Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Oppenheimer’s arrogance betrayed his underlying lack of confidence. It was not something most people sensed on the surface. He exuded authority, seemed effortlessly good at everything, and was very charismatic. “He could charm the socks off of people, even if he really didn’t like them that well,” one of his secretaries recalled. 32 Yet it was all a fragile, frantic, uncertain act. Because he was plagued by inner doubts, Oppenheimer was skilled at sensing—and targeting—the insecurities of others. And yet he perceived and manipulated not just people’s deepest fears but also their desires, and this made him an effective leader. “I don’t think anybody ever believed he had it in him,” said his successor at Los Alamos, director Norris Bradbury, “but he surely did.” 33

  * * *

  Teller was eager to move to Los Alamos. The action was shifting there, and he wanted to be a part of it. He had, after all, helped Oppenheimer organize Los Alamos, select and recruit its staff, and plan its work. Meanwhile, Teller sought to lift the lid on his security clearance caused by the fact that his parents and other relatives were living in Nazi-occupied Hungary. After finally receiving clearance for secret work, Teller, his wife, Mici, and their newborn son, Paul, arrived on the Hill. * That Teller had been invited to Los Alamos was a tribute to his reputation and talents as a theoretical physicist. That he was kept on at Los Alamos would be a tribute to the patience and forbearance of others.

  Teller brought with him to Los Alamos a personal possession vital to his peace of mind: a Steinway baby concert grand piano that Mici had bought for him at a Chicago hotel auction. The piano—affectionately called “the monster”—filled the living room of the Tellers’ small apartment. It became the primary form of relaxation for Teller—and torment for his neighbors. Teller would stay up late at night—until 3:00 in the morning—playing sonatas on the piano. Once he asked the wife of another physicist who was an accomplished singer to accompany him. She agreed, flattered by Teller’s invitation. But flattery quickly turned to disappointment. “I couldn’t sing with him,” she recalled, “because he drowned me out completely.” 34

  Watching him stir a huge mound of sugar into his coffee mug, Los Alamos scientists wondered how a man like Teller could be so genuinely friendly and at the same time so ruthlessly self-absorbed. “Lovable and selfish,” concluded a perceptive observer. 35 He could often be seen walking absentmindedly with his heavy, uneven gait (the result of a tramway accident in Munich in the 1920s that had left him with an artificial left foot), his bushy eyebrows moving up and down as he pursued some new idea. As he had always been, he was a gifted and imaginative physicist, with a mind capable of tackling immensely complicated problems, but he was also a temperamental and argumentative man who aroused frustration and sometimes anger in others. He pursued his ideas with a vain insistence that made him seem a prima donna to his colleagues and found it very difficult to work with people who did not agree with him. Although he could be kind, humorous, and likable, he was also egotistical and unhappy playing second fiddle to anyone. He “was not a team player,” said Hans Bethe. “That’s right I wasn’t,” Teller conceded years later. He was devoted to physics, but also ambitious and hungry for recognition. 36 Someone was free to sing, but he would bang his piano louder.

  “Teller was brilliant but flighty,” said a physicist who worked with him at both the Met Lab and Los Alamos. “He would jump from one idea to another. He did not systematically go through things.” 37 Oppenheimer alluded to this quality of Teller’s when he told Groves that “there are a few people here whose interests are exclusively ‘scientific’ in the sense that they will abandon any problem that appears to be soluble.” 38 Teller particularly resented doing the tedious computational work involved in making an atomic bomb. He was bored by details, especially if he thought they could be worked out by lesser minds than his own. Instead, he preferred the puzzle of a thermonuclear bomb, and he insisted on working only on it. This exasperated and alienated those who viewed the atomic bomb as the number one wartime priority.

