109 East Palace (27 page)

The project was scarcely six months old, but already it was apparent to her how they all looked to Oppenheimer, and depended on him to get them through the uncertain days ahead. Only he seemed to see the way to the end of the war and to the thing that would save American boys’ lives, European boys’ lives, countless lives. “He commanded the greatest respect and gave us all the ability to do things we didn’t think we could do,” she told a reporter years later. “Of course, at first we didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t know anything, and then it began to unfold like a book just being written.”

TEN

Nothing Dangerous

F
OR OPPENHEIMER
personally, the warm weather had brought with it a growing sense of unease and self-doubt. While he projected confidence in the formal meetings and colloquiums, and continued to demonstrate the same dazzling ability to zero in on a problem—if not necessarily the solution—during technical discussions, he felt increasingly in over his head and pulled in different directions. For all that he might have imagined that by rooting his work in the familiar wilderness setting he would re-create the stimulating experience of freedom and adventurousness he had always enjoyed at Perro Caliente, he could not have been more wrong. Instead, he found himself chained to a desk and faced with a crushing load of administrative difficulties and decisions.

As the size and scale of the project continued to escalate monthly, with costs doubling and quadrupling, and concerns about housing, construction, salaries, and procurement of supplies taking up more and more of his time, Oppenheimer began to feel unequal to the task of managing the project’s large and complex corporate machinery. To Priscilla Greene, he looked increasing thin, haggard, and worried. Much later, Bob Bacher told Alice Smith that several times during that first summer Oppenheimer confided that he felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of leading the laboratory and worried that he would not be able to see it through. Bacher’s advice to Oppie was short and sweet: he had no choice but to carry on as director, for “No one else could do the job.”

Contributing to Oppenheimer’s sense of vulnerability were the regular debriefings with army intelligence forces, who, incredibly, had yet to approve his security clearance. Consequently, he found himself in the absurd position of being ordered to waste no time in producing the new weapon, while being undercut at every turn with trivial and distracting questions about his past. To make matters worse, the questioning had intensified in recent weeks, following a trip to San Francisco he took that June to visit his former fiancée, Jean Tatlock.

Oppenheimer had stayed in touch with Tatlock after his marriage to Kitty. Though she had continued to call him and wrote with some regularity, in the years between 1939 and 1943 they had seen little of one another. Tatlock had drifted further and further into religious and political fringe groups, and her bouts of melancholia had become more frequent and severe. Late in the summer of ’42, just after the Berkeley weapons conference, Serber had been surprised to see Oppie and his old flame pacing along the sidewalk below Oppie’s house at One Eagle Hill Road. It turned out that Tatlock, the daughter of a noted English professor at the university, was visiting her father, who lived around the corner. As Kitty later told Serber, “Whenever Jean was hit by a bad depression, she would appeal to Oppie for support.”

During the hectic winter and spring of ’43, while Oppenheimer had been preoccupied with the planning and launch of Los Alamos, Tatlock had taken a turn for the worse. Although a psychologist herself, she had not been able to rid her mind of thoughts about Oppenheimer, whom she told friends she regretted not marrying. She had put herself in the care of a psychiatrist and was receiving treatment for depression at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Oppenheimer had received word on several occasions that she needed to see him, but the press of events had made that impossible. But by June, after receiving a message from her passed on by his former landlady, Oppenheimer felt he could no longer ignore her urgent appeals. They had been “twice close enough to marriage” to think of themselves as engaged, he would explain years later during his loyalty hearings, when his visit to a former girlfriend who was a Communist activist was used to incriminate him. Whether out of pity, or in deference to their long and complicated history, Oppenheimer maintained that he had felt obliged to comply with her request. “I almost had to,” he stated. “She was not much of a Communist, but she was certainly a member of the party. There was nothing dangerous about that. Nothing potentially dangerous about that.”

