American Prometheus (23 page)

When Oppenheimer was asked in 1954 about these donations to the Communist Party, he explained, “I doubt that it occurred to me that the contributions might be directed to other purposes than those I had intended, or that such purposes might be evil. I did not then regard Communists as dangerous; and some of their declared objectives seemed to me desirable.”

The Communist Party was often in the forefront of such progressive causes as desegregation, better working conditions for migratory farm workers, and the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and Oppenheimer gradually became active in a number of these causes. Early in 1938, he subscribed to the
People’s World,
the Party’s new West Coast newspaper. He read the paper regularly, taking an interest, he later explained, in its “formulation of issues.” Late in January 1938, his name found its way into the
People’s World,
when the paper reported that Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier and several other Berkeley professors had raised $1,500 to purchase an ambulance to be shipped to the Spanish Republic.

That spring, Robert and 197 other Pacific Coast academics signed a petition urging President Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo on the Spanish Republic. Later that year, he joined the Western Council of the Consumer’s Union. In January 1939, Robert was appointed to the executive committee of the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1940, he was listed as a sponsor of Friends of the Chinese People, and became a member of the national executive committee of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, a group that publicized the plight of German intellectuals. With the exception of the ACLU, all of these organizations were labeled “Communist front organizations” in 1942 and 1944 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Oppenheimer was particularly active in Local 349 of the East Bay Teachers’ Union. “It was a time of great tension in the faculty,” recalled Chevalier. “The few of us who were more or less left-wingers were very conscious of the fact that we were frowned upon by the elders.” In meetings of the faculty council, the conservatives “always won.” Most Berkeley academics refused to have anything to do with a union. The exceptions included Jean Tatlock’s psychology professor, Edward Tolman, the brother of Oppenheimer’s Caltech friend Richard Tolman. Over the next four years, Robert worked hard to increase the union’s membership. According to Chevalier, he rarely missed a union meeting and could be counted on for the most menial of tasks. Chevalier recalled staying up with him until two in the morning on one occasion, addressing envelopes for a mailing to the union’s several hundred members. It was tedious work for an unpopular cause. One evening Oppenheimer appeared as the featured speaker at the Oakland High School auditorium. The event had been widely publicized, and the Teachers’ Union fully expected hundreds of public school teachers to show up to hear Oppenheimer expound on the promise of the union cause. Fewer than a dozen people came. He nevertheless stood up and made his union pitch in a voice characteristically so soft that he could hardly be heard.

Some sensed that Oppenheimer’s politics were always driven by the personal. “Somehow one always knew he felt guilty about his gifts, about his inherited wealth, about the distance that separated him from others,” observed Edith Arnstein, a friend of Tatlock’s and a Party member. Even in the early 1930s, when he was not yet politically active, he had always been aware of what was going on in Germany. Only a year after Hitler came to power in 1933, Oppenheimer was contributing sizable sums to assist German Jewish physicists to escape Nazi Germany. These were men he knew and admired. Similarly, he talked often with anguish about the plight of his relatives in Germany. In the autumn of 1937, Robert’s aunt Hedwig Oppenheimer Stern (Julius’ youngest sister) and her son Alfred Stern and his family landed in New York as refugees from Nazi Germany. Robert had sponsored them legally and paid their expenses, and soon he persuaded them to settle in Berkeley. Robert’s generosity toward the Sterns was not fleeting. He always regarded them as family; decades later, when Hedwig Stern died, her son wrote Oppenheimer, “As long as she could think and feel, she was all for you.”

That autumn, Robert was introduced to another refugee from Europe, Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, a highly respected Viennese disciple of Sigmund Freud. Fleeing the Nazi contagion, Bernfeld had first gone to London, where another Freudian, Dr. Ernest Jones, advised him, “Go West, don’t settle here.” By September 1937, Bernfeld had settled in San Francisco, a city he knew had then only one practicing analyst. His wife, Suzanne, was also a psychoanalyst. Her father had been a major art gallery impresario in Berlin who had helped to introduce artists like Cézanne and Picasso to the German public. When they arrived in San Francisco, the Bernfelds sold one of the last paintings left in their once impressive art collection to pay their living expenses. An eloquent teacher and passionate idealist, Dr. Bernfeld was one of a handful of Freudian analysts who was trying to integrate psychoanalysis with Marxism. As a young man in Austria, Bernfeld had become politically active, first as a Zionist, and later as a socialist. Tall and gaunt, he wore a distinctive porkpie hat, a felt hat with a low, flat top. Oppenheimer was deeply impressed—and soon took to wearing a porkpie hat like Bernfeld’s.

