Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  It also provides some justification for his often quoted remark ‘Beginning in late 1936, my interests began to change’, a remark that has frequently misled people into thinking that there was a shift in his interests away from physics. As we have seen, this was very far from the case. Another mistake that is often made is to think that Oppenheimer was referring here to one particular event that happened in 1936, namely his meeting and falling in love with Jean Tatlock.

  In 1936, Jean Tatlock was twenty-two years old and a medical student at Stanford, hoping to become a psychiatrist. She is remembered by those who knew her at this time as slim, beautiful and intense. Her father was John Tatlock, a professor of English literature at Berkeley and widely recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Jean had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because her father was at Harvard before switching to Berkeley. While studying English literature at Vassar, she took a year out to take pre-med courses at Berkeley, and then in 1935 began her medical studies at Stanford. During her year at Berkeley (1933–4), she had joined the Communist Party and wrote regularly for its newspaper, the Western Worker. She was not, however, ideologically committed to communism. Indeed, ideologically she was, from a communist point of view, hopelessly bourgeois, being far more interested in – and, one suspects, knowledgeable about – the works of Freud and Jung than those of Marx.

  Oppenheimer met Jean Tatlock at a fund-raising party for the Spanish Loyalist cause hosted by his landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn, who was later described by the FBI as an ‘active member of the Communist Party’. This meeting, according to Oppenheimer, took place in ‘the spring of 1936’, but, as the Spanish Civil War did not break out until July of that year, it seems more plausible to assume it occurred some time soon after that. In any case, by the autumn of 1936 he and Jean were dating. Though there was a considerable age gap (he had turned thirty-two in 1936, and so was ten years older than her), he was, by all accounts, completely in love with her.

  Her role in ‘radicalising’ him, however, seems to have been overplayed. It is true that she was a member of the Communist Party and, as such, deeper into radical activism than he was. But on the other hand, her membership of the Party, probably because of her commitment to Freudian psychoanalysis, was, as Oppenheimer put it, an ‘on again, off again’ affair. Communism, Oppenheimer wrote, ‘never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking. I do not believe that her interests were really political.’ Though he and Jean were both drawn into, and sympathetic towards, the leftist political currents that converged on the efforts to support the Loyalists in Spain, it was, one suspects, far more important to them and their intimacy that they had in common both a deep love of literature and a fervent interest in psychiatry.

  It was primarily with others that Oppenheimer would develop his interest in left-wing politics. With Jean, he shared a love of, for example, the poetry of John Donne (a particular favourite of hers) and an exploration of the depths of the human soul, which the theories of Freud and Jung promised to shed light upon. When Oppenheimer said that he did not believe Jean’s interests were really political, and that communism could not provide what she was seeking, what he seemed to have in mind was the evident fact that Jean’s problems were fundamentally psychological.

  As the daughter of a Harvard and later a Berkeley professor, Jean knew how to behave in the company of sophisticated and intellectual people. She was, as Robert Serber noted, ‘quite composed in any social gathering’. In this respect she differed from, for example, Frank’s wife, Jackie, who neither knew nor cared how one should behave in the ‘social gatherings’ that the Oppenheimers were accustomed to attend. And yet, whereas Jackie was robustly defiant about the way she was, Jean was plagued by self-doubts. Serber remembers that she had ‘these terrible depressions’, which would affect Oppenheimer: ‘He’d be depressed some days, because he was having trouble with Jean.’

  At the root of Oppenheimer’s ‘trouble with Jean’, it seemed, was the fact that she did not love him as much as he loved her. Their love affair lasted from the autumn of 1936 to the spring of 1939, during which time he twice proposed to her. She turned him down on both occasions and the end, when it came, was brought about by her. As he had many years earlier with Charlotte Riefenstahl, Oppenheimer turned Jean away from him by courting her a little too insistently. He overdid it. ‘No more flowers, please Robert,’ she would tell him. Refusing to listen, Oppenheimer would appear with more flowers. One time she threw his gardenias to the floor, shouting to her friend: ‘Tell him to go away, tell him I am not here.’ Serber remembers that Jean ‘disappeared for weeks, months sometimes, and then would taunt Robert mercilessly. She would taunt him about whom she had been with and what they had been doing. She seemed determined to hurt him, perhaps because she knew Robert loved her so much.’ By 1939, this – the greatest love Oppenheimer had yet known and, in the opinion of some of his friends, the greatest love he would ever know – was over.

