An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  The idea would have been so disturbing that Robert would have shoved it into a compartment in his mind and slammed it shut. Neither would he have allowed himself to consider Kitty and Peter, left in Los Alamos. She did not like it when he left; she could not know, or control, whom he would see in Berkeley, what he would do there.

  He took a last deep drag of the cigarette, flicked it away, then swung onto the Key System train that carried him over the Oakland Bay Bridge and into the city. He had celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday only a month before. Jean was twenty-nine; they had known each other, loved each other, for seven years now. Even when she wouldn't—couldn't—marry him, he continued to love her.

  Perhaps he had not seen her before he left for Los Alamos because he wasn't allowed to tell her why he was leaving or where he was going, or especially what he was doing. Jean, who believed above all else in the sanctity of life.

  It was dark by the time the train rattled over the lower level of the Bay Bridge. The FBI would have a file on Jean, on their relationship. What could they possibly know about that relationship, what could anyone know?

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

  OPPENHEIMER, ARRIVING AT 9:45 PM, the FBI report reads, 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.284

  SHE WAS SMILING, NOT HURTING—Robert could see that—but glowing, happy. The Jean that kept him coming back. He smiled as she fit into his arms and kissed him. He would have studied her with that intensity that so unsettled others, the blue eyes riveted, as if he could study the very synapses of her brain. She slipped her arm into his and led him to the roadster.

  She drove east along the Embarcadero—scene of much of the labor unrest she had reported with such righteous indignation in the Western Worker—then turned north and 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 hot spicy food he favored and some proletarian privacy.

  AN AGENT WAITED OUTSIDE, WHERE he could watch the door. He would report: Drove to Xochiniloc Cafe, 787 Broadway at 10 pm. Cheap type bar, cafe, and dance hall operated by Mexicans. Had few drinks, something to eat.285

  Robert would later say that they did not talk about Communism. It was always an on-again, off-again thing with her, he would explain. Nor did they talk about where he was and what he was doing. "Military secret," he might have intimated. By now, though, Jean would have known something about his war work—they had several good mutual friends who had some knowledge: Bernard and Hannah Peters, whom Robert had tried to recruit for Los Alamos; or even Mary Ellen Washburn, who was close to the Serbers and knew how to contact them. He might have mentioned Peter, but probably not Kitty.

  Perhaps Jean told him that her brother was an Army doctor at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, studying infectious diseases. Or they talked about Churchill, who was in Washington at the moment with Roosevelt. The newspapers were full of the war. Maybe they spoke of the Europe both remembered from what now seemed long ago. The Allies were making progress in Tunisia, the tide seemed to be turning. Yet there was no doubt that this war was a fight for survival.

  What Jean wanted—needed—to tell him was that she loved him. He needed to know that it didn't matter if he had married, had started his family, had moved ever more deeply into the world of science that was his one pure love. What mattered to her was that he knew she had never stopped loving him.

  Perhaps she told him at the Xochinoloc Café. Or maybe it was later, when they went to her apartment on Telegraph Hill, where a car with two agents sat watching. The report reads that the couple went to 1405 Montgomery, where Jean lived on the top floor: At 11:30 pm the lights in the above mentioned apartment were extinguished.. . .The relationship of Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock appeared to be very affectionate and intimate.286

  PERHAPS SHE WAITED TO TELL him when finally they turned out the lights. They may have made love or simply held each other for the night. They had to have known it might be their last time together for a long while. The next morning they left in her roadster; she kissed him goodbye at the East Bay Terminal and he caught a streetcar back to the Berkeley campus and his meetings. They made plans to meet later that day at the airline office in downtown San Francisco, and she drove on to the hospital.

  That afternoon, the FBI picked up the surveillance: Tatlock arrived on foot and Oppenheimer rushed to meet her. They appeared very affectionate and walked to her car nearby . . . they then went to Kit Carson's Grill. After dinner, she drove him down the Peninsula to the San Francisco Airport.287 Perhaps he kissed her goodbye before they left the car, mindful that he was meeting a colleague. She watched him walk onto the tarmac and board the plane, first to Los Angeles, then on to Los Alamos and his other life.

