An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  The article began with Robert's quote: "I have tried to prove that a security risk can survive." The only way he could do that, Robert said, was to "establish by other means that what was put out as a final judgment about me wasn't the final judgment." The story was nothing new, but because it was about Robert Oppenheimer, other papers picked it up. Robert made clear that he neither intended for the security hearing to define the rest of his life, nor was he comfortable in the role of professional martyr. Alongside his survival story was a sidebar about Frank, explaining how he had lost his teaching position at the University of Minnesota, and that he had been banished to the high mountains of Colorado. Robert's choice of newspapers was a not so subtle reminder that it was the University of Minnesota which had taken part in the travesty that had cost so many good men their careers, Frank included.

  Robert ached for his brother; it was time for him to come out of the wilderness and back to the life they both loved: physics. In fact, the mood of the country was beginning to change; Frank was allowed to teach science in the local rural high school. It was a start, and Robert hoped that his brother would soon be back teaching at a university.

  Ruth adored Frank, and worried about the strains on the brothers' relationship. The year before Robert's "survival" article appeared, Ruth had visited with Frank and Jackie. The plainspoken Jackie had always caused tension, Ruth knew. She wrote to tell Robert "how much Jackie has grown. I thought she was quiet and poised and thoughtful and understanding. . . . It seemed to me that her attitudes toward people were generous and compassionate and wise."483 Robert might have thought the description a better fit for Ruth than for his brother's wife, but he would have understood what she was telling him.

  ROBERT'S AUNT HEDWIG WROTE: "The shock what I got today from Pasadena means very much to me. Everyone who knew Ruth Tolman will miss her very hard. I feel deeply with you the big loss of your best true friend. My thoughts are with you like always."484

  The heavens had opened and a tropical storm drenched Pasadena on September 18, 1957, the day that Ruth Tolman died. She was at home at the end of the season she had come to dread, and her heart had shuddered to a full stop.

  Ruth was sixty-four; she was born in the Midwest and had grown up in California, but she would be buried next to her husband in the place he loved best, Woods Hole on Cape Cod. It is not known if Robert visited her grave, or how or where he said goodbye. That he did grieve is without question; Robert's love for Ruth had endured for almost thirty years. Aunt Hedwig understood how deeply the loss of his true best friend would hurt.

  After her death, Edward Tolman wrote to Robert: "It isn't much good to try to put one's feelings about death into words. Ruth herself probably could have but I can't. It leaves a tremendous hole for all of us which aches." Robert wrote him back: "I have felt close to you in these weeks since Ruth's death, because you loved each other."485

  Psychologist Ted Newcomb, who was on the psychology committee at the Institute with Ruth, wrote to say, "Somehow I can hardly face the prospect of attending next year's meeting without Ruth Tolman . . . You were one of the first persons I thought of when Jean Bacher wired me about her death. Though I knew her much less well than you, she was still one of a very very select few in my life whose departure has been hard to take. I don't expect any answer to this. It just did not seem right . . . not to tell you how deeply I share what I know is your own sense of loss."486

  Jerry Bruner was surprised at the level of desolate grief he felt at Ruth's death. He called her his confidante, his friend, his goad, his confessor. She, he wrote, surely changed the lives of those she touched. And almost plaintively concluded: "How curious that we never fully appreciate that there are some people who make us more civilized with each other."487*

  * * *

  * In Ruth's honor, her colleagues planned a series of lectures in Berkeley. The speaker at the first Ruth Tolman Memorial Lecture was psychologist Rollo May. More than 1,500 attended.

  The men who loved Ruth wrote to each other; the women—especially Val and Nat and Jean Bacher—sought each other out for consolation. Perhaps with Val in mind, Ruth had willed the Pasadena house, with its adjoining garden gate, to Bob and Jean Bacher for their lifetimes. The three to carry on the old stammtisch.

  At the beginning of that winter, David Lilienthal had written a description of the neighborhood at the Institute that he shared with the Oppenheimers: "On this quiet street under the great trees, trees that seem almost more inspiring now that their leaves are gone than when they were heavy and dark with leaves. Yesterday afternoon it snowed, huge fluffy feathers filled the air, and soon the trees were lined with this whiteness, a whiteness so pure it seems like something from Heaven."488 It is easy to imagine Robert walking those winter woods, his heart heavy at the loss of Ruth, as he had once mourned Jean in the snow-covered mountains rising above Los Alamos.

