An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  175. Goodchild, JRO, 38.

  CHAPTER 12

  176. Jean Tatlock to May Sarton, Spring 1931.

  177. Deborah Tolman Whitney and Mary Tolman Kent, interview by Streshinsky. Ruth also had married women friends, among them Sigrid Lauritsen, Jean Bacher and Else Uhlenbeck.

  178. John and Mary Ellen Washburn, California Voter Registration, Alameda County, 1926, 1928, 1932, 1934. www.Ancestry.com.

  179. Joe Dallet to Kitty Dallet (his sister), July 13, 1930, Box 1, Folder 12, Joseph Dallet Jr. Papers, NYU.

  180. Joe Dallet to Hilda Dallet, [July 1934?]

  181. Goodchild, JRO, 38.

  182. Jean Tatlock to Priscilla Smith [Robertson], March 1935, Box 25.1, Priscilla Smith Robertson Papers, Virginia B. Smith Memorial Manuscript Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar Libraries, Vassar, Poughkeepsie, NY.

  183. Ibid.

  184. Ibid.

  185. Edith Arnstein Jenkins, one of Jean's close friends and a Communist, wrote that she felt that she and Jean had drifted apart because "she was now a Freudian analyst and we considered Freud and Marx unreconcilable, though she claimed she was still a Marxist." Edith Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister: Memoirs and Stories (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1991), 31.

  186. KB and MS, Prometheus, 157. Based in part on one of Joe Dallet's letters to Kitty.

  187. Steve Nelson, interview by MS; Goodchild, JRO, 38.

  188. Priscilla Smith would comment that it was Jean's social conscience as well as her earlier contact with Jung that made her want to be a doctor. "Promise."

  189. Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister, 28.

  CHAPTER 13

  190. Michelmore, The Swift Years, 49

  191. Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister, 27–28.

  192. Jean Tatlock to Priscilla Smith Robertson, July 15, 1936, PSR Papers, Vassar.

  193. Serber, interview by MS.

  194. Jean Tatlock to May Sarton, September 9, 1939.

  195. Michelmore, The Swift Years, 49.

  196. Kitty to Hilda Dallet, April 2, 1937.

  197. Nelson, Barrett, and Ruck, American Radical, 188.

  198. Kitty to Hilda Dallet, April 2, 1937.

  199. Ibid., April, 1937.

  200. Ruth Tolman, "Some Differences in Attitudes Between Groups of Repeating Criminals and of First Offenders," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 30, no. 2 (July–August 1939): 196–203. Based on her dissertation at University of California, Berkeley.

  201. Marjorie Tatlock to Priscilla Smith Robertson, May 1937, Box 25.1, PSR Papers.

  202. Information courtesy of John Tatlock.

  203. Joe Dallet to Kitty, March 30, 1937, in Letters from Spain (New York: Workers Library, 1938) 14. The letters quoted here are from www.Archives.org. There are also copies at the Bancroft Library, UCB; and the Taniment Library, NYU.

  204. Ibid., April 9, 1937, 21.

  205. Ibid., April 19, 1937, 27.

  206. Jean Tatlock to Priscilla Smith Robertson, July 11, 1937, Box 25.1, PSR Papers.

  207. Ruth Schorr (friend of the Tatlocks), interview by Shirley Streshinsky, 2005. Edith Jenkins, a friend of Jean's, was explicit: "The summer of her mother's dying, Jean grieved for her and burned with rage against her father, who, out of his own need and weakness, would not let her die." Against a Field Sinister, 28; Jean Tatlock to Priscilla Smith Robertson, July 11, 1937, PSR Papers.

  CHAPTER 14

  208. Joe Dallet to Kitty, April 27, 1937, in Letters from Spain, 28–29.

  209. Ibid., May 17, 1937, 40; June 21–25, 49.

  210. Steve Nelson, interview by Peter Carroll, quoted in Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 161.

  211. Richard Polenberg, ed., In the Matter of JRO: The Security Clearance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 12. Hereafter cited as Polenberg, ITMJRO.

