American Prometheus (45 page)
Some investigators, as well as Jean’s brother, Dr. Hugh Tatlock, have continued to question the bizarre nature of Jean’s death. In 1975 they became increasingly suspicious of the conclusion that she had committed suicide after the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee hearings on CIA assassination plots were made public. One of the star witnesses was none other than the irrepressible Boris Pash, who had not only directed the wiretapping of Jean’s phone but had also proposed to interrogate Weinberg, Lomanitz, Bohm and Friedman “in the Russian manner” and then dispose of their bodies at sea.
Pash served from 1949 through 1952 as the CIA’s Chief of Program Branch 7 (PB/7), a special operations unit within the Office of Policy Coordination, the original CIA clandestine service. Pash’s boss, the Director of Operations Planning for OPC, told the Senate investigators that Colonel Pash’s Program Branch 7 unit was responsible for assassinations and kidnapping as well as other “special operations.” Pash denied that he had been delegated responsibility for assassinations, but acknowledged that it was “understandable” that others in the CIA “could have had the impression that my unit would undertake such planning.” Former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, Jr., told the
New York Times
on December 26, 1975, that in the mid-1950s he had been informed by his superiors that Boris T. Pash was in charge of a special operations unit responsible for the “assassination of suspected double agents and similar low-ranking officials. . . .”
Despite the CIA’s claim that it had no records dealing with assassinations, the Senate Committee staff investigation concluded that Pash’s unit was indeed assigned “responsibility for assassinations and kidnappings.” It was documented, for example, that while working in the CIA’s Technical Services Division in the early 1960s, Pash was involved in the attempt to design poisoned cigars destined for Fidel Castro.
Clearly, Col. Boris Pash, a veteran anti-Bolshevik turned counterintelligence officer, had all the credentials requisite for an assassin in a Cold War spy novel. But despite his colorful résumé, no one has produced evidence linking him to Tatlock’s death. Indeed, by January 1944, Pash had been transferred to London. Jean’s unsigned suicide note suggests that she died by her own hand—a “paralyzed soul”—and this is certainly what Oppenheimer always believed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Would You Like to Adopt Her?”
Here at Los Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of
an ideal republic.
JAMES TUCK
LOS ALAMOS WAS ALWAYS AN ANOMALY. Hardly anyone was over fifty, and the average age was a mere twenty-five. “We had no invalids, no in-laws, no unemployed, no idle rich and no poor,” wrote Bernice Brode in a memoir. Everyone’s driver’s license had numbers and no name; their address was simply P.O. Box 1663. Surrounded by barbed wire, on the inside Los Alamos was transforming itself into a self-contained community of scientists, sponsored and protected by the U.S. Army. Ruth Marshak recalled arriving at Los Alamos and feeling “as if we shut a great door behind us. The world I had known of friends and family would no longer be real to me.”
That first winter of 1943–44, the snows came early and stayed late. “Only the oldest men in the Pueblo,” wrote a longtime resident, “remember so much snow on the ground for so many weeks.” On some mornings the temperature fell to well below zero, draping the valley below in a thick fog. But the harshness of the winter served only to enhance the natural beauty of the mesa, and to connect the transplanted urbanites to this strange new mystical landscape. Some Los Alamos residents skied until May. When the snows finally melted, the drenched highlands blossomed with lavender mariposas and other wildflowers. Almost every day in the spring and summer, dramatic thunderstorms rolled in over the mountains for an hour or two in the late afternoon, cooling the terrain. Flocks of bluebirds, juncos and towhees perched in the spring-green cottonwoods around Los Alamos. “We learned to watch the snow on the Sangres, and to look for deer in Water Canyon,” Phil Morrison later wrote, with a lyricism that reflected the emotional attachment to the land that seized many residents. “We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture; there were our neighbors, the people of the pueblos, and there were the caves in Otowi canyon to remind us that other men had sought water in the dry land.”
LOS ALAMOS was an army camp—but it also had many of the characteristics of a mountain resort. Just before arriving, Robert Wilson had finished reading Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain,
and sometimes he now felt as if he had been transported to that magical dominion. It was a “golden time,” said the English physicist James Tuck: “Here at Los Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic.” It was an “island in the sky,” or, as some new arrivals dubbed it, “Shangri-La.”
