American Prometheus (31 page)

WHEN A STUDENT WAS STUMPED and just couldn’t finish a paper, it was not unheard of for Oppie to just do it himself. One night in 1939, he invited Joe Weinberg and Hartland Snyder up to his home on Shasta Road. The two young graduate students had collaborated on a paper but felt unable to write a satisfactory conclusion. “He gave us the usual obligatory tumbler of whiskey,” Weinberg recalled, “and he put on some music to keep me busy. Hartland drifted around looking at books while Oppie sat down at the typewriter. After a half-hour he had hammered out the last paragraph. A beautiful paragraph.” The paper, “Stationary States of Scalar and Vector Fields,” was published in
Physical Review
in 1940.

Oppenheimer’s lectures were invariably accompanied by a slew of formulas written on the blackboard. But like most theoreticians, he had no respect for mere formulas. Weinberg, whom Oppenheimer had come to regard as one of his brightest students, observed that mathematical formulas were like temporary hand-holds for a rock-climber. Each hand-hold more or less dictates the position of the next hand-hold. “A record of that,” Weinberg said, “is a record of a particular climb. It gives you very little of the shape of the rock.” For Weinberg and others, “being in a course with Oppie was like experiencing lightning flashes five or ten times in an hour, so brief that you might’ve missed them. If you were scrounging formulas off a blackboard, you might very well not have known they were there at all. Very often these flashes were basic philosophical insights that placed physics in a human context.”

Oppenheimer thought that no one could be expected to learn quantum mechanics from books alone; the verbal wrestling inherent in the process of explanation is what opens the door to understanding. He never gave the same lecture twice. “He was very keenly aware,” Weinberg recalled, “of the people in his class.” He could look into the faces of his audience and suddenly decide to change his entire approach because he had sensed what their particular difficulties were with the subject at hand. Once he gave an entire lecture on a problem he knew would pique the interest of just one student. Afterwards, that student rushed up to him and said he wanted permission to tackle the problem. Oppenheimer replied, “Good, that’s why I gave the seminar.”

Oppenheimer gave no final exams, but he handed out plenty of homework assignments. During each class hour he presented a non-Socratic lecture, “delivered at high speed,” recalled Ed Geurjoy, a graduate student from 1938 to 1942. Students felt free to interrupt Oppie with a question. “He generally would answer patiently,” Geurjoy said, “unless the question was manifestly stupid, in which event his response was likely to be quite caustic.”

Oppenheimer was brusque with some students, but he treated those who were vulnerable with a gentle hand. One day when Weinberg was in Oppenheimer’s office, he began rummaging through papers stacked on the trestle table in the center of the room. Picking out one paper, he began reading the first paragraph, oblivious to Oppie’s irritated look. “This is an excellent proposal,” Weinberg exclaimed, “I’d sure as hell like to work on it.” To his astonishment, Oppenheimer replied curtly, “Put that down; put it back where you found it.” When Weinberg asked what he had done wrong, Oppenheimer said, “That was not for you to find.”

A few weeks later, Weinberg heard that another student who was struggling to find a thesis topic had begun work on the proposal he had read that day. “[The student] was a very genial, decent man,” Weinberg recalled. “But, unlike a few of us who enjoyed the kind of challenge that Oppie threw out like sparks, he was often baffled and nonplussed and ill at ease. Nobody had the courage to tell him, ‘Look, you’re out of your depth.’ ” Weinberg now realized that Oppie had planted this thesis problem for this very student. It was a distinctly easy problem, “But it was perfect for him,” Weinberg said, “and it got him his Ph.D. It would have been difficult for him to get it with Oppie if Oppie had treated him the way he treated me or Phil Morrison or Sid Dancoff.” Instead, Weinberg insisted years later, Oppie nurtured this student as a father would have treated a baby learning to walk. “He waited for him to discover that proposal accidentally, on his own terms, to pick it up and to express his interest, to find his way to it. . . . He needed special treatment, and by God, Oppie was going to give it to him. It showed a great deal of love, sympathy and human understanding.” The student in question, Weinberg reported, went on to do distinguished work as an applied physicist.

Weinberg quickly became a devoted member of Oppenheimer’s inner circle. “He knew that I adored him,” Weinberg said, “as we all did.” Philip Morrison, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm and Max Friedman were some of the other graduate students who regarded Oppenheimer as their mentor and role model during these years. These were unconventional young men who, in the words of Morrison, prided themselves on being “self-conscious and daring intellectuals.” All of them were studying theoretical physics. And all of them were active in one or another Popular Front cause. Some, like Philip Morrison and David Bohm, have acknowledged that they joined the Communist Party. Others were merely on the fringe. Joe Weinberg was probably in the Party for at least a brief time.

