An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Borden had provided the Admiral with his next move.

  KITTY AND ROBERT RETURNED FROM Paris on December 13th. The next day Strauss called him to say it "might be a good idea" to come see him in Washington, D.C. Oppenheimer appeared a week later at 3 P.M. Waiting with Strauss was Kenneth Nichols, a former aide to General Groves, and now general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss wasted no time. Robert needed to know that the Commission had "a very difficult problem" relating to his top-secret security clearance. In April, President Eisenhower had issued an executive order for anyone whose files contained any derogatory information. Strauss built to the big news: a former government official had questioned Robert's security clearance and President Eisenhower had ordered an investigation. Strauss went on, there was going to be a "review," which meant an immediate suspension of his security clearance.422 Robert listened, quietly asked pertinent questions. Nichols took notes. Strauss continued, the Commission had prepared a draft of the charges against Robert, but it had not yet been signed. He could read the charges right there, right then, but he could not take the draft with him. Robert noted that it was the same mix of charges brought before, some true but others clearly skewed to make him look guilty. Still others simply wrong.

  Robert was to be given a choice. His tenure as a General Advisory Committee consultant was about to expire; he could walk away, as Strauss would prefer.423 Or he could challenge the government and then go before a special panel and undergo an administrative review. And it was Strauss who would choose the three members of the panel. The Admiral demanded a response that night; he would be at home by 8 P.M., he said, so Robert was to answer anytime after that.

  Robert went directly to the law office of Joe Volpe, a former counsel to the Atomic Energy Commission. Herb Marks would join them. The three men talked for an hour—none of them realizing that the office was bugged; Strauss had convinced Hoover that he needed to be privy to anything said in Volpe's office, client-lawyer privilege be damned. From this source, Strauss quickly learned that Robert didn't know what he was going to do—walk away or fight.

  Anne Marks came to pick up Robert. "I can't believe what is happening to me," he said. But what he needed to do, he told them, was get back to Princeton right away to talk to Kitty. Anne drove him to Union Station. Kitty was waiting, eager to hear all that had happened and ready to do battle. Robert ignored Strauss' deadline. The next morning he phoned to say he would give his answer in person, and that he would be at Strauss' office at nine the following morning. Robert and Kitty boarded a train that would put them in Washington late in the afternoon, and went directly to the Marks' house. "He was still in the same almost despairing state of mind," Anne remembered.424

  Robert had made his decision. A one-page letter was crafted. Addressed to "Dear Lewis," Robert explained that he had considered resigning his position, as Strauss had seemed to suggest, but decided "this course of action would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this government, that I have now served for some twelve years. This I cannot do. If I were thus unworthy I could hardly have served our country as I have tried, or been the Director of our Institute in Princeton, or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of our science and our country."425

  That settled, Robert excused himself and went to the guestroom. Kitty, Anne and Herb were still in the living room, having a nightcap, when they heard what Anne called "a terrible crash." Robert was in the bathroom, the door shut, and did not respond. It took all three of them to push the door open to find Robert on he floor, unconscious. They got him to a couch; when he came to, he admitted he had taken some of Kitty's prescription sleeping pills. Following orders, the trio kept him walking and made him drink coffee until the doctor arrived.426

  Robert understood that his reputation was at risk. They were going to fight.

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1953, AS temperatures dipped into the 20s, two representatives from the Atomic Energy Commission arrived at Olden Manor with orders to remove the classified documents in Robert's possession, to tell him he would no longer have access to the vault, and to relieve the soldier who stood guard.

