by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Robert had begun to take an almost paternal interest in helping his younger brother navigate the rough shoals of adolescence—a difficult voyage, as he knew only too well. That March, in response to Frank’s confession that he had been distracted from his studies by a member of the opposite sex, Robert had written a letter filled with advice that bordered on self-conscious analysis. It was, he suggested, the young woman’s “profession to make you waste your time with her; it is your profession to keep clear.” No doubt drawing on his own checkered experience, Robert remarked that dating was “only important for people who have time to waste. For you, and for me, it isn’t.” His bottom line was “Don’t worry about girls, and don’t make love to girls, unless you have to: DON’T DO IT AS A DUTY. Try to find out, by watching yourself, what you really want; if you approve of it, try to get it; if you disapprove of it, try to get over it.” Robert admitted that he was being dogmatic, but he told Frank that he hoped his words would be of some use “as the fruit and outcome of my erotic labours. You are very young, but much more mature than I was.”
ROBERT WAS QUITE RIGHT; young Frank was far more mature than his brother had been at the same age. He had the same icy blue eyes and shock of bushy black hair. Born with the Oppenheimer lankiness, he would soon stand six feet but weigh a mere 135 pounds. He was in many ways as gifted intellectually as his brother, but seemed unburdened by Robert’s intense nervous energy. If Robert could sometimes seem manic in his obsessions, Frank was a calming presence and ever congenial. As an adolescent, Frank had known his brother at a distance, mainly through his letters, and during vacations when they had gone sailing together. It was during this trip to New Mexico—without their parents—that Frank bonded with his sibling as an adult.
When the brothers arrived in Los Pinos, they bunked at Katherine Page’s ranch, and despite his persistent coughing, Robert insisted on mounting a series of extended expeditions on horseback into the surrounding hills. They’d make do with a little peanut butter, some canned artichokes, Vienna sausages and Kirschwasser and whiskey. As they rode, Frank would listen as Robert talked excitedly about physics and literature. At night, the older brother would pull out a worn copy of Baudelaire and read aloud by the light of a campfire. That summer of 1928, Robert was also reading the 1922 novel The Enormous Room, an account by e. e. cummings of his four-month incarceration in a French wartime prison camp. He loved cummings’ notion that a man stripped of all his possessions can nevertheless find personal freedom in the most spartan of surroundings. The story would take on a new meaning for him after 1954.
Frank Oppenheimer noticed that his brother’s passions were always mercurial. Robert seemed to divide the world into people who were worth his time and those who were not. “For the former group,” Frank said, “it was wonderful. . . . Robert wanted everything and everyone to be special, and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special. . . . Once he had accepted someone as worthy of attention or friendship, he would always be ringing or writing them, doing them small favors, giving them presents. He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up those enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special. His sunsets were always the best.” Frank observed that his brother could like all manner of people—they could be famous or not—but in liking them he had a way of making these people into heroes: “Anybody who struck him with their wisdom, talent, skill, decency or devotion became, at least temporarily, a hero to him, to themselves and to his friends.”
One day that July, Katherine Page took the Oppenheimer brothers on a ride about a mile up into the mountains above Los Pinos. After riding through a pass at 10,000 feet, they came upon a meadow perched on Grass Mountain and covered with thick clover and blue and purple alpine flowers. Ponderosa and white pine trees framed a magnificent view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Pecos River. Nestled in the meadow at an altitude of 9,500 feet was a rustic cabin built from half-trunks and adobe mortar. A hardened clay fireplace dominated one wall of the cabin and a narrow wooden staircase led upstairs to two small bedrooms. The kitchen had a sink and wood stove, but there was no running water, and the only bathroom was a windy outhouse built at the end of a covered porch.
“Like it?” Katherine asked Robert.
When Robert nodded, she explained that the cabin and 154 acres of pasture and brook were for rent.
“Hot dog!” Robert exclaimed.
“No, perro caliente!” quipped Katherine, translating Robert’s exclamation into Spanish.
