American Prometheus (64 page)
Sometime during the war—or perhaps shortly after returning from Los Alamos—Oppie and Ruth Tolman began an affair. A clinical psychologist, Ruth was nearly eleven years older than Robert. But she was an elegant and attractive woman. Another friend, the psychologist Jerome Bruner, called her “the perfect confidante, a wise woman . . . she could give a sense of personalness to anything she touched.” Born in Indiana, Ruth Sherman graduated from the University of California in 1917. In 1924 she married Richard Chase Tolman, and continued her studies in psychology. Richard was by then a distinguished chemist and mathematical physicist; he was also twelve years her senior. Though the couple never had children, friends thought they were “totally suited for each other.” Ruth had stimulated Richard’s interest in psychology and, specifically, in the social implications of science.
Oppenheimer shared with Ruth a fascination with psychiatry. For her doctorate, Ruth had studied the psychological differences between two groups of adult criminals. In the late 1930s she had worked as a senior psychological examiner for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. And during the war, she had served as a clinical psychologist for the Office of Strategic Services. Beginning in 1946, she worked as a senior clinical psychologist with the Veterans Administration.
A career woman, Dr. Ruth Tolman possessed a formidable intellect. But by all accounts, she was also a warm, gentle and astute observer of the human condition. She seems to have known aspects of Oppie’s character not visible to many others: “Remember how we have always, both of us, been miserable when we had to look more than a week ahead?”
When, in the summer of 1947, Oppenheimer was preparing to move to Princeton, he wrote Ruth a letter from his vacation at Los Pinos to complain that he was “fagged” and felt “appalled” about the future. Ruth replied, “My heart is very full of many many things I want to say. Like you, I’m grateful to be writing. Like you, I cannot yet quite accept the fact that the monthly visits will not be resumed, once the irregularities of the summer are over. From Richard I could not get very much news of you, though the impression remains that you were tired still.” She urged him to visit her in Detroit while she was in that city attending a conference—and if not, then in Pasadena: “Come to us when you can, Robert. The guest house is always and completely yours.”
Few of Oppenheimer’s letters to Ruth Tolman survive; most were destroyed after her death. But her love letters display a deep tenderness and closeness. “I look back on your wonderful week here,” she wrote in one undated letter, “with all my heart grateful, Dear. It was unforgettable. I’d give great rewards even for another day. In the meantime, you know the love and tenderness I send.” On another occasion, she wrote of their plans to get together for a weekend; she promised to meet his plane and hoped “we’d go to the sea for the day.” She wrote that she had recently driven by “the long stretch of beach where the sandpipers and gulls played. Oh Robert, Robert. Soon I shall see you. You and I both know how it will be.” Later, after this planned outing by the sea, Oppenheimer wrote, “Ruth, dear heart . . . I write in celebration of the good day we had together which meant so very much to me. I knew that I should find you full of courage and wisdom, but it is one thing to know it, and another to be so close. . . . It was so wonderful to see you.” He signed the letter, “My love, Ruth, always.”
Kitty was certainly aware of Robert’s long-standing friendship with the Tolmans. She knew that on his monthly travels to Pasadena, he stayed in the Tolman guest cottage while teaching his Caltech class. Frequently he would take the Tolmans, and sometimes the Bachers, out to their favorite Mexican restaurant—and often Kitty would call him from Berkeley. “I think Kitty was intensely resentful of any other person getting involved with Robert,” recalled Jean Bacher. But if Kitty was naturally possessive, there is no indication that she ever learned of an affair.
Then, one Saturday night in mid-August 1948, Richard Tolman suddenly suffered a heart attack in the midst of a party he and Ruth were hosting at their home. Kitty’s former husband, Dr. Stewart Harrison, was called to the scene and managed to get Richard checked into a hospital within thirty minutes. Three weeks later, Richard died. Ruth was devastated; she had dearly loved her husband of twenty-four years. But some of their friends used the tragedy to smear Robert. Ernest Lawrence, whose attitude toward Robert had by then become one of outright enmity, speculated that Richard’s heart attack had been precipitated by the discovery of his wife’s affair. Lawrence later told Lewis Strauss that “Dr. Oppenheimer first earned his [Lawrence’s] disapproval a number of years ago when he seduced the wife of Professor Tolman at CalTech.” Lawrence claimed that “it was a notorious affair which lasted for enough time for it to become apparent to Dr. Tolman who died of a broken heart.”
