An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  For the next five years, though, Pat and Kitty maintained a peculiar friendship, and like others before her, Pat found herself in the uncomfortable position of bearing witness to the intricacies of the Oppenheimer marriage. According to Pat, Kitty repeated the patterns she had established at Los Alamos, where she would "latch on to someone, bare her soul and I mean bear her soul, tell you absolutely everything . . . about herself, about her sex life with him, about anything." Kitty would, Pat recounted, later disparage whatever friend she had divulged too much to, publicly attempting to discredit her. In an effort to be somewhat even-handed about the director's wife, Pat said, of Kitty's social abilities: "She was outwardly gay and exuded some warmth . . . I think the general appearance was one of ease with people and warmth."381

  Kitty's parenting skills are less well documented. In 1947, Life magazine ran a cover story on Robert and included photographs of him reading a bedtime story to the children. The dog is curled at his feet, Kitty watches on lovingly. A happy family. And a few standard stories are repeated in most of the articles and books about Robert: how Kitty and the children liked to search the lawn for four-leaf clovers for good luck, how Toni carried tea in a delicate French china cup to the horses. How Kitty and Peter had made what he called a "gimmick," a square board with lights, buzzers, fuses and switches, and a tangle of wiring. Peter was to play with it for two years. (And how once, when Robert sat down to play with it, Peter had asked his mother if it was okay to let his daddy work with the gimmick.)382 But more often, the children were pushed to the background, turned over to a maid. When Peter was six or seven, Kitty's relationship with him changed dramatically. He seemed to disappoint his mother and she reacted by nagging and goading him—and they fought. According to several who were close to the family in those years, Kitty made life miserable for Peter, and Robert did not come to his son's defense.383 If Kitty bore little resemblance to the gentle, very proper Ella Oppenheimer, Robert also never offered the unabashed affection and attention that Julius lavished on his sons. Robert's friends had declared his parents "well suited" to each other, but few would say that about Robert and Kitty.384

  ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 14, a Saturday, Val was helping Ruth prepare for a dinner party at the Tolmans. Suddenly, Richard began to suffer violent symptoms. "Cheyne-Stokes breathing; muscle spasms and gross motor activity," Val would write Robert, at Ruth's request. Stewart Harrison came at once and had Richard admitted to the hospital. Val explained, "By 3 o'clock Sunday morning [Richard] had quieted . . . Now [he] seems to be reasonably comfortable."385 The stroke was serious. In the morning, Val said, Richard had recognized Ruth and Stewart, but wasn't able to speak.

  Val wrote: "Ruth, of course, is superb. Last night our united efforts succeeded in getting her to be 'sensible' so Charlie and Sigrid brought her home about 11:30, she took a Seconal and got a good 6 hours sleep. I am either with her at the hospital or here doing chores for her and all the good friends are being helpful and supporting." Val signed off, "I have cancelled my plans and am standing by."386 She did not leave to meet Ruth Benedict in New York, as planned.

  For two weeks after his stroke, Ruth stayed by Richard's side. He died on September 5. Ruth was stunned—inconsolable.

  VAL'S LETTER WOULD HAVE ARRIVED just before Robert had to leave for conferences in Paris, Copenhagen, London and Brussels; he was in Belgium lecturing on electron theory when Richard died. Val found herself in a quandary; she had been ready to return to New York and her life with Benedict, but her oldest friend needed her. The day after Richard's death, Val called on Benedict's sister Margery in her Pasadena home. Margery wondered how Val would resolve her conflict between her lover and her best friend, and worried that her "inordinate sense of duty might make her feel she should stay with Ruth." In fact, while Val was close to Ruth Tolman, their relationship did not go beyond that. Ruth simply accepted Val's lesbian relationships, but she knew that neither herself nor Val "would be happy in such a constant and intimate relationship" with one another. Though they would remain close friends, see each other often, and continue to work together, Ruth and Val's friendship required space."387

  SIX DAYS LATER, ON SEPTEMBER 12, Ruth Benedict, Val's partner, had a heart attack in New York. Found in Benedict's purse at the time was Margery's letter reporting that Val had decided to return to "the old gal—the famous anthropologist."388 Benedict now needed her even more. Val boarded a train for New York, and was with her in her last hours.