  In the three years of his relationship with Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s world changed completely. Though he always denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, he did once admit that he ‘had probably belonged to every Communist-front organization on the west coast’. When the remark was quoted back at him, he said it was not true and that it was a ‘half-jocular overstatement’, but it does, it seems to me, capture the spirit of his involvement with communism pretty accurately.

  Always more open and less complicated than his older brother, Frank Oppenheimer made no secret of the fact that he had become a member of the Communist Party. He and Jackie joined the Party together early in 1937, after they had seen a membership application form in People’s World, the West-Coast Communist Party magazine. ‘We clipped it out and sent it in,’ Frank said later. ‘We were really quite overt about it – completely overt about it.’ It was party policy at that time for members to have an alias. Frank’s was ‘Frank Folsom’, after the famous Californian prison. Soon after he joined, he drove to Berkeley to tell Robert the news. According to Oppenheimer himself, he was ‘quite upset’ about Frank joining the Party, though he does not say why. One imagines that it was because he was very aware that Communist Party members found it hard to get jobs, and, as Oppenheimer knew only too well from the experiences of his students, academic jobs were hard enough to find anyway.

  Despite his reaction to this news, Oppenheimer accepted an invitation from Frank and Jackie to attend a Communist Party meeting at their house in Pasadena, ‘the only thing,’ he later claimed, ‘recognizable to me as a Communist Party meeting that I have ever attended’. With something of the tone with which he is said to have referred to Jackie as ‘the waitress my brother married’, Oppenheimer described the event in the following terms:

  The meeting made no detailed impression on me, but I do remember there was a lot of fuss about getting the literature distributed, and I do remember that the principal item under discussion was segregation in the municipal pool in Pasadena. The unit was concerned about that and they talked about it. It made a rather pathetic impression on me. It was a mixed unit of some colored people and some who were not colored.

  I remember vividly walking away from the meeting with Bridges [Calvin Bridges, a geneticist at Caltech] and his saying ‘What a sad spectacle’ or ‘What a pathetic sight’ or something like that.

  The meeting was of what was known as a ‘street unit’ of the Communist Party, consisting of local people, most of whom, because Frank and Jackie lived in a predominantly black neighbourhood, were black. The campaign to desegregate the local swimming pool was remembered very differently by Frank, who was clearly shocked at the treatment then meted out to black people: ‘It’s really hard to imagine; they just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.’ The campaign to end this segregation was not successful, but it illustrates the kind of practical issue that moved Jackie and Frank to join the Communist Party.

 
; Shortly afterwards Frank was asked by the Party to make use of his Caltech connections to organise a communist group at the university, leaving Jackie to continue leading the ‘street unit’. Much against Frank’s own inclinations, the university group was secret. It consisted of about six members, including the chemist Sidney Weinbaum and the rocketeers Frank Malina and Hsue-Shen Tsien, all of whom preserved strict secrecy because, as Frank put it, ‘they were scared of losing their jobs’.

  Oppenheimer had nothing to do with Frank’s secret Caltech group and quite possibly did not know of its existence. He was, however, drawn into Communist Party activities in a number of different ways. Through his participation in the Spanish Civil War campaigns, he made contact with the prominent left-winger Thomas Addis. Addis was professor of medicine at Stanford and, as such, knew Jean well. One day, Oppenheimer recalled, Addis asked Oppenheimer to come to his laboratory in Stanford to discuss how he could best serve the Loyalist cause in Spain. He said, ‘You are giving all this money through these relief organizations. If you want to do good, let it go through Communist channels, and it will really help.’ ‘He made it clear,’ Oppenheimer wrote, ‘that this money, unlike that which went to the relief organizations, would go straight to the fighting effort.’ He went on: ‘I did so contribute; usually when he communicated with me, explaining the nature of the need. I gave him sums in cash, probably never much less than a hundred dollars, and occasionally perhaps somewhat more than that, several times during the winter.’

