Pandora's Keepers (16 page)

The daughter of a right-wing English professor at Berkeley, Tat-lock had become increasingly involved in left-wing activities
and was a member of the Communist Party by the time she met Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had lived up to then for himself alone,
or at any rate in his own fashion. She awakened him to the suffering in the world around him, stimulated his social conscience,
and introduced him to leftist intellectuals at a time when it seemed to many people that communism offered the only alternative
to the failure of capitalism in Depression-ravaged America and to the fascism that was spreading in Europe.

Oppenheimer had been remarkably ignorant of politics up to this point in his life. Whenever colleagues mentioned the rise
of Nazism, he brushed them off. He wanted to discuss physics. Now he embraced politics with a neophyte’s passion. Once Oppenheimer
got interested in something, he would jump in with both feet. He championed the progressive causes of the day, from the plight
of migrant farmworkers to struggling labor unions to unemployment among university graduates. Said Oppenheimer, “I saw what
the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them,
I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives.”
⁴⁸
He read the
People’s Daily
, made the acquaintance of a number of California communists, and belonged to nearly every communist-front organization on
the West Coast. The Loyalist cause in Spain was for him, as for many others on the Left during the decade, of particular concern.
The capitalist nations, such as Britain and France, had done nothing about Nazi intervention in the Spanish civil war. Instead,
it was the Soviet Union that was fighting fascism.

Although some people saw the American Communist Party as a cynical means to extend Soviet influence, this was an uncommon
view in the 1930s. Many Americans believed the gloom and resignation caused by the Depression contrasted sharply with the
hopefulness and purposefulness of workers in the Soviet Union. Thousands of Americans visited Russia in the 1930s and returned
home with favorable accounts. Ignoring or discounting the human toll of collectivization and the terror famine, they regarded
the rational planning of a command economy as superior to the vagaries and hardships of a market economy on the ropes. Even
the news of Stalin’s bloody purges, which was slowly emerging from Russia, did little to shake their belief that communism
was a movement with great potential for constructive social change. To them, even brutal communists were simply “progressives
in a hurry.”

The politically unsophisticated Oppenheimer sympathized with many of these views. Communism was attractive to the humanitarian
in him because it presented itself as a utopian vision of society in which injustice and oppression would cease to exist.
It was attractive to the scientist in him because it presented itself as a “logical” and “objective” philosophy of politics
and history. In these senses, he was certainly a fellow traveler; he may have been even more.
^*
But at a time when overt expressions of patriotism were unfashionable among intellectuals in general, and particularly among
those on the Left, he never hid his love for America. Oppenheimer was naive in his understanding of communism, and he would
pay dearly one day for his naïveté. His political flirtation would come back to haunt him.

Other factors compelled Oppenheimer’s transformation from cloistered academic to social activist. His mother had died after
a long battle with leukemia in late 1931; his father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1937. His attachment to his parents—especially
his mother—had been exceptionally strong. For the first time in his life, he knew the pain of personal loss, the two deaths
marking the unworldly physicist’s most intimate discovery of suffering in the world. And as the 1930s went on, human suffering
was increasingly hard for a Jew to ignore. He later explained it this way: “I had a smoldering fury about the treatment of
Jews in Germany. I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country.” His
aunt Hedwig and her son escaped from Nazi Germany and settled nearby in Oakland. They arrived only a few days after his father’s
death, and he and his brother, Frank, assumed responsibility for getting them on their feet.

Though Oppenheimer’s conscience had been awakened, his activism had a quality of immature gullibility to it. He relied on
Tat-lock and her circle of radical friends as political mentors. One of them was a handsome, charming, and cultivated thirty-five-year-old
professor of French literature at Berkeley named Haakon Chevalier, whom Oppenheimer first met in 1937. They became close friends,
founding a campus branch of a teacher’s union and sponsoring benefits for leftist causes. Chevalier was fascinated by Oppenheimer’s
intellect and restlessness. When Oppenheimer sat, he shifted constantly—flicking his fingers stained with nicotine from chain-smoking,
crossing and uncrossing his legs. There was a driven—almost Byronic—quality to his life that reflected an inner turmoil.

Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil made what had now become a full-fledged affair with Tatlock a stormy one. Despite their intimacy,
their relationship swung back and forth. They were on again, then off again. “We were at least twice close enough to marriage
to consider ourselves engaged,” said Oppenheimer later.
⁴⁹
Each time, it was Jean who shied away from commitment. Much of the problem stemmed from her severe bouts of depression. Their
love affair continued tempestuously for three years, but it never seemed to provide Jean with what she was seeking. In early
1939 their relationship ended.

In August of that year Oppenheimer met Kathryn Puening Dallet Harrison at a party given by mutual friends in Pasadena, where
Oppenheimer spent part of each year teaching at Caltech. Petite and dark, with a broad, high forehead, brown eyes, prominent
cheekbones, and a wide, expressive mouth, “Kitty” Harrison resembled Jean Tatlock in many ways. She was politically engaged.
She was bright, strong-willed, and controversial. The wife of a young British doctor in residence at a Pasadena hospital (a
marriage that was not working out), Kitty had been married twice before—the first time to a European musician (the marriage
had been annulled), the second time to an American communist union organizer who had been killed fighting for the Loyalists
in Spain. When she met Oppenheimer, the effect on both of them was electric. Their secret affair did not last long. On November
1, 1940, Kitty obtained a quick Nevada divorce and married Oppenheimer the same day. They returned to Berkeley to make a home
for themselves and their expected child, a boy named Peter, who was born on May 15, 1941.

“When I met her,” Oppenheimer later said of Kitty, “I found in her a deep loyalty to her [deceased second] husband, a complete
disengagement from any political activity, and a certain disappointment and contempt that the Communist Party was not in fact
what she had once thought it was.”
⁵⁰
Oppenheimer had also begun to reexamine his own political views. Because of his earlier insulation from politics, he had
suffered a late awakening to the totalitarian realities beneath the socialist facade of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era.
In 1938 two physicists who had just returned from an extended stay in Russia, Victor Weisskopf and George Placzek, paid him
a long visit at Perro Caliente. What they told Oppenheimer of purge trials, tyranny, and the lack of personal and scientific
freedom shocked him. He later described their reports as “so solid, so unfanatical, so true, that they made a great impression”
on me.
⁵¹
The fall of France in June 1940 further jolted him. He was deeply troubled by the turn of events in the war—France had just
fallen and Britain was in imminent danger. “What are we going to do about Europe?” he asked another physicist that summer.
⁵²
Hitler seemed unstoppable, and Oppenheimer suddenly realized not only that something had to be done but that communism wasn’t
going to do it. A friend recalled this moment as “the first occasion when Oppenheimer talked about political matters not from
the standpoint of the Left, but from the standpoint of the West.”
⁵³

And then it was clear. Although he was the intellectual equal of the greatest physicists of his generation, Oppenheimer knew
he was never going to make a grand success out of pure physics. He was a proud man and scientifically ambitious, but he was
never able to immerse himself completely in a particular problem with the intensity of a Bohr or Fermi. His wide range of
interests worked to his disadvantage and he lacked the creative confidence shared by those who made major discoveries. He
had no great scientific achievement to his name, he had won no Nobel Prize; yet he now saw a way to achieve lasting distinction:
by using his scientific knowledge in the fight against Nazi Germany. He began plotting a story with himself as the hero.

It was Lawrence who brought Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project. The two first met when Oppenheimer arrived at Berkeley
in August 1929, and quickly began a friendship that shaped the rest of their lives. It was an unlikely relationship. Lawrence—highly
intuitive and extroverted, by turns taciturn and brash—was a doer who built big and never doubted himself. Oppenheimer—highly
cerebral and introspective, by turns arrogant and charming—was a dreamer who used a piece of chalk as his basic working tool
and suffered severe depressions. Lawrence was practical and pragmatic; Oppenheimer was bookish and intellectual. Lawrence
liked sports and movies; Oppenheimer liked poetry and music. Lawrence wore three-piece suits and behaved like an industrialist;
Oppenheimer dressed in a bohemian manner and was proud of his reputation for mixing drinks.