Ruth and Robert continued to see each other after Richard’s death. Four years later, Ruth wrote Robert after one such meeting, “I shall always remember the two magic chairs on the dock, with the water and the lights and the planes swooping around overhead. I suppose you realized what I did not dare to mention—that it was the anniversary—4 years—of Richard’s death, and the memories of those dreadful days of August 1948, and then of many earlier sweet ones was very overwhelming to me. I felt very grateful that I could be with you that night.” In another undated letter, Ruth wrote, “Robert dear—The precious times with you last week and the week before keep going through my mind, over and over, making me thankful but wistful, wishing for more. I was grateful for them, Dear, and as you knew, hungry for them, too.” She went on to suggest a date for their next liaison: “How would it be if I said you had to see someone at UCLA and we’d be away for the day, [and] be back for a party at night? . . . Let’s think about this.” Obviously, Ruth and Robert loved each other, but neither of them intended their affair to destroy their respective marriages. Throughout these years, Ruth also managed to maintain friendly relations with Kitty and the Oppenheimer children. She was simply one of the Oppenheimer household’s oldest friends—and Robert’s special confidante.
BEFORE ACCEPTING the Princeton job, Oppenheimer had volunteered to Strauss that “there was derogatory information about me.” At the time, Strauss had dismissed the warning. But, as mandated by the newly passed McMahon Act, the FBI was reviewing the security clearances of all Atomic Energy Commission employees and all the commissioners were obliged to read Oppenheimer’s file. As an aide to J. Edgar Hoover put it, this gave the Bureau the opportunity “to conduct an open and extensive investigation of Oppenheimer since we don’t have to be discreet or cautious. . . .” Agents were sent to tail Oppenheimer and interview more than a score of his associates, including Robert Sproul and Ernest Lawrence. Everyone vouched for his loyalty. Sproul told an agent that Oppenheimer had told him that he was “ashamed and embarrassed” by his left-wing past. Lawrence said Oppie “had a rash and is now immune.”
Despite these testimonials to Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness, Strauss and other AEC commissioners soon learned from the FBI that Oppenheimer’s security clearance would be anything but a routine matter. In late February 1947, Hoover sent the White House a twelve-page summary of Oppenheimer’s file, highlighting the physicist’s associations with communists. On Saturday, March 8, 1947, this report was also sent to the AEC, and soon afterwards Strauss called the AEC’s general counsel, Joseph Volpe, into his office. Volpe could see that Strauss was “visibly shaken” by what he had read. The two men studied the file, until finally Strauss turned to Volpe and said, “Joe, what do you think?”
“Well,” Volpe replied, “if anyone were to print all the stuff in this file and say it is about the top civilian adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission, there would be terrible trouble. His background is awful. But your responsibility is to determine whether this man is a security risk
now,
and except for the Chevalier incident, I don’t see anything in this file to establish that he might be.”
That Monday the AEC’s Commissioners met to discuss the problem. Everyone realized that withholding Oppenheimer’s clearance would have serious political consequences. James Conant and Vannevar Bush told the commissioners that the FBI’s allegations had been heard and dismissed years before. Still, they knew that if the AEC wished to approve Oppenheimer’s security clearance, the FBI had to agree. On March 25, Lilienthal went to see the FBI chief. Hoover was still troubled by Oppenheimer’s failure to report his conversation with Chevalier in a timely fashion. He nevertheless reluctantly agreed that while Oppenheimer “may at one time have bordered upon the communistic, indications [were] that for some time he [had] steadily moved away from such a position.” When told that the AEC’s own security officials felt the evidence was not strong enough to deny Oppenheimer a clearance, Hoover indicated he would not push the matter any further. In fact, he thought it convenient that Oppenheimer’s security status was the AEC’s bureaucratic responsibility, leaving the FBI free to continue its own investigation. Nevertheless, Hoover warned that Frank Oppenheimer was quite another case—the FBI, he said, would not approve a renewal of Frank’s security clearance.