Oppenheimer traveled to Berkeley on Saturday, June 12, and busied himself with meetings at the university. He caught up with Lawrence, dining with him on Sunday night. He had planned to spend some time with Tatlock on Monday at her apartment on Telegraph Hill and take the train back to Los Alamos that night, but he found her condition more fragile than he had expected and could not easily take his leave. Tatlock was “extremely unhappy,” he later testified, and confessed she was still in love with him. Oppenheimer ended up missing his train and stayed the night in her apartment. He must have known that he was being tailed by G-2 agents and had certainly read enough FBI files to realize that his visit would become part of his dossier, but he did not know enough to try to insulate himself from any appearance of impropriety. Compounding matters, he agreed to meet with her again the following evening, and after dinner she drove him to the airport. Late for important meetings at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer attempted to make up for lost time by catching the first plane back to New Mexico, breaking Groves’ moratorium against key project members flying. All of this, of course, was duly reported by his round-the-clock surveillance team and submitted in a comprehensive report to Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, who was chief of Counter-Intelligence for the Ninth Army Corps on the West Coast.

Predictably, Pash and G-2 were greatly interested in what they regarded as Oppenheimer’s reckless decision to meet privately with a card-carrying Communist. They already had sufficient reason to be concerned about Robert’s close connections with party members and insistence on hiring left-wing professors to work at Los Alamos, but the report that he had traveled from the highly classified atomic bomb laboratory for a reunion with someone as suspect and unstable as Tatlock provided fresh grounds for doubt. The question that confounded them was, Why would anyone in a position as highly sensitive as Oppenheimer’s continue to pursue associations with Communist adherents, especially in time of war? Why would he openly court suspicion, or even allow himself to be drawn into a situation that might possibly be construed as suspicious?

While these considerations might seem obvious, it is impossible to know what Oppenheimer, already bound in a fantastic web of secrecy and lies and false identities as proscribed by the project, actually viewed as risky behavior. In his arrogance, he may have believed that as director of the Los Alamos laboratory he was held to a different standard, that in effect his brilliance and importance to the project rendered him both irreplaceable and beyond reproach. “Look, I have had a lot of secrets in my head a long time,” he testified during the hearing. “It does not matter who I associate with. I don’t talk about those secrets. Only a very skillful guy might pick up a trace of information as to where I had been or what I was up to.”

In the same way that his egotism and air of superiority had once alienated many of his academic colleagues, they again worked against him with his military counterparts. Pash formed an immediate dislike of the haughty New York physicist and was far from convinced of his infallibility. As far as he was concerned, Oppenheimer’s meeting with a Communist “contact” like Tatlock provided all the ammunition he needed to alert Washington that they were dealing with a potential traitor. In late June, he forwarded a summary of the surveillance data to Lieutenant Colonel John Lansdale, his chief at the Pentagon, along with his memorandum stating in unequivocal terms his judgment that “the subject,” his preferred term for Oppenheimer, was not to be trusted: “In view of the fact that this office believes that the subject still is or may be connected with the Communist Party in the Project…” He then spun his own elaborate conspiracy theories, including “the possibility of his developing a scientific work to a certain extent, then turning it over to the Party without submitting any phase of it to the US Government.” A hard-liner on security risks, Pash recommended that Oppenheimer be “removed completely from the project and dismissed from employment by the US Government.”

As a result of Oppenheimer’s flagrant flouting of the rules, the army security officers in charge of the Los Alamos site did not like or trust him. This all but guaranteed that their file on him, first opened by the FBI, would never be closed. Not only would the investigation into his past continue, he would be forced to submit to round after round of probing interviews. Much of the questioning was done by Lansdale, a young army intelligence officer and Harvard Law graduate, who was Groves’ chief aide on security matters. The thirty-one-year-old Lansdale had originally been recruited by Conant in early 1942 to keep tabs on the political activities of the Berkeley physicists. At the time, Conant, who was all too aware of how gossipy academics could be, worried that the notoriously left-wing Berkeley contingent could not be trusted to safeguard their atomic research with the zealousness the situation required and might allow information to fall into the wrong hands. His worst fears were confirmed when Lansdale reported back a few weeks later that while on Berkeley’s campus he had filled a notebook with snippets of conversations relating to atomic research, all of which Conant regarded as serious breaches of security. Conant, who feared that whatever the Nazis gleaned of the United States’ project would galvanize their efforts to build the first atomic weapon, immediately sent Lansdale back to Berkeley with instructions to put the fear of God into the physicists when it came to national security. In the months that followed, Lansdale had continued his monitoring of Berkeley’s security lapses and, during the early phase of the project, had focused his attention on the character of the newly appointed Oppenheimer, his Communist wife, and their many “pink” associations.