Morrison, born in 1915 in Pittsburgh, grew up not far from Kitty Oppenheimer’s childhood home. After a public school education, he received a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1936. That autumn, he went to Berkeley to study theoretical physics under Oppenheimer. A victim of childhood polio, he arrived on campus wearing a brace on one leg. As a child convalescing from the disease, he had spent a great deal of time in bed, and learned to speed-read at five pages a minute. As a graduate student, Morrison impressed everyone with his wide range of knowledge about almost anything, from military history to physics. In 1936, he joined the Communist Party. But though he didn’t hide his left-wing political views, neither did he advertise his Party membership. His office-mate at Berkeley in the late 1930s, Dale Corson, was unaware that Morrison was a CP member.

“We were all close to communism at the time,” Bohm recalled. Actually, until 1940–41, Bohm didn’t have much sympathy for the Communist Party. But then, with the collapse of France, it seemed to him that no one but the communists had the will to resist the Nazis. Indeed, many Europeans appeared to prefer the Nazis to the Russians. “And I felt,” Bohm said, “that there was such a trend in America too. I thought the Nazis were a total threat to civilization. . . . It seemed that the Russians were the only ones that were really fighting them. Then I began to listen to what they said more sympathetically.”

Late in the autumn of 1942, the newspapers were filled with accounts of the battle for Stalingrad; for a time that fall, it seemed as if the entire outcome of the war depended on the sacrifices being made by the Russian people. Weinberg later said that he and his friends suffered every day along with the Russian people. “No one can feel the way we felt,” he recalled. “Even when we saw the sham of what was going on in the Soviet Union, of the show trials, we turned our eyes away from them.”

In November 1942, just as the Russians opened up an offensive to push the Nazis back from the outskirts of Stalingrad, Bohm began attending regular meetings at a Berkeley chapter of the Communist Party. Typically, fifteen people might show up. After a while, Bohm found the meetings “interminable,” and decided that the group’s various plans to “stir up things on the campus” didn’t amount to much. “I had the feeling that they were really rather ineffective.” Gradually, Bohm just stopped attending. But he remained a passionate and enthusiastic intellectual Marxist, reading Marxist texts together with his closest friends at the time, Weinberg, Lomanitz and Bernard Peters.

Phil Morrison recalled that his Party unit meetings were attended by “many people who were not communist. It would be very hard to say which members were communists.” The meetings were often like college bull sessions. They discussed, Morrison recalled, “everything under the sun.” As a cash-starved graduate student, Morrison was assessed Party dues of a mere twenty-five cents a month. Morrison remained a Party member through the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but, like many of his American comrades, he drifted out of the Party soon after Pearl Harbor. By then he was teaching at the University of Illinois, and his small Party unit simply decided that their priority should be to assist the war effort, and that left no time for “discussing politics.”

David Hawkins came to Berkeley in 1936 to study philosophy. Almost immediately, he fell in with a number of Oppenheimer’s students, including Phil Morrison, David Bohm and Joe Weinberg. Hawkins encountered Oppenheimer one day at a meeting of the Teachers’ Union; they were discussing the plight of underpaid teaching assistants and Hawkins recalled being struck by Oppenheimer’s eloquence and sympathetic demeanor: “He was very persuasive, very cogent, elegant in language and able to listen to what other people said and incorporate it in what he would say. I had the impression that he was a good politician in the sense that if several people spoke he could summarize what they said and they would discover that they had agreed with each other as a result of his summary. A great talent.”

Hawkins had met Frank Oppenheimer at Stanford and, like Frank, he joined the Communist Party in late 1937. Like the Oppenheimer brothers and many other academics, he was incensed by the antilabor vigilantism sweeping California’s farm factories. Even so, his political activities were very much part-time; he didn’t meet a full-time Party functionary like Steve Nelson until sometime in 1940. Like many in the academy, Hawkins felt it necessary to hide his affiliation with the Party. “We were pretty secretive,” he said, “we would have lost our jobs. You could be on the left, you could engage in some of these activities, but you couldn’t say, ‘I’m a Communist Party member.’ ” Hawkins didn’t think about revolution either. “The centralization of a technological society,” he later said, “made it very hard to think about barricades in the streets . . . we were self-consciously a left-wing component of the New Deal. We were pulling the New Deal to the left. That was our mission in life.” It was an accurate description of Robert Oppenheimer’s political objectives as well as his own.