  212. Robert Oppenheimer to George Uhlenbeck, June 29 [1937], quoted in AKS/CW, Letters, 201.

  213. Benveniste, "Early History of Psychoalysis in San Francisco."

  214. Kitty to Hilda Dallett, June 13, 1937.

  215. Ibid., July 11, 1937. In some of the letters Kitty would forego capitalization.

  216. Joe Dallet to Kitty, July 19, 1937, in Letters from Spain, 53.

  217. FAECT was the controversial union, Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians. Army intelligence began watching it, concerned that there were active Communists in the union. Oppenheimer held an organizing meeting for FAECT in the summer of 1941. Lawrence was incensed that the union was trying to organize people in his laboratory.

  218. Joe Dallet to Kitty, August 1, 1937, in Letters from Spain, 60.

  219. Ibid., July 25, 1937, 57.

  220. Kitty to Hilda Dallet, September 11, 1937.

  221. Ibid.

  222. Joe Dallet to Kitty, September 15, 1937, Letters from Spain, 62.

  223. Carroll, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 161.

  CHAPTER 15

  224. Kitty to Hilda Dallet, October 18, 1937.

  225. Ibid.

  226. Ibid.

  227. Kitty to Dallet family, Telegram, Box 1, Folder 12, Joseph Dallet Jr. Papers, NYU.

  228. Kitty to Hilda Dallet, November 10, 1937.

  229. Nelson, interview by MS.

  230. Kitty to Hilda Dallet, November 10, 1937.

  231. Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister, 26.

  232. Ibid., 21–22.

  233. Ibid.

  234. Jean Tatlock to May Sarton, 1930.

  235. In a 2002 interview with Gregg Herken, Edith would say that although Jean claimed that she was not homosexual, Edith did not believe her and referred to a comment Jean had made to a mutual friend that she "had slept with every boy she could find to get over it." When Edith asked her later if she regretted not marrying Robert, Jean replied yes; she "would have done so had she not been "so mixed up." Edith offered that Jean didn't love Robert because "she perceived him as essentially nonsexual." Against a Field Sinister, 30–31. Serber, who admits he never met Jean, would tell of the arguments Robert and Jean would have and how she would taunt him about her affairs, accounts he would either have heard from Robert, or Kitty later.

  236. According to most accounts (Gregg Herken, Ray Monk, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin) Stewart Harrison was a British doctor, a family friend, whom Kitty had known as a teenager and met again when she was vacationing with her parents in England after Joe Dallet had died. Herken bases this on Army intelligence records in his work Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). Harrison most likely had not known Kitty when she was a teenager as she was living in Pittsburgh and he was in England, attending Oxford University and then medical school. She probably met him through her friend Zelma Baker who was working on tumors in lung tissue; Harrison had spent some time at Pennsylvania's medical school and his speciality was radiation therapy in cancer.

  237. Harold Cherniss, interview by Martin Sherwin, May 23, 1979.

  CHAPTER 16

  238. Elizabeth Whitney to Hugh Tatlock undated [ca. 1939–1940], letter courtesy of John Tatlock and David Tatlock.

  239. Ruth Benedict to Margaret Mead, September 10, 1939.

  240. Ibid. October 11, 1939.

  241. Helen Campbell Allison, interview by AKS. See Helen Cambpell correspondence with AKS, 1976.

  242. Verna Hobson, interview by Martin Sherwin, July 31, 1979. Verna Hobson would meet Wilder Hobson (editor for Time, Fortune and Harper's Bazaar, a musician and historian of jazz) while working at Time. She would be Robert's secretary from 1954 to 1966, when she retired and moved to London, before becoming a writer.

  243. Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (New York: Braziller, 1965), 31–32.

  244. Serber, interview by Streshinsky.

  245. Frank Oppenheimer to Denise Royal, Feb. 25, 1967, Box 4, Fra
nk Oppenheimer Papers.

  246. Natalie Raymond to Ruth Benedict, August 1940, Special Correspondence, Box 1: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead Papers, LOC.

  247. Robert Serber, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science, with Robert P. Crease (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 59.

  248. Serber, interview by MS.

  249. Ibid.

  250. Jean Tatlock to Winifred, "Dear W.S.," Series I: Correspondence. Folder 15.16, Winifred Smith Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar.

  251. Ibid.

  252. Peters, May Sarton, 130–131.

  253. Robert Oppenheimer FBI File, Series I: Correspondence. Folder 15.16, Doc. 154, Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Library, Vassar. Quoted in KB/MS, Prometheus, 162.

