by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Smith had known Robert since he was fourteen, and the boy had always been physically delicate and somehow emotionally vulnerable. But now, seeing him in the rugged mountains, camping out in spartan conditions, Smith began to wonder whether Robert’s persistent colitis might be psychosomatic. It occurred to him that these episodes invariably came on when Robert heard someone making “disparaging” remarks about Jews. Smith thought he had developed the habit of “kicking an intolerable fact under the rug.” It was a psychological mechanism, Smith thought, that “when it was carried to its most dangerous, got him into trouble.”
Smith was also well caught up on the latest Freudian theories of child development, and he concluded from Robert’s relaxed campfire conversations that the boy had pronounced oedipal issues. “I never heard a murmur of criticism on Robert’s part of [his] mother,” Smith recalled. “He was certainly critical enough of [his] father.”
As an adult, Robert clearly loved his father, deferred to him and indeed, until his father’s death, went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate him, introduce him to his friends and generally make room for him in his life. But Smith sensed that as a particularly shy and sensitive child, Robert was profoundly mortified by his father’s sometimes maladroit affability. Robert told Smith one night around the campfire about the icehouse incident at Camp Koenig—which of course had been prompted by his father’s overreaction to his letter home about the sex talk at camp. As an adolescent, he had become increasingly self-conscious about his father’s garment business, which he no doubt saw as a traditional Jewish trade. Smith later recalled that once on that 1922 Western trip, he had turned to Robert as they were packing up and asked him to fold a jacket for his suitcase. “He looked at me sharply,” Smith recalled, “and said, ‘Oh yes. The tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?’ ”
Such outbursts aside, Smith thought Robert grew emotionally in stature and confidence during their time together on the Los Pinos ranch. He knew Katherine Page could take a great deal of credit for this. Her friendship was extremely important to Robert. The fact that Katherine and her aristocratic hidalgo friends could accept this insecure New York Jewish boy in their midst was somehow a watershed event in Robert’s inner life. To be sure, he knew he was accepted inside the forgiving womb of the Ethical Culture community in New York. But here was approbation from people he liked outside his own world. “For the first time in his life,” Smith thought, “. . . [Robert] found himself loved, admired, sought after.” It was a feeling Robert cherished, and in the years ahead he would learn to cultivate the social skills required to call up such admiration on demand.
One day he, Katherine and a few others from Los Pinos took packhorses out and, starting from the village of Frijoles west of the Rio Grande, they rode south and ascended the Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau, which rises to a height of over 10,000 feet. They rode through the Valle Grande, a canyon inside the Jemez Caldera, a bowl-shaped volcanic crater twelve miles wide. Turning northeast, they then rode four miles and came upon another canyon which took its Spanish name from the cottonwood trees that bordered a stream trickling through the valley: Los Alamos. At the time, the only human habitation for many miles consisted of a spartan boys’ school, the Los Alamos Ranch School.
Los Alamos, the physicist Emilio Segré would later write when he saw it, was “beautiful and savage country.” Patches of grazing meadows broke up dense pine and juniper forests. The ranch school stood atop a two-mile-long mesa bounded on the north and south by steep canyons. When Robert first visited the school in 1922, there were only some twenty-five boys enrolled, most of them the sons of newly affluent Detroit automobile manufacturers. They wore shorts throughout the year and slept on unheated sleeping porches. Each boy was responsible for tending a horse, and pack trips into the nearby Jemez mountains were frequent. Robert admired the setting—so obviously a contrast to his Ethical Culture environment—and in years to come would repeatedly find his way back to this desolate mesa.
Robert came away from that summer love-struck with the stark desert/mountain beauty of New Mexico. When, some months later, he heard that Smith was planning another trip to “Hopi country,” Robert wrote him: “Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos . . . spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”
CHAPTER TWO
“His Separate Prison”
The notion that I was traveling down a clear track would be wrong.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
IN SEPTEMBER 1922, Robert Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard. Although the university awarded him a fellowship, he didn’t accept it “because I could get along well without the money.” In lieu of the scholarship, Harvard gave him a volume of Galileo’s early writings. He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River. At nineteen, Robert was an oddly handsome young man. Every feature of his body was of an extreme. His fine pale skin was drawn taut across high cheekbones. His eyes were the brightest pale blue, but his eyebrows were glossy black. He wore his coarse, kinky black hair long on top, but short at the sides—so he seemed even taller than his lanky five feet, ten-inch frame. He weighed so little—never more than 130 pounds—that he gave an impression of flimsiness. His straight Roman nose, thin lips and large, almost pointed ears accentuated an image of exaggerated delicacy. He spoke in fully grammatical sentences with the kind of ornate European politeness his mother had taught him. But as he talked, his long, thin hands made his gestures seem somehow contorted. His appearance was mesmerizing, and slightly bizarre.
