Peter was unwilling to fit into the intellectual mode expected of a child of the Institute director. In May of 1958, the tension between mother and son seemed to reach a turning point when Robert was invited to teach at the Sorbonne in Paris, then go on to lecture in Israel, Greece and Belgium. Kitty took Toni out of her private school for the trip, but she balked at allowing Peter to come with them, using his grades as an excuse. According to Verna Hobson, who would watch over Peter while they were away, "There came a time when Robert had to choose between Peter—of whom he was very fond—and Kitty. She made it so that it had to be one or the other, and because of the compact he had made with God or with himself, he chose Kitty."503 Hobson would not forgive Robert for leaving his son behind. Eventually, Peter would do what his father had done to find himself: he went west, to his Uncle Frank. He would return to Olden Manor, and to the family, but his future would be in the high wild country of New Mexico.
ON JUNE 19, 1959, VAL wrote to Margaret Mead, "My (noncommunist) physicist friends here are delighted that Admiral Strauss got the axe. So am I."504 The U.S. Senate voted against confirming Lewis Strauss' nomination to be Eisenhower's Secretary of Commerce because they remained unconvinced of his "character and integrity."505
IN NOVEMBER OF 1960, KITTY and Robert traveled to Japan. ("A tragic pair," their neighbor David Lilienthal was to write of them, "The trail from Los Alamos and Alamogordo is a long and terrible one, a Golgotha indeed."506) The Japanese greeted him with an excess of civility, and Robert did not speak of evil or of blood on his hands. His message was clear: minds and nations must be open in their sharing of knowledge. Secrecy, he would say, denies governments the wisdom and resources of the whole community. That would also be his message the following year, when he made a lecture tour in Latin America, and then in Europe. Earlier, at Rheinfelden, West Germany, he had sharply criticized his country's inability to discuss the reality of a nuclear war: "What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life" but which "has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?"507
LILIENTHAL WATCHED THE OLD CADILLAC come up the hill, and raised his walking stick in salute: "The door opened," he wrote, and there was "Kitty, her eyes larger than ever, against the ravages that time and trouble, poor dear, have committed against her."508 Kitty wanted what she felt time and trouble had taken from her to be returned; Robert knew it wasn't possible. He also knew that it wasn't his life that Kitty wanted restored so much as her own—a life that had been consumed by children and wifely duties, by the stifling rituals of academia, by a war that interrupted the education she believed would have led to equality and a place for her in a man's world. Alongside Jean, alongside Ruth. But Kitty, the risk taker, could not risk being without a man. That need was her primary ambition, as well as her lasting burden.
THE ELECTION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY in 1960 brought a new mood to the country. Finally, Frank was able to move to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and once again taught physics. Some of Kennedy's close advisors were friends of Robert's, and they talked of bringing him back into government, to right a wrong. Robert flinched at the idea; he had no desire to revisit his days as a martyr, to endure another security clearance. Early in the fall of 1963, Robert learned that he was to receive the prestigious Fermi Award and that President Kennedy would be presenting it himself. The date, time, and place were set: December 2, 1963, at 5:00 P.M. in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Ten days earlier, on November 22, the President was scheduled to be in Dallas.