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS, LT. COLONEL Boris Pash would send a memo to the Pentagon recommending that Dr. Oppenheimer be denied a security clearance and be fired as Scientific Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, citing among other things his overnight tryst with Jean Tatlock, identified as his mistress and a known Communist. The General was livid, but he did not fire Robert. By now, Groves felt that the success of his mission depended on this man. But there was a limit to his patience, and to how long he could hold off the hounds of the Counter-Intelligence Corps. Military Intelligence immediately requested that the FBI conduct an investigation of Jean and recommended installation of a technical surveillance on the residence of Jean Tatlock for the purpose of determining the identities of espionage agents within the Comintern Apparatus for the further purpose of protecting secret information regarding this nation's war effort. Her phone was tapped, "informers" questioned.288

  When Robert returned to Berkeley the following month, he did not see her.

  20

  RUTH LEARNS HOW ONE OLD SHOVEL CAN HELP MAKE FOUR HAND GRENADES, RICHARD IS SENT ON A SECRET MISSION TO ENGLAND, JEAN SENDS "ALL LOVE AND COURAGE" AND ROBERT TAKES A LONELY WALK IN THE WINTER WOOD AND MEETS THE PALE ANGEL OF MISERY

  On the Home Front, rationing tightened supplies of almost everything: gas, tires, sugar, meat, nylons—the list was long and affected everyone. The War Production Board's mission was to speed up manufacturing, as well as to set priorities and designate allotments of materials. The Board was expected to rally civilians. One statement exhorted: "We are faced with a serious shortage of metal scrap, rubber and other vital materials." The search was on for "the ordinary junk that today is lying around in barn yards and in the gullies of farms, in the basements, attics and garages in homes and stores throughout the country." Children helped by saving tin cans and newspapers, and taking them to a pickup point at their schools. The message was that everyone needed to help: "Even one old shovel will help make four hand grenades."289

  After two years of pitching in, civilians began to grow weary and even protest about shortages, putting morale at risk, so the War Production Board set up a Civilian Surveys Division to look into shortages. George Gallup was brought in, as were four psychologists, one of them Dr. Ruth Tolman. At the WPB, Ruth met Jerome Bruner, a recent Harvard Ph.D. in psychology. After being assigned to the Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters in London, Bruner came to know Richard well, and was one of their friends who had a key to their Washington house, where he stayed when he was in town. Another frequent guest in the war years, according to Bruner, was Robert Oppenheimer—"brilliant, discursive, lavishly intolerant, ready to pursue any topic anywhere, extraordinarily lovable. I had no idea what he was doing, only that it was war work and in the Southwest. We talked about most anything, but psychology and the philosophy of physics were irresistible."290

  AT LOS ALAMOS, AN ARMY base replete with military supplies, the scientists' wives weren't affected by rationing as much as the rest of the countr
y was. But that didn't keep them from complaining about a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Luckily, while there were no shops on the Hill, there was also little need for formal dress. Jeans and slacks were standard apparel; Kitty favored blue jeans and a Brooks Brothers shirt, or sometimes a short, pleated skirt and sweater, with bobby sox and saddle oxfords. In the winter, ski pants and parkas became everyday wear. Men switched from the coats and ties that had been their university uniforms to jeans or khakis and flannel shirts. For many of the young couples, the years at Los Alamos were one of life's grand adventures.

  KITTY'S DISCONTENT, HOWEVER, WAS GROWING, fueled by her loneliness and the demands made on her. Like most of the scientists, Robert vanished into the Tech Area where she was not allowed to follow. Other people at Los Alamos had more access to her husband than she did, and he seemed always to make time for them. When he traveled to Berkeley or Washington, she stayed behind. Once again, Kitty found herself in a place where living conditions were rough, where she felt she was expected to do menial work, living with a man who was the center of her universe, only to find that she was not the center of his. She became jealous of any woman she imagined had designs on her husband. Robert's first secretary, Priscilla Duffield—who had felt Kitty's sting—described her boss's wife: "She was a very intense, very intelligent, very vital kind of person, and no question at all that she was difficult to handle. She didn't get along very well with women." Duffield added, "I'm sure she had romantic ideas about herself that she didn't carry through and I think this went on for years and her frustration got worse and worse."291 At Los Alamos, working on a doctorate in botany was impossible. Even the flower garden she had coaxed out of the high desert soil had to be sacrificed when there was a shortage of water.