  IX

  MARTYRDOM REJECTED AND A FINAL VOYAGE

  30

  THE POISON APPLE REVISITED: "HE WAS WONDERFULLY INTELLIGENT, CHARMING, FUN TO BE WITH, DIGNIFIED AND HANDSOME"

  John Edsall, a friend from student days at Harvard, seemed to appear at critical junctures in Robert's life. Most important, he had been on Corsica when Robert left abruptly to return to England because of the mysterious poison apple left on his tutor's desk. It would be fourteen years before Edsall saw Robert again, in Berkeley at the Eagle Hill house on a stormy, windblown night not long before the Oppenheimers left for Los Alamos. At that time, Edsall was astonished at the changes that had taken place in his college friend. The awkward, frantic young man he remembered from Cambridge had been transformed. "I felt that he obviously was a far stronger person," Edsall said, describing how Robert had achieved "a great deal of inner resolution." This was an altogether new Robert, confident and authoritative, who radiated "a feeling of such an extraordinarily brilliant and rapidly moving and scintillating mind that was beyond the power of most of us to follow: that he could reach and see intuitively things that most people would be able to follow only very slowly and hesitatingly, if at all."489 This new Robert had risen, phoenix-like, from the near disaster of the phantom apple left on the desk of his tutor, Patrick M.S. Blackett, experimental physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and just seven years older than Robert. And also the object, Edsall would say, of Robert's "tremendous admiration, combined perhaps with an intense jealousy—jealously because of his feeling that Blackett was brilliant and handsome and a man of great social charm, and combining all of this with a great brilliance as a scientist—and I think he had a sense of his own comparative social awkwardness and perhaps a personal sense of being physically unattractive compared to Blackett."490

  One more thing Edsall would remember: Only a month after returning to Cambridge from Corsica, Robert had introduced him to Blackett at King's College. The two had a private conversation and Edsall came away tremendously impressed with Blackett. He would say, "I felt [him] to be an extraordinary person . . . immediately, just after talking to him for five minutes."491

  Edsall wasn't the only one impressed with Blackett; Teddy Bullard, another outstanding British physicist and a friend of Blackett's, would describe him as "The most versatile and best loved physicist of his generation and his achievement was without rival . . . he was wonderfully intelligent, charming, fun to be with, dignified and handsome." Another admirer said Blackett was "Tall, slim, beautifully balanced and looking always better dressed than anyone . . . that mysterious intense and haunted visage . . . alive indeed with intelligence, modesty and friendliness."492 In short, Patrick Blackett was everything Robert Oppenheimer wanted to be. Wherein lies at least part of the poison apple Robert said he left on Blackett's desk.

  Some things seem obvious: Robert would not have been so quickly allowed back into the good graces of the Cavendish, and of Blackett himself, if the "apple" had been real and laced with some deadly chemical, say strychnine.493 Robert's lifelong weapons of choice were a sharp tongue or a poison pen, sar
casm his firepower. Those in command at the Cavendish would have been more inclined to make an exception for a nasty broadside or even an impetuous love letter or poem (the apple here as a symbol of temptation, seduction, an implied homosexuality). It is definitely hard to imagine that attempted murder would have been excused or that Blackett would then be so forgiving as to allow Robert casually to introduce his friend Edsall not long after.

  To complicate matters, the explanation that Robert gave when he rushed back to England from Corsica was his second confession of a "poison apple" left on Blackett's desk. The first had occurred six months earlier at the height of Robert's emotional breakdown. He had calmed down considerably since then, and actually was doing some good work. It has been suggested that when Robert hurried back from Corsica, he might have been racing to make changes on a paper he had written and left for Blackett. It was one of Robert's first papers to have a profound effect on his career. So "poison," in this case, could well have meant that while on Corsica he realized a mistake—poison in his own paper—and he hoped to return in time to make a correction.494 Then again, it could simply have been a metaphor for his erratic behavior.