When December 2 arrived, the sorrow of John Kennedy's assassination weighed heavily on the nation. Robert himself was described as "a figure of stone, grey, rigid, almost lifeless." The group of physicists and friends, including Lilienthal, and the new President, Lyndon Johnson, gathered with the Oppenheimers in the Cabinet Room. Kitty was "a study in joy, in exultation almost," Lilienthal would report, while he found "the two Oppenheimer children were embarrassed, particularly Peter, a shy and tender-looking teenager. I think it was more painful than happy for them."509
Lilienthal had misread Kitty. Later, when they were all back in Princeton, she would tell him about the day in the White House, her eyes smouldering, burning with resentment:"That was awful; there were some awful things about it." At that, Robert bowed his head "in that kindly, almost rabbinical posture which I have seen so often when Kitty was blazing and saying violent things." He countered that there were some "very sweet things" about the day.510 Probably he was thinking about the private visit Jacqueline Kennedy had requested after the ceremony. Or even Lyndon Johnson's blustery Texas talk about how "behind every great man there must be two great women—a great mother and a great wife. All of you men in the room know what we would be without either, so Dr. Oppenheimer, although I have never met your mother, I have met your wife, and I want this group to meet this lady who shares honor with you today—Mrs. Oppenheimer." And then the President added, "You may observe she got hold of the check."511
It was supposed to have been a joyful step toward rehabilitation. Lilienthal and others saw it differently: "It all seemed to me a ceremony of expiation for the sins of hatred and ugliness visited on Oppenheimer, now, belatedly, being given a gold medal, a plaque, and a check for $50,000 from the Government of the U.S."512 However smouldering Kitty's resentment, it did not keep her from spending $10,000 on a new mink coat. And later, she would make a trip into New York City to a foreign car dealership to buy Robert a new luxury Peugeot as a surprise for his birthday.513
BY 1966, ROBERT HAD BEEN smoking for at least forty-two of his sixty-two years. That January he had a persistent sore throat; when finally he saw a doctor, a small cancerous lump was found in his throat. Surgery followed, then cobalt radiation treatments and an awful exhaustion. Lilienthal would stop in to check on Robert. On one of these visits, Kitty took him outside. "I asked her how Robert was getting on," he said, "and she uttered such a moan, began to cry, caught herself, blaming me for making her weep. Then shook it off, looked at me with that little-girl look and asked me if she looked all right now, could we go back and join the others?"514
On January 6, 1967, the doctors told Robert that his cancer had returned and was inoperable.
Near the end, old friends began to make regular pilgrimages. Frank came. He lay on the bed alongside his brother and thought, perhaps, of the days of Vienna sausages and whiskey in their saddlebags as they ranged the Pecos. Now they watched an episode of Perry Mason on the television, waiting together. Kitty, in agony, could not bring herself to enter the room where Robert lay curled into himself. He died at home on February 18, 1967.
ON A BITTERLY COLD AND CLEAR February 25, a Saturday, more than 600 gathered in Princeton University's Alexander Hall for a memorial service. The Julliard String quartet played Robert's choice, Beethoven's Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Hans Bethe spoke about how Robert had done more than any man to make American theoretical physics great. In the long years after the Hearing, George Kennan had become for Robert a source of warmth and respect, of common sense and civility. Like Ruth, Kennan had seen behind the carefully configured persona of Robert Oppenheimer. When Kennan rose to speak, it was of a Robert few in the audience knew, "A man who had a deep yearning for friendship, for companionship, for the warmth and richness of human communication. The arrogance which to many appeared to be a part of his personality masked in reality an overpowering desire to bestow and receive affection."515
JEAN, RUTH AND KITTY—ROBERT'S trinity—had understood and returned, each in her own way and in her own time, Robert's deep yearnings, his desire to bestow and receive affection. Jean and Robert had been seekers together when they were young, at a time when he was establishing his place in physics, and was searching for the more intensely moral life, the engaged and committed life, that she offered. They shared, too, a fascination with psychology and what seemed the mystical connections between the human psyche and science. Jean
looked to him for empathy and the continual search for an answer to the depressions that devastated her. She had loved the brilliant young physicist, but career and depression and war had interrupted, and in the end she could not promise him anything, except to love him.
It did not happen right away; it was to take time, over a period of years, for Ruth to come to adore the compassionate Robert who could listen to the needs, fears and hopes of others. Robert had singled her out early in his California life; like Jean, Ruth was a seeker, open to experiences and challenges. Ruth embraced tradition, but was tolerant enough to push against its boundaries in a way that didn't threaten men. She became a refuge, the wise woman who knew him well.