  Between 1937 and 1942 Oppenheimer would meet Addis – or Isaac Folkoff, the treasurer of the local Communist Party – several times a year and hand over between $100 and $300 in cash to be used by the Communist Party as they saw fit. His income at that time was about $15,000, made up of a university salary of around $5,000 and $10,000 from his inheritance (this was at a time when one of Oppenheimer’s students considered himself to be comfortably well off when he received a grant of $650 a year). As he later estimated that, through Addis and Folkoff, he was giving the Communist Party about $1,000 a year, this means that he was supporting the party to the tune of about 7 per cent of his (extremely large) income. In the light of these statistics, the question of whether he was actually a card-carrying member of the Party becomes somewhat academic. He was, in a very practical and real sense, a supporter of the Communist Party. Moreover, in terms of the time, effort and money spent on Party activities, he was a very committed supporter, far more so than many people who did pay their membership dues and carry a membership card.

  When Oppenheimer was later accused (simply by throwing his own words back at him) of having joined Communist Party front organisations, one of the more unlikely and puzzling examples given was the Western Consumers Union. This was an organisation led by the Berkeley economist Robert A. Brady, dedicated to testing various consumer products and providing people with information that would enable them to make informed choices about which products to buy. It still exists and is not now, nor has it ever been, a communist organisation. Brady was well known as an anti-fascist, but not as a communist. The Western Consumers Union was listed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a subversive organisation, a communist front, from 1944 to 1954. This perhaps indicates that there was some evidence of an (apparently unsuccessful) attempt to infiltrate the organisation by the Communist Party, but it may equally signify nothing more than the notorious paranoia of that particular committee.

  What is odd, and what Oppenheimer himself clearly found hard to explain, was how and why he found himself a member of the council that ran the Western Consumers Union. When questioned about it later, he said that he had been asked to join by Brady and his wife, Mildred Edie, who both ‘had enthusiasm’ for it. ‘It was a very inappropriate thing for me to do,’ he conceded: ‘I know nothing about the business.’ Of his involvement with the Western Consumers Union, the documentary record consists of three letters written by Oppenheimer: one to Mildred Edie giving a half-hearted report on his attempts to find buyers and testers for various products, and two to Brady saying that he was too busy to attend meetings of the council. Though the Western Consumers Union would be mentioned repeatedly in future attempts to paint Oppenheimer as a dangerous subversive, there was in truth very little there from which to create such a picture.

  Of far greater significance was Oppenheimer’s involvement in the Teachers’ Union, which was affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, and which represented the interests not just of schoolteachers, but also of university lecturers and professors. It was through the Teachers’ Union that Oppenheimer got to know Haakon Chevalier, who came from a mixed French and Norwegian background and taught French literature at Berkeley. Tall, blond and handsome, Chevalier cut an impressive figure. He was three years older than Oppenheimer and far more worldly. He had married his first wife, Ruth, in 1922, and, after divorcing her in 1930, married his second wife, Barbara, in 1931. Barbara was an heiress, and the Chevaliers lived in great comfort in a large home that became the centre of radical, left-wing Berkeley society. When he and Oppenheimer met in 1937, Chevalier was probably already a member of the Communist Party.

  Certainly, according to his later account, Chevalier was already a member of the Teachers’ Union when he met Oppenheimer, and the two of them set up a Berkeley campus branch, ‘Local 349’, with Chevalier as president and Oppenheimer as ‘recording secretary’. ‘For four years,’ Chevalier has recalled, ‘we worked, with some success, to increase union membership both in the schools and in the university, to promote action to improve teaching conditions and standards and to encourage a more active participation on the part of teachers in political and community life.’ The focus, however, was not as sharply on issues relating to teachers as one might have assumed:

  In bursts of what I suppose can only be described as immature fervor we felt ourselves called upon, in our union meetings, to make pronouncements and to pass resolutions on all sorts of political, civil rights and even international issues extraneous to the business of the Teachers Union and thereby caused, I am afraid, a certain amount of disaffection and pangs of conscience among some of our more timid members.