  VIII

  IN THE MATTER OF

  J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AND AFTERMATH

  28

  THE AEC LOOKS FOR FUNDAMENTAL DEFECTS IN ROBERT'S CHARACTER, JEAN HAUNTS THE HEARING, KITTY BECOMES AN ACCIDENTAL COMMUNIST AND RUTH IS "DEEPLY TROUBLED" BY ROBERT'S SILENCE

  1953: A day or two before Christmas, Robert's secretary Verna Hobson had been in the office at the Institute when Robert and Kitty walked in and, with scarcely a nod, went into his office and closed the door. When they finally emerged, Hobson could see they were in "some kind of trouble." The mood was intense, she remembered; the next day Robert called her into his office, told her about the charges, and explained the larger implications of having his Q clearance denied. Then he spent an hour and a half telling his story—all the way to his childhood—to put his actions in the context of his life. He told her what he would soon write in answer to the Atomic Energy Commission charges. Hobson later explained that she presumed he was likely rehearsing.427

  Robert poured himself into the task of writing and re-writing what would become a forty-two-page autobiography, with Kitty doing some editing. She drank too much, and could be contentious and embarrassing, but she supported him without question.* As Hobson saw it, "Kitty was Robert's greatest confidant and advisor and so he told her everything and she would get involved in making decisions."428 As his defense attorney, Robert settled on Lloyd Garrison, an old-school gentleman and champion of civil rights (like his great-grandfather, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison).429

  * * *

  * Rudolf Peierls once commented that, "Kitty was a person of great courage, both in the saddle and when facing an enemy."

  IN THE WEEKS BEFORE THE Hearing, Robert would sit in his big leather swivel chair by his office window, Kitty curled up in one of the upholstered armchairs. Garrison was there, sometimes with others from his law firm. At five in the evening, the group would remove to the house. Secretary Kay Russell was there to take notes. Hobson let Robert know she thought he should "push back, kick back, attack his accusers," until one night he walked out with her to say goodnight, and on the front steps told her, gently, that he was fighting as hard as he knew how, and in what seemed to him to be the best way. After that, she stopped pressing.430

  To most of Robert's friends and a majority of the scientific community, the suspension of his security clearance seemed absurd. They had no idea of the lengths to which Strauss—with Hoover's help—would go to destroy Robert, and his supporters had no idea of the extent of Robert's pre-war connections to Communism. In the political climate of the day, that information could easily be used against him.

  Even though Kitty was one of those Communist links, her husband now needed her. "I wish now I could observe Kitty again in those days," Hobson was to say. The situation "called on all her faculties, it was probably the only time in her life she ever really felt that she . . . used her capabilities."431 On January 2, Kitty telephoned Dean Acheson to find out what he knew. When she saw General Groves at a party in New York, she didn't hesitate to ask what he intended to say on the witness stand.432

  Robert's secretaries were bright, educated women with young families of their own, but they were devoted to Robert. Kay Russell had been his secretary for seven years. "The Oppenheimers became her life," Hobson explained, "He expected you to be around and willing to work all kinds of funny hours but it was not that he said now you must be here, it was just the atmosphere . . . you wanted to because you could see it was important."433 Hobson and Russell were part of a long line of secretaries who became mesmerized by their boss, but it was Kitty who became dependent on them. They did most of the planning for the social functions Kitty was expected to host. And sometimes they drank with her late in the afternoon. They also rescued her more than a few times from her accidents. Hobson
would say, "What a strange person she was: all that fury and soreness and intelligence and wit. She had a constant state of the hives."434

  THE EMOTIONAL UPHEAVAL CREATED BY the Hearing spilled onto Kitty's parents. On March 16, when Kaethe and Franz Puening arrived in New York from Bremerhaven, customs agents had been ordered to search the elderly couple's luggage, carefully noting what books and written material they carried. Franz, a bespectacled, gentle figure, was now in a wheelchair. Kitty's parents were so traumatized that they had to be hospitalized.435 Kitty was soon to make her own trip to the emergency room, to tend to the ankle she broke when she fell down a flight of stairs.