Kitty loved the dramatic and ambitious Robert who walked the paths of power, and whose success and reputation reflected onto her. She was also the one who challenged him sexually and physically, who loved risk and excitement and had a barbed, witty sense of humor that matched his own. In the realm of the physical, she could do anything he could do, sometimes better: galloping horses, sailing close to the wind, sex without inhibitions, a fierce competitiveness.
Robert loved yet another woman, one who at times had made demands that overwhelmed all the others. She was the one Albert Einstein was referring to when, after the Hearing, he said that Robert "loves a woman who doesn't love him." That woman was the U.S. government.516
For Robert's memorial ceremony, Kitty selected a poem that she knew had been one of Robert's favorites and she felt it would reveal how "Robert had appeared to himself." But in the end she decided the poem "The Collar"—written by the seventeenth-century poet and priest George Herbert—was simply too personal, too revealing. She said she did not want to bare Robert's soul in public.517 She could not have known that this last stanza is an eerie echo of the passion of a young Jean Tatlock.
Away! Take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's head there, tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, "Childe";
And I reply'd, "My Lord."
31
"ROBERT IS NOT ONLY HER HUSBAND, HE IS HER PAST, THE HAPPY PAST AND THE TORTURED ONE, AND HE IS HER HERO AND NOW HER GREAT 'PROBLEM'"
At 16, Robert had sailed his twenty-eight-foot sloop in summer storms off Long Island's Great South Bay, racing the wind and pushing the boat to its limits. He had tested himself on horseback in the Sangre de Cristos and again at Perro Caliente as the cowboy physicist. When he had met Kitty, she had taken on the challenge and raised the ante and their early days together had been exhilarating. In the last dozen years of his life, Robert and Kitty built the beach house on St. John and discovered the thrill of sailing together in the near-perfect conditions around the Virgin Islands, with trade winds that blow steady from the northeast, transparent waters filled with bright flashes of fish, and a treasure of cays and islands with deserted white sand beaches.
On St. John, the Oppenheimers had thrived. Robert could drop his world statesman-physicist persona and move into an artless life, made simple by the surroundings. Sea and sandy beach on an isolated tropical island. No suits or formal dress. Only bathing suits, open shirts, bare feet. It was a warmer, gentler Perro Caliente. When they grew restless and required adventure, they sailed; when they wanted company, there was a cluster of residents who would eat with them, usually the bounty of the fish traps they set, and drink with them. "It was a life apart—offbeat, expat, a self-selected community that had gone to some lengths to get there," according to Fiona St. Clair, whose family had settled on the island and became friends of the Oppenheimers.518
In the month or more each year that the family spent on St. John over a decade, including every Christmas, Kitty again accumulated women friends who drank and gossiped with her as the sun lowered and the light ebbed. Fiona St. Clair's mother remarked about Kitty: "She was not a particularly sweet lady and I am not a particularly sweet lady, so we got along fairly well." Kitty remained bitter about the Hearing, but for the most part, according to the elder St. Clair, "We didn't discuss all the unhappiness of the past."519 St. John was a reprieve, and after Robert's death, Kitty needed a reprieve. And something more.
Kitty did what she had always done when she found herself without a man. She looked around and saw that another was available, this time Robert Serber. Charlotte had attended Robert's memorial service with him; they sat behind Kitty and Toni. But Charlotte had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and had become depressed. Three months after Robert's death, Charlotte took an overdose of sleeping pills. Serber found her body in their apartment the following morning. Not long after, he answered Kitty's call for help. She wanted to arrange a conference in Robert's honor at the Institute to bring together twenty-five top physicists to discuss the current state of theoretical physics. Serber, as always where the Oppenheimers were concerned, obliged.520 He was on the faculty at Columbia, he had been at Robert's elbow for all of the Los Alamos years, and he knew who should be invited. After the conference, Kitty served French champagne and unlimited caviar at her house. In 1968, Kitty was fifty-eight; Serber, fifty-nine.
