An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Ruth's letters to Robert were filled with her research, her work on the committee to bring psychologists to the Institute, and reports of their old mutual friends who were coming to Pasadena. Always she added some personal notes: that she was sending him a gift of wine for his birthday and that she had "come to have respect for expendable gifts." That she had "rented the little guest house to a geneticist . . . whom I have seen only twice since he has moved in . . . It means that there is someone on the premises and that I do not have the guilt I mentioned at occupying so many square feet all by myself."405

  "These last few weeks I have been in a torrent of conflict," Ruth wrote. The psychology department at the University of Michigan had written asking her to consider several faculty positions. "I have needed terribly your help over these days of trying to decide. It is ironic to say that I have missed Richard's wisdom just excruciatingly, for if he were here there could be no such conflict and no such invitation. And just the occurrence of the issue, of course, has made so sharp and vivid my present unwanted 'freedom' and rudderlessness." Ruth said the thought of leaving Pasadena filled her with sadness. She ended with, "Remember how we have always, both of us, been miserable when we had to look more than a week ahead?"406

  They did, though, have to think ahead.

  The growing intensity of their relationship is captured in the few letters from Ruth saved by Robert. "I look back on your wonderful week here with all my heart grateful, Dear. It was unforgettable. I'd give great rewards even for another day. In the meantime, you know the love and tenderness I send."407

  ON AUGUST 29, 1949, THE Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in Kazakhstan; nine days later an American reconnaissance plane confirmed it had been a nuclear explosion. President Truman was staggered; he did not want to believe it, not even when the Defense Department brought advisors, including Robert, who verified that it was a close copy of the bomb developed at Los Alamos. Truman took three more days before he admitted to the American people that the U.S. had lost its monopoly on atomic power—as the scientists had tried to convince him it would. In Time magazine, Oppenheimer warned that the U.S. monopoly of the science was "like a cake of ice melting in the sun."

  27

  THE OPPENHEIMERS DISCOVER THE VIRGIN ISLANDS, ROBERT COMFORTS RUTH, AND KITTY AND ROBERT HAVE A MISERABLE CHRISTMAS

  In the early 1950s, after the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb and destroyed the monopoly America thought it had, the scene was set: the race for bigger bombs was on and the anti-Communists in the U.S. were out in force, with Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy leading the pack.408

  The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began unearthing potential spies everywhere—in universities, Hollywood, the State Department, even in the Army. Anyone who had anything in their pasts suggesting sympathy to Communism was suspect. In the chaos, other powerful people used the opportunity to destroy their own adversaries.

  After Joe-1, the "Super bomb" was promoted as insuring American atomic superiority. At the end of January 1950, President Truman announced that the U.S. would pursue a crash program for the Super. The nuclear arms race began. Teller, Lawrence and a powerful combination of military brass and politicians would not forgive Robert for opposing them and even began to question his loyalty. Admiral Strauss began scrutinizing Robert's well-worn FBI record.

  "IN THE EARLY '50S, UNDER Robert Oppenheimer, the Institute had become the finishing school for the best and the brightest young theorists," said Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, then one of those elite young theorists. One of the great men of physics, Hans Bethe, was to write, "Even more than Berkeley in the 1930s, the Princeton Institute became the centre for physics. Nearly everybody who was anybody passed through its stimulating atmosphere."409

  Seventeen years into their marriage, physics remained the part of Robert's life that Kitty could not share. Nor could she be part of, or understand, the deepening nature of her husband's friendship with Ruth. Most certainly she sensed it; she always resented any other woman whose company Robert enjoyed. According to Jerry Bruner, Ruth seemed easy and comfortable around Kitty and had no intention of making Robert's home life any more difficult that it obviously already was. What Robert did share with his wife was the convoluted, and sometimes contentious, role he played in government. Kitty was positive that she was his greatest advocate; it gave her a sense of purpose and power—a chance to show the steel in her character.

