Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  When Compton learned of Szilard’s bladder cancer in early 1960, he wrote his onetime Met Lab colleague—who had caused him so much trouble with Groves and others in Washington—a nostalgic and moving letter, so open in its emotions that it touched its usually gruff recipient:

  Dear Leo:

  First let me tell of my deep and sincere sorrow at the news of your serious illness.

  Let me further say that with the passing years I have become more clearly aware of the sincerity and earnestness and effectiveness of your efforts to turn the development of nuclear energy to the preservation of freedom and the meeting of man s human needs throughout the world.

  It is true that we have not always seen eye to eye as to how these humane ends could best be achieved. But of the sincerity of your intent I have never had a doubt. Also your clear understanding of human reactions is impressive to me, and has led you to foresee with unusual clarity, some trends of history.

  May I venture the prediction, which neither of us will probably be able to test, that history will see you not only as one of the important initiators of the “atomic” age but also as one who labored bravely to make of that age a condition of life under which men could enjoy an increasing degree of safety and mutual confidence, in spite of the threats of war.

  With sincere friendship,

  Arthur C 26

  Two years later, while on a speaking visit to Berkeley, Compton died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 15, 1962. He was sixty-nine.

  As for Szilard, he continued to fight for the issues he cherished, and to struggle with the nuclear fears that haunted him. One night in October 1962 friends saw how deeply he suffered. The Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height. Russian ships were plowing through the Caribbean toward Cuba, American naval vessels waiting to confront them. Szilard sat in his hotel room on Dupont Circle in Washington in the depths of despair. He viewed himself as the inventor of a monster which soon might destroy the world. “What can be done?” a visitor asked. “Nothing,” Szilard answered, his face pale with fear. “It is hopeless.” He had failed—he had created a Frankenstein. The next day he packed his bags and flew to Switzerland to ride out the coming disaster.

  Oppenheimer’s exile had eased gradually with the passage of years. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, Oppenheimer’s friends, such as McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., moved into high posts in the administration and began seeking ways to restore the physicist’s reputation. In 1962 Oppenheimer was invited to a White House dinner for Nobel laureates. Although he was not a laureate himself, Oppenheimer stood out among the honorees who shared the evening with him. During the event, AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg approached Oppenheimer and asked if he would like to have another security hearing to restore his clearance. “Not on your life,” replied Oppenheimer with utter certainty.

  Since Oppenheimer could not regain his clearance without a new hearing, the best alternative was the Fermi Award, the highest honor the U.S. government could bestow for service in the field of nuclear energy. On April 5, 1963, the White House announced that the Fermi Award would go to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer immediately issued a statement. “Most of us look to the good opinion of our colleagues, and to the goodwill and the confidence of our government. I am no exception.” There was some residual opposition among Oppenheimer’s old enemies, but most reaction was positive. “In Victor Hugo’s tale,” wrote one admirer, “they first decorated the hero, and then shot him. Happily in your case, the order is reversed.” Rabi wrote him:

  Dear Robert,

  You must feel like a voyager on a ship when after a long journey the sailor on the crow s nest cries, Land, Land!

  I wish the reaction to the award could have been a simple Congratulations but there is too much history for simple rejoicing. The dismal years when injustice, paranoia and hypocrisy seemed to prevail remain all too vivid in the memory.

  Now in addition to our gratification perhaps we can hope for better things to come.

  Love to you and Kitty,

  Rabi 27

  A handwritten note also arrived from Edward Teller:

  Dear Oppie,

  I just heard on the radio that you are getting the Fermi Award of 1963. This makes me happy for many reasons.

  One is the memory of our work together in Berkeley in 1942. The other is your proposal which had become known as the Baruch Plan and which is the only honest and effective suggestion in this field that was ever made.

  I had been often tempted to say something to you. This is the one time I can do so with full conviction and knowing that I am doing the right thing.

  I enjoyed getting the Fermi prize last year. If you had gotten it first it might have been perhaps better. But I am glad that the announcement was made early, so you have more time for the pleasure.

  With sincere wishes for good luck—which we all need,

  Edward

  Oppenheimer responded to Teller with a short, conciliatory note of his own:

  Dear Edward:

  Thank you for writing to me. I am very glad that you did.

  With good wishes,

  Robert Oppenheimer 28

  On the morning of November 22, 1963, the White House announced President Kennedy’s intention to present the award personally to Oppenheimer on December second. Less than twelve hours later, Kennedy was dead in Dallas. On the appointed day—twenty years after Oppenheimer had left Berkeley for Los Alamos and ten years after a “blank wall” had been placed between him and government secrets—President Johnson awarded him the Fermi Medal in the cabinet room of the White House. Once remarkably youthful for his years, Oppenheimer was now, at fifty-nine, painfully thin, gray, and wearied. Overcome with emotion, he grasped Kitty’s hand as the president spoke. Oppenheimer silently reflected on the situation and the medal for a few moments and then, turning to Johnson, he said, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.” His eyes shone with unshed tears as he spoke.

