American Prometheus (24 page)

Frank ignored this bit of sibling counsel. After earning his undergraduate degree in physics in only three years, he spent 1933–35 studying at Cavendish Laboratory in England under some of the same physicists who had taught Robert, and he met such friends of his brother’s as Paul Dirac and Max Born. By then, however, Robert was more than reconciled to his brother’s chosen course: “You know how happy I was,” he wrote Frank in 1933, “with your decision to go to Cambridge. . . .” But now he longed to see his brother. “There has seldom been a time,” he wrote Frank in early 1934, “when I have missed you so as in these last days. . . . I take it that Cambridge has been right for you, and that physics has gotten now very much under your skin, physics and the obvious excellences of the life it brings. I take it that you have been working very hard, getting your hand in the laboratory, and learning mathematics at close hand, and finding in this, and in the natural austerity of life in Cambridge, at last an adequate field for your unremitting need of discipline and order.” If at times Robert sounded patronizing in his role as elder brother, his letters to Frank make it clear that he was as dependent on the closeness of this brotherly bond as was Frank.

Unlike Robert, Frank excelled at experimental physics; he liked getting his hands dirty in the laboratory. He loved tinkering with machines and once built his brother a custom phonograph. As Robert observed, Frank had a way of “reducing a specific and rather complex situation to its central irreducible
Fragestellung
[formulation of a question].” After studying two years in England and several months in Italy—where he observed and acquired a loathing for Mussolini’s fascism—Frank applied to several universities to complete his Ph.D. in experimental physics. He was conflicted about whether to go to Caltech, but Robert “did something,” and suddenly Caltech offered him a tuition scholarship based on merit, and his decision was made.

In the laboratory he worked under Robert’s old friend Charlie Lauritsen, experimenting with a beta-ray spectograph. Whereas Robert had taken only two years to complete his doctorate, Frank spent a leisurely four earning his. In part, this was because experimental work was often simply more time-consuming than theoretical physics. But it was also Frank’s choice, by temperament and inclination, to fill his life with more than physics. He loved music and was accomplished enough as a flutist that his brother and many friends thought he could have played professionally. Drawing on his mother’s artistic sensibilities, he loved painting and read a great deal of poetry. In contrast to Robert’s assiduously correct European manners, friends thought Frank rather sloppy in dress and “bohemian” in manner.

During his first year at Caltech, Frank met Jacquenette “Jackie” Quann, a twenty-four-year-old French-Canadian woman who was studying economics at Berkeley. They met in Berkeley in the spring of 1936, when Robert took his brother to visit a friend, Wenonah Nedelsky, and Jackie happened to be there baby-sitting. To pay the bills, she worked as a waitress. Plain and outspoken, she possessed a down-to-earth demeanor that rebuffed pretentiousness. “Jackie prided herself on being working-class,” said Bob Serber, “and she had no use for intellectuals.” Her ambition was to be a social worker. She wore her hair in a simple page-boy cut and never bothered with lipstick or other makeup. She was not the kind of woman Robert Oppenheimer would have chosen for his brother. But later that spring, Robert, Frank, Jackie and Wenonah (recently separated from her husband, Leo) went out together two or three times. In June, Frank invited Jackie to come up to Perro Caliente that summer. They arrived in a brand-new $750 Ford pickup truck, a gift from Robert.

When, later that summer, Frank informed Robert that he intended to marry Jackie, Robert tried to talk him out of it. Jackie and Robert did not get along. She recalled that “he was always saying things like, ‘Of course, you’re much older than Frank’—I’m eight months older, actually—and saying that Frank wasn’t ready for it.”

This time, however, Frank ignored his brother’s advice, and married Jackie on September 15, 1936. “It was an act of emancipation and rebellion on his part,” wrote Robert, “against his dependence on me.” Robert continued to disparage Jackie by referring to her as “the waitress my brother has married.” On the other hand, he continued to “arrange things” for his brother and his new wife. “The three of us saw each other a great deal in Pasadena, Berkeley and Perro Caliente,” recalled Frank, “and between my brother and me there was the continuing sharing of ideas, enterprises and friends.”