  THE INSTITUTE WAS SIXTY MILES from Kitty's parents' home in Riegelsville, Pennsyvania, near enough for frequent visits. Kitty knew her mother was lonely and wanted to become part of her daughter's family life. After all, Kitty had run for home each time she had found herself unable to cope, and her parents had always accepted her. It was not unreasonable to expect it was time for their daughter to open her life to them.

  There is a photograph of Kitty's parents sitting on the terrace at Olden Manor, her father staunch in coat and tie, looking uncomfortable. Chances are the Puenings didn't see their daughter and grandchildren often. Within the decade, Kitty and her mother would become estranged. While the Puenings would have been encouraged by their daughter's marriage to an accomplished and famous man whom she worshipped (though it might have been more to their liking had he not been a Jew) and by their two young grandchildren and the fine house at Princeton, they might also have wondered if Kitty would someday turn up on their doorstep again.

  Soon after the war, Kaethe and Franz returned to Germany to visit family members; they saw the terrible toll the war had taken and mourned the deaths of Kaethe's sister by suicide, and of several nephews on the Eastern Front. Kaethe's cousin and one-time suitor, Field Marshal Keitel, had been found guilty at the Nuremberg trials and hanged as a war criminal in 1946.

  THE FOUR OPPENHEIMERS SPENT PART of the summer of 1950 at Perro Caliente, playing poker and searching for four-leaf clovers, a favorite pastime of Kitty's, as the magazines pointed out. Kitty began to paint watercolors. Peter was nine and Toni six, both now old enough to ride. Ruth visited, and later sent a note thanking them for "our sweet visits." But the era of high spirits had evaporated. Kitty was now troubled with colitis, and Robert was distracted by nearby Los Alamos, where the H-bomb was underway. And Frank—always so lively and interested in everything—no longer felt welcome.

  Even though the raw truths of marriage and politics and circumstances pulled them apart, Robert and Frank longed for their old camaraderie, for the closeness that had been an important part of their younger and more innocent lives. In the early 1950s, Robert began taking another personal trip each year to Colorado. The brothers were working on making amends, but there remained some roadblocks. Frank believed he had become a cattle rancher; Robert was certain his brother was a physicist, and needed to be at a university. Frank believed that Robert had been seduced by the power and glamour of Washington. But it was a given that the affection between the two had not eroded completely.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1952, the FBI asked to interview Kitty. Robert insisted on being there, probably to protect both of them from her acid tongue and perhaps to make sure their stories of certain incidents were the same. For two days in March, and another two in April, the agents asked Kitty the same questions she had been asked before. She gave all the same answers. About Joe Dallet, about her membership in the Communist Party, how she had given up the Party but not all of her old friends, at least not right away. It was a rehearsal and she was proving to have talent as a witness.

  That spring eight-year-old Toni came down with what doctors said was a brush with polio, and suggested she be taken to a warm climate. The family flew to the West Indies and rented a seventy-two-foot ketch. Robert recovered his old pleasure in sailing. Kitty, who prided herself in her proficiency in almost everything, soon was taking the helm and acting as navigator. Toni recovered quickly. Now, part of each summer would be spent sailing the warm waters of the Caribbean. Eventually the family built a beach house on a strip of white sand on tiny St. John in the Virgin Islands.

>   ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 5, 1952, having left Robert in New York, Ruth returned to Washington and promptly wrote: "A line before the plane goes West to thank you again for the sweet times together," adding, "The good lunch and dinner, the tiny breakfast, the brief calls with the familiar and reassuring sounds on the other end. Thank you for it all, Dear. It was great good luck. I shall always remember the two magic chairs on the dock with the water and the lights and the planes swooping around overhead. I suppose you realized what I did not have to mention—that it was the anniversary—four years—of Richard's death, and the memories of those dreadful days of 1948, and then of many earlier sweet ones were very overwhelming to me. I feel very grateful that I could be with you that night. My love Robert, and again my thanks. Ruth"410

  After four years, the pain of Richard's death was still vivid. Ruth continued to need Robert's comfort and Robert, who had also loved Richard, could understand.

