Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  Oppenheimer's vulnerability to allegations of disloyalty to his country stemmed primarily from his well-known association with members of the Communist Party and his own membership in a number of communist front organizations prior to World War II—indeed, these had very nearly prevented his appointment as head of the Manhattan Project, and the FBI had had him under surveillance ever since. His opposition to the H-bomb project was also raised against him, and he was forced by a bullying prosecutor to confess to a lie he had told in 1943 to protect a communist friend.

  One after another, members of the scientific elite who had worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project attested to his unquestionable loyalty to his country, as evidenced by his untiring labors in its defense. Among them was my father, who pointed out how innocent of any knowledge of espionage and counterespionage they had all been at the beginning of the project. “We were little children,” he said, “we had to make up…our code of conduct as we went along.” He wasn't surprised at “how long it took Dr. Oppenheimer to get adjusted to this Buck Rogers universe, [but]…he learned how to handle it and handled it very well.”6

  Edward Teller, on the other hand, drove the final nail into Oppenheimer's professional coffin with his reply to a question from a member of the three-person board that served as the jury as to whether he thought the nation's security would be endangered if Oppenheimer were allowed to keep his clearance: “[I]f it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say it would be wiser not to grant clearance.”7 In destroying Oppenheimer, Teller also damaged himself. He became a pariah to most members of the close-knit physics community, many of whom shunned him ever after, even to the point of refusing to shake his hand.

  Drawing on his skills in interpersonal relationships, my father remained friends with both Teller and Oppenheimer and maintained a good relationship with Admiral Strauss. He had been unable to prevent Oppenheimer's expulsion from the world of decision making on national security matters in which he had played such a central role. He did succeed, though, in persuading Strauss, who was also chairman of the institute's Board of Trustees, not to oust Oppenheimer from the directorship there as well, thus salvaging a role for his devastated colleague, albeit a truncated one, in the world of physics that had been his universe since childhood. Oppenheimer proved himself worthy of my father's intervention on his behalf by building the IAS into one of the world's great centers of physics, as he had done twice before at other institutions—at the University of California, Berkeley, before the war and then at Los Alamos.

  In the fall of 1954, hard on the heels of both the Army-McCarthy and the Oppenheimer hearings, my father was himself nominated for a seat on the AEC—later superseded by the Department of Energy—which had regulatory control over all activities involving the development and use of nuclear energy. It was a prestigious post, and one that required a spotless record of loyalty to the United States. My father's scientific prominence, his central role in the Los Alamos project, and his hard-line stance against Soviet communism won him Senate confirmation with flying colors. The congratulatory letter I wrote him was enthusiastic, but it also had a less straightforward subtext. Heavily influenced by my mother's desire to conceal our family's Jewish origins, over the years I had internalized her fear that the truth might somehow detract from my social acceptability. In my letter, I expressed concern that his sudden prominence in the public eye might “out” our ancestry.

  His reply addressed both his attitude toward the nomination and my awkward, as well as naive, request that he keep up the pretense of what he called, with his flair for a good pun even when discussing serious matters, “pseudo gentility.”

  The job isn't mine yet, I have to be confirmed by the US Senate and in view of my doings in re: Oppenheimer this might yet lead to a bust, but I think that is less probable than 50%, although not at all impossible. The job is of course horribly tempting for an ambitious SOB like I am…It is interesting to come to close quarters with some of the most Buck Rogerian technical jobs, and with some of the weirdest things of the so-called “contemporary scene.” I would be lying if I did not admit that it is—to put it mildly—very stimulating.

  Now to the Aryan business…Dear, I love you even if you decide to pass as a Chinaman. I don't despise you for trying to appear mildly Episcopalian, for a man who tries to get along at the same time with R. Oppenheimer and L.L. Strauss, the foundations of quantum mechanics and the hydrogen bomb, I couldn't take exception to such a matter even if I wanted to. I do think that you are taking unnecessary chances for an inadequate return. You are a talented girl, and you could probably get along in this silly world without indulging in such marginal operations. However this is no mortal sin.8

  I accepted his mild rebuke in the loving spirit in which it was offered, but it would be a good many years before I saw the wisdom of my father's words and abandoned any effort to conceal my ethnic origins, although I remain to this day a communicant of the Episcopal Church I grew up in. This is not because I share the Christian belief in the promise of life after death, although, as the end of my eighth decade draws inexorably closer, I sometimes regret not having this psychological bulwark against mortality. But the older I get, the more I am convinced that when I die my body will return to the elements and a shrinking number of my genes will be passed down from one generation of my offspring to the next, but that my individual consciousness, my “self,” will be forever extinguished. Why, then, do I remain a participant in the traditional Episcopalian service? It is because I find the familiar liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer a helpful framework within which to “keep myself constantly mindful of la condition humaine” as I once wrote to my mother.

