American Prometheus (44 page)

And yet, in
Rashomon
fashion, there is yet another version of this story. On March 5, 1944, FBI agent William Harvey wrote a summary memorandum titled “Cinrad.” “In March 1944,”
¹³
Harvey reported, “General Leslie R. Groves conferred with Oppenheimer. . . . Oppenheimer finally stated that only one person had been approached by Chevalier, that one person being his brother, Frank Oppenheimer.” In this version, Chevalier is supposed to have approached Frank—not Robert—in the fall of 1941. Frank is reported to have immediately informed his brother—who promptly phoned Chevalier and “gave him hell.”

If Frank was involved, this of course would put the story in a quite different light. But the story is not only problematic, it is certainly incorrect. Why would Chevalier approach Frank, whom he hardly knew, rather than Robert, his closest friend? And it seems quite ridiculous that anyone would ask Frank for information in the autumn of 1941 about a project that didn’t get started until the summer of 1942, at the earliest. Moreover, both Chevalier and Eltenton, in simultaneous interviews with the FBI, confirmed that the Eagle Hill kitchen conversation was between Oppenheimer and Chevalier and it occurred in the winter of 1942–43. Furthermore, Harvey’s March 5 memo is the only roughly contemporaneous document that mentions Frank Oppenheimer, and after searching its files the FBI reported that “the original source of the story involving Frank Oppenheimer has not been located in Bureau files.” Nevertheless, because Harvey’s report was now part of Oppenheimer’s FBI dossier, this part of the story would acquire a robust life of its own.
¹⁴

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Suicide, Motive Unknown”

I am disgusted with everything. . . .

JEAN TATLOCK January 1944

LT. COL. BORIS PASH had spent two frustrating months in the autumn of 1943 trying to discover who had talked to Oppenheimer about passing information to the Soviet consulate. To no avail, he and his agents had repeatedly interviewed various Berkeley students and faculty members. Pash had been dogged and stubborn in his investigation— and so antagonistic toward Oppenheimer as to finally lead Groves to conclude that Pash was wasting the Army’s time and resources on an investigation that was going nowhere. This was what had finally prompted Groves, in early December 1943, to order Oppenheimer to name the contact—Chevalier. At the same time, Groves decided that Pash’s talents could be put to better use elsewhere. In November, he was made military commander of a secret mission, code-named Alsos, to determine the status of the Nazi regime’s bomb program by capturing German scientists. Pash was transferred to London, where he would spend the next six months preparing a top-secret team of scientists and soldiers to follow the Allied troops into Europe. But even after Pash’s departure, his friends at the FBI office in San Francisco continued monitoring Jean Tatlock’s phone conversations from her apartment on Telegraph Hill. Months had gone by, and they had learned nothing to confirm their suspicions that the young psychiatrist was Oppenheimer’s (or anyone’s) conduit for passing information to the Soviets. But no one at Bureau headquarters in Washington told them to stop the surveillance.

Early in 1944—just after the holiday season—Tatlock was coping with one of her black moods. When she visited her father in his Berkeley home on Monday, January 3, he found her “despondent.” Upon leaving him that day, she promised to phone him the next evening. When she failed to call on Tuesday night, John Tatlock tried phoning her, but Jean never answered. Wednesday morning he tried again, and then went to her apartment on Telegraph Hill. Arriving at about 1:00 p.m., he rang the doorbell and after getting no response, Professor Tatlock, age sixty-seven, climbed through a window.

Inside the flat, he discovered Jean’s body “lying on a pile of pillows at the end of the bathtub, with her head submerged in the partly filled tub.” For whatever reason, Professor Tatlock did not call the police. Instead, he picked his daughter up and laid her on the sofa in the living room. On the dining room table, he found an unsigned suicide note, scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope. It read in part, “I am disgusted with everything. . . . To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t. . . . I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.” From there the words ran into a jagged, illegible line.