His behavior in Cambridge over the next three years did nothing to soften the impression his appearance gave of a studious, socially inept and immature young man. As surely as New Mexico had opened up Robert’s personality, Cambridge drove him back to his former introversion. At Harvard his intellect thrived, but his social development floundered; or so it seemed to those who knew him. Harvard was an intellectual bazaar filled with delights for the mind. But it offered Robert none of the careful guidance and devoted nurturing of his Ethical Culture experience. He was on his own, and so he retreated into the security his powerful intellect assured. He seemed incapable of not flaunting his eccentricities. His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes. Lunch was often just a “black and tan”—a piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with chocolate syrup. Most of his classmates thought him diffident. Fortunately, both Francis Fergusson and Paul Horgan were also at Harvard that year, so he had at least two soul mates. But he made very few new friends. One was Jeffries Wyman, a Boston Brahmin who was beginning graduate studies in biology. “He [Robert] found social adjustment very difficult,” Wyman recalled, “and I think he was often very unhappy. I suppose he was lonely and felt he didn’t fit in well. . . . We were good friends, and he had some other friends, but there was something that he lacked . . . because our contacts were largely, I should say wholly, on an intellectual basis.”
Introverted and intellectual, Robert was already reading such dark-spirited writers as Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. His favorite Shakespearean character was Hamlet. Horgan recalled years later that “Robert had bouts of melancholy, deep, deep depressions as a youngster. He would seem to be incommunicado emotionally for a day or two at a time. That happened while I was staying with him once or twice, and I was very distressed, had no idea what was causing it.”
Sometimes Robert’s flair for the intellectual went beyond the merely ostentatious. Wyman recalled a hot spring day when Oppenheimer walked into his room and said, “What intolerable heat. I have been spending all afternoon lying on my bed reading Jeans’ Dynamical Theory of Gases. What else can one do in weather like this?” (Forty years later, Oppenheimer still had in his possession a weathered and salt-encrusted copy of James Hopwood Jeans’ book Electricity and Magnetism.)
In the spring of Robert’s freshman year,
he formed a friendship with Frederick Bernheim, a pre-med student who had graduated from the Ethical Culture School a year after him. They shared an interest in science, and with Fergusson about to leave for England on a Rhodes Scholarship, Robert soon anointed Bernheim as his new best friend. Unlike most college-age men—who tend to have many acquaintances and few deep friendships— Robert’s friendships were few and intense.
In September 1923, at the beginning of their sophomore year, he and Bernheim decided to share adjacent rooms in an old house at 60 Mount Auburn Street, close to the offices of the Harvard Crimson. Robert decorated his room with an oriental rug, oil paintings and etchings he brought from home, and insisted on making tea from a charcoal-fired Russian samovar. Bernheim was more amused than annoyed by his friend’s eccentricities: “He wasn’t a comfortable person to be around, in a way, because he always gave the impression that he was thinking very deeply about things. When we roomed together he would spend evenings locked in his room, trying to do something with Planck’s constant or something like that. I had visions of him suddenly bursting forth as a great physicist, and here I was just trying to get through Harvard.”
Bernheim thought Robert was something of a hypochondriac. “He went to bed with an electric pad every night, and one day it started to smoke.” Robert woke up and ran to the bathroom with the burning pad. He then went back to sleep, unaware that the pad was still burning. Bernheim recalled having to put the thing out before it burned the house down. Living with Robert was always “a little bit of a strain,” Bernheim noted, “because you had to more or less adjust to his standards or moods—he was really the dominant one.” Difficult or not, Bernheim roomed with Robert for their two remaining years at Harvard and credited him with inspiring his later career in medical research.
Only one other Harvard student dropped by their Mt. Auburn Street quarters with any regularity. William Clouser Boyd had met Robert in chemistry class one day and took an instant liking to him. “We had lots of interests in common aside from science,” he recalled. They both tried to write poetry, sometimes in French, and short stories imitative of Chekhov. Robert always called him “Clowser,” purposely misspelling his middle name. “Clowser” often joined Robert and Fred Bernheim on occasional weekend expeditions to Cape Ann, an hour’s drive northeast of Boston. Robert didn’t yet know how to drive, so the boys would go in Bernheim’s Willys Overland and spend the night at an inn in Folly Cove outside of Gloucester where the food was particularly good. Boyd would finish Harvard in three years, and, like Robert, he worked hard to do it. But while Robert obviously spent many long hours in his room studying, Boyd remembers that “he was pretty careful not to let you catch him at it.” He thought Robert could run circles around him intellectually. “He had a very quick mind. For instance, when someone would propose a problem, he would give two or three wrong answers, followed by the right one, before I could think of a single answer.”
The one thing Boyd and Oppenheimer did not have in common was music. “I was very fond of music,” Boyd recalled, “but once a year he would go to an opera, with me and Bernheim usually, and he’d leave after the first act. He just couldn’t take any more.” Herbert Smith had also noticed this peculiarity, and once said to Robert, “You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical.”