  254. Nelson, Barrett, and Ruck, American Radical, 268.

  255. Serber, interview by Jon Else.

  256. Chevalier, Story of a Friendship, 3.

  CHAPTER 17

  257. Ruth was chosen as chairman in part because she was not a feminist; it was thought that her "moderate stance" would enable her to deal with the issues facing the use of women psychologists in war work in a most diplomatic manner. See James H. Capshew, Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 1999),78. For the articles she would write on wartime women psychologists, see the Bibliography.

  258. The debate over whether or not Robert was a Communist Party member or joined the Party (semantics are very important in this discussion) surfaced at the Oppenheimer Centennial conference held at University of California, Berkeley in 1904, as well as being a topic of many books and reviews. Some historians, Gregg Herken for example, argue that Robert was not a CPUSA member; Barton Bernstein believes he was; Martin Sherwin hedges but leans in the direction of Robert being a member. They all agree that Robert, whether he joined secretly or not, was sympathetic during the 1930s to Communism.

  259. As quoted in Goodchild, JRO, 39–40.

  260. Chevalier, Story of a Friendship, 42.

  261. Ibid.

  262. Kitty would flaunt her aristocratic connections, Jackie her working-class origin.

  263. Zerka Moreno, interview by Tian Dayton, quoted in Toni Hovartin and Edward Schreiber, eds., Zerka Moreno, The Quintessential Zerka: Writings by Zerka Toeman Moreno on Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Therapy (New York: Routledge, 2006). Accessed at www.Tiandayton.com.

  CHAPTER 18

  264. Military Application of Uranium Detonation

  265. Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, The Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2002), 239; see also, Barton J. Bernstein, "Reconsidering the 'Atomic General': Leslie R. Groves," Journal of Military History 67 (July 2003): 883–920.

  266. James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 166.

  267. Serber, Peace and War, 67.

  268. Dr. Lewis Hempelmann, interview by Martin Sherwin, August 10, 1979. Hempelmann was working with Ernest Lawrence's brother in the cancer radiation lab at the university and would become one of the medical doctors at Los Alamos.

  269. For an engrossing story of how a psychologist could battle severe manic depression and yet be a member of the psychiatry faculty at UCLA, see Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage Books, 1995).

  270. Robert Bacher, Robert's second in command, described in an interview later that "I just disappeared into thin air. Lee DuBridge knew where we were going, because he was the director of the laboratory. But nobody else, except Jean, knew where I was going; we just disappeared for two weeks." Robert F. Bacher, interview by Mary Terrall, Oral History Project, June–August 1981, Archives, Caltech, February 1983, Tape 4, Side 1, p. 63.

  271. In reality, many of the American scientists, and almost all of the European, would confide in their wives.

  272. Hilda Kresch, interview by Shirley Streshinsky, November 28, 2005.

  273. Lois Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 422.

  274. Natalie Raymond to Ruth Benedict, August 11 [ca. 1943], Series I: Correspondence, Folder 35.1, Ruth Benedict Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar Libraries.

  275. Ruth Tolman to Dr. Franklin Fearing, Dept. of Psychology, UCLA, February 27, 1943, Letter from Congressional Files, Courtesy of Eric Vanslander, NA.

  276. Norris in Racing for the Bomb describes the Manhattan Project as "among other things, a gigantic industrial and engineering effort, run by the military under great security, rapidly accomplished, using unorthodox means, and dealing in uncertain technologies," 187. Brookings Institute, "The Costs of the Manhattan Project," http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/archive/nucweapons/manhattan. The complete Manhattan Project, including plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford, would come in at more than $1 billion 1940s dollars.

  277. Nelson, Barrett, and Ruck, American Radical, 269.

  278. This is the account Chevalier wrote in The Story of a Friendship, 53–56; Robert's version is from his Security Hearing Testimony, Polenberg, ITMJRO, 62; Kitty's version is from a conversation that Hobson related to Sherwin in her July 31, 1979 interview.

  CHAPTER 19

  279. Ruth Tolman, "Some Work of Women Psychologists in the War," Journal of Consulting Psychology 7 (1943):127.

  280. Ruth Marshak, "Secret City," in Jane S. Wilson and Charlotte Serber, eds., Standing By and Making Do: Women of Wartime Los Alamos (Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1997), 9.