  As part of this wider remit, the Teachers’ Union organised fund-raising parties on behalf of the Spanish Loyalists, which, according to Chevalier, were ‘invariably lively and successful affairs’ that raised ‘thousands of dollars for the alleviation of human suffering’. Though Oppenheimer later dismissed the Teachers’ Union as a ‘miserable thing’ that ‘fell apart because it grew into a debating society’, he also specifically listed his participation in it as an example of the comradeship that had drawn him into radical politics.

  Another form that this comradeship possibly took, a far more controversial form, was Oppenheimer’s involvement in what Chevalier has described privately as a Communist Party ‘unit’. Publicly, in his memoir of Oppenheimer, Chevalier describes the formation of this unit as follows:

  We had decided, Oppenheimer and I, at our first meeting – this I do remember – to ask a small number of our friends, all colleagues, whom both of us knew, respected and trusted, and who shared our views, to join us and to form a discussion group that would meet from time to time, as occasion might dictate. This group – the number, in the course of time, varied from six to ten – was promptly formed, and we met, more or less regularly, every week or two during college sessions, not at all during the long summers, for the next five years. Our last reunion, as far as I remember, must have been in the late fall of 1942.

  This is not how Chevalier had originally wanted to describe the group. What he had wanted to write, he told Oppenheimer in a letter written in 1964, was the ‘story . . . of your and my membership in the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942’. As Oppenheimer had always denied Party membership, Chevalier’s letter naturally horrified him. ‘I have never been a member of the Communist Party,’ he replied, ‘and thus have never been a member of a Communist Party unit. I, of course, have always known this. I thought you did to
o. I have said so officially time and time again.’ In the light of this, Chevalier spoke in his book of the ‘discussion group’ mentioned above. To another member of this unit/discussion group, the union organiser, Lou Goldblatt, Chevalier wrote: ‘I had originally planned to reveal the fact that O. had been, from 1937 to 1943, a CP member,fn37 which I knew directly. On thinking it over, I decided that I shouldn’t, even though the fact is of considerable historical importance.’

  That Chevalier was not alone in regarding this group as a secret Communist Party unit has become apparent in two documents that have recently been made public on the website associated with Gregg Herken’s book, Brotherhood of the Bomb. The first of these is an unpublished manuscript by Chevalier’s wife entitled ‘Robert Oppenheimer and Haakon Chevalier: from the memoirs of Barbara Chevalier’. After telling the story of how Oppenheimer read Marx on a train, Barbara Chevalier adds: ‘Shortly thereafter he and Haakon joined a secret unit of the Communist Party. There must have been 6 or 8 members – a doctor, a wealthy businessman (maybe).’ Later in the memoir she writes: ‘Oppie’s membership in a closed unit was very secret indeed.’

  The gist of Barbara Chevalier’s account is confirmed in another unpublished document made available on the same website, ‘Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor’ by the Berkeley history professor Gordon Griffiths. Griffiths describes how, in 1939, when he returned to Berkeley after studying at Oxford, he wanted to resume membership of the US Communist Party, but his new wife, Mary, was worried about the idea. A compromise, suggested by the graduate mathematician and Communist Party member Kenneth May, was adopted whereby Griffiths ‘could perform a useful function for the Party that involved little or no risk of exposure’. That function was to liaise between the Party and what Griffiths describes as ‘the faculty Communist group’, the Berkeley members of which were Chevalier, Oppenheimer and the Icelandic scholar Arthur Brodeur. To those three names, Chevalier, in private correspondence, has added names from outside the Berkeley faculty: Thomas Addis of Stanford, Robert Muir of the California Labor Bureau, Lou Goldblatt and the anthropologist Paul Radin.fn38