  26

  RUTH LEARNS TO LIVE A DIFFERENT LIFE AND ROBERT HOPES THEY CAN HAVE TIME TOGETHER

  "How am I?" Ruth wrote in answer to a letter of sympathy from one of her colleagues, "Only part of me seems to be here. This would be inevitable, I think, after 24 years of such a close relationship as Richard and I have had and richness in talking about everything together. I shall have to learn to live this different life. And I am inexpressibly grateful to have a job that needs doing and that is exigent and that provides some kind of continuity with the past."389

  Robert's return to Europe was his first in almost twenty years. The war had changed not only the landscape, but the mindset. Robert would write Frank that at the important centers of physics where both had studied, the scientists said they felt somewhat out of things. Robert concluded, "It is in America largely that it will be decided what manner of world we are to live in."390

  Except that in America, the world of physics was being jolted by the House Un-American Activities Committee—HUAC—which was laying waste to political liberals and left-wingers who had any connection with the Communist Party. Frank and Jackie were at risk. Even though Time magazine splashed Robert's image on their November 1948 issue and called him "an authentic American Hero," he too was at risk. The main purpose of the letter Robert wrote to Frank from Europe was to urge him to seek "the comfort, the strength and the advice of a good lawyer" for the upcoming committee interrogation. He recommended Herb Marks.

  When Robert returned, he paused in Princeton before heading west. He was the one person who would understand the magnitude of Ruth's loss and could comfort her. She wrote to him after the visit, "The precious times with you last week and the week before keep going through my mind, over and over, making me thankful but wistful, wishing for more. I was grateful for them, Dear, and as you knew, hungry for them, too." In response, Robert wrote, "Ruth, dear heart, even if there were not a few practical things, I should want to write in celebration of the good day we had together which meant so very much to me. I knew that I should find you full of courage and wisdom, but it is one thing to know it, and another to be so close. I hope our excursion to the sea did not leave any of our friends cross, either with you or with me. It seemed to me so wonderful."391

  In the same letter, he returned to her the first chapter of a textbook Richard had been working on at the time of his death. Wanting to keep Richard's memory alive, Ruth had asked Robert to read the manuscript to see if it could be published. Robert saw that it was only an introduction to what Richard had planned to write. He told Ruth, very gently, why it could not be.

  After another trip to Berkeley, he went south to see Ruth again. Robert had too many friends and colleagues in Pasadena to keep his visit a secret, so he and Ruth agreed on a subterfuge to be able to spend a day together. She wrote, "How would it be if I said you had to see someone at UCLA and we'd be away for the day, but back for a party at night? Let's think about this."392

  Soon after Robert became the director of the Institute, Ruth had suggested he include psychology in the scholarly mix. To give himself room to maneuver, Robert had requested a "Director's Fund" to bring in visiting fellows from new disciplines. Robert established the psychology advisory committee including Ruth and her brother-law Edward, along with Jerry Bruner and Ed Boring, Ruth's good friends from wartime Washington. The group would meet once or twice a year at Princeton.

  Ruth and Robert also began to arrange to meet in other cities at other times, usually around conferences. "If you are coming East and we m
ust be in Washington near to the same time," he would write, "we just hope that we can have a little time together."393 It was a refrain that was to be repeated, time and again, in the years to come, as they tried to carve "a little time together" out of their increasingly complicated lives. Another time, Ruth would write in answer to Robert's suggestion they meet the following weekend, that they could go to the sea together "for the day, until the afternoon." She was also planning a dinner party for him and a number of their physicist friends, and asked him, "Anybody else you think would be fun to see?" She ended the letter telling him about a trip with Val: "We saw the long stretch of beach where the sandpipers and gulls played. Oh Robert, Robert. Soon I shall see you. You and I both know how it will be."394