  281. Ibid., 10.

  282. John Lansdale, John Lansdale, Jr.—Military Service (privately printed), 35. Courtesy of Chloe Lansdale Pitard.

  283. Bacher, interview by Terrall, February 1983, Tape 4, Side 1, p. 70, Caltech.

  284. Memorandum for the Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, CA, June 23, 1943, FBI: SF 100-18382, in the Martin Sherwin Collection, LOC, MSF.

  285. Ibid.

  286. Ibid.

  287. Ibid.

  288. FBI Confidential Memo, August 23, 1943, MIS (Military Intelligence Service) was requested that the FBI continue surveillance of Jean Tatlock and "place a microphone" in her apartment. Other FBI memos in August and September 1943 mention an informer and Jean's vacation to the East Coast. See memos in Box 62, Jean Tatlock file, MSC, LOC.

  CHAPTER 20

  289. Emergency Statement to the People of the U.S., War Production Board, with Conservation Division. See Allan M. Winkler, Home Front U.S.A.: America During World War II, 2nd Ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000).

  290. Jerome Bruner, In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 44.

  291. Priscilla Duffield, quoted in Goodchild, JRO, 127.

  292. Both Priscilla Greene, Robert's first secretary at Los Alamos, and Dorothy McKibben, who ran the Project office in Santa Fe and who became close friends with Robert, said that Kitty had few friends other than the women with whom she would ride.

  293. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 237.

  294. Ibid., 240, 533n17.

  295. Bruner, In Search of Mind, 44.

  296. Powers, Heisenberg's War, 238.

  297. Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace, Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 200.

  298. As quoted in Powers, Heisenberg's War, 247.

  299. See Robert Oppenheimer, "Niels Bohr and Atomic Weapons," New York Review of Books, December 17, 1964.

  300. Necropsy Report, CO-44-63, 1/6/44. 9:30 a.m., Coroner's Office, City and County of San Francisco. For additional reports, see KB/MS, Prometheus, 637n and Jean Tatlock file, MS, MSF.

  301. San Francisco Examiner, January 6, 1944, p. 1. Jean's death was also reported in the San Francisco Chronicl
e, January 7, 1944, p. 9, and the Oakland Tribune, January 6, 1944, printed the headline, "Woman Psychiatrist of S.F, Drowns Self in Bathtub." p. 12.

  302. A poem Jean wrote in 1930 and included in a letter to May Sarton, February 1930.

  303. Elizabeth Fenn (John Tatlock's godmother and close friend of his mother) to John Tatlock, ca. 1989. Letty Field's mother thought Jean never recovered from Letty's death. Peters, May Sarton, 145. See also Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister, 31.

  304. FBI Confidential Teletype: "No action will be taken by this Office due possible unfavorable publicity. Direct inquiries will be made discreetly." FBI: 100-20-3581, Jean Tatlock file, MS/LOC.

  305. AEC, ITMJRO: Transcript, 153. Curiously this phrase is in the statement read by Robb to Oppenheimer on April 14, but not in the prepared statement (p. 8) Robert read before the panel two days earlier.

  306. JRO to Maj. Gen. K. D. Nichols, March 4, 1854. This is a draft of the letter that Robert would actually send to the AEC and which was read at the Hearing. Security Hearing Case File, Boxes 198–199, JRO Papers, LOC.

  307. This is the final stanza of "Epithalamion" which was among the poems Robert gave to Linus Pauling when they were both at Caltech. Pauling noted the poems as "Poems by JRO 1928." 3. Linus Pauling Safe, Drawer 3, 30186/18.193. Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, 1873–2011, Special Collections & Archives, OSU Libraries, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR.

  CHAPTER 21

  308. J. S. P. Tatlock, "Nostra Maxima Culpa," supplement, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 53 (1938): 1313. Tatlock was president of the Association in 1938.

  309. Edith Jenkins suggested in Against a Field Sinister that Jean and Mary Ellen Washburn were lovers; Hilde Stern Hein, Robert's cousin, told KB in an interview on March 4, 2004, that Mary Ellen and Jean were "more than friends." KB/MS, Prometheus, 637n.

  310. Edith Jenkins thought it was Barbara Chevalier who told her that Jean called Mary Ellen Washburn the night before she died and said she was very depressed.

  311. John Tatlock, personal communication to Patricia Klaus, April 20, 2012.