An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  In New York, the newly formed United Nations had created an International Atomic Energy Commission. President Truman appointed Dean Acheson to chair a committee that would recommend U.S. nuclear policy. Robert and David Lilienthal, who had administered the Tennessee Valley Authority before the war, were to provide technical advice. Robert called up his dazzling powers of persuasion, and convinced Lilienthal, Acheson, and Acheson's aide Herb Marks that the U.S. should give up its monopoly on atomic weapons immediately. Robert became the primary author of the thirty-four-page Lilienthal-Acheson Report, which offered some radical ideas on the control of atomic weaponry and supported the idea of international control of nuclear information, which he thought essential for world peace.

  Acheson passed the report on to Secretary of State James Byrnes, who said publicly that he found it impressive and sent it on to Truman. The conservative Democrat Bernard Baruch (Byrnes' business partner) was selected as U.S. Representative to the UN Commission,348 which would prove to be the death knell for the Lilienthal-Acheson report. Baruch, unduly protective of American atomic interests, added provisions of his own that were unacceptable to the Soviets.

  Acheson was discouraged; Lilienthal felt Baruch had sabotaged their report and felt "quite sick." Oppenheimer said, "We have failed."349

  THE OPPENHEIMERS HAD ACQUIRED A retired Army dog named Buddy, who became Peter's shadow. (If Peter slipped out of Buddy's sight, the dog was known to barge into neighbors' homes, and would not leave until he had searched every room.) Kitty was again driving to and from the train station or the airport. She hosted dinners, arranged Robert's schedules, accepted or declined their many invitations. For the first time, she was part of the substance of Robert's working life, even when he was away.

  Compared with academia and the life of a faculty wife, the struggle building in Washington seemed infinitely more interesting, and more important. Kitty was thirty-five that year; with no Ph.D., two young children, and a husband she adored (as she often said, sometimes in public when she'd had one too many drinks), she was enjoying Robert's access to the power brokers in Washington. Kitty knew by then that the FBI was taping their conversations. She would have been pleased when they copied Robert telling someone he couldn't give them an answer until he communicated "with my boss."350 That Boss being Kitty.

  THERE WAS NO REASON FOR Kitty to go with Robert to Pasadena; the train trip was long and boring, he used the time to read and work. At the Tolmans' he could talk with Richard, who was also making regular trips to Washington. Kitty and Ruth had spent little time together; Kitty must have felt that at fifty-two, Ruth was not a threat. She didn't realize that neither Ruth's energy nor her ambition had ebbed. Or that Ruth had good friends—men and women alike—who had been with Kitty at Los Alamos and had tales to tell about her erratic behavior. So although Ruth was scrupulous about inviting Kitty to join Robert at their house, she was mostly relieved when Kitty remained in Berkeley.

  AT THE WAR'S END, RICHARD looked decidedly older than his sixty-four years. He had spent the months immediately before Hiroshima helping to prepare the important—and controversial—Smyth Report, which recommended what nuclear information could be disclosed to the public, a subject that was to divide scientists and the American political establishment in the years to come. Robert was still rail thin, but was regaining his strength. Ruth, once again, found herself the confidante of two of the most revered scientists on the planet, both struggling to find a way for the world to live in peace with the nuclear threat they had helped to create.

  RUTH KNEW, FROM RICHARD AND Robert, the anguish that was corroding the consciences of many of the scientists from Los Alamos. Nat's letter wasn't the only one Ruth received the week after news of the atomic bomb broke, when it became obvious that Richard was intimately involved in the biggest story of the war.

  On August 7, after Hiroshima, an old friend and admirer of Ruth's—a photographer she had corresponded with during World War I—sent her a letter that she tucked away to keep. The friend wrote that from the radio and newspaper accounts of Hiroshima, he had learned of Richard's involvement, and that he "can no longer lay the flattering unction to his soul that he never did any harm." He went on to say that if the world "can't adapt this discovery, conceived in a destructive spirit, to constructive uses even in the low spirit of realization that all hostile groups are mutually check-mated, they deserve to be destroyed utterly. I congratulate the doctor on attaining the eminence of avenging angel. 'Vengeance is mine—I will repay, saith the lord,' through Richard Tolman and his scientific colleagues."