Stunned, Tatlock began rummaging about the apartment. Eventually, he found a stack of Jean’s private correspondence and some photographs. Whatever he read in this correspondence inspired him to light a fire in the fireplace. With his dead daughter stretched out on the sofa beside him, he methodically burned her correspondence and a number of photographs. Hours passed. The first phone call he made was to a funeral parlor. Someone at the funeral parlor finally called the police. When they arrived at 5:30 p.m., accompanied by the city’s deputy coroner, papers were still smoldering in the fireplace. Tatlock told the police that the letters and photos had belonged to his daughter. Four and a half hours had passed since he had discovered her body.

Professor Tatlock’s behavior was, to say the least, unusual. But relatives who stumble upon the suicide of a loved one often behave oddly. That he methodically searched the apartment, however, suggests that he may have known what he was looking for. Clearly, what he saw in Jean’s papers motivated him to destroy them. It wasn’t politics: Tatlock sympathized with many of his daughter’s political causes. His motive can only have been something more personal.

The coroner’s report stated that death had occurred at least twelve hours earlier. Jean had died sometime during the evening of Tuesday, January 4, 1944. Her stomach contained “considerable recently ingested, semi-solid food”—and an undetermined quantity of drugs. One bottle labeled “Abbott’s Nembutal C” was found in the apartment. It still contained two tablets of the sleeping pills. There was also an envelope marked “Codeine
¹
⁄2 gr” that contained only traces of white powder. Police also found a tin box labeled “Upjohn Racephedrine Hydrochloride, ⅜ grain.”The tin still contained eleven capsules. The coroner’s toxicological department conducted an analysis of her stomach and found “barbituric acid derivative, a derivative of salicylic acid and a faint trace of chloral hydrate (uncorroborated).” The actual cause of death was “acute edema of the lungs with pulmonary congestion.” Jean had drowned in her bathtub.

At a formal inquest in February 1944, a jury determined Jean Tatlock’s death to be “Suicide, motive unknown.” The newspapers reported that a $732.50 bill from her analyst, Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, was found in the apartment, evidence that she had “taken her own troubles to a psychologist.” Actually, as a psychiatrist in training, Jean was required to undergo analysis and pay for it herself. If recurring episodes of manic depression drove her to suicide, it was tragic. By all accounts, her friends thought she had reached a new plateau in her life. Her achievements were considerable. Her colleagues at Mount Zion Hospital—the foremost center in Northern California for training analytic psychiatrists—thought her an “outstanding success” and were shocked that she had taken her own life.

When Jean’s childhood friend Priscilla Robertson learned of her death, she wrote her a posthumous letter, trying to understand what had happened. Robertson did not think a “personal heartbreak” would have pushed Jean to suicide: “For you were never starved for affection—your insatiable hunger was for creativity. And you longed to find perfection in yourself, not out of pride but in order to have a good instrument to serve the world. When you found that your medical training, completed, did not give you all the power for good that you had hoped for, when you found yourself entangled in the small routine of hospital conventions and in the huge messes which the war made in the lives of your patients, far beyond any doctor’s power to patch up—then you turned, in your eleventh hour, again to psychoanalysis.” Robertson speculated that perhaps it was this experience, “which always brings introspective despair in mid-course,” that had stirred up agonies “too deep to be assuaged.”

Robertson and many other friends were unaware that Tatlock was struggling to cope with issues surrounding her sexual orientation. Jackie Oppenheimer later reported Jean as telling her that her psychoanalysis had revealed latent homosexual tendencies. At the time, Freudian analysts regarded homosexuality as a pathological condition to be overcome.

Some time after Jean’s death, one of her friends, Edith Arnstein Jenkins, went for a walk with Mason Roberson, an editor of
People’s World.
Roberson had known Jean well and he said that Jean had confided to him that she was a lesbian; she told Roberson that in an effort to overcome her attraction to women she “had slept with every ‘bull’ she could find.” This prompted Jenkins to recall one occasion when she had entered the Shasta Road house on a weekend morning and seen Mary Ellen Washburn and Jean Tatlock “sitting up and smoking over the newspaper in Mary Ellen’s double bed.” In remarks suggesting her perception of a lesbian relationship, Jenkins later wrote in her memoir that “Jean seemed to need Mary Ellen,” and she quoted Washburn as saying, “When I first met Jean, I was put off by her [large] breasts and her thick ankles.”