Later that winter, Robert and Frank persuaded their father to sign a four-year lease on the ranch; they named it Perro Caliente. They continued to lease it until 1947 when Oppenheimer purchased it for $10,000. The ranch would be Robert’s private haven for years to come.
After two weeks in New Mexico, the brothers left in the early fall of 1928 to join their parents at the luxurious Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Both Robert and Frank took some rudimentary driving lessons and then bought a used six-cylinder Chrysler roadster. Their plan was to drive to Pasadena. “We had a variety of mishaps,” Frank said with understatement, “but finally got there.” Outside of Cortez, Colorado, with Frank at the wheel, the car skidded on some loose gravel and landed upside-down in a gulley. The windshield was shattered and the car’s cloth top was ruined. Robert fractured his right arm and two bones in his right wrist. After getting a tow to Cortez they got the roadster running again—but the very next evening Frank managed to run the car up onto a slab of rock. Unable to move, they spent the night lying on the desert floor, “sipping from a bottle of spirits . . . and sucking on some lemons we had with us.”
When they finally arrived in Pasadena, Robert went straight away to Caltech’s Bridge Laboratory. With one arm in a bright red sling, he walked in, disheveled and unshaven, and announced, “I am Oppenheimer.”
“Oh, are you Oppenheimer?” replied a physics professor, Charles Christian Lauritsen, who thought he “looked more like a tramp than a college professor.” “Then you can help. Why am I getting the wrong results from this confounded cascade voltage generator?”
Oppenheimer was back in Pasadena only to pack his belongings and prepare for a return to Europe. Earlier that spring of 1928 he had received job offers from ten American universities, including Harvard, and two from abroad. All of them were attractive positions with competitive salaries. Robert decided to accept a double appointment in the physics departments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Caltech. The plan was for him to teach one semester at each school. He chose Berkeley precisely because its physics program lacked any theoretical component. Berkeley was in that sense “a desert,” so for that reason he “thought it would be nice to try to start something.”
He did not intend to “start something” immediately, however. For at the same time, Robert asked for, and shortly received, a fellowship so that he could return to Europe for another year. He felt that he still needed the seasoning, particularly in mathematics, that would come with an additional year of postdoctoral studies. He wanted to study under Paul Ehrenfest, a greatly admired physicist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. As he embarked for Leiden, his plan was that after a term with Ehrenfest he might move on to Copenhagen, where he hoped to get to know Niels Bohr.
In the event, Ehrenfest was out of sorts and distracted, suffering from one of his recurrent bouts of depression. “I don’t think that I was of great interest to him then,” Oppenheimer recalled. “I have a recollection of quiet and gloom.” In retrospect, Robert thought he wasted his term in Leiden and that this was his own fault. Ehrenfest insisted on simplicity and clarity, traits that Robert had not yet embraced. “I probably still had a fascination with formalism and complication,” he said, “so that the large part of what had me stuck or engaged was not his dish. And some of the things that were his dish I didn’t appreciate how really valuable it would be to have them in clear, good order.” Ehrenfest thought Robert was too quick with his answers to a
ny question—and sometimes hidden behind his quickness were errors.
Ehrenfest in fact found it emotionally draining to work with the young man. “Oppenheimer is now with you,” Max Born wrote his Leiden colleague. “I should like to know what you think of him. Your judgment will not be influenced by the fact that I have never suffered as much with anybody as with him. He is doubtless very gifted but completely without mental discipline. He’s outwardly very modest, but inwardly very arrogant.” Ehrenfest’s reply is lost, but Born’s next letter is indicative: “Your information about Oppenheimer was very valuable to me. I know that he is a very fine and decent man, but you can’t help it if someone gets on your nerves.”
Only six weeks after his arrival, Oppenheimer astonished his peers by giving a lecture in Dutch, yet another language he had taught himself. His Dutch friends were so impressed by this spirited delivery that they began calling him “Opje”—an affectionate contraction of his last name—and he would bear the new nickname for life. His facility with this new language may have been assisted by a woman. According to the physicist Abraham Pais, Oppenheimer had an affair with a young Dutch woman named Suus (Susan).