By 1941, Hawkins was active in local campus politics as a junior faculty member in the philosophy department. He participated in the same study groups attended by Weinberg, Morrison and others in private homes around Berkeley. “We were all very much interested in historical materialism and the theory of history,” Hawkins recalled. “I was very much impressed with Phil, and he and I became close friends.”

Some of these meetings occurred in Oppenheimer’s home. When asked years later whether he thought Oppenheimer had been a member of the Party, Hawkins replied, “Not that I know of. But you know, again, I would say it wouldn’t have mattered very much. In a sense, it’s not an important question. He was clearly identified with many of these left-wing activities.”

MARTIN D. KAMEN was another of Oppie’s acolytes. A chemist by training, he had written his doctoral dissertation in Chicago on a problem in nuclear physics. In just a few years, he and another chemist, Sam Ruben, would use Lawrence’s cyclotron to discover the radioactive isotope carbon-14. In early 1937, he followed a girlfriend to Berkeley, where Ernest Lawrence hired him for $1,000 a year to work in the Rad Lab. “It was like Mecca,” Kamen recalled of Berkeley. Oppenheimer quickly learned that Kamen was a serious musician—he played the violin with Frank Oppenheimer—and enjoyed talking about literature and music. “I think he took a shine to me,” Kamen said, “because I could talk to him about things other than physics.” They spent a lot of time together from 1937 until the war broke out.

Like everyone else who entered Oppenheimer’s circle, Kamen admired the charismatic physicist. “Everyone sort of regarded him very affectionately as being sort of nuts,” Kamen said. “He was very brilliant, but somehow superficial. He had the approach of a dilettante.” At times, Kamen thought Oppie’s eccentricities were calculated performances. Kamen recalled going with him to a New Year’s Eve party at Estelle Caen’s home. On the drive over, Oppie said he knew Estelle lived on a particular street, but he had forgotten the number of the house. He remembered only that it was a multiple of seven. “So we drove up and down the street,” Kamen recalled, “and finally found Number 3528, a multiple of seven, all right. Thinking about it now, I wonder sometimes whether he wasn’t pulling everybody’s leg a little bit. . . . He had this overwhelming temptation just to snow you.”

Kamen was no left-wing activist, and he certainly was never a communist. But he joined Oppenheimer on the Berkeley cocktail circuit, attending various fundraising affairs for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and Russian War Relief. Oppenheimer also involved him in an ill-fated attempt to organize a union at the Radiation Laboratory. It all began with a labor union election fight inside the Shell Development Company’s plant in nearby Emeryville. Shell had a large number of white-collar workers, engineers and chemists who had Ph.D.s, many from Berkeley. A Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)–sponsored union, the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT-CIO), launched an organizing drive in the plant. In response, Shell management was encouraging its employees to join a company union. At one point, a Shell chemist named David Adelson appealed to Oppenheimer to lend his prestige to the FAECT organizing drive. Adelson belonged to a professional unit of the Alameda County (California) Communist Party, and he thought Oppenheimer would be sympathetic. He was right. One evening, Oppenheimer gave a union-sponsored talk at the Berkeley home of one of his former graduate students, Herve Voge, who was then employed by Shell. More than fifteen people attended and listened respectfully as Oppenheimer talked about the likelihood of America getting into the war. “When he spoke,” recalled Voge, “everyone listened.”

In the autumn of 1941, Oppenheimer agreed to hold an organizing meeting in his Eagle Hill home, and, among others, he invited Martin Kamen to attend. “I was not happy about that,” recalled Kamen, “but I said, ‘Yes, I’ll come.’ ” Kamen was worried about the notion of recruiting employees of the Radiation Lab—who were now essentially working for the U.S. Army and had signed security pledges—into a controversial union like FAECT. But he came to the meeting and listened to Oppenheimer’s union pitch. Fifteen people were present, including Oppenheimer’s psychologist friend Ernest Hilgard, Joel Hildebrand of the Berkeley chemistry department, and a young British chemical engineer, George C. Eltenton, employed by the Shell Development Company. “We all sat in a circle in Oppenheimer’s living room,” Kamen recalled. “Everybody said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, it’s marvelous.’ ” When it came Kamen’s turn to speak, he said, “Wait. Has anybody told [Ernest] Lawrence about this? We’re working in the Radiation Lab and we have no independence in this matter. We have to get the permission of Lawrence on this.”