  BY THE SPRING OF 1954, Ruth had not seen Robert since the previous summer, after her heart attacks. Now that he was embroiled in crisis, she had to find out what was happening from Bob Bacher and Charlie Lauritsen—both were consulted about testifying for him—when they returned from Washington. She was frantic to hear from Robert. In the first days of April, he finally phoned. Afterward, Ruth wrote to him with palpable relief, "It was incredibly good to hear your voice this morning. I think there has never been a time when so long a period has elapsed without letters or visits or some kind of communication for us." She was, she wrote, "deeply troubled" by his silence: "I suppose you have felt too harassed and confused to write . . . and I was a little confused, too because I did not know how much I was 'supposed' to know—though surely I could have assumed that you were willing for me to know anything which Bob and Charlie told me. You have been constantly in my thoughts Dear, and with, of course, much concern . . . Oh Robert, Robert, how often has it been this way for us! That we have felt powerless to help when we wanted to so deeply."436

  JEAN HAD BEEN DEAD NOW for ten years, but Robert knew their relationship would be exposed in the Hearing. It would have seemed obscene to betray her memory with explanations, but he had no choice. In an attempt to describe the impact Jean had on his life he wrote (and Kitty read):

  "In the spring of 1936, I had been introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a noted professor of English at the university; and in the autumn, I began to court her, and we grew close to each other. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged. Between 1939 and her death in 1944 I saw her very rarely. She told me about her Communist Party memberships; they were on again, off again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking. I do not believe that her interests were really political. She loved this country and its people and its life. She was, as it turned out, a friend of many fellow travelers and Communists, with a number of whom I was later to become acquainted. I should not give the impression that it was wholly because of Jean Tatlock that I made leftwing friends, or felt sympathy for causes which hitherto would have seemed so remote from me, like the Loyalist cause in Spain, and the organization of migratory workers. I have mentioned some of the other contributing causes. I liked the new sense of companionship, and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country."437

  ON APRIL 5, THE OPPENHEIMER children were sent to stay with friends for two weeks. Robert wanted Peter and Toni to be protected should the Security Clearance Hearing become public. On the morning of April 12, Robert, Kitty, Lloyd Garrison and two of his staff made their way—slowed because Kitty was on crutches—to one of the temporary buildings assembled on the National Mall during the war. The group was ushered into a bare room, number 2022, which was about to become a Star Chamber. The three Strauss-appointed members of the panel sat at the head of a T-shaped table for the "administrative review." Lawyers and aides sat on either side. A single chair for the witness was placed at the bottom of the T. Not an auspicious venue in which to defrock an American icon.

  The Oppenheimer contingent was an hour late and entered looking bedraggled. Kitty was clumsy, her face blotched from a recent outbreak of measles. In the confusion, Garrison offered his apologies to the irritated panel members. Kitty was told she could stay for that first morning session. After, she could appear only when called as a witness. No spectators or press were allowed. The Hearing, the Oppenheimer team was promised, was to be confidential.

  The New York Times broke the story the next day.438

  As attorney for the panel, Strauss had chosen Roger Robb, an assistant U.S. attorney with a reputation as a ruthless and skillful prosecutor who excelled in twisting witnesses' words. That the Hearing was presented as a procedural inquiry did not restrict Robb from using "prosecutorial tricks to catch (and confuse) witnesses." David Lilienthal, testifying for Robert, would walk out of Room 2022 and write that he was "so steamed up over the entrapment tactics," he felt "sadness and nausea at the whole spectacle."439

  On that first day, Robb and each of the three panel members had before them a stack of large green folders. Inside were the "new" FBI files packed with ten years of information gleaned from wiretaps, mail, the family trash and various unsubstantiated accusations from both named and unnamed informants—a mélange of random facts, suspicions and accusatory letters. All of it was available to Robb, who had been granted a fast security clearance, and the panel members. But Robert's lawyers were denied access. What's more, for many months, the FBI had been listening, through wiretaps, to conversations in the lawyers' offices and in the house where Kitty and Robert were staying in Washington, where his defense team met to discuss strategy. Garrison would describe Robert as being "in the most overwrought state imaginable—so was Kitty—but Robert even more so."440

  Hoover did not want the Hearing to be a trial because the wiretap information would be ruled illegal, not admitted in a court of law.441 There was no proof that Robert had been a member of the Communist Party. At a time when the country was panicked about the Communist threat, the accusations alone were enough to create doubts about the wisdom of allowing Robert access to any national security secrets.