  Having said what was on his mind, which must have jolted the preacher's daughter, he shifted to a tough but affectionate tone that seemed to define their former relationship: "You are a lousy correspondent in this war and you were a wonderful one in the last war. Your letters were the most interesting and stimulating of any I ever received. How about composing one to me and let me see if you are as good as you used to be. . . . When you come to New York, remember that I still have a passion for you and would love to see you." Then he added a postscript. "I regretted the death of your relative, Bill Chickering, whom I met in Honolulu. He was a charming fellow and was getting to be a good writer."351

  Bill Chickering was cousin Alma's son, the little boy that Ruth and Lillie Margaret had adored as a baby. They had watched him grow into a tall and handsome man. He was beginning a career as a writer when the attack on Pearl Harbor interfered. Time Incorporated took him on as their first war correspondent in the Pacific, reporting for both Time and Life magazines. The cousins kept close touch during the war. Alma sent copies of some of the letters Bill wrote home. In January of 1945, he was standing on the bridge of the battleship New Mexico, along with its captain and two Royal Navy men, waiting to cover the landing on Luzon. A Kamakazi appeared, then plunged his Zero into the bridge, killing all of them in the explosion. Bill Chickering was the only Time correspondent lost in the Pacific war. Ruth did not escape the kind of devastating news that was being delivered to families in cities and towns throughout the country as the war wore on. For the families of men already on the high seas, in troop ships ready to take part in the invasion of Japan—code named "Operation Downfall"—the atomic bomb seemed a miracle. They were thinking of the American lives saved if Japan surrendered rather than the 200,000 Japanese dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  For Ruth, as for most of the scientists who were instrumental in building the first atomic bomb, the lives saved—some casualty estimates escalated to as high as a million—helped to justify the use of this almost unimaginably destructive new weapon on a civilian population. Ruth, close as she was to Richard and Robert, could not have questioned the decision. But echoes from her early years in her father's church, cadences from the King James Bible, the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots," and her own moral code would have compelled her to confront the ethical questions raised by this new threat to civilization. That was yet to come; first she had to face an aftermath of the war, the battered returning army.

  WAVES OF GIS WITH DEBILITATING emotional and neurological injuries were coming home with symptoms that ranged from a pounding heart and racing pulse to prolific sweats and terrifying flashbacks. In World War I it was called "shell shock," in World War II, "combat fatigue." In all, some 44,000 veterans returned from the war with some degree of emotional trauma. The Veterans Administration, established in 1930, was responsible for these traumatized soldiers, a difficult task given the serious shortage of psychiatrists in the country.

  At the time, psychiatrists were supposed to treat patients, and psychologists to devise studies to assess them; but now the psychologists were needed to treat patients as well.352 This meant they needed to be trained. Ruth, who had been assessing and training OSS candidates during the war, was in the right place at the right time to help educate psychologists to see patients.

  Ed Boring, director of the Psychological Laboratory at Harvard,353 had been at OSS with Ruth, and they became friends. When, as part
of several studies that he and Alice Bryant did on women psychologists, Boring asked Ruth to explain her success in a predominately male profession, she answered that it was hard "to abstract 'being a woman' from being a particular woman and [that she tended] to hold responsible my particular idiosyncrasies rather than my sex for the arrangements of my life."354 Ruth was one of the few women at the top of her profession, and she was treated as an equal by men who were acknowledged to be leaders in their field. Realist that Ruth was, she acknowledged that this was the result of her skills but also of her relationship to her brother-in-law, Edward. Although younger women seem to have found her somewhat threatening, with the men and professional women with whom she worked, she was regarded as an excellent colleague; she was a serious researcher and teacher, made no overt demands, and asked for few if any exceptions. And she had powerful connections in the field of psychology and in the government.