Jackie had always been a political firebrand. “She could drive you crazy with her political rants,” recalled a relative. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, she had joined the Young Communist League, and later she worked for a year in Los Angeles for the Communist Party newspaper. Frank was quite comfortable with her politics. “I had been close to sort of slightly left-wing things starting in high school,” he recalled. “I remember once I went with some friends to hear a concert at Carnegie Hall that didn’t have a conductor. It was a kind of ‘down with the bosses’ movement.”

Like Robert, Frank was a product of the Ethical Culture School, where he had learned to debate moral and ethical issues. At sixteen, he had worked, together with some of his school friends, on Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign. At Johns Hopkins, many of his peers were to the left of the Democratic Party. But at the time, Frank disliked long-winded political discussions. “I used to tell people,” he recalled, “unless I meant to do something about it, I didn’t want to talk about it.” He recalled being “dismayed” in 1935 by what he heard at a Communist Party meeting in Cambridge, England. “It sounded to me sort of empty,” Frank recalled. During a visit to Germany, however, he quickly acquired an appreciation of the fascist menace: “The whole society seemed corrupt.” His father’s relatives had told him “some of the terrible things” that were happening in Hitler’s Germany, and he was inclined to support any group determined to “do something about it.”

Upon his return to California that autumn, he was deeply moved by the deplorable condition of local farm laborers and Negroes. The Depression was taking a terrible toll on millions of people. Another graduate student in physics at Caltech, William “Willie” Fowler, used to say that the reason he was a physicist was that he didn’t want to have to worry about people—and now he was upset because he was being forced by the Depression to do just that. Frank felt the same way. He began reading up on labor history and eventually read a great deal of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

One day early in 1937, Jackie and Frank saw a membership coupon in the local Communist newspaper,
People’s World.
“I clipped it out and sent it in,” recalled Frank. “We were really quite overt about it—completely overt about it.” But it was some months before anybody from the Party responded. Like many professionals, Frank was asked to join the Party under an alias, and he chose the name Frank Folsom. “When I joined the Communist Party,” he later testified, “for some reason which I did not understand at the time and have never understood since, they requested that my right name and another name be written down. This seemed to me ludicrous. I never used any name but my own, and at the same time, because of the fact that it seemed so ludicrous, I wrote down the name of a California jail [Folsom].” In 1937 his Communist Party “book number” was 56385. One day he absent-mindedly left his green-colored Party card in his shirt pocket when sending it to the laundry. The shirt came back with the Party card neatly preserved in an envelope.

By 1935, it was not at all unusual for Americans who were concerned with economic justice—including many New Deal liberals—to identify with the Communist movement. Many laborers, as well as writers, journalists and teachers, supported the most radical features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. And even if most intellectuals didn’t actually join the Communist Party, their hearts lay with a populist movement that promised a just world steeped in a culture of egalitarianism.

Frank’s attachment to communism had deep American roots. As he later explained: “The intellectuals who were drawn toward the left by the horror, the injustices and fears of the thirties did, in varying degrees, identify with the history of protest in America. . . . John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and even with movements such as the abolitionists, the early AFL and the IWW.”

Initially, the Party assigned Frank and Jackie to what was called a “street unit” in Pasadena; most of their comrades were local neighborhood residents, and quite a few were poor, unemployed Negroes. Their Party cell membership fluctuated between ten and as many as thirty people. They had regular, open meetings attended by both communists and members of various organizations connected with the New Deal, such as the Workers’ Alliance, an organization of unemployed laborers. There was a lot of talk and not much action, which frustrated Frank. “We tried to integrate the city swimming pool,” he said. “They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” But despite their efforts, the pool remained segregated.

A little later, Frank agreed to try to organize a Party unit at Caltech. Jackie remained with the street unit for a while, but she too eventually joined the Caltech group. She and Frank recruited about ten members, including fellow graduate students Frank K. Malina, Sidney Weinbaum and Hsue-Shen Tsien. Unlike the Pasadena street unit, this Caltech group “was essentially a secret group.” Frank was the only member who remained open about his political affiliation. Most of the others, he explained, “were scared of losing their jobs.”