This Dutch affair must have been brief, because Robert soon decided to leave Leiden. Though he had intended to go to Copenhagen, Ehrenfest convinced him he would be better off studying under Wolfgang Pauli in Switzerland. Ehrenfest wrote Pauli: “For the development of his great scientific talents, Oppenheimer needs right now to be lovingly spanked in shape! He really deserves that treatment . . . since he is an especially lovable chap.” Ehrenfest usually sent his students to Bohr. But in this case Ehrenfest was certain, Oppenheimer recalled, “that Bohr with his largeness and vagueness was not the medicine I needed but that I needed someone who was a professional calculating physicist and that Pauli would be right for me. I think he used the phrase herausprügeln [to thrash out]. . . . It was clear that he was sending me there to be fixed up.”
Robert also thought that Switzerland’s mountain air might do him good. He had ignored Ehrenfest’s nagging admonishments on the evils of smoking, but now his persistent cough suggested to him that he might still have a lingering case of tuberculosis. When concerned friends urged him to rest, Oppenheimer shrugged and said that rather than take care of the cough, he “prefers to live while he is alive.”
On his way to Zurich, he stopped in Leipzig and heard Werner Heisenberg give a talk on ferromagnetism. Robert had, of course, met the future head of the German atomic bomb program at Göttingen a year earlier, and while no great friendship had ensued, they had developed a mutual if reserved respect. Upon arriving in Zurich, Wolfgang Pauli told him about his own work with Heisenberg. By then, Robert was very much interested in what he called the “electron problem and relativistic theory.” That spring he nearly collaborated on a paper with Pauli and Heisenberg. “At first [we] thought the three of us should publish together; then Pauli thought he might publish it with me and then it seemed better to make some reference to it in their paper and let [my paper] be a separate publication. But Pauli said, ‘You really made a terrible mess of the continuous spectra and you have a duty to clean it up, and besides, if you clean it up you may please the astronomers.’ So that’s how I got into that.” Robert’s paper was published the following year under the title “Notes on Theory of Interaction of Field and Matter.”
Oppenheimer grew to be very fond of Pauli. “He was such a good physicist,” Robert joked, “that things broke down or blew up when he merely walked into a laboratory.” Only four years older than Oppenheimer, the precocious Pauli had established his reputation in 1920, the year before he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Munich, when he published a two-hundred-page article on both the special and general theories of relativity. Einstein himself praised the essay for its clear exposition. After studying under Max Born and Niels Bohr, Pauli taught first at Hamburg and then, in 1928, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. By then he had published what became known as the “Pauli exclusion principle,” which explained why each “orbital” in an atom may be occupied by only two electrons at a time.
Pauli was a pugnacious young man with a biting wit; like Oppenheimer, he was always quick to jump to his feet and aggressively question a lecturer if he perceived the slightest flaw in an argument. He frequently disparaged other physicists by saying that they were “not even wrong.” And he once said of another scholar that he was “so young and already so unknown.”
Pauli appreciated Oppenheimer’s ability to discern the heart of a problem, but he found himself frustrated by Robert’s inattentiveness to detail. “His ideas are always very interesting,” Pauli said, “but his calculations are always wrong.” After listening to Robert lecture one day, and hearing him pause, groping for words and murmuring little “nim-nim-nim” sounds, Pauli took to calling him the “nim-nim-nim man.” Yet Pauli was fascinated by this complicated young American. “His strength,” Pauli soon wrote Ehrenfest, “is that he has many and good ideas, and has much imagination. His weakness is that he is much too quickly satisfied with poorly based statements, that he does not answer his own often quite interesting questions for lack of perseverance and thoroughness. . . . Unfortunately, he has a very bad trait: he confronts me with a rather unconditional belief in authority and considers all I say as final and definitive truth. . . . I do not know how to make him give that up.”
