Pandora's Keepers (15 page)

Oppenheimer’s outlook grew out of his education at the elite Ethical Culture School facing Central Park on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan. The progressive school imparted a liberal ethos to its students that stressed ethical values over moral
laws. The result was a pragmatism leavened by selflessness—doing “the noble thing,” as it was known at the school. Oppenheimer
learned well; he was valedictorian of his class.
²⁸

To toughen him up and round him out, Oppenheimer’s parents had one of his teachers, Herbert Smith, take him out West during
the summer before he entered Harvard College.
²⁹
For several weeks during June and July 1922, Oppenheimer and his teacher roamed the southern Rockies together on horseback.
The trip opened a whole new world to Oppenheimer. For starters, he learned to appreciate the breathtaking beauty of the West.
He also learned that he could stand on his own feet, that he could do what he thought ought to be done, that he did not need
to lean on anyone for approval. It was the discovery of an internal grit and stamina that gave him much needed self-confidence.

The high point of the summer was a pack trip in the mountains and volcanic mesas of northern New Mexico. On one of these mesas,
Oppenheimer and Smith came upon a cluster of rustic cabins shaded in cottonwood trees: the elite Los Alamos Ranch School for
Boys. Oppenheimer loved the extraordinary light and breathtaking vistas of the high desert, the fragrant juniper cedars and
piñon pines, the wild-flowers colored a palette of muted browns, reds, and yellows. It made an indelible impression on him.
He would return two decades later for a very different reason.

Oppenheimer entered Harvard that fall with an astonishing appetite for work. Typical was this note he wrote: “I am now going
regularly to 10 courses, & doing my research, & I have started to learn Chinese.”
³⁰
He spent hours alone in his dorm room overlooking the Charles River, surrounded by oils, etchings, and a samovar, subsisting
on chocolate-covered raisins. He found studying easy but socializing difficult. “He was often very unhappy,” a roommate recalled.
“He was lonely and felt he didn’t fit in well with the human environment. There was something that he lacked, perhaps some
more personal and deep emotional contact with people.”
³¹
Exhibiting symptoms of a manic-depressive, he alternated between periods of furious study and severe depression that led
to periodic sessions with a psychiatrist, which continued for several years after Harvard.
³²
He struck his friends with the pathos of a sensitive and thoughtful young man, lacking in self-knowledge, constantly struggling
with a major repression or conflict that he could neither dislodge nor resolve.

Oppenheimer started out at Harvard in chemistry but was soon drawn to the physics underlying it. The study of nature’s harmony
and order touched a deep chord in Oppenheimer, appealing to the philosopher and poet in him. After graduating summa cum laude
in just three years, he applied for postgraduate work under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge. His Harvard mentor, the future
Nobel laureate Percy Bridgman, wrote a letter about him to Rutherford that was perceptive and prophetic. Oppenheimer had a
“perfectly prodigious power of assimilation,” Bridgman wrote, and “his problems have in many cases shown a high degree of
originality in treatment and much mathematical power.” He conceded that “it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer
will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe that he will be
a very unusual success.”
³³

Rutherford was unimpressed with Oppenheimer’s credentials and rejected his application. Oppenheimer next wrote to J. J. Thomson,
another renowned experimentalist at the Cavendish. Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student and put him to work
in a corner of the laboratory. “I am having a pretty bad time,” he wrote to a high school friend in November 1925. “The lab
work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything.” When Max Born visited
the Cavendish in the summer of 1926 and suggested that Oppenheimer pursue graduate studies at the University of Göttingen,
a center for theoretical physics, Oppenheimer readily accepted the plan. It was at Göttingen that Oppenheimer first became
aware of the problems perplexing European physicists. At that time, Born, Heisenberg, and Pascual Jordan were all in Göttingen,
formulating the theory of quantum mechanics. Oppenheimer profited a great deal from his association with such prominent European
physicists.