  In 1946, the Division of Clinical Psychology in the Neuropsychiatric Service at the Veterans Administration created five types of facilities where veterans could be treated. The largest number would go to what were called Mental Hygiene Clinics, for outpatient care which would allow the veteran to stay in his community. Group therapy was one of the innovations introduced in these clinics. Although Ruth had taught part-time at various colleges before the war, she spent most of her postwar years doing research and developing training programs for clinical psychology, one of the few fields in which women outnumbered men.355 In 1946 she was assigned to the clinic in downtown Los Angeles, the largest in the West.

  She would write to David Shakow, a colleague and friend, that the VA program offered rich research possibilities that should be integrated throughout the system. To help solve her quandary of what, exactly, was effective therapy, Ruth argued that the first step would be to define and measure what "efficacy" means.356 Throughout her career Ruth would place great importance on defining terms, to make psychology as precise a science as possible, something she undoubtedly learned from the physicists in her life.

  IN PASADENA, THE PRE-WAR camaraderie revived; Robert confided in Ruth his growing doubts about teaching. Before the war it had been his life, he would say, but now the thrill was gone, and all the calls from Washington were distracting. Having Robert to herself for a few hours each month gave the two, after the rigors of the past four years, time to grow closer. He had always, in some ways, been a younger, more intense version of Richard.

  It wasn't long before rumors of an affair between Ruth and Robert began to circulate. A young acquaintance recalled stopping by the Tolman house one morning to find Ruth and Robert alone and in their dressing gowns.357 It was enough to start talk. Those close to Ruth didn't believe it, but the Oppenheimer marriage had become such a topic of gossip in academic communities that the hint of an affair between Robert and not just any older woman, but the wife of his good friend Richard Tolman, created a frisson of speculation.

  VII

  REPERCUSSIONS

  24

  J. EDGAR HOOVER MONITORS LIFE AT EAGLE HILL, ROBERT FINDS THAT TEACHING SEEMS IRRELEVANT AND KITTY HAS A PREMONITION

  Immediately after the war, Robert at forty-two was a celebrity. Richard just wanted to go home to Pasadena.

  Robert was meeting important people in Washington, including Secretary of State General George Marshall and President Truman. But he was beginning to find the practice of democracy an aggravating, often disappointing business. Not nearly as clean and orderly as physics. Many of the political leaders he worked with were thoughtful men, others he dismissed as either too simple to grasp a concept, or fools. But he could not dismiss Edward Teller and others who refused to understand that taking the atomic bomb to another "super" level could be catastrophic.358

  ON EAGLE HILL, KITTY ENTERTAINED a steady stream of guests, juggled Robert's schedule, and continued to drink. At one in the morning one night in 1946 Kitty fell in her driveway. FBI wiretap reported that she fractured her wrist in seven places, and spent the early morning hours in Alta Bates hospital. It was just another in a series of bone breaks and bruises collected in car crashes or on horseback, some fueled by recklessness, others by alcohol.

  The FBI recordings of the Oppenheimers' phone conversations produced a tapestry of daily events: Peter had traumatic nightmares, Toni would soon be out of diapers. Kitty called a domestic help agency to explain that while they felt it was wrong to have servants, they needed a second maid. They were happy with their current help, she said, because she "went around with a completely detached attitude; she did not bother them at all and Robert liked that."

  In May of 1946, Kitty's mother came to visit. Robert was in the East at the time, and arranged to see Kitty's father in Pittsburgh and meet his boss, the head of research at Bethlehem Steel. Kitty suggested, "If you can say the right things, it won't do [father] any harm. So be nice to him."359 She also said she wanted Robert to come home before her mother left.

  ON THIS TRIP, ROBERT DELIVERED the fifth in a series of lectures at Cornell University. He unabashedly described the event to Kitty as "wonderful." She was desperate to be part of the excitement so he appeased her by saying how much "everybody misses you, many people wished you had come." Then he ended the conversation quickly by saying he would call again on Sunday "for Pete's sake too." But if it turned out he was too busy, he said, he would call as soon as he could. When Robert finally did call, it was to tell Kitty he would be delayed.360 He finally flew home on May 25, missing Kitty's mother by one day.