Afterwards, Strauss told Oppenheimer that he had examined his FBI file “rather carefully” and seen nothing in it that would bar his appointment as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. A formal clearance from the AEC Commissioners naturally took longer; it was not until August 11, 1947, that the AEC Commission formally voted Oppenheimer a top-secret “Q” clearance. The vote was unanimous; even Strauss, the most conservative commissioner, voted for the clearance.
Oppenheimer had survived his first postwar scrutiny—but he had every reason to think that he was still a marked man. Hoover persisted, despite having told Lilienthal that he would drop the case. In April 1947, a month after the AEC commissioners had decided to give Oppie his clearance, Hoover forwarded new information “specifically substantiating the fact that the Oppenheimer brothers were substantial contributors to the Communist Party in San Francisco as late as 1942.” The new information came from an FBI burglary of CP offices in San Francisco that produced copies of CP financial records.
In an effort to keep the case alive, Hoover urged his agents to dig for derogatory material of any kind. In the autumn of 1947, for instance, the Bureau’s San Francisco office sent Hoover and Assistant Director D. M. Ladd a confidential memo containing prurient material about the alleged sexual activities of Oppenheimer and some of his close friends. Hoover was informed that an unnamed “very reliable individual” employed at the University of California was volunteering to become a regular “confidential informant of this office.” This unidentified source allegedly had known a number of Oppenheimer’s Berkeley friends since 1927. The FBI’s informant described one such friend, a married woman, as “an oversexed individual” inclined to bohemian tastes; the source claimed that “it was common knowledge around the campus that [this couple] were involved in a husband and wife trade with another member of the faculty and his wife. . . .” As if this weren’t salacious enough, Hoover was informed that among her many affairs, this woman had attended a faculty party in 1935, become intoxicated and then disappeared with a mathematics student, Harvey Hall. Almost as a postscript, the FBI’s source claimed that at the time of this seduction, Hall was living with Robert Oppenheimer. The source said it was also “common knowledge” that prior to Oppenheimer’s marriage in 1940, “he had had homosexual tendencies” and that he was “having an affair with Hall.”
In fact, at no time did Oppenheimer ever share quarters with Hall—and there is no evidence that Oppenheimer interrupted his socially active heterosexual life to have an affair with a man. The FBI’s own source characterized these sexual escapades, probably quite accurately, as “gossip.” But this did not stop Hoover from allowing the tidbit about Oppenheimer’s alleged “affair” with Hall to be incorporated into some of the many summaries of Oppenheimer’s FBI file. These summaries were eventually read by Strauss and many other high-ranking policy-makers in Washington. While such material no doubt titillated many officials, it also persuaded some that the information they were being passed about Oppenheimer was less than reliable. Lilienthal thought it telling, for instance, that one anonymous source was described as a twelve-year-old boy. He concluded that most of the damaging stories were little more than malicious gossip from prewar sources, many of whom clearly did not know Oppenheimer. It was an accurate assessment for much of the derogatory information in Oppenheimer’s FBI dossier, but it ignored the pernicious effect of the accumulated weight that this now unevaluated information could have on readers who were not particularly sympathetic to Oppenheimer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“An Intellectual Hotel ”
In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no
overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have
known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
THE OPPENHEIMERS ARRIVED in Princeton in mid-July 1947, during an unusually hot and humid summer. Oppenheimer’s new position, as director-elect of the Institute that had been Albert Einstein’s sanctuary for nearly fifteen years, would provide him both a prestigious platform and easy access to the growing number of nuclear policy–related committees he served on in Washington. The Institute paid him a generous salary of $20,000 a year, plus rent-free use of the director’s home, Olden Manor—which came with a live-in cook and a groundskeeperhandyman to tend to the house and its extensive gardens. The Institute also allowed him plenty of time to travel where and when he pleased. He would not formally assume his new responsibilities until October, and he would not preside over his first faculty meeting until December. He and Kitty— and their two young children, six-year-old Peter and Toni, age three— would have a leisurely few months to adjust to their new surroundings. Robert was just forty-three years old.