Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  Once that hurdle was crossed, Oppenheimer was eager to start recruiting his staff and went to Cambridge to begin his raid on the Rad Lab. He knew he would have to coax many of the physicists into leaving Loomis’ laboratory, and this might inevitably cause some turbulence. As he wrote Conant: “In view of . . . the very large number of men of the first rank who are now working on that project, I am inclined not to take too seriously the no’s with which we shall be greeted. . . .” Oppenheimer began by courting Alvarez, a former Berkeley colleague and old friend. “Great salesman that he was,” recalled Alvarez, Oppenheimer had no difficulty convincing him to head west and join the atomic bomb project. “He wanted me back on his team and hinted enough about the challenges of the separation project to persuade me to leave radar.” He also set his sights on Rabi, another old friend. But Rabi refused Oppenheimer’s overtures and insisted on staying at the Rad Lab to finish his work. In the end, he agreed to serve as a consultant and would be one of the few scientists permitted to go back and forth to “the Hill,” as they dubbed the Los Alamos lab.

  Loomis was shocked when he first heard Oppenheimer wanted to steal several of his ablest division heads, and he and DuBridge “hit the roof.” He had known Oppenheimer since his first visits to Berkeley, and while he acknowledged his brilliance, he had always found him a bit too arrogant and cocky. But out of loyalty to Bush and Lawrence, Loomis finally relented. Over the next few months, the list of scientists who joined the migration from the MIT Rad Lab to Los Alamos grew to include Norman Ramsey, Bob Bacher, Hans Bethe, and George Kistiakowsky. Oppenheimer needed everyone there by mid-April for a conference on the many problems of physics and technique that loomed large ahead of them. One by one, the physicists slipped quietly out of Cambridge, heading out to the desert by train and traveling under assumed names.

  By that spring, the details of the uranium 235 bomb, called the “Thin Man,” had been pretty well worked out, and their main focus was directed toward the development of the plutonium 239 bomb. Oppenheimer asked Kistiakowsky, who had become an explosives expert at the request of the NDRC, to head up the effort, and he appointed Alvarez as his right-hand man. Fifteen months later, just after dawn on July 16, 1945, the first atom bomb test, Trinity, took place at a barren stretch of desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Lawrence, Bush, and Conant had come to the mesa for the demonstration and lay sprawled in shallow trenches twenty miles northwest of the tower-supported bomb. Alvarez was approximately twenty-four thousand feet above ground zero, watching from the cockpit of a B-29 bomber, when the sky suddenly turned bright, and he saw “an intense orange-red glow through the clouds.” He had volunteered to measure the explosive energy of the bombs that were to be dropped on Japan, and this was the only dress rehearsal.

  As Kistiakowsky watched the ascending mushroom cloud through his welder’s mask, he felt the same combination of surprise and relief shared by so many of his colleagues at that moment—the bomb had actually worked. The detonators he and Alvarez had designed had fired as planned. It had gone off without a hitch. He looked around for Oppenheimer to collect his money. In the nerve-racking days before the bomb’s debut, they had started a betting pool to help ease the tension, each of them wagering on their estimate of the explosive yield. “Oppie, you owe me ten dollars,” he told Los Alamos’ director, who had entered a cautiously lowball guess. Later, they calculated the nuclear blast was equivalent to eighteen thousand tons of TNT, a yield of 18.6 kilotons, far greater than anyone had expected. Rabi, who had arrived late and had to take the last bet, which was eighteen—the theoretical maximum—wound up winning the pool.

  After their initial jubilation at the outcome of the experiment, Rabi recalled the reverberating wave of dread that followed the “opening of the atomic age”:

  While this tremendous ball of flame was there before us, and we watched it, and it rolled along, it became in time diffused with the clouds. . . . Then, there was a chill, which was not the morning cold; it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance I did of my wooden house in Cambridge, and my laboratory in New York, and of the millions of people living around there, and this power of nature which we had first understood it to be—well, there it was.