  One by one over the following weeks, some of the most stellar scientists of the twentieth century entered the shabby building to testify "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer," as the published testimony would later be called: Rabi, Fermi, Bethe, Bacher, Alvarez, Lauritsen, Teller. Also Bush, Conant, Compton, Groves.* Most had come to stand witness for Robert, with a few important exceptions, the most significant being Edward Teller. Ernest Lawrence would have had the most damning influence, had he not avoided testifying.

  Although Lawrence had been a close friend since their early days in Berkeley, he had cooled on Robert. One of his reasons was that he had heard whispers at a cocktail party in Pasadena that Robert had seduced Ruth Tolman, while Richard was still alive. Lawrence had deduced that "poor" Richard had died of a broken heart, reason enough for him to declare Robert morally untrustworthy.442 But Lawrence was shrewd in a way that Teller was not; he understood that testifying against Robert would mean painful repercussions in the scientific community. The lineup of important physicists who would sing Robert's praises was an indication. Illness gave Lawrence an excuse not to testify at the Hearing. Strauss phoned to call him a coward.

  Lawrence did tell Strauss the story of Robert's supposed seduction of Ruth. Incensed, Strauss spread the gossip when it served his purposes. ("Did Ernest ever tell you what [Robert] did in the Tolman household?" he would ask Teller.)443

  RUTH HAD NO IDEA LAWRENCE was spreading dangerous gossip. The Lawrences had been friends of the Tolmans for many years, had been their houseguests when they came to Pasadena. It was probably because of Ruth that Lawrence had been invited to the cocktail party. After the event, he returned home to his wife Molly, furious because of what he thought he had learned. The woman who had told him was Gloria Gartz, a wealthy and well-regarded civic leader in Pasadena who was deeply involved with women's issues—a psychologist and, as it happened, Val's new love interest. As one of the small band of women psychologists in Pasadena, Gloria would almost certainly have known Ruth. What seems likely is that Gloria engaged Lawrence in conversation and said something about how close Robert and Ruth had been for many ye
ars. Perhaps she even offered "how much they loved each other." Or that they had "loved each other for a very long time." It would not be hard for Lawrence to add his own interpretation at a time when he needed to find reason to fault his old friend, to justify turning against him in the Hearing.

  WITH THE BENEFIT OF TIME and distance, the Oppenheimer Security Clearance Hearing seems more an inquisition than a review; important voices declared it so even at the time. What made the Hearing possible was the fear and the anti-Communist fervor that engulfed the nation. Almost as soon as Robert entered the tawdry room in which his fate was to be decided, the man who could convince anybody of anything, who could captivate men and women alike, his language eloquent and precise, his voice pitch perfect—had vanished.

  When Robert left the leather sofa to take the witness chair, he suffered through four weeks of testimony from friends and critics and six days of direct questions from the panel, interspersed with vicious courtroom hammering from Robb, who made Robert seem evasive and equivocal and, worse, embarrassed and humiliated. Robert would say he felt "The way a soldier does in combat, I suppose. So much is happening or maybe about to happen that there is no time to be aware of anything but the next move like someone in a fight and this was a fight. I had very little sense of self."444

  As Robert suspected, Jean was a vulnerable spot. Robb began the grilling: Between 1939 and 1944, as I understand it, your acquaintance with Miss Tatlock was fairly casual; is that right?445

  Robert: Our meetings were rare. I do not think it would be right to say that our acquaintance was casual. We had been very much involved with one another and there was still very deep feeling when we saw each other.