  Kitty distracted herself with an interest in the flourishing romance between Anne Wilson and the married Herbert Marks. Kitty invited Anne to come west to stay for a time. One day on the phone Herb asked Anne, now at Eagle Hill, what kind of spirits Oppie was in when he left for New York. She answered, "not good." Anne had delivered to Robert some news that had depressed him terribly, and she felt like a "skunk . . . Kitty almost slit my throat, for which I do not blame her." Anne described Kitty as a tigress, determined to protect her mate. Herb, who knew what news she had delivered, reassured her, "No, I think it was best that you did what you did . . . he needs to know things as they are, for his own sake."361 One of the things Robert "needed to know" was that Bernard Baruch's speech before the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission had included provisions that the Soviets would not and did not approve. Lilienthal noted in his journals that "O. was deeply troubled."

  Lilienthal also wrote that Robert had told him, "I am ready to go anywhere and do anything, but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant." When Lilienthal was appointed chairman of the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission the following year, he would write: "God grant in the coming year that I may by a bit lessen the cloud of dread and fear that hangs over the world since Hiroshima."362

  In Washington, Oppenheimer increasingly relied on Marks, now the Atomic Energy Committee counsel. Marks was at Robert's side as he worked to operate effectively in government. Anne and Herb, struggling to make a life together, were becoming mainstays in the Oppenheimers' lives. If Kitty were running true to form she was growing confessional as she drank, and Anne was learning more than she probably cared to know.

  THE FBI RECORDINGS REVEAL KITTY'S continuing hopes of being a more integral part of Robert's public life. When he was invited to dinner with "a flock of brass coming through" Berkeley, Kitty asked if she could go—"I would like to meet General Farrell, I am so fond of him"—but she was rebuffed. Wives were not included, which frustrated Kitty, who felt she was so much more than a "faculty wife." One day Robert called from Washington and reported to Kitty that he was with Richard, that soon Ruth was joining them, and they were going to Martha's Vineyard. Kitty—who had pleaded to join him—now pleaded that he wouldn't go. In another conversation, Kitty offered a problem of her own: her mother had written to say she was lonesome for reasons she was not yet willing to disclose.363 The FBI tapes make it clear: although he called Kitty frequently, Robert was n
ot interested in the family problems he had heard time and again. No matter how much she wanted to deny it, Kitty was the wife left at home with two small children.

  JACK TENNEY WAS A CALIFORNIA state senator and chair of the state's new Committee on Un-American Activities who liked to say, "You can no more coexist with communism than you can coexist with a nest of rattlesnakes."364 By the late 1940s, with fears of Communist espionage escalating, the Tenney Committee began to issue subpoenas. Frank was on the list. Robert, calling from Washington, said (with a nod to the FBI on the line) that he "wondered what it was all about," then told Kitty he had spoken to Frank and he seemed "not worried." As the Hearings began in California, Robert was on a train from New York to New Jersey, where he was to meet Lewis Strauss at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

  ROBERT WAS CERTAIN IT WAS a chimera to think the U.S. could contain atomic energy. He had confidence in his formidable powers of persuasion, but was finding people he could not persuade. His conversion to realpolitik was inevitable. If he wanted to continue to have influence in government he must, as Herb Marks had put it, "know things as they are, for his own sake." He, unlike many of the scientists still at Los Alamos, would have to settle for what was possible.

  Kitty, whose own reactions were consistently visceral, would have been in complete agreement. She was smart, but without Robert's ethical compunctions; she did not question the morality of building an atomic bomb. She made decisions on what was best for them, and had no problem cutting off a friend who might detract from Robert's success. In fact, in the early Los Alamos years, when it was clear that Army security considered Communism a threat, she was quick to renounce all her past involvement.365 When Kitty's old friend Steve Nelson, still an entrenched member of the Party, tried to contact them after the war, Kitty slammed the door shut. Nelson never saw them again. Frank, as Robert's much loved brother, was inviolable. Jackie and Frank had left the Party, but not their left-wing views, and they would not betray their friends. Like many of the young activist scientists, Frank had been disappointed in what seemed like Robert's willingness to work with those in government and the military who were "pro-bomb." Still, he would say of his older brother, "he'd been in the Washington scene, he saw that everything was moving—he felt he had to change things from within."366