In 1929 he returned home to take up a prestigious joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Before Oppenheimer, American theoretical physics did not inspire high blood pressure
in the seminar rooms of Europe. There were a few adept experimentalists, such as Lawrence, Compton, and Rabi, but most universities
had no theoretical physicists as such. At the University of Hamburg in the late 1920s, the
Physical Review
, the research journal of the American Physical Society, was considered to be of such scientific insignificance that copies
of the monthly magazine were permitted to pile up for a year before being unwrapped for use in the library.

Young Professor Oppenheimer cut a very dramatic figure. He was six feet tall, slightly stooped, with a mobile, expressive
face and a body as thin as the wisps from the cigarettes he constantly smoked. His gestures and temperament were much closer
to the coffeehouses of Europe than to anything American. He led an almost prototypical ivory tower existence. “I was almost
wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country,” he later said. “I never read a newspaper or a current magazine
like
Time
or
Harper’s
. I had no radio, no telephone. The first time I ever voted was in the Presidential election of 1936.”
³⁴
He learned of the Wall Street crash from Ernest Lawrence six months after it happened. “Tell me,” Oppenheimer once said to
a student, “what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?”
³⁵
To his brother, Frank, he wrote, “I need physics more than friends.”
³⁶

An inherited income allowed Oppenheimer to live far better than most during the Depression. His first residence was an apartment
on Shasta Road built into the wall of a steep canyon in the hills above campus. The furniture was simple, and a few lovely
Navajo rugs covered the floors. “I have a little house up on the hill,” he wrote Frank, “with a view of the cities [of Oakland
and San Francisco] and of the most beautiful harbor in the world. There is a sleeping porch; and I sleep under the stars.”
³⁷
His second residence was an elegant house on the crest of Eagle Hill Road that he bought with a check the afternoon he toured
it. “I do not have much time for diversions, but I ride about once a week,” he wrote in another letter to Frank. “There are
good horses, and lovely country among the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. From time to time I take out the Chrysler,
and scare one of my friends out of all sanity by wheeling corners at seventy.”
³⁸

At Berkeley, Oppenheimer wore gray suits, blue shirts, and blue ties. He was finely cultivated, ever poised and graceful.
As a host, he had impeccable manners, made potent martinis (icing them first), cooked gourmet meals, and told droll stories.
Spouses of colleagues received red roses; dates received gardenias—both found him irresistible. It was his intellect, however,
that impressed people most. He had a mind that could penetrate to the heart of things, that could grasp the essential nature
of a physical phenomenon, a book, even a person. Many of those who encountered Oppenheimer considered him the fastest thinker
they had ever met—a true genius. In scientific conversation he always assumed that others knew as much as he did. This seldom
being the case, and few persons being willing to admit their ignorance, his partner often felt at a distinct disadvantage.

Yet there was a flaw in his genius. He was brutally intolerant of anyone he considered slow or foolish. Those who struck him
as intolerably stupid were denounced to their faces. It was called the “blue-glare treatment” in Berkeley circles: when aroused,
Oppenheimer’s eyes seemed to turn a vivid blue, his voice dropped way down, and his caustic tongue erupted. “He could be devastating
if he chose,” said one who witnessed the blue-glare treatment, “and sometimes he chose to be so at the wrong time.”
³⁹
His cutting tongue wounded people where they were most sensitive. “Robert could make people feel they were fools,” a fellow
physicist recalled.
⁴⁰
Oppenheimer acknowledged his behavior in a letter to his brother, Frank, but added that “it is not easy—at least it is not
easy for me—to be quite free of the desire to browbeat somebody or something.”
⁴¹
He called the behavior “beastliness.” Those at the receiving end of his cutting tongue put it differently: “He was very snooty,”
said one.
⁴²
Many victims of Oppenheimer’s tongue-lashings nursed a lingering resentment that would be repaid in later years.