  The physicists knew the brutal island war in the Pacific made the use of the bomb inevitable. They had wondered briefly if the bomb project would go forward after Roosevelt’s stunning death from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 14, 1945. It had struck him down in the midst of posing for his presidential portrait, and he had died a few hours later at three thirty-five P.M. Later that same day, Stimson began briefing Harry Truman, the newly sworn in commander in chief. “Stimson told me,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, “about an immense project that was under way—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” With Germany’s collapse a month later, on May 7, it appeared certain the bomb would be used against Japan. The weapon they had raced to develop to save the free world would be used to destroy a ruthless enemy and terminate the war. The success of the Trinity shot all but guaranteed that the new president would continue what his predecessor had begun. After weeks of debate over how the bomb should be used to bring surrender—a technical demonstration coupled with a warning was rejected by Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Compton, and Fermi as unlikely “to bring an end to the war”—the target cities in Japan were selected.

  A few days after the test, Alvarez assembled spares of all the measurement system components, fitted out a toolbox to service the equipment, and made out a will. He packed the uniform and official papers that identified him as an air force colonel, so that if their plane was downed over enemy territory, he would be treated as a military officer and not executed as a spy. On July 20, he flew to Wendover, Utah, and boarded one of the Green Hornet Squadron’s transports, which would ferry him to the B-29 base on Tinian island, fifteen hundred miles from Japan. From there he would fly the mission in an escort plane three hundred feet behind Colonel Paul Tibbets’ Enola Gay, which would carry the Thin Man’s smaller and lighter brother, a four-ton atomic bomb known as “Little Boy.”

  In the end, the calutron that Lawrence sketched in Loomis’ living room would supply virtually all of the U-235 uranium used in the bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The sixty-inch cyclotron, using a method of gaseous diffusion that was developed at a second wartime plant in Hanford, Washington, would produce the fissionable plutonium 239 for the second bomb, dubbed the “Fat Man” in honor of Churchill, dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

  BY the summer of 1944, Loomis had already begun to look ahead to the end of the war. The Rad Lab, whose experimental microwave technology had once been labeled by the army as “something for the next war,” had produced over a hundred distinct radar systems, most of which were in service and helping to speed the day of victory. But for much of the last year, the excitement of developing new radar equipment had been replaced by the laborious administrative task of seeing it produced and mobilized. Loomis spent much of the year chained to a desk in Washington and expediting patent filings so that the radar projects could be moved forward as quickly as possible. It was a tall order, as DuBridge described in a summary report: “By June 1943 nearly 6000 radar sets of Radiation Laboratory design had been delivered to the Army and Navy, 22,000 were on order, and production was climbing past the rate of 2000 sets per month of all types. The total value of Service orders had by that time grown to three quarters of a billion dollars. Production mounted rapidly during the latter half of the year, and equipment with trained personnel were reaching the theaters in large quantities.”

  Loomis presided over a laboratory that had ballooned into an organization of nearly four thousand—five hundred of them physicists—with emissaries all over the world implementing its war-winning ideas and devices. It had sprawled over more than fifteen acres of floor space in Cambridge and elsewhere, spent approximately $80 million in federal funds, and in its last year had reached a bud
get of about $125,000 a day, or close to $4 million a month. It was, in the words of Karl Compton, “the greatest cooperative research establishment in the history of the world.” While many found fault with the administrative eccentricities of the organization—or “dis-organization,” as some critics maintained—it was General Patton, witnessing the Rad Lab’s radar systems in operation in the Rhineland in 1944, who observed, “This is the way that wars not only can, but must be, run from now on.” Loomis had helped to force the development of radar within the army, and in the opinion of many of his peers, his greatest contribution lay in his brilliantly orchestrated effort with Stimson to mobilize the products of science and technology, break down military resistance to the flow of innovative ideas and applications, and continuously press for further experimentation and the acceptance of new weapons systems and tactics. As Lawrence told an interviewer at the time, “If Alfred Loomis had not existed, radar development would have been retarded greatly, at an enormous cost in American lives.”

