American Prometheus (21 page)

Still, like many American communists, Jean was not a very good ideologue. “I find it impossible to be an ardent Communist,” she wrote Robertson, “which means breathing, talking and acting it, all day and all night.” She aspired, moreover, to become a Freudian psychoanalyst, and at the time the Communist Party insisted that Freud and Marx were irreconcilable. This intellectual schism seems not to have fazed Tatlock, but probably had much to do with her on-again, off-again ardor for the Party. (As an adolescent, she had rebelled against the religious dogma she had been taught by the Episcopal Church; she told a girlfriend that every day she scrubbed her forehead to wipe away the spot where she had been christened. She hated any form of religious “claptrap.”) Unlike many of her Party comrades, Jean still had “a feeling for the sanctity and sense of the individual soul,” even as she expressed exasperation with those of her friends who shared an interest in psychology but scorned political action: “. . . their interest in psychoanalysis amounts to a disbelief in any other positive form of social action.” For her, psychological theory was like expert surgery, “a therapeutic method for specific disorders.”

Jean Tatlock, in sum, was a complicated woman certain to hold the interest of a physicist with an acute sense of the psychological. She was, according to a mutual friend, “worthy of Robert in every way. They had much in common.”

AFTER JEAN AND OPPIE began dating that autumn, it quickly became clear to everyone that this was a very intense relationship. “All of us were a bit envious,” one of Jean’s closest friends, Edith Arnstein Jenkins, later wrote. “I for one had admired him [Oppenheimer] from a distance. His precocity and brilliance already legend, he walked his jerky walk, feet turned out, a Jewish Pan with his blue eyes and his wild Einstein hair. And when we came to know him at the parties for Loyalist Spain, we knew how those eyes would hold one’s own, how he would listen as few others listen and punctuate his attentiveness with ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ and how when he was deep in thought he would pace so that all the young physicist-apostles who surrounded him walked the same jerky, pronated walk and punctuated their listening with ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ ”

Jean Tatlock was well aware of Oppenheimer’s eccentricities. Perhaps because she herself felt life to the bone, she could empathize with a man whose own passions were so odd. “You must remember,” she told a friend, “that he was lecturing to learned societies when he was seven, that he never had a childhood, and so is different from the rest of us.” Like Oppenheimer, she was decidedly introspective. She had, as noted, already decided to become a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.

Prior to meeting Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s students noticed that he had been seeing many women. “There were a half dozen at least,” recalled Bob Serber. But with Tatlock, things were different. Oppie kept her to himself and rarely brought her into his circle of friends in the physics department. His friends only saw them together at the irregular parties hosted by Mary Ellen Washburn. Serber recalled Tatlock as “very good-looking and quite composed in any social gathering.” Politically, Serber recognized that she was decidedly “left-wing—more so than the rest of us.” And though she was obviously “a very intelligent girl,” he could see that she had a dark side. “I don’t know whether it was a manic-depressive case or what, but she did have these terrible depressions.” And when Jean was down, so was Oppie. “He’d be depressed some days,” Serber said, “because he was having troubles with Jean.”

The relationship nevertheless survived these episodes for more than three years. “Jean was Robert’s truest love,” a friend would later say. “He loved her the most. He was devoted to her.” And so perhaps it was only natural that Jean’s activism and social conscience awakened in Robert the sense of social responsibility that had been so often discussed at the Ethical Culture School. He soon became active in numerous Popular Front causes.

“Beginning in late 1936,” Oppenheimer would explain to his interrogators in 1954, “my interests began to change. . . . I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there [an aunt and several cousins], and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”

For a time, he became particularly interested in the plight of migrant farm workers. Avram Yedidia, a neighbor of one of Oppenheimer’s students, was working for the California State Relief Administration in 1937–38, when he became acquainted with the Berkeley physicist. “He manifested deep interest in the plight of the unemployed,” Yedidia recalled, “and showered us with questions on work with migrants who came to this area from the dust bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas. . . . Our perception then—which I feel was shared by Oppenheimer—had been that our work was vital and, in the language of today, ‘relevant’ while his was esoteric and remote.”