  THE COCKTAIL HOUR WAS A ritual for the Oppenheimers, as it was for many of this hard-working generation: Manhattans, Old Fashioneds and Highballs—a mix of whisky and ginger ale. In Berkeley, Kitty had remarked that their liquor bill was often larger than their food bill. Robert was known for his martinis— cold, a hint of vermouth, and powerful. At Olden Manor the liquor cabinet was well stocked, Robert was able to pace his drinking, Kitty was not. Nor did Robert drink during the day. It was also the age of smoking. Robert was seldom without a cigarette—his students used to joke about the day when he would confuse his omnipresent cigarette with the chalk he was using to write on the blackboard.

  ROBERT, NOW DETERMINED TO INTRODUCE a strong humanities strain to the Institute, brought in poet and soon-to-be Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot, historian Arnold Toynbee, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, social philosopher Isaiah Berlin, among others. For Kitty, an even more impressive group that showed up at the Manor was the Washington Establishment: James Conant was president of Harvard, David Lilienthal was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution. George Kennan, a diplomat at the State Department, would become Robert's close friend. Though Kitty seldom went to Washington with Robert, or to New York when it involved government business, he often asked her opinions and sometimes took her advice.

  To entertain so many important guests, Kitty requested that the Institute employ a French couple to prepare meals, hoping to raise the culinary level of the Manor. Both Oppenheimers loved good food (though some guests complained there was never enough of it), and they worked together on recipes. In the spring Kitty filled the house with masses of daffodils; in the summer she planned picnics with champagne and caviar. In all seasons she lavished the house with orchids from her greenhouse. Even when she had had too much to drink, she could pull herself together and be a charming, witty, if acerbic, hostess.

  Kitty was thirty-nine in 1949 and Robert, forty-five. Their children—Peter, eight, and Toni, four—seemed always on the periphery.395

  ON JUNE 7, 1949, ROBERT testified before HUAC about potential spying at Berkeley's Radiation Lab. He was told it was a closed session and, in a stunning display of naivete, he believed that meant anything he said would be held in confidence. He talked freely about former graduate students and his friends. He said one had "committed an incredible indiscretion," another he called a "dangerous man and quite red."396 The names Robert mentioned, including once good friend Bernard Peters, quickly showed up in the newspapers. Just as quickly, the men lost their teaching positions. Some of the physicists Robert most admired, including Hans Bethe, were angry. And Frank was furious with his brother.

  A week after Robert's ignominious appearance, Frank and Jackie were called to testify under oath. The couple decided they would have to admit they had been members of the Communist Party USA but unlike Robert, they would refuse to name others. Frank had given the dean at the University of Minnesota a letter of resignation. The dean assured him that it would not be accepted. But when it became obvious that Frank had lied to the university when he'd denied being a Communist, his resignation was accepted.

  At Berkeley, Lawrence let it be known that Frank wasn't welcome back. As was the case for the graduate students Robert had named, there was no place in America where Frank could teach physics or do research. What stung him most was that, after helping him get counsel, Robert had backed away, perhaps because he was now worried about his own fate. For the FBI's Hoover, it was one Oppenheimer brother down, one to go.

  AFTER THE BROTHERS' BRUISING APPEARANCES before the House committee, Katherine Page wrote to Robert: "I wish you were on the Pecos. I want to talk with you about so many things." She went on to list them in her usual blunt way. "How can I reach Frank?" she wanted to know, then went on reveal that when Frank "found that he was not going to be at Perro Caliente, I tried to persuade him to buy the Allen place . . . He looked at it and loved it but decided he couldn't bear to be so near Perro Caliente."397 After the war, when the ranch was finally offered for sale, Robert had bought Perro Caliente for himself and inflicted another cut in the bond with his brother. Did Robert remember Proust's words which had triggered his epiphany on Corsica, that the "indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty"?