  Kitty had a small coterie of women who rode the trails with her, and sometimes drank with her, but she had no close friends.292 She was becoming increasingly isolated, both emotionally and physically. The government-issue fence that wrapped around the community began to wear on Kitty; and so, it seems, did the little boy who needed her attention.

  ALL THROUGH THE SUMMER AND fall of 1943, Richard was in and out of Los Alamos, bringing Ruth news of the Oppenheimers. He often returned to Washington with gifts of silver and turquoise jewelry for her—purchased from Indians on the plaza at Santa Fe. In the first week of November 1943, Richard left for London. His mission, top secret, was to bring back Niels Bohr, the Dane who was at the very heart of the nuclear revolution.

  Germany had occupied Denmark since April of 1940, but it wasn't until October 1, 1943 that Hitler ordered Denmark's Jews be deported to concentration camps. The Gestapo had specifically ordered the arrest of the great champion of quantum theory. At last, Bohr was convinced to leave; that night the Danish Underground smuggled him and his wife across the choppy seas of the Oresund Strait to Sweden. Their sons were among the 8,000 Jews that made the crossing into Sweden in the next few days.

  The British sent a modified Mosquito bomber to Sweden, its bomb bay fitted for one passenger. Bohr climbed into an insulated flying suit with a helmet but he didn't listen to the instructions on how to operate his oxygen mask. When the plane reached 20,000 feet and Bohr did not respond, the pilot dove to a dangerously low elevation, figuring his passenger had passed out. Once on the ground in England, Bohr roused, telling his welcoming party that he'd had a nice nap.293

  Bohr and his physicist son Aage sailed on the SS Acquitania across the Atlantic to New York. General Groves sent one of his aides to met Bohr, with instructions to handle the situation "with extremely soft kid gloves." Richard had called him "an extremely superior person."294 Two days later, Bohr was on a train to Washington.

  ONE WINTER THURSDAY IN 1944, psychologist Jerome Bruner arrived at the Tolmans as usual, and noticed two cars parked outside the house—both of them occupied by quiet, stoic men. "I thought it rather odd," he noted. He let himself in, and found himself "face to face with a kindly and rumpled man who introduced himself as Mr. Baker. Ruth and Richard, he told me, had gone to a Ration Board Appeals sitting." Mr. Baker had been told to expect Bruner, and the two settled down for a drink. They were happily discussing "the complementarity of the human mind" when Ruth and Richard appeared. As soon as he could, Bruner took Richard aside and, considering the Army security parked outside, queried if, perhaps, the Mr. Baker he was chatting with was actually Mr. Bohr. Richard conceded.295

  Niels Bohr had a habit of thinking out loud, murmuring in long run-on sentences, talking through any problem. In Denmark, he had been convinced that building an atomic weapon was impossible. Now, hearing what the British and Americans had already done, he saw that the bomb was feasible. His thoughts quickly turned to what he now saw as the overwhelming problem: What could be done to control such an apocalyptic weapon? The problem, he repeated, was "what is going to happen afterwards."296

  In Washington, Bohr bustled about seeing influential people, explaining that he felt the only way to avoid a postwar arms race was to share the information with the Russians from the start. General Groves was apoplectic, and became even more intent on getting this "extremely superior person" safely behind the fences at Los Alamos, and keeping him there as long as possible.

  IN OCTOBER, THE ASPENS IN the Jemez Range flamed yellow; by November a chill was in the mountain air and for that first Christmas on the mesa, snow fell softly, camouflaging the rough gashes inflicted by the Army Corps. By mid December, a steady stream of British scientists, two and three at a time—some twenty in all—began arriving on the mesa. Sir James Chadwick arrived with a few of his countrymen and an assemblage of German, Austrian, Swiss and Polish scientists.