“Between us was always the distance of different temperaments,” Oppenheimer later said, “but even so, we were very close.”
⁵⁴
They dined together at Jack’s, an upscale restaurant in San Francisco; rode horses together in the Berkeley and Piedmont
hills; and took long drives together to Yosemite and Death Valley. They grew so close that Lawrence named his second son Robert.
When Oppenheimer rushed East in the summer of 1931 to the bedside of his gravely ill mother, he wrote to Lawrence:

Dear Ernest
,

It has not been easy to write to you before this; but I want you to have some little word from me. I know your understanding
and your sympathy; and very deeply I appreciate it.

I found my mother terribly low, almost beyond hope…. She is in very great pain and piteously terribly weak…. I have been able
to talk with her a little; she is tired and sad, but without desperation; she is unbelievably sweet.

For my father alone I should have been glad to come. I think that it has been something of a comfort. He is brave and strong
and gentle beyond all telling…. You know that I shall come back as soon as I possibly can, and that, if I stay away so long,
it is only because what I can do here seems incommensurate with the Berkeley duties.

I hope things are going well, that you are by now done wholly with the administrative horrors, and are having time for work
and tennis and an occasional ride. I feel pretty awful to be away so long; you will do what you can for the fatherless theoretical
children, won’t you?

Affectionately,
Robert
⁵⁵

It helped, of course, that they were not rivals. Instead, they perfectly complemented each other. Lawrence’s cyclotrons yielded
precious physical data that Oppenheimer then used to construct exciting new theories. Their collaboration minimized the gulf
separating them culturally and temperamentally. It also allowed Lawrence to dominate American experimental physics much as
Oppenheimer dominated American theoretical physics.

Where they differed was in politics. Oppenheimer’s political engagement mystified Lawrence, who thought his friend was wasting
his time and talent. “You’re too good a physicist to get mixed up in politics and causes,” Lawrence told him. One day Oppenheimer
came into the Rad Lab and wrote on the blackboard: “Cocktail Party Benefit for Spanish Loyalists, everyone at the Lab invited.”
When Lawrence saw Oppenheimer’s message, he stood silently for a minute clenching his jaw, then furiously erased it. Their
political differences would sunder their close friendship after the war.

Oppenheimer, like Lawrence, had followed the discovery of fission in December 1938 with great interest. But he had not learned
about the secret bomb project until September 1941—and only then because Mark Oliphant talked indiscreetly to Lawrence in
Oppenheimer’s presence. Assuming Oppenheimer already knew about the bomb project, Oliphant suggested using him in a more active
way. Lawrence agreed. There was opposition in some quarters in Washington to Oppenheimer’s participation because of his leftist
politics, but Lawrence personally vouched for his reliability and considered the project too important to forgo his talents.
“I have a great deal of confidence in Oppenheimer,” Lawrence wrote Compton, “and, when I see you, I will tell you why I am
anxious to have the benefit of his judgment in our deliberations.”
⁵⁶
On October 21, 1941, Lawrence took Oppenheimer to a meeting that Compton had called at General Electric’s research laboratory
in Schenectady, New York, to discuss problems of assembly and critical mass (the smallest amount of fissionable material that
will support a self-sustaining chain reaction). The final report of the meeting, containing Oppenheimer’s estimate of how
much U-235 would be needed, became the blueprint for the bomb.

Oppenheimer became intensely interested in the project, even as he continued to teach. He was stirred not only by the technical
challenge but also by a sense of mission: he loathed Nazism and wanted to do what he could to help defeat it. After Pearl
Harbor, Oppenheimer was invited to meetings in Chicago, where Compton was organizing the Met Lab. Compton felt that a group
of physicists should start studying bomb design and construction in addition to the work on a plutonium-producing pile. Oppenheimer
was eager for such work, but he told a colleague that his leftist past probably meant that he would not receive the necessary
security clearance.
⁵⁷
A temporary clearance came through, however—owing to Compton’s intervention in Washington—and Oppenheimer moved to Chicago
at the beginning of 1942.