Within weeks of landing in San Francisco, Dr. Bernfeld organized an ecumenical group of the city’s leading intellectuals to discuss psychoanalysis on a regular basis. In addition to Oppenheimer, Bernfeld invited Dr. Edward Tolman, Dr. Ernest Hilgard, Drs. Donald and Jean Macfarlane (friends of Frank Oppenheimer’s), Erik Erikson (a German-born psychoanalyst trained by Anna Freud), the pediatrician Dr. Ernst Wolff (who was to become Jean Tatlock’s boss at Mt. Zion Hospital’s Child Guidance Clinic), Dr. Stephen Pepper, a philosophy professor at Berkeley, and the well-known anthropologist Dr. Robert Lowie to be regular members of this interdisciplinary study group. They met in private homes, drank good wine, smoked cigarettes and talked about such psychoanalytic issues as “fear of castration” and the “psychology of war.”

Oppenheimer, of course, had painful memories of his youthful encounters with psychiatrists. But that was no doubt part of his attraction to the topic. He must have been particularly interested in Erikson’s work on the problem of “identity formation” in young adults. A prolonged adolescence, Erikson argued, accompanied by “chronic malignant disturbance,” was sometimes an indication that an individual was having trouble shedding fragments of his personality that he finds undesirable. Seeking “whole-ness,” and yet fearing a threatened loss of identity, some young adults experience such a sense of rage that they strike out at others in arbitrary acts of destruction. Oppenheimer’s behavior and problems back in 1925–26 had conformed in significant ways to this thesis. He had thrown himself into theoretical physics, carving out for himself a robust identity. But the scars remained. As the physicist and science historian Gerald Holton has observed, “Some psychological damage remained, however, not least a vulnerability that ran through his personality like a geological fault, to be revealed at the next earthquake.”

Bernfeld would sometimes talk about individual therapy cases. Like his mentor Freud, he lectured without notes, smoking one cigarette after another. “Bernfeld was one of the most eloquent speakers I’ve ever heard,” recalled another psychoanalyst, Dr. Nathan Adler. “I sat at the edge of my seat listening not only to what he said, but to the way he spoke. It was an aesthetic experience.” Oppenheimer, the only physicist in the group, was remembered as someone who was “intensely interested” in psychoanalysis. In any case, Robert’s curiosity about the psychological complemented his interest in physics. Recall Wolfgang Pauli’s complaint to Isidor Rabi in Zurich that Oppenheimer “seemed to treat physics as an avocation and psychoanalysis as a vocation.” Things metaphysical still took priority. And so during the years 1938 to 1941, he found the time to attend Bernfeld’s seminars, a study group that in 1942 gave rise to the formation of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.

Oppenheimer’s exploration of the psychological was encouraged by his intense, often mercurial, relationship with Jean Tatlock—who was, after all, training to become a psychiatrist. Though not a member of Bernfeld’s monthly group, Jean knew some of these men and later was analyzed by Dr. Bernfeld as part of her training. Moody and introspective, Tatlock shared Robert’s obsession with the unconscious. Furthermore, it made sense that Oppenheimer the political activist would choose to study psychoanalysis under the tutelage of a Marxist Freudian analyst like Dr. Bernfeld.

Some of Oppenheimer’s oldest friends found his sudden political activism distasteful—most particularly Ernest Lawrence, who could easily sympathize with the plight of his friend’s persecuted relatives, but on a more personal level thought that what was happening in Europe was not our affair. He separately told both Oppie and his brother Frank, “You’re too good a physicist to get mixed up in politics and causes.” Such things, he said, were best left to the experts. One day Lawrence walked into the Rad Lab and saw that Oppie had written on the blackboard, “Cocktail Party Benefit for Spanish Loyalists at Brode’s, everyone at Lab invited.” Seething, Lawrence stared at the message and then erased it. To Lawrence, Oppie’s politics were a nuisance.