  ONE OF THE FIRST PSYCHOLOGISTS INVITED to the Institute was Harvard's George Miller, who worked on the linguistic side of decision theory. Robert thought Miller a good match for Johnny Von Neumann, the Institute's mathematical genius, who was delving into psychological issues in his own work. Ruth knew Edward Tolman had been invited to the Institute. He was leading the fight against a new "loyalty oath" at Berkeley which essentially required all employees to swear that they did not belong to the Communist Party. The California State Supreme Court eventually ruled for Tolman and the professors who had refused to sign the oath. After that was resolved, Edward could go to the Institute.

  In February of 1953, the members of the Psychology Committee were meeting at the Institute, and were to have dinner and drinks at Olden Manor. Robert was in Washington, standing by as a possible witness in the perjury trial of one of his former graduate students at Berkeley, Joe Weinberg. (Like Frank, Joe had been dismissed from the University of Minnesota two years before, another HUAC victim.) Kitty was in Washington with Robert. It was obvious to their friends that no matter how difficult she could be, Robert had come to depend on her in the turmoil created by a frightened and irrational nation.

  When the trial ran late, Robert sent a message to the psychologists waiting for him to say he was sorry, and told them to make themselves at home and have a drink. He wrote another memo to Ruth, explaining his delay and saying, "I have, as you know, no choice; but it breaks my heart to be away. Please be, as you so often have, a pinch hit hostess, and have people over to the house for cocktails. Jerry knows where we keep things, and I hope he will tend bar."411

  On the plane back to California Ruth wrote, careful to include "you both" in the context: "Your sweet, warm hospitality lingers with me happily . . . if [only] you both could have been completely untroubled by all the miseries of subpoenas and the like. It was especially generous of you both to make the visit so warm and good at a time when you felt so worn and worried and frazzled." Robert had confided to her his growing concern that he was being drawn into the vortex that had already consumed Frank. He must have written that he wished she were closer, because Ruth answered: "I too wish that you needed my advice and often I wish I had a book in my guts so that I could ask to work at the Institute with all the incoming hordes of psychologists." As always, she signed it "Robert, my love, Dear."412

  IN HER APRIL LETTERS, RUTH SEEMED unusually stressed. She complained, something she rarely did, about being tired. She had some "frightfully busy weeks ahead . . . with a couple of other papers to prepare and give and one oral examination for the Board of Examiners to arrange for and conduct. I wish it were the end of June, with all this strenuousness over."413 She nudged him, again, to send his suggestions on the draft of the President's address she was to deliver at the Western Psychology Association conference in June.

  Ruth wanted to talk about psychology as both a "pure" and an "applied" science, describing how the theoretician and the practitioner should work together. Since she was comparing physics and psychology, she had asked both Charlie Lauritsen and Robert to read her speech. It is easy to see Robert's hand in it. She quotes one "well-known theoretical physicist," describing a theory as "a picture of the universe that opens up all kinds of new possibilities, just as Freud did in psychology with his theory of the unconscious." It was a serious paper, carefully researched and thought-provoking. And it was a great success; a few months later, it was published in American Psychologist.414

  ON JULY 3, 1953, ADMIRAL Strauss again became the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He had been in the office only a short time when he asked Hoover to send him the latest FBI file on Oppenheimer. A friend of Herb Marks who was with the Commission called to say, "You'd better tell your friend Oppie to batten down the hatches and prepare for some stormy weather."415

  That same summer, a few weeks after Ruth's success in Seattle, she suffered a heart attack. As she was recuperating, she was struck by another. She was in the hospital in mid-August when all four Oppenheimers returned from a six-week trip to Brazil where Robert had delivered a series of lectures. He wanted to leave at once to be with Ruth, but Lillie sent a telegram asking him to wait. No visitors were allowed, she said, and they didn't know how long it would be before she was well enough to go home.