  For this reason, Oppenheimer, with I. I. Rabi’s encouragement, decided to give the job of Theoretical Division leader to Bethe rather than Teller. 39 Oppenheimer thought Bethe was more likely to get this crucial job done, and that mattered more than Teller’s feelings. Though not as creative or imaginative as Teller, Bethe was far more adroit and effective at dealing with others. Oppenheimer also thought Bethe’s logic and thoroughness would better serve the project at a stage when detailed calculations had to be carried out and a good deal of administrative work was inevitable. “We had to sit down in our offices and actually work something out,” said Bethe, “and this was against [Teller’s] style.” 40

  Teller bitterly resented Oppenheimer’s decision. “When [Oppenheimer] told Bethe and me that he had named Hans to head the division, I was a little hurt,” Teller wrote years later with considerable understatement. 41 A proud man with a strong belief in his own ability, Teller felt he ought to have been doing Bethe’s job—and would have done it much better. He had been part of the Manhattan Project longer than Bethe, and he considered himself intellectually superior. He considered Bethe a “brick-maker” physicist—thorough, meticulous, but unimaginative—while he considered himself a “bricklayer”—a synthesizer who understood the underlying structure of physics. “I was not happy about having him as my boss,” Teller later admitted. “[Bethe] and I did not work well together. He wanted me to work on calculations, while I wanted to continue not only on the hydrogen bomb, but on other novel subjects.” Teller brooded about being Bethe’s subordinate. The arrangement, Teller later wrote, “marked the beginning of the end of our friendship.” 42

  Seeing that Teller was unhappy, Oppenheimer moved him out of Bethe’s division and gave him his own group, despite the manpower shortage. Oppenheimer also continued to meet with Teller weekly for an hour of freewheeling discussion—a remarkable concession, given the enormous demands on his time. And though he liked Teller personally, he came to find him inordinately vain and sensitive to slight. One evening, when Oppenheimer gave a party for a visiting British physicist, he inadvertently failed to invite the deputy of the British mission. Oppenheimer sought out the deputy the next day and apologized, adding: “There is an element of relief in this situation: it might have happened with Edward Teller.” 43 He also began belittling Teller in private. “In wartime he is an obstructionist,” Oppenheimer told one of his confidants, “and in peacetime he will be a promoter.” 44 Teller, for his part, focused much of his resentment toward Bethe on Oppenheimer, whom he began to view with coolness and even hostility.

  When Bethe had first arrived in New Mexico, the arid landscape—like the work that lay ahead—frightened and intimidated him. Bethe kept imagining himself walking through the high desert without a drop of water. He coped with his anxiety by throwing himself into his work. The pressure he felt was tremendous. “I had the feeling of pushing a big load,” he confessed decades later, adding: “It was probably the most concentrated work I have done in my life.” 45

  Bethe was equal to the task. Calm, cool, and thoughtful, he was a patient and effective leader who worked well with others. A tall and heavyset man, Bethe moved and spoke somewhat slowly, but behind his slow speech and movements lay a mind of formidable speed and power that earned him the affectionate nickname “the Battleship.” Solid, dependable, and well liked, Bethe was mature and wise in his dealings with people. “You never had any feeling that Hans was going to get upset and fly off the handle,” said a friend. “He didn’t hesitate to state his particular position on anything, but it was done in a calm and rational manner.” 46 His methodical and detail-oriented approach allowed him to face problems squarely, analyze them quietly, and plow straight through them.

  Bethe was effective in his work in part because he was highly motivated politically. He understood through bitter personal experience just how evil and threatening were the Nazis. To him and other refugee physicists, they had to be defeated. “I went to beat Hitler,”
he said of his decision to work at Los Alamos. He had no qualms about using the bomb against his native land. “We hoped very much to use it against Germany,” Bethe recalled, “and I entirely concurred with that, even though my father and his second wife were still there.” 47 A strong sense of teamwork, and the knowledge that their work was vital to the war effort, gave Bethe and his colleagues in the Theoretical Division a strong sense of mission. It kept them going ten hours a day, six days a week.