Within a very few months, Los Alamos’ residents forged a sense of community—and many of the wives credited Oppenheimer. Early on, in a nod to participatory democracy, he appointed a Town Council; later it became an elected body and, though it had no formal power, it met regularly and helped Oppie keep in touch with the community’s needs. Here the mundane complaints of life—the quality of PX food, housing conditions and parking tickets—could be vented. By the end of 1943, Los Alamos had a low-power radio station that broadcast news, community announcements and music, the last drawn in part from Oppenheimer’s large personal collection of classical records. In small ways, he made it known that he understood and appreciated the sacrifices everyone was making. Despite the lack of privacy, the spartan conditions and the recurring shortages in water, milk and even electricity, he infected people with his own special sense of jocular élan. “Everyone in your house is quite mad,” Oppie told Bernice Brode one day. “You should get on fine together.” (The Brodes lived in an apartment above Cyril and Alice Kimball Smith and Edward and Mici Teller.) When the local theater group put on a production of
Arsenic and Old Lace,
the audience was stunned and delighted to see Oppenheimer, powdered white with flour and looking stiff as a corpse, carried on stage and laid out on the floor with the other victims in Joseph Kesselring’s comedy. And when, in the autumn of 1943, a young woman, the wife of a group leader, suddenly died of a mysterious paralysis—and the community feared a polio contagion—Oppenheimer was the first to visit the grieving husband.
At home, Oppie was the cook. He was still partial to exotic hot dishes like
nasi goreng,
but one of his stock dinners included steak, fresh asparagus and potatoes, prefaced by a gin sour or martini. On April 22, 1943, he hosted the first big party on The Hill—to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday. He plied his guests with the driest of dry martinis and gourmet food, though the food was always on the scanty side. “The alcohol hits you harder at 8,000 feet,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelmann, “so everybody, even the most sober people, like Rabi, was just feeling no pain at all. Everyone was dancing.” Oppie danced the fox-trot in his usual Old World style, holding his arm stiffly in front of him. Rabi amused everyone that night when he took out his comb and played it like a harmonica.
Kitty refused to play the social role of a director’s wife. “Kitty was strictly a blue jeans and Brooks Brothers shirt kind of gal,” recalled one Los Alamos friend. Initially, she worked part-time as a lab technician under the supervision of Dr. Hempelmann, whose job it was to study the health hazards of radiation. “She was awful bossy,” he recalled. Only occasionally did she invite old Berkeley friends over for dinner, and she seldom hosted open house parties. However, Deke and Martha Parsons, the Oppenheimers’ next-door neighbors, did like to entertain, and held many such events. Oppie encouraged everyone to work hard and play hard. “On Saturdays we raised whoopee,” wrote Bernice Brode, “on Sundays we took trips, the rest of the week we worked.”
On Saturday evenings, the lodge was often packed with square dancers, the men dressed in jeans, cowboy boots and colorful shirts, the women wearing long dresses bulging with petticoats. Not surprisingly, the resident bachelors hosted the rowdiest parties. These dorm parties were fueled by a concoction of half lab alcohol and half grapefruit juice mixed in a thirty-two gallon G.I. can and chilled with a chunk of smoking dry ice. One of the younger scientists, Mike Michnoviicz, sometimes played his accordion while everyone danced.
Occasionally, some of the physicists gave piano and violin recitals. Oppenheimer dressed up for these Saturday evening affairs, wearing one of his tweedy suits. Invariably, he was the center of attraction. “If you were in a large hall,” Dorothy McKibbin recalled, “the largest group of people would be hovering around what, if you could get your way through, would be Oppenheimer. He was great at a party and women simply loved him.” On one occasion, someone threw a theme party: “Come As Your Suppressed Desire.” Oppie came dressed in his ordinary suit, with a napkin draped over his arm—as if to imply that he wished merely to be a waiter. It was a pose no doubt designed to reflect a studied humility rather than any real inner longing for anonymity. As the scientific director of the most important project in the war, Oppenheimer was actually living his “suppressed” desire.
On Sundays, many residents went for hikes or picnics in the nearby mountains, or rented the horses boarded at the Los Alamos Ranch School’s former stables. Oppenheimer rode his own horse, Chico, a beautiful fourteen-year-old chestnut, on a regular route from the east side of town west toward the mountain trails. Oppie could make Chico “single-foot”—trot by placing each of his hooves down at a different time—over the roughest trails. Along the way, he greeted everyone he encountered with a wave of his mud-colored porkpie hat and a passing remark. Kitty was also a “very good horsewoman, really European trained”; initially, she rode Dixie, a full standardbred pacer who had once run the races in Albuquerque. Later she switched to a thoroughbred. An armed guard always accompanied them.