Kitty divided her time between Princeton and St. John, an island so undeveloped it did not have a grocery store. She knew that Serber was a skilled sailor; like Robert, he had learned as a boy on Long Island Sound, and he and Charlotte had a thirty-foot sloop. During the Christmas holidays of 1959, the Serbers had sailed in the Virgin Islands as guests of Kitty's former husband, Stewart Harrison, and his wife Helen, on their new fifty-foot ketch. By chance, the Harrisons and Serbers had run into the Oppenheimers while buying provisions on St. Thomas. "It was a little embarrassing all around," Serber would say, no doubt remembering that he was the one who had driven Kitty to Perro Caliente that fateful summer before the war.521
By the beginning of 1969, Serber was, as he said, "under the influence of Kitty Oppenheimer." When Serber was asked to be the vice-president of the prestigious American Physical Society, he knew that Charlotte would have told him to refuse, that the position "was not my cup of tea." But Kitty had very different ideas and pushed Serber as she had Robert: he became the APS vice-president.522
In the spring of the same year, Kitty also talked Serber into buying a forty-two-foot Rhodes yawl in New York to sail to St. John. Toni christened it the Undique. For the next three years, Serber and Kitty sailed down the Leeward Islands, as far as Granada. Kitty never doubted her abilities as a navigator, he would comment, adding that it sometimes got them in trouble. "When Kitty wanted to do something," Serber would say, "it was difficult not to go along with it."523 Her daughter had discovered this as well; according to Serber, while Kitty was solicitous toward Toni, she also wanted to control her. She had pushed her daughter to go to graduate school, to complete the doctorate she herself had never accomplished. Toni wasn't interested. She had Kitty's wide smile and dark brown eyes, but not the steel to stand up to her domineering mother. Instead, Toni married an older man, an expert sailor, and the two made plans to sail around the world.
That year, Kitty and Serber were on St. Croix, staying at a club owned by friends (they stayed in separate rooms there, even though the gossip in the physics community had them married). The next morning, the people in the room next to Kitty's told Serber that she had been up all night, breaking furniture and making a terrible scene.524 Three days later, she was driving back to her place on St. John in a jeep, when she drove off a mountain road and crashed down a hillside. "She'd been a beautiful girl," Serber said, but "then that terrible auto accident . . . her face was all bashed up." He had rushed her back to New York and there had been plastic surgery, but after that, he said, "she looked her age."525 She was fifty-nine.
Kitty's next project, she said, was to write a biography of Robert and she began to contact some of the physicists who knew him, a
sking for letters or papers. But drinking kept getting in her way. On a trip back to Santa Fe and Los Alamos, where Robert was to be honored, she managed to miss her plane, disrupting all the plans that had been made by their old friends, and was up again all night, drinking heavily. Another time she went to London to visit Verna Hobson, now working for an architectural firm and living on a houseboat. For the duration, Hobson said, "We'd stay up all night with two or three bottles of vodka, smoke a carton of cigarettes . . . and then she'd sleep all day while I went to my office and then I'd come back and do it again. I didn't sleep for three days and nights."526 The biography, if started, was never finished.
SERBER TOOK A SABBATICAL FROM Columbia starting in 1972, and Kitty was determined to cruise to the South Pacific and Japanese islands and then meet Toni and her husband in the eastern Pacific. She bought a beautiful fifty-two-foot ketch named Moonraker—built in Hong Kong of teak with elegant fittings, fine wicker work, and her own stateroom with bath. Three years earlier she had undergone surgery for severe internal bleeding.527 Her liver was failing and she had been warned to live a quiet life and to give up alcohol. That was not, Serber reported, Kitty's style. Life on a sailboat is active and exhausting and she had no intention of giving it up. Nor would she tolerate a dry ship. She did not, Serber would offer, fear death.
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