  After the ceremony, Oppenheimer and Teller posed in a handshake of reconciliation. Both behaved with scrupulous politeness. The former adversaries tried to put the past behind them, to close the wound between them. Teller told the press, “I respect Robert Oppenheimer. There are many things that I admire in him.” Oppenheimer, who always found it hard to keep a feud going and was prone to forgive anyone who showed him affection—whatever he really thought of them and their politics—said, “For a long time I thought of Edward Teller as a friend. I do not think of him as an enemy.” 29 Kitty would have none of it. The cold look on her face as she watched her husband shake Teller’s hand told an entirely different story.

  The world still in one piece, in early 1964 Szilard and his wife moved to La Jolla, California, a picturesque seaside village north of San Diego, where he accepted a fellowship at the new Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His bout with bladder cancer had left him thinner and his shock of brown hair had turned gray. He bought a small cottage on Torrey Pines Road, a winding, two-lane coastal road with stunning views of the blue sea below. Most afternoons he sat in a deck chair on the open veranda of the Salk Institute, staring at the sunlight dancing across the Pacific, thinking and churning. He had a rich inner world that engaged him, but his worries about the bomb kept him restless. He died in his sleep on the night of May 30, 1964, at the age of sixty-six, taken by a massive heart attack. *

  “Leo Szilard was a very complex personality,” Bethe said in summing up his colleague’s extraordinary life. “His mind worked quickly and profoundly, and he was able to come to ideas that most of us appreciated only after many hours of talk. He was always ahead of his time.” 30 Indeed, Szilard propounded ideas which initially were scoffed at as ridiculous, but had an odd way of looking like hard-headed realism within a few years. He had, of course, been the first scientist to imagine a chain reaction and realize that an atomic bomb was thus possible. During the
war, while others toiled at making the bomb a reality, his mind was already exploring what the world would be like after the bomb had been made. This ability to see things honestly and perceptively made him a sage observer of human affairs. His vision of the future applied to politics as much as it did to science, as he once made clear:

  Politics has been defined as the art of the possible. Science might be defined as the art of the impossible. The crisis which is upon us may not find its ultimate solution until the statesmen catch up with the scientists and politics, too, becomes the art of the impossible.

  This, I believe, might be achieved when statesmen will be more afraid of the atomic bomb than they are afraid of using their imagination, because imagination is the tool which has to be used if the impossible is to be accomplished. 31

  The Fermi Award symbolized Oppenheimer’s redemption in official circles. His return to Los Alamos the following spring marked a different kind of redemption, a sentimental homecoming among old friends. In May 1964 Oppenheimer returned to the Hill for his first public appearance there since the war. Much had changed in nineteen years. The Los Alamos he knew no longer existed. Few of the old buildings remained. Most of the original Tech Area had been demolished and the laboratory had been shifted across Los Alamos Canyon. A bridge now separated the vast laboratory from the town, which by 1964 had become a good-sized city, a key component of America’s sprawling Cold War military-industrial complex. Oppenheimer was also different, now a skeleton of skin and bones. Yet in other—more important—respects, he had not changed: his voice still resonated and his mind was as sharp as it had ever been.

  Oppenheimer had come to Los Alamos to give a memorial address in honor of Niels Bohr and to reconnect with an important place from his past. It was an emotional occasion for the man who had founded the desert laboratory and had learned so much from Bohr. The cavernous auditorium of Los Alamos High School—which had not even existed when he left in 1945—was jammed when Norris Bradbury introduced Oppenheimer and noted that he had built Los Alamos by the sheer force of his personality and character. Bradbury’s next sentence was drowned out by applause that rippled from the front row and gathered to a prolonged, standing ovation. 32

  Oppenheimer was deeply moved by the outpouring of respect and affection. A sensitive man who hated to show emotion, he fought back his tears. He ruminated on the passage of time and all that had happened to him. His mind went back to his walks around Ashley Pond with Bohr, where the two had first discussed how the atomic bomb they were making would change the world. A tiny figure at the podium of the auditorium, Oppenheimer told his audience that the nuclear arms race that Bohr had feared, and struggled to avert, had reached mindless proportions. America and Russia each possessed not tens or hundreds but thousands of nuclear bombs, an arsenal of unimaginable destruction made infinitely more dangerous by each country’s suspicion and distrust of the other. New means of delivery and use made command and control of these weapons a nightmare fully known only to those responsible; they had added accident to anger as another potential cause of catastrophe. What Bohr and Oppenheimer had learned first, and some in government had learned since, all people should know and every government should understand: if another major war occurred in which nuclear weapons were used, no country could count on having enough living to bury their dead.

  Yet Oppenheimer remained optimistic despite these dangers, he said, because of Bohr. “Bohr often spoke with deep appreciation of mortality,” said Oppenheimer, whose words—consciously or not—could be used to describe himself: “mortality that screens out the mistakes, the failures, and the follies that would otherwise encumber our future, and that makes it possible that what we have learned, and what has proved itself is transmitted for the next generations.” 33 When he finished, the audience rose in loud and sustained applause.