INITIALLY, ROBERT WAS NOT SURE which academic path he should choose. He took a variety of unrelated courses, including philosophy, French literature, English, introductory calculus, history and three chemistry courses (qualitative analysis, gas analysis and organic chemistry). He briefly considered architecture, but because he had loved Greek in high school he also toyed with the thought of becoming a classicist or even a poet or painter. “The notion that I was traveling down a clear track,” he recalled, “would be wrong.” But within months he settled on his first passion, chemistry, as a major. Determined to graduate in three years, he took the maximum number of allowed courses, six. But each semester he also managed to audit two or three others. With virtually no social life, he studied long hours—though he made an effort to hide the fact because somehow it was important to him that his brilliance appear effortless. He read all three thousand pages of Gibbon’s classic history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He also read widely in French literature and began writing poetry, a few examples of which appeared in Hound and Horn, a student journal. “When I am inspired,” he wrote Herbert Smith, “I jot down verses. As you so neatly remarked, they aren’t either meant or fit for anyone’s perusal, and to force their masturbatic excesses on others is a crime. But I shall stuff them in a drawer for a while and, if you want to see them, send them off.” That year, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published, and when Robert read it, he instantly identified with the poet’s sparse existentialism. His own poetry dwelt with themes of sadness and loneliness. Early in his tenure at Harvard, he wrote these lines:
The dawn invests our substance with desire
And the slow light betrays us, and our wistfulness:
When the celestial sa fron
Is faded and grown colourless,
And the sun
Gone sterile, and the growing fire
Stirs us to waken,
We find ourselves again
Each in his separate prison
Ready, hopeless
For negotiation
With other men.
Harvard’s political culture in the early 1920s was decidedly conservative. Soon after Robert’s arrival, the university imposed a quota to restrict the number of Jewish students. (By 1922, the Jewish student population had risen to twenty-one percent.) In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites.
Oppenheimer was not oblivious to these issues. Indeed, early that autumn of 1922 he joined the Student Liberal Club, founded three years earlier as a forum for students to discuss politics and current events. In its early years, the club attracted large audiences with such speakers as the liberal journalist Lincoln Steffens, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and the pacifist A. J. Muste. In March 1923, the club took a formal stand against the university’s discriminatory admissions policies. Though it cultivated a reputation for radical views, Robert was not impressed, and wrote to Smith of the “asinine pomposity of the Liberal Club.” In this, his first introduction to organized politics, he felt himself “very much a fish out of water.” Nevertheless, lunching one day at the club’s rooms at 66 Winthrop Street, he was introduced to a senior, John Edsall, who quickly convinced him to help edit a new student journal. Drawing on his Greek, he persuaded Edsall to call the journal The Gad-fly; the title page reproduced a quotation in Greek describing Socrates as the gadfly of the Athenians. The first issue of The Gad-fly came out in December 1922, and Robert was listed on its masthead as an associate editor. He remembered writing a few unsigned articles, but The Gad-fly did not become a permanent fixture on campus and only four issues survive. However, Robert’s friendship with Edsall continued.
By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Robert decided that he had made a mistake in selecting chemistry as his major. “I can’t recall how it came over me that what I liked in chemistry was very close to physics,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s obvious that if you were reading physical chemistry and you began to run into thermodynamical and statistical mechanical ideas you’d want to find out about them. . . . It’s a very odd picture; I never had an elementary course in physics.” Though committed to a chemistry major, that spring he petitioned the Physics Department for graduate standing, which would allow
him to take upper-level physics courses. To demonstrate that he knew something about physics, he listed fifteen books he claimed to have read. Years later, he heard that when the faculty committee met to consider his petition, one professor, George Washington Pierce, quipped, “Obviously, if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.”
His primary tutor in physics became Percy Bridgman (1882–1961), who later won a Nobel Prize. “I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,” Oppenheimer remembered, “because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.” “A very intelligent student,” Bridgman later said of Oppenheimer. “He knew enough to ask questions.” But when Bridgman assigned him a lab experiment that required making a copper-nickel alloy in a self-built furnace, Oppenheimer “didn’t know one end of the soldering iron from the other.” Oppenheimer was so clumsy with the lab’s galvanometer that its delicate suspensions had to be replaced every time he used the apparatus. Robert nevertheless showed persistence and Bridgman found the results interesting enough to publish them in a scientific journal. Robert was both precocious and, on occasion, irritatingly brash. One evening Bridgman invited him to his home for tea. In the course of the evening, the professor showed his student a photograph of a temple built, he said, about 400 B.C. in Segesta, Sicily. Oppenheimer quickly disagreed: “I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about fifty years earlier.”
When the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr gave two lectures at Harvard in October 1923, Robert made a point of attending both. Bohr had just won the Nobel the previous year for “his investigations of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them.” Oppenheimer would later say that “it would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr.” Even on this occasion, his first glimpse of the man, he was deeply moved. Afterwards, Professor Bridgman noted that “[t]he impression he [Bohr] made on everyone who met him was a singularly pleasant one personally. I have seldom met a man with such evident singleness of purpose and so apparently free from guile . . . he is now idolized as a scientific god through most of Europe.”