  THE REVELATION ON CORSICA—AN awakening, really—that sent Robert back to Cambridge to attempt to right whatever wrong he had committed, he would later attribute to Proust. His explanation would be purposefully vague, the only hint being a passage he committed to memory, about evil being a rare and estranging state, and that an indifference to the suffering one causes is a "terrible and permanent form of cruelty." Suddenly, Robert felt he had a choice: He could reject the impulses that threatened him—or he could try to remake himself using those attributes of Patrick M.S. Blackett he so admired.495 He had done this once before when, as a sickly New York City boy, he was sent to New Mexico suffering from colitis and possibly tuberculosis, and met the young Katherine Page, who introduced him to a rugged new way of life which he translated into a cowboy-physicist persona. He went home with a determination to enter Harvard and a new life.

  Having survived the emotional turmoil that overwhelmed him in Cambridge, Robert went on to Germany to complete his doctorate and then stayed in Europe for a year of postgraduate work, time enough to burnish his new Blackett image— alive with intelligence, sometimes modesty and friendliness, and always with the mysterious, intense and haunted visage. Fourteen years after Corsica, the conversion was obvious to Edsall, down to the voice that was to mesmerize American audiences, "He spoke in a curious clipped way—an accent that was not quite British but not exactly American either."496

  IN THE WEEKS WHEN HE was clinging to some kind of sanity in Paris, Robert's sexuality had been tested and he had survived. By the time he married Kitty, he had an established reputation as a ladies' man. There had been a succession of mostly young women in the 1930s, with Jean as the only serious attachment before Kitty. And always there were a few quiet murmurs about the possibility of homosexual tendencies. Robert was seen as an aesthete and, as Wyman had noted after Corsica, "a little precious." But that affect was easily balanced by stories about him challenging the mountain wilderness on a horse named Crisis.

  EDSALL APPEARED AGAIN AT OLDEN Manor in 1954 only a few weeks after the Hearing. By then, in the rarefied world of nuclear physics, Blackett's career had paralleled Robert's in several important ways. The British physicist had spent his post-war years speaking and writing unambiguously against the spread of nuclear weapons, using many of the same arguments as Oppenheimer. Blackett had been cautioned for his leftist politics, but would go on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1948. In the 1960s, he would become president of the Royal Society, receive a life peerage as Baron Blackett, and have a crater on the moon named for him. Blackett belonged in a way Robert never had.497 Robert's America was much less forgiving than Blackett's England. "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer," the government transcript of the Hearing, would give rise to stage dramas which portrayed Robert as a tragic figure. He angrily dismissed the theatrical productions as "travesties," and was determined to reject this role. Though Blackett and Oppenheimer would have limited contact during their lifetimes, both were described as unrivaled achievers, versatile physicists, wonderfully intelligent, fun to be with, dignified, and handsome. Thus, the poison apple—as the symbol for the second of Robert's recreations—can be understood.

  ROBERT WORKED HARD TO ERASE the image of his martyrdom though it would linger in the American mindset into the next century. Under Robert's directorship, the Institute became an international center of intellectual achievement. Young academics saw it as a kind of Camelot,498 where they had the luxury of pure thought, or time to write a book or immerse themselves in esoteric research.

  Robert gathered in his woodsy corner of New Jersey an astonishingly vibrant collection of some of the world's most inventive men and women (though mostly men, still). He used his special director's fund to bring in old friends, including Francis Fergusson on two occasions (keeping his promise that he would one day make up to Francis for the time in Paris when he'd tried to strangle him), and others from government whom he admired, such as George Kennan, who would become Robert's close friend. The two were born the same year, each spoke multiple languages and the trajectories of their careers seemed destined to bring them together at the Institute. Kennan was a diplomat trained in the Foreign Service who became an advisor to presidents and an authority on the Soviet Union. Known as one of the "wise men" of foreign policy, Kennan was the intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan. But it was his attitude on the Soviet Union, forged in his years in Moscow before the war and then continuing to evolve after, that would make him controversial. Kennan helped to shape the U.S. policy which resulted in the Cold War. He was called "the father of containment," a policy intended to keep the Soviets in check. Both Robert and Kennan were patriots who found themselves at odds with their government. When the '50s gave way to the 1960s and the Americans raced the Soviets to build ever larger weapons of mass destruction, both men pondered the fallout from their individual actions.