The Depression had caused many Americans to reconsider their political outlook. Nowhere was this truer than in California. In 1930, three out of every four California voters were registered Republicans; eight years later, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a margin of two to one. In 1934, the muckraking writer Upton Sinclair nearly won the governorship with his radical platform to End Poverty in California (EPIC). That year
The Nation
editorialized: “If ever a revolution was due, it was due in California. Nowhere else has the battle between labor and capital been so widespread and bitter, and the casualties so large; nowhere else has there been such a flagrant denial of the personal liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. . . .” In 1938 another reformer, Culbert L. Olson, a Democrat, was elected governor with the open support of the state Communist Party. Olson had campaigned under the slogan of a “united front against fascism.”

Although the political left as a whole in California was momentarily mainstream, the California Communist Party was still a tiny minority, even on the various campuses of the University of California. In Alameda County, where Berkeley was located, the Party claimed between five hundred and six hundred members, including a hundred longshoremen working in the Oakland shipyards. California communists were generally thought to be a voice for moderation in the national Party. With only 2,500 members in 1936, the state Party grew to more than 6,000 by 1938. Nationwide the Communist Party (USA) had approximately 75,000 members in 1938, but many of these new recruits remained less than a year. All told, during the 1930s, about 250,000 Americans affiliated themselves with the CPUSA for at least a short time.

For many New Deal Democrats, no stigma was attached to those who were involved in the CPUSA and its numerous cultural and educational activities. Indeed, in some circles the Popular Front carried a certain cachet. Numerous intellectuals who never joined the Party nevertheless were willing to attend a writers’ congress sponsored by the CP, or volunteer to teach workers at a “People’s Educational Center.” So it was not particularly unusual for a young Berkeley academic like Oppenheimer to savor in this way a bit of the intellectual and political life of Depression-era California. “I liked the new sense of companionship,” he later testified, “and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country.”

It was Tatlock who “opened the door” for Robert into this world of politics. Her friends became his friends. These included Communist Party members Kenneth May (a graduate student at Berkeley), John Pitman (a reporter for
People’s World
), Aubrey Grossman (a lawyer), Rudy Lambert and Edith Arnstein. One of Tatlock’s best friends was Hannah Peters, a German-born medical doctor whom she had met at Stanford medical school. Dr. Peters, who soon became Oppenheimer’s physician, was married to Bernard Peters (formerly, Pietrkowski), another refugee from Nazi Germany.

Born in Posen in 1910, Bernard studied electrical engineering in Munich until Hitler came to power in 1933. Though he later denied being a Communist Party member, he did attend several communist rallies as a spectator, and on one occasion he was present at an anti-Nazi demonstration in which two people were injured. Soon he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau, an early Nazi concentration camp. After three terrifying months, he was transferred to a Munich prison—and then, without explanation, released. (In another version of this story, Peters managed to escape from the prison.) He then spent several months traveling at night on a bicycle through southern Germany and across the Alps to Italy. There he found his Berlin-born girlfriend, Hannah Lilien, age twenty-two, who had fled to Padua to study medicine. In April 1934, the couple immigrated to the United States. They were married in New York on November 20, 1934, and, after Hannah received her medical degree in 1937 at Long Island Medical School in New York, they moved to the San Francisco Bay area. During a stint at Stanford University School of Medicine, Hannah worked on research projects with Dr. Thomas Addis, a friend and mentor of Jean Tatlock’s. By the time Oppenheimer met the Peterses through Jean, Bernard was working as a longshoreman.

In 1934, Peters had written a 3,000-word account of the horrors he had witnessed in Dachau. He described in sickening detail the torture and summary execution of individual prisoners. One prisoner, he reported, “died in my hands a few hours after the beating. All skin was removed from his back, his muscles were hanging down in shreds.” Peters no doubt shared his graphic account of Nazi atrocities with his friends when he arrived on the West Coast. Whether Oppenheimer read Peters’ report on Dachau or merely heard him talk about it, he must have been deeply moved by these stories. There was a note of authenticity and worldliness in Peters’ extraordinary life. Another of Oppenheimer’s graduate students, Philip Morrison, always thought Peters was “a little different from most of us, more mature, marked with a special seriousness and intensity . . . his experience went far beyond ours. . . . He had seen and felt the barbarous darkness that mantled Nazi Germany, [and] had worked among the longshoremen in San Francisco Bay.”