  Lawrence, who had stood at Loomis’ elbow in the early days of the laboratory, could not pay high enough tribute to the banker-turned-scientist who had organized physics for war and exerted his enlightened influence on the kind of war the country was ultimately able to fight: “He had the vision and courage to lead his committee as no other man could have led it. He used his wealth very effectively in the way of entertaining the right people and making things easy to accomplish. His prestige and persuasiveness helped break the patent jams that held up radar development. He exercised his tact and diplomacy to overcome all obstacles. He’s that kind of man.” Lawrence added, “He steers a mathematically straight course and succeeds in having his own way by force of logic and of being right.”

  As visionaries of the wartime laboratory, Loomis, Lawrence, and Compton had had the hubris to hire a staff dominated by physicists, and it enabled them to create an environment for research run for, and almost completely by, physicists, with everything subordinated to preserving their freedom and creativity and the production of their revolutionary technological devices. In doing so, Guerlac wrote in his official history of radar, “the Radiation Laboratory came close to realizing a scientist’s dream of a scientific republic, whose only limitation was the supply of scientists.” There were those who believed that the laboratory’s great success story should continue on after the war and that still more marvelous gadgets and techniques might be forthcoming. Loomis was vehemently opposed to the idea and took decisive steps to stop the juggernaut, paying a call on President Roosevelt. Loomis felt the Rad Lab would surely stagnate and falter and argued that “only the pressure of war” could make a government program of that size and magnitude flourish. He had great faith in private enterprise and a deep suspicion of public ones. While acknowledging that his opinion appeared to conflict with recent experience, Loomis maintained there was no cause short of the national defense that could have inspired him to help create a large, centralized, government-controlled laboratory, and the very idea was “anathema” to him. War was a great stimulus to science, but it was not a stunt that could be repeated in peacetime. Bush shared his views, and it was decided that the Rad Lab should be terminated.

  With his war job almost over, Loomis was eager to return to private life. He felt worn down. He was exhausted by the constant travel and still suffered from the lingering effects of a serious bout of pneumonia. His marriage, which for years had existed only in appearance, was now at an end. His affair with Manette Hobart, long confined to the Glass House and furtive meetings at hotels, had become an open secret. There was no longer any question of his returning to his old home on Club House Road in Tuxedo Park. Throughout the war years, he had repeatedly packed his sickly wife off to sanitariums for her health, and Loomis, in a rare miscalculation, made the mistake of trying to have her committed permanently. When his oldest son, Lee, returned from war and discovered what his father had done, he rushed to his mother’s defense.

  Lee was a big, obstreperous young man, and although he had followed his father’s lead and graduated from Harvard Law School and eyed a Wall Street career, the two had never gotten on. They had always knocked heads, now more than ever. Lee became his mother’s self-appointed protector and guardian. He took control of his mother’s half of the Loomis fortune and shrewdly invested it on her behalf. Both Lee and Henry regarded what their father had done as traitorous and angrily broke off all relations with him. The middle brother, Farney, refused to take sides. While Henry eventually reached an uneasy truce with his father, Lee would have scarcely anything to do with him for the next twenty years. “It was a very bitter divide,” said Lee’s daughter, Sabra Loomis. “They didn’t speak.”

  Like most members of the family, she only knows bits and pieces of the story, because no one ever talked about it. During the war years, she lived with her grandmother in Tuxedo Park off and on when her parents were away, and they were very close. By then, Ellen had taken up the use of her maiden name again and signed her letters Ellen Farnsworth Loomis. “I had a dim sense as a child that a wrong had been done to her,” recalled Sabra. “I know at one point she’d been shut up in a hospital, and no one was allowed to write to her or talk to her. There seemed to be a bit of collusion going on in that the doctors had said, ‘No visits from the children, no calls from the husband, no visitors,’ and she thought she had been dumped there and abandoned. Alfred was very powerful and could have what he wanted. I always thought that there must have been something that precipitated it, whether it was that Alfred had already deserted her and she found out, but I don’t know. Only that if she was depressed when she went in, she was much more depressed by the time she got out.”