  Charlie Lauritsen—knowing how much Ruth meant to Robert, wrote to him: "Since I am fairly sure that she cannot write you, I thought that I would bring you up to date. By now you know she continued to have a good deal of pain but in the whole she seemed to be improving slowly. Then about two weeks ago she had a second attack. Her doctor was not too alarmed about it, but in my opinion the second attack was considerably more severe than the first. She will certainly remain in the hospital for several weeks more. She has been limited to one 15-minute visit a day . . . she is certainly much more reconciled and willing to accept the consequences of her condition. Unfortunately, I am afraid that this is to a large extent due to the fact that she is much more tired now."416

  By August 21, Ruth was writing her warm and considerate letters again. To Robert, she wrote: "It was so wonderful to hear your voice yesterday, sounding so near and warm, not only thermally. I got to thinking later, though, that if you are so pressed and busy . . . you ought not to try to crowd in a trip West unless there are other things you have to do here besides seeing me. I don't need to tell you how much I love to have you here (or in Berkeley if I am there). But I also feel a great desire to protect you against doing too much and adding things to your crowded life unless they are really essential. I have made excellent progress . . . though this second coronary was rather worse than the first, both clinically and in severity of pain. But now all the clinical findings are good. I'm soft from so many weeks in bed . . . but I want to reassure you completely, Robert dear, so that no anxiety about my health will influence you to do anything that is strenuous for you. Always my love to you, and to the family."417

  BY FALL, RUTH WAS GAINING strength, but Robert's calendar had no room for a trip West. He was to deliver the influential BBC Reith lectures in England that November, four talks on the impact of quantum and atomic theory on society, to be broadcast to millions of people around the world. He and Kitty went to London for three weeks, then to Copenhagen for three days to visit Bohr, and finally to Paris to have dinner with Haakon Chavalier and his new wife at their apartment at the foot of Sacre-Coeur. It had been three years since the friends had seen each other; the meeting was, Chevalier would report, as warm as ever, and he opened a bottle of champagne so they could make a series of toasts: "to the health and well-being of all of us, to our long friendship, to the future." Kitty suggested she and Robert sign their names on the cork, as a remembrance. So ended what Chevalier would remember as "a happy reunion and for me a rather fabulous one."418 He made no comment when Robert indicated, as he said goodbye, that he thought the coming months would be stormy.

  Strauss had inserted himself into the happy reunion by ensuring someone from the American Embassy would copy all the phone calls the Oppenheimers made from their room in the elegan
t George V Hotel, and that Robert would be followed wherever he went. The agents reported that the couple had seen Chevalier, whom French intelligence had on a watch list, suspected of being a Soviet agent.419

  The two old friends from Berkeley had managed to tangle each other in a Gordian knot so complicated it would become impossible to know which had done the most damage to the other.

  ROBERT DIDN'T KNOW THAT HE now had yet another enemy—a former bomber pilot and top Yale Law School graduate named William Borden had become obsessed by national security. He saw rocket-powered nuclear warheads as the weapons of the future, and opposed anyone who could not see the necessity for a hydrogen bomb. As executive director of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Borden had access to the Atomic Energy Commission's security files. His reading of Robert's file convinced him that the Father of the Atomic bomb could be an espionage agent. Having a top security clearance himself, Borden used his editing talents to selectively reorganize the voluminous files, presenting all the old information in new and dramatic form.420 He wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover about his findings. And while Hoover knew there was nothing new in the letter except Robert's skepticism about nuclear-powered aircraft and hydrogen bombs, he had to send it to President Eisenhower and forwarded a copy to Admiral Strauss, who had become Chairman of the AEC in July. Eisenhower told his press secretary, "We have got to handle this so that all of our scientists are not made out to be Reds. That goddam McCarthy is just likely to try such a thing." With that the president ordered a "blank wall" placed between Oppenheimer and all classified materials.421