Oppenheimer’s physical stamina atop a horse or hiking in the mountains invariably surprised his companions. “He always looked so frail,” recalled Dr. Hempelmann. “He was always so painfully thin, of course, but he was amazingly strong.” During the summer of 1944, he and Hempelmann rode together over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to his Perro Caliente ranch. “It nearly killed me,” said Hempelmann. “He was on his horse with the ‘singlefoot’ gait, perfectly comfortable, and my horse had to go into a hard trot to keep up with him. I think the first day we must have ridden thirty to thirtyfive miles, and I was nearly dead.” Though rarely sick, Oppie suffered from smoker’s cough, the result of a four- or five-pack-a-day habit. “I think he only picked up a pipe,” said one of his secretaries, “as an interlude from the chain-smoking.” He was given to uncontrolled, protracted spasms of coughing, and his face would sometimes flush purple as he persisted in talking through his cough. Just as he made a ceremony of mixing his martinis, Oppie smoked his cigarettes with singular style. Where most men used their index finger to tap ashes off the end of their cigarettes, he had the peculiar mannerism of brushing the ash from the tip by using the end of his little finger. The habit had so callused the tip of his finger that it appeared almost charred.
Gradually, life on the mesa became comfortable, if hardly luxurious. Soldiers chopped firewood and stacked it for use in each apartment’s kitchen and fireplace. The Army also collected the garbage and stoked the furnaces with coal. Every day the Army bused in Pueblo Indian women from the nearby settlement of San Ildefonso to work as housekeepers. Dressed in deerskin-wrapped boots and colorful Pueblo shawls and wearing abundant turquoise and silver jewelry, the Pueblo women quickly became a familiar sight around town. Early each morning, after checking in with the Army’s Maid Service Office near the town water tower, they could be seen walking along the dirt roads toward their assigned Los Alamos households for half a day—which was why the residents began calling them their “half-days.” The idea, endorsed by Oppenheimer and administered by the Army, was that such maid service would allow the wives of project scientists to work as secretaries, lab assistants, schoolteachers or “computing-machine operators” in the Tech Area. This in turn would help the Army keep the population of Los Alamos to a minimum and support the morale of so many intelligent and energetic women. Maid service was assigned largely on the basis of need, depending on the importance and hours of a housewife’s job and the number of young children, as well as on occasions of illness. Not always perfect, this bit of army socialism greatly eased life on the mesa and helped to turn the isolated laboratory into a fully employed, effective community.
Los Alamos always had an unusually high percentage of single men and women, and naturally, the Army had little success in keeping the sexes apart. Robert Wilson, the youngest of the lab’s group leaders, was chairman of the Town Council when the military police ordered the closing of one of the women’s dormitories and the dismissal of its female residents. A tearful group of young women, supported by a determined group of bachelors, appeared before the Council to appeal the decision. Wilson later recalled what happened: “It seems that the girls had been doing a flourishing business of requiting the basic needs of our young men, and at a price. All understandable to the Army until disease reared its ugly head, hence their interference.” In the event, the Town Council decided that the number of girls plying their trade was few; health measures were taken and the dormitory was kept open.
EVERY FEW WEEkS, residents of The Hill were permitted to spend an afternoon in Santa Fe, shopping. Some would also take the occasion to drop by the bar at La Fonda for a drink. Oppenheimer frequently spent the night in Dorothy McKibbin’s beautiful, thick-walled adobe home on the Old Santa Fe Trail. In 1936, McKibbin had spent $10,000 to build a classic Hispanic ranch house on an acre and a half of land just south of Santa Fe. With its carved Spanish doors and wraparound porch, the house looked as if it had been there for many decades. Dorothy filled it with local antique furniture and Navajo rugs. As the project’s “gatekeeper,” she held a “Q” (top-level) security badge, and so Oppenheimer frequently used her home to hold sensitive meetings in Santa Fe. McKibbin loved playing “den mother” on these occasions—but she also treasured the many quiet evenings she spent alone with Oppenheimer, cooking his favorite dinner of steak and asparagus, while he mixed “the best dry martinis you ever had.” For Oppenheimer, McKibbin’s home was a refuge from the constant surveillance he lived with on The Hill. “Dorothy loved Robert Oppenheimer,” David Hawkins later said. “He was her special one, and she, his.”