CHAPTER NINE

“[Frank] Clipped It Out
and Sent It In”

We [Chevalier and Oppenheimer] both were and were not
[members of the Communist Party]. Any way you want to
look at it.

HAAKON CHEVALIER

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1937, Julius Oppenheimer died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven. Robert had known that his father was no longer robust, but his sudden death came as a shock. In the nearly six years since Ella’s death in 1931, Julius had developed a close and tender relationship with his sons. He visited them both frequently, and it was often the case that Robert’s friends became his father’s friends.

Julius’ fortune had diminished somewhat after eight years of depression. Even so, by the time of his death, his estate, divided equally between Robert and Frank, amounted to the still quite substantial sum of $392,602. The annual income from this inheritance gave each of the brothers an average of $10,000 to supplement his earnings. But, as if to underscore a certain ambivalence about his wealth, Robert immediately wrote out a will leaving his entire estate to the University of California, earmarked for graduate fellowships.

The Oppenheimer brothers had always been extremely close. Robert formed remarkably intense relationships with a number of people, but none was either as deep or as durable as the bond he forged with his brother. Their correspondence in the 1930s reflected an intensity of emotion unusual for siblings, and particularly so for brothers eight years apart in age. Robert’s letters often read more like a father’s than an older brother’s. At times, he wrote with what must have seemed a maddening condescension to Frank, who so obviously wished to emulate him. Frank patiently tolerated whatever his strong-willed brother said or did; only years later did he admit that Robert’s “youthful cockiness . . . stayed with my brother a little longer than it should have.”

They were alike—and yet not. No one disliked Frank Oppenheimer. He was Oppie without an edge, endowed with much of the Oppenheimer brilliance and none of the abrasiveness. “Frank himself is a sweet, lovable person,” observed the physicist Leona Marshall Libby, a friend of both brothers. She called him a “delta function,” a mathematical device used by physicists in which delta is defined as zero—except at a specified place or time, at which point it becomes infinity. When called upon, Frank always possessed an infinite reservoir of goodwill and cheer. Years later, Robert himself said of his brother, “He is a much finer person than I am.”

At one time, Robert had tried to talk Frank out of choosing physics as his profession. When Frank was only thirteen, and clearly set on following in his brother’s footsteps, Robert wrote: “I don’t think you would enjoy reading about relativity very much until you have studied a little geometry, a little mechanics, a little electrodynamics. But if you want to try, Eddington’s book is the best to start on. . . . And now a final word of advice: try to understand really, to your own satisfaction, thoroughly and honestly, the few things in which you are most interested; because it is only when you have learnt to do that, when you realize how hard and how very satisfying it is, that you will appreciate fully the more spectacular things like relativity and mechanistic biology. If you think I’m wrong please don’t hesitate to tell me so. I’m only talking from my own very small experience.”

By the time he got to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins University, Frank was determined to demonstrate that he was made of the same stuff as his brother. Like Robert, he was a polymath; he loved music, and, unlike his brother, he actually played an instrument, the flute, extremely well. At Hopkins, he regularly played in a quartet. But he was committed to physics. During his second year, Frank met Robert in New Orleans, where they attended the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. Afterwards, Robert wrote Ernest Lawrence that “we had a fine holiday together; and I think that it settled definitely Frank’s vocation for physics.” After rubbing shoulders with a good number of physicists, all of them bubbling over with enthusiasm for their work, Robert observed that “it is impossible not to conceive for them a great liking and respect, and for their work a great attraction.” On the second day of the conference, Robert took Frank to a joint session on biochemistry and psychology, and, while “it was enormously rowdy and very funny,” it also “discouraged an excessive faith in either of these sciences.”

But then, only a few months later, Robert cautioned Frank not to commit himself to physics without first exploring the alternatives. He thought Frank’s intellectual appetite might be whetted by some course work in the biological sciences. While declaring that “I know very well surely that physics has a beauty which no other science can match, a rigor and austerity and depth,” he urged Frank to take an advanced course in physiology: “Genetics certainly involves a rigorous technique, and a constructive and complicated theory. . . . By all means, and with my whole blessing, learn physics, all there is of it, so that you understand it, and can use it and contemplate it, and, if you should want, teach it; but do not plan yet to ‘do’ it: to adopt physical research as a vocation. For that decision you should know something more of the other sciences, and a good deal more of physics.”