  I.I. Rabi urged other physicists to move to Los Alamos, but Rabi himself never did, only visiting from time to time as a troubleshooter and a consultant—one of the few exceptions to Groves’s rigid policy of compartmentalization, which permitted each scientist to know only as much as necessary to do his job, thus restricting the exchange of information within and between project laboratories. Rabi always arrived on the Hill dressed immaculately in a suit topped with a hom-burg and swinging a large umbrella. “It hasn’t rained for months.” Oppenheimer and Bethe would smile to him in greeting. Then it would invariably begin to rain, Rabi would open his umbrella, and the other two would get soaking wet as they walked together to the Tech Area. Oppenheimer and Bethe took to calling Rabi the “Rainmaker from Hoboken.”

  The Rainmaker from Hoboken was savvy, perceptive, and wise. “He was interested in everybody and could talk to anybody—I was very fond of him,” said a Los Alamos resident. 48 Careful and deliberate, he preferred to make his points with humor. “One listened to Rabi with great care,” said Rose Bethe, voicing a common opinion among those who knew him well, “because, even though he told you things as jokes, they were always serious.” 49 Rabi had a special instinct for dealing with people in extraordinary situations. He found it hard to suffer fools, and he could be blunt. But if there was something to be done, as Rabi said, “What choice do you have?” 50

  From the beginning of Los Alamos to its end, Rabi appeared on the Hill when needed. His most important function at Los Alamos was his self-described role as Oppenheimer’s “fatherly adviser.” 51 Oppen-heimer was comfortable with Rabi and confided his troubles to him. Rabi listened patiently and offered useful advice. A youth spent in the streets had taught Rabi to be a shrewd judge of people and how to operate effectively in the world of power. He had administrative experience at the MIT radar lab; he had worked with the military; he understood organizations and how to move them—he had tough-minded wisdom. Oppenheimer did not want to formally structure Los Alamos at first. Rabi told him, “You have to have an organization. The laboratory has to be organized in divisions and the divisions into groups. Otherwise, nothing will ever come of it.” 52 Should the laboratory be put under military control? Rabi adamantly opposed the induction of scientists into the army. Oppenheimer listened.

  Rabi counseled Oppenheimer discreetly, but he never hesitated to stand up to Oppenheimer’s intellectual bullying, which paradoxically had a calming effect on the Los Alamos director. Rabi also never hesitated to speak frankly and bluntly with Groves. When he learned about the housing that Groves planned for the Hill, he told the general, “You are treating these scientists as if they were privates in the Army. You should realize that there are fewer fellows of the American Physical Society than brigadiers [Groves’s rank] in the US Army.” 53 The housing arrangements were improved.

  Offered the laboratory’s deputy directorship by Oppenheimer, Rabi turned it down, resisting the pressure of personal friendship and Oppenheimer’s considerable charm. Rabi did so because, as he explained to Oppenheimer, he did not want to make the atomic bomb “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” 54

  All of them felt the pressure of the work. They knew the project involved tens of thousands of people at sites across the country. They knew it was enormously expensive. And “if we ever forgot any of this,” Hans Bethe remembered, “General Groves would tell us.” 55 Many had family and relatives in concentration camps. A Polish physicist did not know whether his wife and children, left behind in Poland, were dead or alive. A British physicist had lost his wife to a German bombing raid. The war came close even on the Hill when Teller listened to a radio broadcast on fighting in Hungary, and said somberly, “My family is there.” Anxiety and fear haunted them day and night. One physicist received a postcard from his brother in the fall of 1944, written from the front lines in Italy. Its complete message was “Hurry up!” The brother was killed in action that October. 56

  A fear of success also existed among them, for they were building a weapon so horrible that its use, which seemed the logical culmination of their efforts, could not easily be distinguished from barbarism. It was necessary for them to fear that the Nazis were working toward the same end, for only this could ease their concerns about the destruc-tiveness of the bomb they were making—that and the hope that such a weapon might end war because nations couldn’t afford its cost in human lives. They often lay awake at night wondering, “Is this right?” Still, it never occurred to anyone to stop. In their minds, they were doing their duty—in some cases, for no other reason than it was their duty; in other cases, because they were unable to conceive of any other course or were, perhaps, afraid to think of any other course. It was not a matter of choice but necessity. This was the morality imposed by brute circumstance, by habit, by the unspoken social demand that most did not have the strength to refuse, or, often, to imagine refusing.

