feeling when we saw each other."

  On that June evening in 1943, he knew that an agent would be lurking near her at the terminal in San Francisco where she would be waiting for him.

  OPPENHEIMER ARRIVED AT 9:45 PWT, the FBI report reads. He rushed to meet a young lady, whom he kissed and they walked away arm in arm. They entered a 1935 green Plymouth coupe and the young lady drove. The car is registered to Jean Tatlock. She is five foot seven, 128 [pounds], long dark hair, slim, attractive.

  SHE WAS SMILING, NOT HURTING, he could see that. The Jean he could not give up. He would have smiled as she raised her face to kiss him, would have studied her with that intensity that so unsettled others, the blue eyes riveted, as if he could record the synapses of her brain. Others wilted under this attention, Jean did not. She slipped her arm into his and led him to the roadster.

  She drove east along the Embarcadero—the scene of much of the labor unrest she had reported in the Western Worker—then turned west on Broadway. She had decided where they would eat; not one of the posh restaurants he would have chosen, but a shabby place not far from her apartment on Telegraph Hill, good for the spicy food he favored and some proletarian privacy. An agent waited outside. He would report: Drove to Xochiniloc Cafe, 787 Broadway, at 10 P.M. Cheap type bar, cafe, and dance hall operated by Mexicans. Had few drinks, something to eat, went to 1405 Montgomery where she lives on top floor . . . Appears to be very affectionate and intimate . . . At 11:30 lights went out.

  Within two weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, chief of counterintelligence for the Ninth Army Corps in San Francisco, would send a memo to the Pentagon recommending that Dr. Oppenheimer be denied a security clearance and be fired as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, citing among other things this overnight tryst with Jean Tatlock, identified as his mistress and a known Communist.

  I

  BLOODLINES

  1

  ON BLOODLINES: 1620–1920 "WELL, NEITHER ONE OF US CAME OVER ON THE MAYFLOWER," ROBERT OPPENHEIMER OFFERED, PROBABLY WITH A SLIGHTLY SARDONIC SMILE

  William Boyd, one of Robert's housemates at Harvard, would remember the remark. Boyd's own Scottish-German forebears would not have been on that iconic ship when it reached American shores in 1620 either, or on any of the other ships that followed soon after in the Winthrop Fleet, carrying English emigrants westward over the Atlantic at the beginning of what would come to be called the "Great Migration." The ancestors of two other Harvard friends—John Edsall and Jeffries Wyman—had arrived on Massachusetts shores in the 1630s, however.*

  * * *

  * All three of Robert's early Harvard friends would go on to illustrious careers: William Clouser Boyd became a noted American immunochemist. Jeffries Wyman, who was also one of Robert's housemates, became renowned for his research into hemoglobin and blood proteins; he also had "a lifelong preoccupation with blood relatives and family ties." John T. Edsall, also a housemate, became a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard, and did pioneering work on proteins and plasma.

  These early settlers in the New World were not the huddled masses that would wash westward from Europe two hundred years later, but strong-minded, God-fearing, typically prosperous and well-educated people who had left their native England seeking freedom to worship. These were the Puritans, supremely confident in their own superiority, who helped to establish a distinctive American character: a kind of rock-ribbed perseverance, a determination that would not falter. The hellfire and damnation they preached would also linger long in the Puritan psyche, but would never be quite so deeply embedded as their belief in the spiritual value of good deeds and the ethics of hard work.

  As the seventeenth century converged into the eighteenth, the English, some of them gentry, continued to make the long sea journey to the colonies in America, looking not so much to worship as they pleased as to make their fortunes. A social elite evolved around those who did not have a "dusky complexion," who were Protestant, who had married well or made money or, preferably, both. Harvard, established in 1636, was the college of choice for those families who "mattered." Their names became a litany—among them Adams and Cabot and Lodge, Saltonstall, Peabody, Forbes, and Lowell, and all of their many permutations. For another century and more, they merged and married each other as often as possible. In 1928, Robert Oppenheimer's Harvard friend Jeffries Wyman married Anne Cabot. (The Cabots had arrived in America in 1770, the Wymans 130 years earlier.) "It was a heritage that was old and rich in willpower, Puritan values and a strong sense of purpose," their daughter Anne Cabot Wyman would write. She describes her family as "entwined with grandparents, uncles and aunts and rafts of cousins. The generations met every year at big family parties and in old summer enclaves in Maine or on Cape Cod. In the winter, colonies of relatives clustered in the upscale Boston suburbs of Brookline or Dover or Milton. The men worked together in offices on State Street in downtown Boston or in labs at Harvard. Their wives belonged to 'Mothers' Clubs.' They were all considered—and considered themselves—'True Bostonians.'"2