  For someone who had always prided himself on being plainspoken, Loomis had been less than candid with his three sons about the existence of another woman. When he first broached the subject of the divorce with Lee, he denied there was anyone else. After they learned the truth, his deception made it seem that much more terrible. “They were all in a state because Alfred had lied to them,” recalled Paulie Loomis, who was engaged to be married to Henry. “Divorce was a terrible thing in those days, and between that and having Ellen locked up, he halfway destroyed her. Ellen blamed herself, and after that she just started to fall apart. I think Alfred did it just to get her out of the way,” she said, adding, “It’s the only thing I ever held against him.”

  In the fall of 1944, Manette and her two young boys moved out west and took up residency in Nevada, as the state regulations governing divorce at the time required. Hobart did not contest the divorce, and in February she signed the papers making it official. Manette remained out west for the rest of that winter while she waited for Loomis to extricate himself from his marriage. He stayed at a neighboring ranch and commuted back and forth to Washington and Cambridge. On April 4, 1945, Alfred and Ellen Loomis’ divorce was final. A few hours later on the same day, he and Manette were married. A justice of the peace in Carson City, Nevada, performed the brief ceremony. No friends stood up for them, but a photograph taken after they exchanged vows shows Loomis, dressed in a banker’s pinstripes, standing stiffly beside his new bride. Manette is smiling shyly up at him and is wearing a prim black suit with a white rabbit-fur collar, cuffs, and matching fur muff, which she had purchased at Bonwit’s expressly for her wedding day. He was fifty-seven; she was thirty-six.

  Although Loomis provided very generously for his former wife, giving her more than half of his substantial fortune as well as the house in Tuxedo Park and the penthouse off Fifth Avenue, New York society was appalled. It was hard to know what was more unforgivable—the tandem divorces, the hasty remarriage to a much younger woman, or the suggestion of a long clandestine relationship with his best friend’s wife. Cholly Knickerbocker, the reigning gossip of the day, wrote a scathing account of the affair in his regular column, “The Smart Set”:

  It’s amazing how many members of the Rarified Set, whose very convolution in their social circles generally is noted for p
osterity by the scribblers, still can manage to draw the blinds on their glass houses and keep in the dark the changes that go on within. For example, I’m sure many of my eager readers are serenely unaware that the senior Alfred L. Loomis’ marital rapture of well over a quarter of a century is now a very definite rupture—and what’s more has been conclusively phfft for seven months. . . .

  The story went on to note that the first public tip-off that the prominent couple were no longer “pulling together in double harness” was the publication of their separate entries in the most recent edition of The New York Social Register. “What’s more, it blandly noted the fact that Alfred is blissfully enjoying a second Darby and Joan existence with Belgian Manette Seeldrayers Hobart. . . . Evidently Al long had been a close friend to Manette and Garret Hobart—for a little research reveals the fact that when their first [actually, it is their second] son was born in 1937, Manette named the child Alfred Loomis Hobart!”

  It would be impossible to overstate the reverberations Loomis’ divorce had in the elite financial and social circles he had once frequented. “Oh, I think it was the most shocking divorce at that time,” recalled Lynn Chase, whose husband, Edward L. Chase, was close to George Roberts, the head of Loomis’ old law firm, Winthrop & Stimson—which, in a move that was regarded as the coup de grâce in the scandalous affair, chose to represent Ellen and not Alfred in the divorce. “People absolutely turned their backs on him and had nothing to do with him for years. It was a combination of the fact that everyone had been so devoted to his wife, and that she was unwell and could not cope on her own. Then he had married somebody that had more or less been in his employ, had worked as some sort of secretary at his laboratory—it was all very, very shocking. He was like a nonperson after that. He just disappeared from society.”