  My father took a much more serious view, however, of my declared intention to marry Bob as soon as I graduated from college. In writing to me about his concerns, he bemoaned the fact that he hadn't told me his feelings when we were together.

  I was quite melancholy afterwards, isn't it symbolic of how I always managed my affairs with you—lots of hemming and hawing, and an occasional emotional burst, always very, very late. Perhaps it is not too late each time, I am afraid it is too little.

  Dear, I am very worried about your plans. I may be seeing ghosts, but I think I don't.

  Don't misunderstand me. I like Bob, I could, if I saw more of him, like him a great deal more. Also, he is clearly able, for many good reasons, e.g., otherwise you would probably not pass the time of day with him, nor could he have landed the Princeton job [where he had just been appointed an instructor in English, beginning in the fall of 1955].

  But…

  Dear, do not misread your own character. You are very, very talented and then some. You absorb information like a sponge, you have sense and charm, you can handle the most highly desired task in the world: dealing with people, influencing people. You are God's own chosen executive, and I am not joking. You would also make a damn good journalist, and a few other things.

  Besides, you like money. Whether you show it or not…you have expensive tastes. You are “genetically loaded” from both sides, both Mariette and I adore money…[so] it would be a pity, a misery to see you in petty, straightened circumstances, and worst of all, cut off from using your talents and acting your proper role in life.9

  Then, fearing that he hadn't expressed his feelings sufficiently clearly, he wrote me less than a month later, repeating his previous concerns and spelling them out at greater length.

  [T]his marriage will set you very straight and narrow financial limits for good and ever. Also, the accidents of academic promotion are not unlikely to land you in remote and otherwise unrewarding places, where you have no means to do anything, to be anything, but a “Hausfrau.” And—all of this has such a desperate finality and ineluctability, right from the word go, right from the age of 21 on. Do you really believe that the mood in which you do this, at 21 or 22, will last at 30 at 40 at 50? It seems to me a desperate chance.

  “Don't�
��for heaven's sake—imagine that we are so very different. In spite of my curses about the human race, I have been as happy as I can constitutionally be, most of the time, with Mariette and with Klari. But I could have never existed—not with a female angel—without external success and some strong intellectual interest…I doubt that things with you are fundamentally different.10

  I was deeply moved by the love and concern expressed in this letter. But, even as I recognized the truth of many of my father's observations about me, I remained firm in my belief that Bob was the person I wanted to spend my life with, and that I would somehow manage to avoid the limitations and frustrations the letter had described. Wanting to respond positively to my father's outpouring of emotion, I tried to reassure him by saying that a year's separation, while I finished my senior year in Cambridge and Bob spent his first year teaching at Princeton, would give us time to test our relationship.

  For my father, happiness was found first and foremost in the world of the intellect; for my mother, its wellspring was social relationships. True to form, she was as delighted with my marriage plans as my father was horrified. Her fear had always been that, by “letting my brains show,” competing with men in the intellectual sphere, I would reduce my chances of finding a mate, which in any case would become more difficult after the college years were over and there were fewer single males at hand. Whereas my father's mantra was “Don't marry until you have established your own professional persona,” hers was “Marry early, even if it means marrying often.” Her enthusiasm, tinged with relief, was enhanced by the fact that my chosen mate was a certified New England Yankee, whose Mayflower pedigree laid to rest her fears about my Jewish origins by guaranteeing my social acceptability and that of our future children.

  Soon after my exchange of letters with my father, I went off to Europe for six weeks with four of my college classmates, including my old friend Margaret Rabi. We had a fine time on our mini-grand tour, visiting all the major tourist sites in England, France, and Italy that we could cram in, engaging in a variety of mild flirtations while fending off the more annoying amorous advances of French and Italian males, and discovering that if we ate enough croissants and drank enough café au lait at our “free” breakfast, we could make it until dinnertime, thus saving the price of lunch.

  We even survived without mishap the ocean crossings over and back on a creaky Italian ship called, euphemistically, the Castel Felice. We didn't tell our parents until we were safely back home that we generally slept on deck in preference to the crowded, smelly dormitory to which we were assigned, or that a couple of the young ladies in other groups who did likewise became pregnant by members of the ship's crew.

  Hoping, once again, to give my father pleasure, I picked up a couple of mementos to bring home to him. One was a statue of a rotund, smiling ivory Buddha, the symbol of wisdom, which bore a more than passing resemblance to its intended recipient. The other was a slim volume of pornographic limericks to add to his vast collection—Count Palmyra's Book of Verses—whose cover left no doubt about what was inside. By the time I delivered these gifts, neither one of us had much heart to laugh together over them.