Lansdale had made a point of getting to know Kitty personally and later recalled that on one afternoon when he went to interview her, she offered him a martini. “Not the kind to serve tea,” he noted, implying that Oppenheimer’s wife took social drinking to a new level. Kitty made no bones about the fact that she knew exactly why Lansdale was snooping around. But at the same time, she made it clear that she was now totally committed to Oppenheimer and his career, and the young intelligence agent was struck by how passionately she had taken up the role of dutiful wife:

As we say in the lingo, she was trying to rope me, just as I was trying to rope her. The thing that impressed me was how hard she was trying. Intensely, emotionally, with everything she had. She struck me as a curious personality, at once frail and very strong. I felt she’d go to any lengths for what she believed in.

Lansdale, an affable, blue-blooded lawyer with little experience in spying, decided to play on her ambition for her husband to draw her out and tried to present himself as “a person of balance, honestly wanting to evaluate Oppenheimer’s position.” He believed she had been in sympathy with her first husband, who had been a member of the Communist Party, and doubted that her “abstract opinions” had altered much with time. As he explained years later, “feelings were her source of belief”:

I got the impression of a woman who’d craved some sort of quality or distinction of character she could attach herself to, who’d had to find it in order to live. She didn’t care how much I knew of what she’d done before she met Oppenheimer or how it looked to me. Gradually I began to see that nothing in her past and nothing in her other husbands meant anything to her compared to him.

Lansdale came away convinced that Kitty was never the least bit fooled by his tactics: “[She] hated me and everything I stand for.” While she was no conventional patriot, he had left with a grudging admiration for her sense of conviction, and he reported to Groves that her protectiveness of her husband might actually serve them well in the long run, as her “strength of will was a powerful influence in keeping Dr. Oppenheimer away from what we would regard as dangerous associations.”

In his long, rambling conversations with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, Lansdale tried to explore the physicist’s various friendships with Berkeley Communists. At one point, he even let Oppenheimer know that G-2 had doubts about the union activities of several of his former students. Their suspicions centered on Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, a gifted twenty-one-year-old physicist, who had been working for Oppie at Berkeley since the spring of ’42 and was being considered for promotion by Ernest Lawrence. Because of his position at the lab, Lomanitz was fully aware of the work being done and the kind of weapon it indicated. Toward the end of July, Lawrence, who had never had any interest in politics, went ahead and made Lomanitz a group leader. Security did not want to challenge Lawrence’s decision outright, but unhappy about having a campus radical with so much access to classified material, G-2 arranged for Lomanitz to be drafted. Instead of steering clear of this hot potato, and letting Lawrence fight his own personnel battles, Oppenheimer interceded on Lomanitz’s behalf, sending a telegram pleading his case to project headquarters. With nuclear physicists in short supply, Oppenheimer argued, Lomanitz was indispensable.

On August 10, Lansdale, during another of his lengthy interviews with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, counseled him against getting involved in such sensitive issues. Among his many doubts about Oppenheimer, Lansadale worried that the Los Alamos director’s extreme competence in his field led him to falsely believe he was also competent in other fields, whether it was playing at politics or matching wits with suspected Communists. Like many brilliant men, he could be surprisingly dense. “For goodness’ sake,” he told Oppenheimer, “lay off Lomanitz and stop raising questions.”