  IN 1922, ROBERT OPPENHEIMER'S FIRST year at Harvard, 21 percent of the student body was Jewish. The following year, Harvard's president—a Lowell—suggested a quota on Jews in the student body: no more than 15 percent.3 It would have been impossible for anyone as smart and sensitive as Robert to be unaware of the prejudices that existed, or to believe they did not apply to him.4

  Robert was at Harvard long enough to learn that bloodlines mattered; that while the gene pool would swirl and widen in the early decades of the twentieth century, New England, with its Great Migration core, would remain implacably white and Protestant. His German-Jewish roots would forever exclude him. And yet two of the women he would come to love in his lifetime had bloodlines that set them solidly inside the circle of those who belonged.

  JEAN TATLOCK'S HERITAGE TRACED BACK TO important families of the 1636 Puritan colony in Connecticut. Her grandfather, William Tatlock D. D., arrived from England in 1853, and married Florence Perry, who in the course of time gave birth to a son, whom they named John S. P. Tatlock, the S for Strong and the P for Perry. Jean's grandfather would serve as rector and archdeacon of St. John's Episcopal Church in Stamford, Connecticut for thirty years.5 His son John grew up to be a handsome young man, with a broad forehead, blue eyes, and a dignified demeanor and, in time, became a scholar of Chaucer and Dante. His first post was as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, where he was destined to meet a remarkable student named Marjorie Fenton.

  The Fentons too had come early to America; they settled into the Hudson River Valley and played a lively role in the new colony's life. John Fenton served in the Revolutionary War as a drummer and worked his way to the rank of sergeant in the Commander-in-Chief's Guard.6 Four score years later, another Fenton and another American war: fifteen-year-old Ernest left his New York home in 1860 to make his way to Washington, D.C., arriving just as Abraham Lincoln was about to become president and the Civil War loomed like a great dark cloud over the capitol.

  In 1865, Virginian Mary Welsh Waters, just seventeen, was one of the hundreds of thousands of grieving wives left behind by the ravages of the Civil War. Ernest Fenton came safely through the carnage, moved back into a Washington boardinghouse, and returned to clerking, this time for the War Department. When the rather tall and dark-haired Ernest proposed, Mary accepted. I
n 1881, she gave birth to a girl they called Marjorie.

  As the twentieth century opened, young Marjorie Fenton—showing the resilience of a Virginia-bred mother and the grit of a Yankee father—made her way west to Ann Arbor, where she enrolled at the University of Michigan, one of the land-grant colleges that accepted women and trained them to be teachers. It was 1901; she was to graduate Phi Beta Kappa with the class of 1905. Chance, Puritan predestination, or possibly simply a class assignment brought Professor John Tatlock face-to-face with Marjorie Fenton. They married in 1908. Three years later, Marjorie gave birth to Hugh, and in 1914, a year before the family was to leave for California and Stanford University, she had another child, a girl.

  The spiraling threads of chromosomes that formed Jean Frances Tatlock's genome—not to be understood for another century—were provided by both parents from the far reaches of their families, then were selected into a template that would dictate the body she was to grow into: the color of her hair, the curve of her breasts, the lavish eyelashes and shining intellect. And something more, a disposition dark and troubling, hidden in those shards of inherited DNA.

  RUTH SHERMAN WAS tall, elegant, and remarkably self-assured when she married Richard Tolman, whose family tree included some of the most positively principled, determined, wrong-righting women in New England history. Richard's grandmother was Elizabeth Buffum Chace, famous for confronting the ills of society head-on. Early in the 1800s, the storied Chace women—Quakers, abolitionists, suffragists—managed also to be exceptionally fecund.7 Both Richard and his brother, Edward, had Chace as a middle name. They grew up in West Newton, an affluent suburb of Boston, and attended MIT, their father's college. Edward would go on to Harvard for a Ph.D. in the new field of psychology. Richard received his doctorate from MIT.