Mary Ellen Washburn had a particular reason to be devastated when she heard the news of Tatlock’s death; she confided to a friend that Jean had called her the night before she died and had asked her to come over. Jean had said she was “very depressed.” Unable to come that night, Mary Ellen was understandably filled with remorse and guilt afterwards.

The taking of one’s own life invariably becomes an imponderable, a mystery to the living. For Oppenheimer, Jean Tatlock’s suicide was a profound loss. He had invested much of himself in this young woman. He had wanted to marry her, and even after his marriage to Kitty, he had remained a loyal friend to her in her need—and an occasional lover. He had spent many hours walking and talking her out of her depressions. And now she was gone. He had failed.

The day after the suicide was discovered, Washburn cabled the Serbers in Los Alamos. When Robert Serber went to tell Oppenheimer the sad news, he could see that Oppie had already heard. “He was deeply grieved,” Serber recalled. Oppenheimer then left the house and went for one of his long, lonely walks high into the pines surrounding Los Alamos. Given what he knew about Jean’s psychological state over the years, Oppenheimer must have felt a basketful of painfully conflicting emotions. Together with regret, anger, frustration and deep sadness, he surely also felt a sense of remorse and even guilt. For if Jean had become a “paralyzed soul,” his looming presence in her life must somehow have contributed to this paralysis.

For reasons of love and compassion, he had become a key member of Jean’s psychological support structure—and then he had vanished, mysteriously. He had tried to maintain the connection, but after June 1943 it was made very clear to him that he could not continue his relationship with Jean without jeopardizing his work in Los Alamos. He was trapped by circumstances. He had obligations to a wife he loved and a child. He had responsibilities to his colleagues in Los Alamos. From this perspective, he had acted reasonably. But in Jean’s eyes, it may have seemed as if ambition had trumped love. In this sense, Jean Tatlock might be considered the first casualty of Oppenheimer’s directorship of Los Alamos.

Tatlock’s suicide was front-page news in San Francisco newspapers. That morning, the FBI office in San Francisco cabled J. Edgar Hoover a summary of what had been reported in the papers. The cable concluded: “No direct action will be taken by this office due possible unfavorable publicity. Direct inquiries will be made discreetly in view of elapse of time and Bureau will be advised.”

In the years since, a number of historians and journalists have speculated about Tatlock’s suicide. According to the coroner, Tatlock had eaten a full meal shortly before her death. If it was her intention to drug and then drown herself, as a doctor she had to have known that undigested food slows the metabolizing of drugs into the system. The autopsy report contains no evidence that the barbiturates had reached her liver or other vital organs. Neither does the report indicate whether she had taken a sufficiently large dose of barbiturates to cause death. To the contrary, as previously noted, the autopsy determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation by drowning. These curious circumstances are suspicious enough—but the disturbing information contained in the autopsy report is the assertion that the coroner found “a faint trace of chloral hydrate” in her system. If administered with alcohol, chloral hydrate is the active ingredient of what was then commonly called a “Mickey Finn”—knockout drops. In short, several investigators have speculated, Jean may have been “slipped a Mickey,” and then forcibly drowned in her bathtub.

The coroner’s report indicated that no alcohol was found in her blood. (The coroner, however, did find some pancreatic damage, indicating that Tatlock had been a heavy drinker.) Medical doctors who have studied suicides—and read the Tatlock autopsy report—say that it is possible she drowned herself. In this scenario, Tatlock could have eaten a last meal with some barbiturates to make herself sleepy and then self-administered chloral hydrate to knock herself out while kneeling over the bathtub. If the dose of chloral hydrate was large enough, Tatlock could have plunged her head into the bathtub water and never revived. She then would have died from asphyxiation. Tatlock’s “psychological autopsy” fits the profile of a high-functioning individual suffering from “retarded depression.” As a psychiatrist working in a hospital, Jean had easy access to potent sedatives, including chloral hydrate. On the other hand, said one doctor shown the Tatlock records, “If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it.”