  I had just returned to my mother's house from our European jaunt when a call came from my stepmother, telling me that my father had just been operated on for a malignant tumor so large that it had led to a spontaneous fracture of his collarbone. On hearing the news, Desmond, whose career in health physics had made him wise to such matters, immediately told me to ask whether the tumor was primary or secondary. On hearing that it was secondary, he gently explained to me that the cancer had metastasized from some other site. In the days before chemotherapy, such a diagnosis was a certain death sentence.

  My father knew only too well what he was facing, but he told the truth to as few people as possible and carried on with his busy life as before. When I visited him and Klari in Washington, he clearly preferred to avoid any discussion of what lay ahead. I went along with his unspoken desire to pretend that everything was normal, although I cried myself to sleep many nights after I returned to my final year of college. But at the same time, I asserted my growing independence in a particularly painful way, by truncating the “test year” I had promised him. The summer's brief separation had only strengthened my conviction that I wanted to be reunited with Bob as soon as possible; we made plans to announce our engagement at Christmas and marry in June, as soon as I graduated.

  Confronting both his imminent mortality and the knowledge that I was determined to take the step he had so vehemently argued against, my father wrote me a letter that was both angry and anguished.

  I feel thoroughly shocked…A person of your intelligence and sensitivity cannot fail to know that you are breaking a gentleman's agreement. Your lightness in glancing over this does you very little credit…

  I am sorry, but I must mention one more thing. At the time of the rather depressing episode of your worries, that my nomination to the AEC might lead to a public disclosure of your jewish origin, I wrote you…that I would, if you wish, put up and cooperate as far as I can with your desire to “pass” as gentile. However, I also wrote you, that there is one exception to this. I would consider it as definitely unconscionable if you concealed—by commission or by omission—from your future husband the fact that you are 100% jewish on both sides and no nonsense about it.11

  On this score, at least, he had no reason to worry. It had never occurred to me not to tell Bob everything I knew about my origins, and he regarded my ethnicity as just one interesting but not particularly important piece of the mosaic that made me the person I was.

  After his long cri de coeur about what he regarded as both a personal betrayal and a seriously unwise decision on my part, my father drew a line in the middle of page 8 of his letter and launched into a long, detailed, scholarly discussion of the proposed topic for my senior thesis. I was planning to write on the political theories of an obscure seventeenth-century theologian called Bossuet, a proponent of the absolute divine right of kings. In his response to my query, my father wrote knowledgeably about that bishop's theory of history, monarchism, and anti-Protestantism and suggested that I compare his theory of the state to that of Calvin, quoting in French, from memory, the essence of the latter's views on the subject. Never once, in a letter that ranged from outraged anguish to an intellectual tour de force, did my father refer to his own dire situation.12

  Despite the pain he felt at my unshakeable decision, my father acquiesced in our plans with the outward graciousness that was his hallmark. Although by the Christmas vacation of 1955 he was confined to a wheelchair, he traveled from Washington to New York, where we had arranged to hold our engagement party in a hotel rather than at my mother's home on Long Island, in order to make the logistics easier for him. He captivated the guests with his wit and charm, never referring to his condition or revealing his true feelings about the event.

  Soon after the beginning of the New Year, my father entered Walter Reed Hospital, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. Given the gravity of his illness, both of my grandmothers urged me to postpone our wedding, feeling that such a celebration would be inappropriate while he lay dying. Although I respected my grandmothers' traditionalist views, I didn't see that waiting for him to die before going ahead with our plans would either give my father comfort or show him respect. And I certainly didn't intend to deceive him by pretending that I had followed his wishes by breaking the engagement.

  Despite my firmness, or rather because of it, I was an emotional wreck during the last term of my senior year at Radcliffe, knowing that I had reneged on a promise to the father I had spent my whole life striving to please. What's more, I had done it when we both knew he was dying. I actually took my final exams in the college infirmary, having been felled by a variety of symptoms that, though real enough, were almost certainly emotional in origin. No one from my family was there to see me receive the prize for the highest-ranking academic record in my class at graduation; my mother
was also ill at the time, my stepfather was recovering from major surgery, and my stepmother was looking after my father in Washington. But Bob and his mother provided my cheering section, and I did the same for him when he received his PhD from Harvard the following day.

  Our wedding took place just ten days after these academic rites of passage. The Episcopalian service was held in the beautiful, whitewashed, eighteenth-century Caroline Church, which my mother and stepfather attended in Setauket, a few miles from their home. That, too, had its complications. During one of the premarital sessions with the rector that were required of all couples intending to be married in the Episcopal Church, Bob mentioned that he was a Unitarian. This threw the good clergyman into embarrassed confusion; apparently baptism in a Trinitarian sect—one that accepts the reality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—was a requirement for an Episcopalian church wedding.