  Robert's loves played a larger part in his public life than was true for most figures of the time; he had felt compelled to describe Jean as a "sensitive, yearning creature" to a government panel weighing charges that she (thus he) was wanting in moral character. His deep friendship with Ruth made her the object of gossip meant to smear him. Kitty's early years as an Accidental Communist brought her to the witness stand in an effort to damage him, in a political climate that could not tolerate any shade of red. While Robert was preaching to the world the need for an open exchange of information, he was also excruciatingly frank in his observations about Kitty's psychological problems. He was not a saint, as some observers commented, but he did not betray his wife.

  Ruth Tolman had been Robert's lodestar, their friendship deep and lasting. Close friends grew angry when rumors of a sexual affair were even mentioned, as if it besmirched the rare intimacy Robert and Ruth had achieved. Those rumors tracked back to Ernest Lawrence's questionable repetition of something Ruth Valentine's partner was supposed to have told him. So the only tangible evidence that suggests there might have been something more to their relationship can be found in Ruth's own words in her letters to Robert. A year after Richard's death she wrote: "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." And again: "Oh Robert, Robert. Soon I shall see you. You and I both know how it will be."

  But in fact no one other than Ruth and Robert can ever know how it was between them. Ruth wrote in an effusive style to many of her friends. Thankful, grateful can connote offering comfort as well as sex. Yet "even hungry for" does give one pause. Ruth might have destroyed Robert's letters because they would affirm an affair, but it is just as likely it was because he wrote in confidence about people they knew, and the letters, if made public, could hurt feelings or damage reputations.

  In
quickness of mind and breadth of interests, Robert and Richard had been alike. Robert was forty-four when Richard died, Ruth was fifty-five, and vulnerable; the tone of her letters changed, becoming more emotional and needier. If an affair happened, it would have been at this time, not when Richard was alive.499 Yet Ruth was also worldly wise and too deeply devoted to Robert as a friend, as he was to her, to want what they had to be damaged. A continent separated Ruth and Robert, they saw each other only a few times a year, and were seldom alone when they did. That they loved each other was obvious to everyone who knew them well. Jerry Bruner was one of these; he came to know Ruth and Robert during and after the war. "Robert did not get close to many people," he offered, then attempted to explain what made Ruth so exceptional. She had, he says, the ability to "think inside your head" which, combined with an exceptional degree of empathy, made her an extraordinary confidante. "She had a wonderful sense of what life was like," Bruner says, smiling at the memory of a Ruth who could raise an eyebrow and tease him out of his doubts. He is certain that Ruth and Robert were emotionally very close, had a deep intellectual connection. "But she also had a sort of steadiness and soundness," he adds, something Robert surely found comforting.500 In the end, the strength of their emotional connection, and their enduring loyalty, makes the subject of sex seem irrelevant.

  LIFE IN OLDEN MANOR MOVED with the seasons, the light subtly altering Van Gogh's Enclosed Field with Rising Sun in the formal sitting room, as it had in Julius' apartment in New York. (Like his father before him, Robert would bring people in to observe the painting in the changing light.) David Lilienthal was now their next-door neighbor, and settled happily into the pastoral pleasures of the Institute. "I can hear," he wrote, "Toni's horses snorting as they graze, in their paddock just beyond our back fence and shrubs . . . Last night, before turning in, I walked round to the paddock and just stood there, watching the two horses grazing."501 When asked how the children were doing, Robert always said, "Fine." It wasn't true. Peter had been sent away to boarding school, and while Robert would drive the aging Cadillac over to see him, there were always others who were allowed to usurp his time. Toni fulfilled the role of dutiful daughter, doing what was expected of her; she found freedom by galloping her sorrel mare across the Institute's common, and on the trails of its woods. "My sister's regard for horses was similar to her father's," Peter has said, "Sober and appreciative, deep and simple; warm, essentially dignified, I think."502