Frank understood that his association with the Party offended some people. “I remember a friend of my father’s, an old man, saying he wouldn’t send his son to a college at which I was teaching.” The Stanford physicist Felix Bloch once tried to persuade him to quit the party, but Frank wouldn’t hear of it. Most of his friends, however, cared little one way or the other. Party membership was just one aspect of his life. By then, Frank was devoted to his studies in beta-ray spectroscopy at Caltech. Like his brother, he stood on the edge of a promising career. But his politics—if not necessarily his Party membership—were both an open book and an extracurricular activity. One day Ernest Lawrence ran into Frank, whom he liked very much, and asked him why he wasted so much time with “causes.” It baffled Lawrence, who saw himself as a man of science above politics, even though he spent much of his own time ingratiating himself with the businessmen and financiers on the Board of Regents who directed the policies of the University of California. In his own way, Lawrence was as much of a political animal as Frank; he just owed his allegiance to different “causes.”

Frank and Jackie opened their home to regular Tuesday evening CP meetings. According to one “reliable confidential” FBI informant, Frank continued to host these meetings until about June 1941. Robert attended at least once—which he later claimed was the only time he participated in a “recognizable” Communist Party meeting. The topic was the ongoing concern of racial segregation at Pasadena’s municipal swimming pool. Robert later testified that the meeting “made a rather pathetic impression on me.”

Like his brother, Frank was active in the East Bay Teachers’ Union, the Consumer’s Union and the cause of migratory farm workers in California. One evening he gave a flute recital in Pasadena, with Ruth Tolman on the piano, in a local auditorium; proceeds from the event went to the Spanish Republic. “We spent a lot of time at meetings, political meetings,” Frank later said. “There were many issues.” “He frequently spoke,” a Stanford colleague told the FBI, “of instances of economic oppression which he seemed to resent.” Another informant claimed that Frank “continually showed a great admiration for the Soviet Union in its internal and external policies.” On occasion, Frank could be strident. He assailed one colleague—who reported the conversation to the FBI later—as a “hopeless Bourgeois not in sympathy with the Proletariat.”

Robert later made light of his brother’s communist associations. Although a Party member, Frank did a lot of other things: “He was passionately fond of music. He had many wholly non-Communist friends. . . . He spent his summers at the ranch. He couldn’t have been,” Robert summed up, “a very hard working Communist during those years.”

Soon after Frank joined the Party, he made a point of driving up to Berkeley, where he spent the night with his brother and told him the news. “I was quite upset about it,” Robert testified in 1954, without explaining just why he was unhappy over Frank’s taking this step. Party membership, to be sure, was not without its risks. But in 1937 there was little stigma attached to it among Berkeley liberals. “It wasn’t regarded,” Robert testified, “perhaps foolishly, as a great state crime to be a member of the Communist Party or as a matter of dishonor or shame.” Still, it was clear that the University of California administration was hostile to anyone affiliated with the CP, and Frank was in the process of trying to build an academic career. And, unlike Robert, Frank didn’t have tenure. If Robert was upset with Frank’s decision, perhaps he thought his younger brother was being unwisely head-strong in making such a commitment, or was too much under the influence of his radical wife. Despite Robert’s own political awakening, he felt no compulsion to join the Communist Party as a matter of principle. Frank, on the other hand, evidently felt an emotional need to make a formal commitment. The brothers may have shared common political instincts, but Frank was proving himself to be far more impetuous. He still very much idolized Robert, but with his marriage, and his politics, he was trying to stake out his own persona and step out of Robert’s shadow.

In 1943 a colleague of Frank’s during his two years at Stanford University told an FBI agent that “in his opinion Frank Oppenheimer had followed the lead and dictates of his brother, J. Robert Oppenheimer, on all of his political attitudes and affiliations.” This anonymous source had it mostly wrong—Frank had joined the Party independently, against his brother’s advice. The informant had one thing right, however: he assured the FBI that he believed both Oppenheimers were “basically loyal to this country. . . .” In the eyes of their friends (and of the FBI), the Oppenheimer brothers were extraordinarily close. What Frank did would always reflect on Robert. And, try as he might to arrange things for his brother, Robert would never quite be able to protect Frank from the glare of his own fame.