  The reactions to such tensions varied. Some thought, “We’ve worked on this thing and let’s use it—that’s what it’s for—and see if we can’t get the war stopped.” 57 Some secretly hoped the technical difficulties would prove insurmountable. If it was impossible to develop an atomic bomb, there wouldn’t be any danger of the Nazis getting one either. Some of them hoped the war would end before the bomb could be finished. Some harbored moral qualms about the bomb, but many more were preoccupied by work or were lulled into unreflective self-importance by the weapon’s power. Gradually, as they became more deeply involved in the work, their misgivings began to fade—or were buried—and the tension of achievement took over and became the driving force, a kind of Faustian fascination about whether the bomb would really work. They had to achieve what they had set out to do. All of them sensed they were involved in something momentous, but they did not see clearly exactly what it was.

  Each coped with these complicated feelings in his own way. Oppenheimer tried to relax at night behind the walls of his stone-and-timber cottage set behind a stand of poplars and spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, serapes on the sofa, and black pueblo pottery on the fireplace mantel. A Picasso lithograph and pictures of the Hindu god Krishna hung on the walls. Oppenheimer drank a martini while Kitty sat nearby, her legs curled beneath her on a sofa, an ashtray in her lap. But the project was never far away; soldiers patrolled outside the house around the clock. His Native American housekeeper sensed the anxiety. “Dr. Oppenheimer was quiet…. He was worried. You could tell it by his face; it was down. Even his wife was worried. I sensed a lot of tension.” 58

  Occasionally, Oppenheimer would drive down to a teahouse at Otowi Bridge over the Rio Grande that was run by Edith Warner, a quiet and reserved woman who lived as a neighbor to the Indians of nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo. He drew strength from the warmth that Warner radiated. Juniper wood burned in her adobe fireplace. Often there was the smell of bread that had just been taken from the oven and covered with a cloth on the table under the kitchen window. Black pottery plates stood upright on open shelves along one wall, with cups and saucers in terra-cotta colors from Mexico. Orange candles and red-and-black-striped Chimayo squares brightened the wall; a Navajo rug covered part of the rough floor.

  There Oppenheimer drank tea and ate cake in a small room that looked through large windows toward the Sangre de Cristos. Warner, who observed these mountains daily, described what Oppenheimer saw:

  Sometimes the light makes each range stand out, casting sharp shadows on the ones behind. Occasionally when the air
is very clear, there is a strange and breath-taking shining light on the green aspen leaves. At evening the twilight may run quickly from the valley, shrouding almost at once the highest peaks. Or mauve and rose move slowly upward, turning to blood-red on the snow above. One morning they may be purple cardboard mountains sharpcut against the sky. On another they will have withdrawn into themselves. Sometimes I have watched ghost mountains with substance only in their dark outline. It seems then as if the mountains had gone down into their very roots, leaving an empty frame. 59

  Caught up as he now was in the whirlpool of war, the furious plans to construct a deadly weapon, the impossible and often agonizing decisions that had to be weighed and implemented every day, often every moment, Oppenheimer had a particular need for tranquility and quiet reflection that these hours at Edith Warner’s teahouse filled. As one whose daily thoughts were involved with techniques of destruction, he found healing here for his divided spirit.

  Teller, when burdens seemed greatest, would sit down at his concert grand piano and play the soothing sounds of Bach and Mozart. He gave occasional recitals in the Fuller Lodge dining hall. The room, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, had walls of honeyed pine and looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. The center of attention, Teller would beam with satisfaction. His technique was loose but his playing showed a lot of determination and feeling and musicality. Teller also delighted in simple pleasures. His favorite author was Lewis Carroll, and he read Carroll’s stories and poems to his son, Paul, long before the child could understand them. He could be as playful as his little boy when he narrated fairy tales on community radio station KRS—a deep voice with a Middle European accent telling bedtime stories. When he reached a funny passage, he let out a very loud, high-pitched giggle.