Oppenheimer grew into a teaching legend at Berkeley, but he was hardly one at first. He didn’t speak loud enough, he didn’t
face his class, and he scrawled equations at random all over the blackboard while lacing his delivery with obscure references
to classics of literature and philosophy. Although desperately eager to reach his pupils, he was too impatient. He lectured
to the most advanced students in the class, leaving all the others lost. Frequently he would make big jumps in the presentation
of some theory and then turn toward the class, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and say offhandedly, “I hope I’m not being
too pedestrian.”
⁴³
He applied his sharp tongue freely to students who were doing their best to keep up. Many took his course one year and then
again the next in order to understand what it was all about. They would work in pairs, one taking notes and the other one
listening.

Gradually Oppenheimer realized this was not a good system. He began trying to connect with and hold all of his audience. He
dropped his pace of delivery and took pains to make the links between ideas clearer. He learned to slow down when students
could not keep up. He became more relaxed in the classroom. The brilliance of his ideas, the flow of his voice, and the feeling
in his beautifully chosen words now began to hold students spellbound. His performance was a stimulating combination of sophistication
and elegance mixed with a pinch of intellectual arrogance. Even non-physics majors found him one of the most charismatic professors
on campus. Students cut other classes to sit in on his lectures, which were usually filled beyond capacity.

If Oppenheimer was a good lecturer, he was a great mentor, caring openly and deeply about his graduate students. He inspired
them with his passion for the excitement and discovery of physics. He praised them, patiently answered their questions in
his office until midnight, even asked them to collaborate with him on scholarly articles. His charm, eloquence, and humor
captivated them, and the scope of his knowledge and the quickness of his mind awed them. He had new and exciting concepts
to communicate; it was as if physics seemed to be unfolding from week to week in his seminar.
⁴⁴

Oppenheimer’s magnetism extended far beyond class. He was cultivated, well read, and wealthy enough to indulge his tastes.
He liked to have a coterie of students around him. His chats with them often spilled out into hallways, campus quadrangles,
and local restaurants, where he ordered students living on tiny stipends expensive meals and picked up the bill. He played
classical music albums for them—Bach’s Overture in B Minor was his favorite—took them to concerts, and read original Greek
and Sanskrit literature to them. His style and his vision of life ignited them. In his presence they became more intelligent,
more poetic, more prepared to discuss the nuances of any subject. He stretched them beyond their expectations and experiences.
He was irresistible.
⁴⁵

Oppenheimer’s charisma was so great and the veneration of his students so deep that they imitated his gestures and mannerisms.
They mumbled, “Ja, ja,” in affirmative response to questions. They held their heads a little to one side. They splayed their
feet when they walked. They coughed slightly between sentences. They held their hands in front of their lips when they spoke.
They clicked open a lighter whenever anyone took out a cigarette. They referred to him not as Professor Oppenheimer, but simply
and reverently as “Oppie” (sometimes spelled
Opje
by the very
in
). “I was very much under his influence,” recalled Robert Christy, one of Oppenheimer’s graduate students, more than sixty
years later. “I would effectively do anything that he wanted me to do.”
⁴⁶

During summers Oppenheimer would retreat to his northern New Mexico ranch, which he impishly named
Perro Caliente
(“hot dog” in Spanish). It was a beautiful, tranquil place nestled in the high alpine meadows of the Pecos Valley near Cowles.
A rough-hewn log cabin on six acres, it had few conveniences and no electricity. The atmosphere was bohemian: everyone would
sit in front of the fireplace, eating Indonesian food, playing tiddledywinks, and talking. Oppenheimer prepared wild strawberries
with Cointreau for dessert. Guests rode horses by day—sometimes as far as Taos—and slept on Navajo rugs on the porch at night.
⁴⁷

One visitor to Perro Caliente in 1936 was an attractive, complex young woman who captivated Oppenheimer. Her name was Jean
Tat-lock. Tall and slender with green eyes and dark hair, always immaculately and severely dressed, she was pursuing a doctorate
in psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. She was bright, passionate, and compassionate, an idealist and a rebel who was subject
to fits of deep depression. Her spontaneity and forcefulness impressed Oppenheimer. Her beauty and intelligence entranced
and infatuated him.