Another student, Isidor I. Rabi, spent a lot of time with Robert that spring. Having met in Leipzig, they traveled together to Zurich. “We got along very well,” Rabi recalled. “We were friends until his last day. I enjoyed the things about him that some people disliked.” Six years older than Oppenheimer, Rabi had spent his childhood, like Robert, in New York City. But his was a far different New York than Robert’s gilded life on Riverside Drive. Rabi’s family lived in a two-room flat on the Lower East Side. His father was a manual laborer and the family was poor. And unlike Oppenheimer, Rabi grew up with no ambiguity about his identity. The Rabis were Orthodox Jews and God was a part of daily life. “Even in casual conversation,” Rabi remembered, “God entered, not every paragraph, more like every sentence.” As he grew older, the formal religion fell away: “This was the church I failed,” he quipped.
But Rabi remained comfortable as a Jew. Even in Germany in those years of festering anti-Semitism, Rabi insisted on introducing himself as an Austrian Jew precisely because he knew Austrian Jews were stereotypically the most disliked. Oppenheimer, by contrast, never advertised his Jewish identity. Decades later, Rabi thought he knew why: “Oppenheimer was Jewish, but he wished he weren’t and tried to pretend he wasn’t. . . . The Jewish tradition, even if you don’t know it in detail, is so strong that you renounce it at your own peril. [This] doesn’t mean you have to be Orthodox, or even practice it, but if you turn your back on it, having been born into it, you’re in trouble. So that poor Robert, an expert in Sanskrit and French literature . . . [Rabi’s voice here trailed off into silent thought.]”
Rabi later speculated that Robert “never got to be an integrated personality. It happens sometimes, with many people, but more frequently, perhaps, because of their situation, with brilliant Jewish people. With enormous capacities in every direction, it is hard to choose. He wanted everything. He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend of mine, who’s a lawyer, about whom someone said, ‘He’d like to be president of the Knights of Columbus and B’nai B’rith.’ God knows I’m not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I’m very, very simple.”
Rabi loved Robert, but he could also proclaim to a friend for outrageous effect, “Oppenheimer? A rich spoiled Jewish brat from New York.” Rabi thought he knew the type. “He was East German Jewish, and what happened to them was that they began to value the German culture above their own. You can see very easily why—with those immigrant Polish Jews and their very crude form of worship.” The remarkable thing, Rabi thought, was that so many of these highly assimilated German Jews nevertheless couldn’t in the end brin
g themselves to renounce their identity. The doors would open for them, but many refused to pass through. “I think in the Bible,” Rabi said, “it says God complains that they’re such obstinate people.” In Rabi’s eyes, Oppenheimer was similarly conflicted, but the difference may have been that he was unconsciously obstinate. “I don’t know if he thought of himself as being Jewish,” Rabi recalled many years later. “I think he had fantasies thinking he was not Jewish. I remember once saying to him how I found the Christian religion so puzzling, such a combination of blood and gentleness. He said that is what attracted him to it.”
Rabi never told Oppenheimer what he thought of this ambivalence: “I didn’t think it would be worthwhile telling him these things. . . . Can’t change a man, that comes from inside.” Rabi just felt he knew better than Oppenheimer himself who he was. “Whatever you want to say about Oppenheimer, he certainly wasn’t a WASP.”
Despite their differences, a close bond developed between Rabi and Oppenheimer. “I was never in the same class with him,” Rabi later said. “I never ran into anyone who was brighter than he was.” Still, Rabi’s own brilliance was never in doubt. In just a few years, his experiments in a molecular-beam laboratory at Columbia University would produce seminal results for a wide range of fields in both physics and chemistry. Like Oppenheimer, he did not have the hands of an experimentalist; because he was clumsy, he often let others handle the equipment. But he had an uncanny ability to design experiments that produced results. And perhaps this was explained by the fact that during his stint in Zurich Rabi acquired, unlike most experimentalists, a very firm grasp of the theoretical. “Rabi was a great experimentalist,” recalled Oppenheimer’s student Wendell Furry, “and he was no slouch as a theorist.” In the rarefied world of physics, Rabi would come to be regarded as the deep thinker and Oppenheimer as the great synthesizer. Together, they were formidable.