American Prometheus (103 page)
When Fischer handed Robert two chapters of his manuscript, he began reading a few pages and asked a question about Fischer’s source material. “From Berlin?” he said. Fischer pointed to a footnote on the page. “He gave me a very sweet smile at this point,” Fischer later wrote. “He looked extremely thin, his hair was sparse and white, and his lips were dry and cracked. As he read, and at other times too, he kept moving his lips as if to speak but did not speak, and, probably realizing that this made a bad impression, he held his bony hand in front of his mouth; his fingernails were blue.”
After some twenty minutes, Fischer thought it time for him to leave. On his way out, he spotted a packet of cigarettes lying on the second step of the stairs leading to the second floor. Three cigarettes had fallen out of the pack and were lying on the carpet nearby, so Fischer reached down to put them back in the pack. When he stood up, Robert was by his side; reaching into his pocket, he brought out a lighter and lit it. He knew Fischer didn’t smoke and was on his way out of the house, but the gesture was instinctive. He had always been the first to light a guest’s cigarette. “I have a strong impression,” Fischer wrote a few days later, “that he knew his mind was failing and that he probably wanted to die.” After insisting on helping Fischer with his coat, Robert opened the door and said with a thick tongue, “Come again.”
Francis Fergusson dropped by the house on Friday, February 17. He could see that Robert was pretty far gone. He could still walk, but he now weighed under a hundred pounds. They sat together in the dining room, but after a short time, Fergusson thought Robert looked so feeble that he ought to take his leave. “I walked him into his bedroom, and there I left him. And the next day I heard that he had died.”
Robert died in his sleep at 10:40 p.m. on Saturday, February 18, 1967. He was only sixty-two years old. Kitty later confided to a friend, “His death was pitiful. He turned into a child first, then an infant. He made noises. I couldn’t go into the room; I had to go into the room, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Two days later his remains were cremated.
LEWIS STRAUSS sent Kitty a cable, claiming that he was “grieved at the news of Robert’s death. . . .” Newspapers at home and abroad published long, admiring obituaries. The
Times
of London described him as the quintessential “Renaissance man.” David Lilienthal told the
New York Times
: “The world has lost a noble spirit—a genius who brought together poetry and science.” Edward Teller had less fulsome remarks: “I like to remember that he did a magnificent job and a very necessary job . . . in organizing [the Los Alamos Laboratory].” In Moscow, the Soviet news agency Tass reported the death of an “outstanding American physicist.”
The New Yorker
remembered him as “a man of exceptional physical elegance and grace, an aristocrat with an enduring touch of the intellectual bohemian about him.” Senator Fulbright gave a speech on the floor of the Senate, and said of the late physicist, “Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him.”
After the memorial service in Princeton on February 25, 1967, Oppenheimer was memorialized once again in the spring at a special session of the American Physical Society in Washington. Isidor Rabi, Bob Serber, Victor Weisskopf and several others spoke. Rabi later wrote an introduction for the speeches, which were subsequently collected and published in book form. “In Oppenheimer,” he wrote, “the element of earthiness was feeble. Yet it was essentially this spiritual quality, this refinement as expressed in speech and manner, that was the basis of his charisma. He never expressed himself completely. He always left a feeling that there were depths of sensibility and insight not yet revealed.”
KITTY TOOK her husband’s ashes in an urn to Hawksnest Bay, and then, on a stormy, rainy afternoon, she, Toni and two St. John friends, John Green and his mother-in-law, Irva Clair Denham, motored out toward Carval Rock, a tiny island in sight of the beach house. When they got to a point in between Carval Rock, Congo Cay and Lovango Cay, John Green cut the motor. They were in seventy feet of water. No one spoke, and instead of scattering Robert’s ashes into the sea, Kitty simply dropped the urn overboard. It didn’t sink instantly, so they circled the boat around the bobbing urn and watched silently until it finally disappeared below the choppy sea. Kitty explained that she and Robert had discussed it, and “That’s where he wanted to be.”
Epilogue:
“There’s Only One Robert”
Within a year or two of Oppie’s death, Kitty began living with Bob Serber,
Robert’s close friend and former student. When a friend mistakenly called
Serber “Robert,” Kitty reprimanded her sharply: “Don’t you call him
Robert—there’s only one Robert.” In 1972, Kitty bought a magnificent fifty-two-foot teak ketch, christened the
Moonraker.
The name refers to the topmost sail on a large sailing vessel—or to someone touched with madness.
Kitty persuaded Serber to sail with her around the world in May 1972. But
they didn’t make it very far. Off the coast of Colombia, Kitty became so ill
that Serber turned the boat around and made for port at Panama. Kitty died
of an embolism on October 27, 1972, in Panama City’s Gorgas Hospital.
Her ashes were scattered near Carval Rock, in the same spot off the coast of
St. John where Robert’s urn had been sent to the sea’s bottom in 1967.
In 1959, ten years after his banishment, Frank Oppenheimer finally
made it back into academia when the University of Colorado gave him an
appointment in the physics department. In 1965, he won a prestigious
Guggenheim Fellowship to do bubble chamber research at University College in London. While in Europe that year, he and Jackie visited a number of
science museums; they were particularly impressed by the Palais de la
Découverte, which used models to demonstrate basic scientific concepts.