  The snow brought with it some holiday spirit and everyone rallied; soldiers were ordered to cut Christmas trees of all sizes, including a huge blue spruce for the great room of Fuller Lodge. Decorations were scrounged or made from what could be found; dinners in formal dress were planned; hunters were sent out to bag wild turkeys; parties were scheduled for every weekend. It was a curious mix of European formality and American openness in the wide-open Old West. Kitty managed to procure a goose for Christmas dinner. A chorus of carolers rode around town on the back of a truck, breathing in the cold mountain air, gaping at the splash of stars in the clear, dark night sky—an inadvertent gift from General Groves, who refused to allow street lights for fear of giving away the location of his secret city.

  THE BRITISH CONTINGENT WAS FASCINATED by this desert mountaintop and by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at sunset, blushing the cold pink of alpenglow, and bewildered by the quiet after the steady pounding of the London Blitz. While the Americans fussed over a lack of fresh vegetables, the British and those who had escaped from Europe luxuriated in the fresh eggs and what must have seemed like abundant food.

  The European refugees gave the people of the mesa pause; when the Americans asked about the damage inflicted by the German bombardment of England, a young British mathematician named Bill Penny gave a straightforward report that left the listeners stunned. "His presentation was in the scientific matter-of-fact style, with his usual brightly smiling face," recalled physicist Rudolph Peierls. "Many of the Americans had not been exposed to such a detailed and realistic discussion of casualties." It would be some time before they learned that Penny's wife had in fact been killed in one of the bombing raids on London. Peierls and his Russian wife Eugenia had fled Austria for England; the blitz had so traumatized them that they had sent their two young children, four and six, to Canada.297 After four years, they would be reunited in Los Alamos. Others had families, wives and parents on the Continent, and wouldn't know their fate until after the war. As 1943 came to an end, the one thing they had in common was concern about how close the Germans might be to developing an atomic bomb; some of them knew Werner Heisenberg and did not doubt his abilities.

  IN THE LAST FEW DAYS of that first year at Los Alamos, Richard Tolman and General Groves were once again on the Super Chief train heading west, this time escorting the irrepressible Dane t
o Los Alamos. They agreed to take turns sitting with Bohr in his compartment so he didn't wander around, as he tended to do. Richard took the first watch; after an hour he came out, exhausted by listening to the continual murmurings from Bohr's fulsome mind. "General," Richard said to Groves, "I can't stand it any more. I am reneging. You are in the Army, you have to do it."298

  The Bohrs—now known as Nicholas Baker and his son, James—were greeted warmly at Lamy railroad station in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The scientists were eager to meet the man who was at the very center of their world and who possessed the kind of moral authority that gave their work an imprimatur, quieting the restless questions that were in the backs of many of their minds. Robert would recall that Bohr was marvelous and that, although he took a lively technical interest, "His real function, I think, for almost all of us, was not a technical one. He made the whole enterprise seem hopeful, when many were not free of misgiving."299 That night, a reception was held in the great room at Fuller Lodge. The first question Bohr put to Oppenheimer was: "Is it big enough?" Would the power of the bomb be destructive enough to put an end to all war?

  General Groves left the following day, the last one of the year. Richard stayed on to celebrate the New Year with old friends at a party at Fuller Lodge, while most of the younger group celebrated with the usual high spirits. Given the altitude, it was easy to get drunk and more than a few residents of the Hill stumbled home in the early hours of the first day of 1944.

  In England, General Eisenhower began to prepare for the long-awaited invasion of France and the Red Army was only 200 miles from Poland. In Italy, there would be 55,000 Allied casualties at the bloody battle of Monte Casino. The U.S. Marines began to push the Japanese out of the Marshall Islands, often in vicious hand-to-hand fighting. And the American press reported that Hitler claimed he had a secret weapon that would end the war. It was a year in the balance, and death was the fulcrum.