  Oppenheimer never returned to Los Alamos again.

  A bout of pneumonia the following year weakened Oppenheimer badly, and he had to give up the directorship of the Institute, accepting Einstein’s old post as senior professor of theoretical physics instead. Then he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He began radiation therapy, gave up smoking, and took to sucking lozenges to ease his sore and swollen throat. He was in considerable pain, but he went to his office each day. His spirit strengthened as his body weakened. He was serenely courageous.

  By now, Oppenheimer had become less nervous than he had been in the past, and he met the misfortune that befell him with determination. Criticism did not bother him as much as it once had. He still reacted passionately to events and was no less self-absorbed, but he had learned to control himself. Tempered by the fire, he seemed to have acquired a new, steely resolve. Those around him saw the arrogance of his earlier years dissolve, replaced by a healthy irony about himself, a humility, a compassion, a gentleness. He once again recalled his legendary partnership with Lawrence in the 1930s with affection. He began to examine himself searchingly, as he did at a public forum in the summer of 1966:

  Up to now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.

  It turned out to be impossible… for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth… and in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.

  To a historian who came to interview him in Princeton for a documentary film about Fermi, Oppenheimer whispered, when the taping was over, “Well, when do we get down to the real business, the real interviews, the real historical personal material?” 34 He was prepared at last to look at himself, and to speak of himself, searchingly and honestly.

  A few months before his death, Oppenheimer sat for one final, on-the-record interview. Fighting with stoic grace the painful throat cancer that would soon kill him, he amiably greeted the reporter. He wore a brown tweed jacket, dark slacks, and scuffed shoes. His large blue eyes shone brightly over reading glasses. He was very frail, with deep lines in his face and his hair a white mist. There was all of the quickness of his mind and none of the abrasiveness. The once elegant and rich voice was now only a scraping hush.

  Oppenheimer took off his glasses and let his hands fall to his lap. He hunched up his shoulders and brought forth a crooked smile, in which all the ironies in his life danced and played. Speaking in a gritty voice, he reaffirmed that scientists were responsible for the consequences of their work. “The central question is this,” he said: “how to subject the development of [nuclear] weapons to a notion of what is right.” He recalled what Bohr had said during their wartime talks: that the atomic bomb was both a peril and a hope for mankind. “Very great evil is inherent in weaponry,” Oppenheimer said, “and where there is great evil is the opportunity for great good. We have forgotten now, but right after the war, this is what people were saying: that the discovery of atomic power was good, that, among other things, it created an opportunity for great human grandeur because one was dealing with such great dimensions of evil. Atomic power is not the same old problem of evil with which man has always been confronted, but you lose an essential dimension when you view it without considering good and evil.” He regretted that the world had grown to include many other atomic powers and believed the United States bore much responsibility for this. “As long as we say, ‘It is all right for us, but don’t you do it,’” Oppenheimer sadly predicted, “efforts to prevent proliferation aren’t going to be very effective.” About the future, he said: “I’m not very sanguine, but at least the ideas I expressed are no longer radical.” 35

  Oppenheime
r remained preoccupied with the morality of nuclear weapons and his role in their creation for the rest of his days. It was not long before his death that, speaking of the role he played in building the atomic bomb, he said he was not entirely free of guilt. 36 Two weeks before the end came, he told Rudolf Peierls, the head of the British wartime team at Los Alamos who had come to see him a final time at Princeton, that he should have resigned from the GAC as soon as Truman overruled his recommendation against the superbomb. “You know,” Oppenheimer told Peierls, “there is the attitude that says, ‘As long as I keep riding on this train, it won’t go to the wrong destination.’” 37 His tone was one of regret rather than bitterness.

  Even as Oppenheimer suffered the final ravages of his illness, he remembered his friends. Unable to attend Bethe’s sixtieth birthday celebration in Ithaca in October 1966, he sent Bethe a warm congratulatory telegram instead. Bethe replied with a handwritten note that illustrated the deep bond that had grown between them over the years:

  Dear Robert,

  Thanks for your especially warm telegram. It was very good to see you two weeks ago. Your words express, better than I can, what I feel for you—admiration, affection, enduring gratitude and friendship.

  As ever,

  Hans 38

  That same month Oppenheimer wrote friends, “My cancer is spreading rapidly; thus I am being radiated further.” In November, “I am much less able to speak and eat now.” And in the following February, he wrote, “I am in some pain…. my hearing and my speech are very poor.” But he was content. “I have to die some year, and mine has been a pretty good life,” he remarked to a friend. 39 On the night of Saturday, February 18, 1967, Robert Oppenheimer died at his home in Princeton at the age of 62. Kitty had his body cremated and his ashes scattered in the quiet seas of the Caribbean, where in his later years he found the peace that had always eluded him.