Upon their return to America, he and Jackie began to develop plans for a
science museum that would give children and adults a “hands-on” experience with physics, chemistry and other scientific fields. The idea took hold,
and in August 1969, with grants from various foundations, Frank and
Jackie Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium opened its doors on the grounds of
San Francisco’s renovated Palace of Fine Arts, a monumental exhibition
hall built in 1915. The Exploratorium quickly became a showcase in the
“participatory museum movement,” and Frank became its charismatic
director. Jackie and their son Michael worked closely with Frank, and the
museum became a family endeavor—and possibly the world’s most interesting pedagogical museum of science.
Robert would have been proud of Frank. Everything the two brothers
had learned in two lives devoted to science, art and politics was brought
together in the Exploratorium. “The whole point of the Exploratorium,”
Frank said, “is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand
the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up
with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.” If Frank ran his Exploratorium as a
“benevolent despot” until his death in 1985, it was always with the egalitarian notion that “human understanding will cease to be an instrument of
power . . . for the benefit of a few, and will instead become a source of
empowerment and pleasure to all.”
Peter Oppenheimer moved to New Mexico, living in his father’s Perro
Caliente cabin overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Over the
years, he raised three children. Twice divorced, he eventually settled in
Santa Fe, and made a living as a contractor and carpenter. Peter never
advertised his familial connections to the father of the atomic bomb—even
when he occasionally went canvassing door-to-door as an environmental
activist, lobbying against nuclear waste hazards in the region.
After her father’s death, Toni floundered. “Toni always felt inferior to
Kitty,” recalled Serber. “Kitty managed her life so much that Toni never
became independent.” Her strong-willed mother had pressured her into
going to graduate school, but after a while she dropped out. She lived alone
in a small apartment in New York City for a time, but she had few close
friends. Eventually she moved out of her apartment and lived in a back
room of Serber’s large Riverside Drive apartment. Using her facility for
languages, she got a temporary job in 1969 as a trilingual translator for the
United Nations. “She could shift from one language to another without any
problem whatsoever,” recalled Sabra Ericson. “But somehow or other, she
was always getting slapped in the face.” The position required a security
clearance. The FBI opened a full field investigation—and dredged up all the
old charges about her father. In what must have been a painful and ironic
blow to a tender ego, the security clearance never came through.
Toni eventually returned to St. John, resigned to making the island her
home. “She made the mistake of staying on St. John,” Serber said. “I mean,
it’s so limited. There was nobody there she could talk to, really . . . nobody
her own age.” Twice married and twice divorced, Toni enjoyed only fleeting
happiness. Denied her chosen career by the FBI, she never seemed to
recover her footing.
After her second divorce, she became good friends with another recent
arrival on the island, June Katherine Barlas, a woman eight years older.
With Barlas and others, Toni rarely talked about her parents. “But when
she did mention her father,” recalled Barlas, “it was always lovingly.” She
often wore a ponytail holder that had been given to her by Robert—and
she’d become very upset if she ever misplaced it. She avoided discussing the
1954 hearing, other than to say on occasion “that those men had destroyed
her father.”
But clearly, she still had issues with her parents. For a time, she saw a
psychiatrist in St. Thomas, and she told her friend Inga Hiilivirta that this
experience had helped her to understand “her resentment toward her parents from the way she had been treated as a young child.” She suffered from
fits of depression. One day, determined to drown herself, she started swimming out from Hawksnest Bay toward Carval Rock, where Robert’s ashes
rested on the sea bottom in an urn. She swam for a long time straight out
across the ocean—and then, as she later confided to a friend—she suddenly
felt better and turned back to shore.
On a Sunday afternoon in January 1977, she hanged herself in the
beach cottage Robert had built on Hawksnest Bay. Her suicide was clearly
premeditated. On her bed Toni had left a $10,000 bond and a will deeding
the house to “the people of St. John.” She was beloved throughout the
island. “Everybody loved her,” Barlas said, “but she didn’t know that.”
Hundreds came to the funeral—so many, in fact, that scores had to stand
outside the small church in Cruz Bay.
The cottage on Hawksnest Bay is now gone, swept away by a hurricane,
but in its place is a community house standing on what is now called
Oppenheimer Beach.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
“My Long Ride with Oppie”
BY MARTIN J. SHERWIN
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER was an accomplished horseman, and so it was not entirely bizarre that in the summer of 1979 I sought to give new meaning to the scholarly concept of Sitzfleisch (sitting flesh) by starting my research for his biography on horseback. My adventure began at the Los Pinos Ranch, located ten miles above Cowles, New Mexico, from which in the summer of 1922, Oppie had first explored the beautiful Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I had not ridden for decades and, to say the least, the prospect of the long ride ahead—actually and metaphorically—was daunting. My destination, several hours by horseback from Los Pinos, over the 10,000 foot summit of Grass Mountain, was the “Oppenheimer ranch,” Perro Caliente, the spare cabin on 154 acres of spectacular mountainside that Oppie had leased in the 1930s and purchased in 1947.