  When Frank was offered positions to teach abroad, the State Department refused to issue him a passport. Finally, Frank and Jackie moved to the 800-acre ranch they had bought in the Blanco Basin in Colorado as their own summer retreat, and planned to work it as a cattle ranch. The pair knew nothing about raising cattle, of surviving the deep cold and snow of a Colorado winter, or how they could rear two young children in pioneering conditions twenty miles from the nearest town. But Jackie had never shied away from hard work and all his life Frank had welcomed an adventure. He sold one of the Van Goghs he had inherited from Julius for $40,000, and settled in for years of cattle ranching.398 Their father's dream of America had become ugly and the Oppenheimer brothers had become object lessons in the imperfections of democracy.

  IN JUNE, ROBERT WAS CALLED to Capitol Hill again, this time to testify in what should have been a routine matter before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. The Atomic Energy Commission had, as a goodwill gesture, suggested that the U.S. offer friendly foreign countries small amounts of radioisotopes to be used for basic research. The General Advisory Committee had agreed that the isotopes posed no threat. One of the four Atomic Energy commissioners insisted the isotopes could have a military application. Robert, seeming to forget he was in Washington, responded in the voice laced with sarcasm he usually reserved for students: "You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy." He went on, comparing isotopes to vitamins and drawing laughter, making a fool of the dissenting commissioner.

  That dissenting commissioner was Admiral Lewis Strauss. David Lilienthal noticed that a look of hatred came over his face.399 The Admiral was not a man who would tolerate being humiliated.

  VAL HAD MOVED BACK TO Pasadena and—her house not immediately available– had moved in with Ruth. By the spring after the deaths of Richard and Benedict, Ruth would write Robert: "Val seems better, with the bad days less frequent and more energy and enterprise than she had for a time. She is settled in her own house, has guests often, comes over here often, and we do many things together when there is time. She no longer tries to run me, though, and is generous and helpful without being demanding. I think that as more time has passed our relationship has become just about right."400

  WITH RICHARD GONE, RUTH CONCENTRATED on her work. Her articles on criminal psychology and on women psychologists, written during the war, had appeared in a number of professional journals. At one point, Ruth and Val persuaded Linus Pauling and others at Caltech to include the scientific basis of psychoanalyis as a topic in their lecture series401. Ruth had spent many hours with Richard and Robert discussing human behavior as a science; comparing the theoretical and the experimental physicists to psychiatrist and the psychologist seemed an obvious step.

  This new interest—suggested by her intimacy with physics and its "rigor and austerity and depth"—stimulated her to focus on the differences in language used by psychologists and psychiatrists. With colleague Harry Grayson, a
psychiatrist at the VA's Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles, she studied the hospital's staff and intern psychologists as well as its resident psychiatrists, analyzing the language used in their reports on their patients. Ruth and Grayson discovered that while psychologists and psychiatrists may have used the same terms, they did not define them the same way.

  One example: aggressive. The psychologists: An attitudinal set which is characterized by readiness to react to stimulation with destructive behavior, directed toward self, objects, and/or other persons. The psychiatrists: A destructive drive, primarily id in its origin.402

  The psychologists' penchant for verbosity, for abstraction and ambiguous definitions, was the result of their academic training, the researchers decided. Ruth hoped that by clarifying the language of observation, making the descriptions more precise and thus the perceptions of clinical data more reliable, results would be more constant, more scientific. Later, when it became clear that psychology as a science based on proven theories had far to go, she would admit that perhaps she had "wanted too clear and orderly and rich a body of theory to emerge."403

  At Cambridge, Robert had once found his way into the right science clubs in his quest to move into the top ranks in physics. Ruth now continued her climb into the upper echelons of her profession. She would become president of the Western Psychological Association and was active in the national American Psychological Association. She said yes to the Governor's Committee on Mental Health. For the national office of the Veterans Administration she traveled to San Diego to inspect a new site for an additional Mental Hygiene Clinic. At the clinic on Broadway in Los Angeles, she worked with Ed Pye, who would always remember her as a wonderful friend to the staff. He was fond of her, he said, "emotionally and professionally." Most of her colleagues felt the same way.404