When Peters displayed an interest in physics, Oppie encouraged him to take a course in the subject at Berkeley. He proved to be a talented student and, despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, Robert got him enrolled in Berkeley’s physics graduate program. Peters soon became Oppenheimer’s designated note-taker in his course on quantum mechanics and wrote his thesis under Oppie’s supervision. Not surprisingly, Oppie and Jean Tatlock frequently socialized with Hannah and Bernard Peters. Although the couple always insisted that they never joined the Communist Party, their politics were clearly left-wing. By 1940 Hannah had a private practice in a poverty-stricken district of downtown Oakland, and this experience “strengthened a conviction that had been growing for some years, namely that adequate medical care can only be provided by a comprehensive health insurance scheme with federal backing.” Hannah also insisted on racial integration in her practice, accepting black patients at a time when few other white physicians did so. Both views stamped her as a radical—and the FBI concluded that she was a member of the CP.

All these new friends drew Oppenheimer into their world of political activism. On the other hand, it would be wrong to suggest that Tatlock and her circle were solely responsible for his political awakening. Sometime around 1935, Oppenheimer’s father lent him a copy of
Soviet Communism:
A New Civilization?
, a rosy description of the Soviet state written by the well-known British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He was favorably impressed by what it said about the Soviet experiment.

In the summer of 1936, Oppenheimer is said to have taken all three volumes of the German-language edition of
Das Kapital
with him on a three-day train trip to New York City. As his friends tell the story, by the time he arrived in New York, he had read the three volumes cover to cover. In fact, his exposure to Marx occurred several years earlier, probably in the spring of 1932. His friend Harold Cherniss remembered Oppie visiting him in Ithaca, New York, that spring and boasting that he had read
Das Kapital.
Cherniss just laughed; he didn’t think of Oppie as political, but he knew his friend read widely: “I suppose somewhere someone said to him, ‘You don’t know about this? You haven’t seen it?’ So he got this wretched book and read it!”

Though they had yet to be introduced, Haakon Chevalier knew of Oppenheimer by reputation—and it was not for his work in physics. In July 1937 Chevalier noted in his diary a remark by a mutual friend that Oppenheimer had bought and read the complete works of Lenin. Chevalier, impressed, commented that this would make Oppenheimer “better read than most party members.” Although Chevalier considered himself a relatively sophisticated Marxist, he had never plowed through
Das Kapital.

Born in 1901 in Lakewood, New Jersey, Haakon Chevalier might nevertheless easily have been mistaken for an expatriate. His father was French and his mother had been born in Norway. “Hoke,” as his friends called him, spent parts of his early childhood in Paris and Oslo; consequently, he spoke fluent French and Norwegian. But his parents brought him back to America in 1913, and he finished high school in Santa Barbara, California. He studied at both Stanford and Berkeley, but interrupted his college studies in 1920 to spend eleven months working as a seaman aboard a merchant ship sailing between San Francisco and Cape Town. After this adventure, Chevalier returned to Berkeley and received his doctorate in Romance languages in 1929, specializing in French literature.

Six feet one inch tall, with blue eyes and wavy brown hair, Hoke cut a debonair figure as a young man. In 1922, he married Ruth Walsworth Bosley—but divorced her on grounds of desertion in 1930, and a year later married Barbara Ethel Lansburgh, twenty-four, one of his Berkeley students. The blond, green-eyed Lansburgh came from a wealthy family and owned a stunning redwood seaside home at Stinson Beach, twenty miles north of San Francisco. “He was a terribly charismatic teacher,” recalled their daughter Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff. “That drew her to him.”