Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  In early 1943, Oppenheimer sent the twenty-eight-year-old Robert Wilson to Harvard to arrange for the safe shipment of Harvard’s cyclotron to Los Alamos. On March 4, Wilson arrived at Los Alamos to inspect the building that would house the cyclotron. He found utter chaos; there seemed to be no schedule, no planning and no line of responsibility. Wilson complained about the situation to Manley, and the two men agreed they should confront Oppenheimer. Their meeting in Berkeley was a disaster: Oppenheimer became angry and swore at them. Stunned, Wilson and Manley left wondering if he was up to the challenge.

  A Quaker by ancestry, Wilson was a pacifist when the European war erupted: “So it was quite a change for me to find in fact that I would be working on this horrible project.” But, like everyone else he knew at Los Alamos, Wilson feared above all the prospect of the Nazis’ winning the war with an atomic weapon. And while privately he still hoped that they might someday prove that an atomic bomb was not possible, he was eager to build it if it could be built. Hardworking and serious-minded by temperament, Wilson initially found himself annoyed by Oppenheimer’s arrogant demeanor. “I sort of disliked him,” he later said. “He was such a smart-aleck and didn’t suffer fools gladly. And maybe I was one of the fools he hadn’t suffered.”

  In the end, however disconnected from his responsibilities Oppenheimer may have seemed before he moved to Los Alamos, he quickly demonstrated his capacity for change. Wilson was surprised after several months at Los Alamos to see his boss metamorphose into a charismatic and efficient administrator. The once eccentric theoretical physicist, a long-haired, left-wing intellectual, was now becoming a first-rate, highly organized leader. “He had style and he had class,” Wilson said. “He was a very clever man. And whatever we felt about his deficiencies, in a few months he had corrected those deficiencies, and obviously knew a lot more than we did about administrative procedures. Whatever our qualms were, why, they were soon allayed.” By the summer of 1943, Wilson noticed that “when I was with him, I was a larger person. . . . I became very much of an Oppenheimer person and just idolized him. . . . I changed around completely.”

  EVEN SO, through these early planning stages, Oppenheimer was often incredibly naïve. On the organization chart he gave Manley, he had listed himself as both director of the lab and chief of the theoretical division. But it soon became clear to his colleagues, and finally to Robert, that he hadn’t the time to do both jobs, so he appointed Hans Bethe to head the theoretical division. He also told General Groves that he thought he would need only a handful of scientists. Major Dudley claims that when they were first scouting the site, Oppenheimer remarked that he thought six scientists, joined by a number of engineers and technicians, could do the job. While this is probably an exaggeration, the point is clear: Oppenheimer at first greatly underestimated the magnitude of the job. The initial construction contract budgeted $300,000—but within a year $7.5 million had been spent.

  When Los Alamos opened in March 1943, a hundred scientists, engineers and support staff converged on the new community; within six months there were a thousand and a year later there were 3,500 people living on the mesa. By the summer of 1945, Oppenheimer’s wilderness outpost had grown into a small town of at least 4,000 civilians and 2,000 men in uniform. They lived in 300 apartment buildings, fifty-two dormitories and some 200 trailers. The “Technical Area” alone enclosed thirty-seven buildings, including a plutonium purification plant, a foundry, a library, an auditorium and dozens of laboratories, warehouses, and offices.

  To the dismay of nearly all his colleagues, Oppenheimer had originally accepted General Groves’ suggestion that all the scientists in the new lab should become commissioned Army officers. In mid-January 1943, Oppenheimer visited the Presidio, an Army base in San Francisco, to arrange for his commission as a lieutenant colonel. He actually took the Army physical—and failed it. Army doctors reported that at 128 pounds Oppenheimer was 11 pounds under the minimum weight and 27 pounds under the ideal weight for a man his age and height. They noted he had a “chronic cough” dating back to 1927, when X rays of his chest had confirmed a case of tuberculosis. He also reported a history of “lumbo-sacral strain”: Every ten days or so, he said, he felt moderate pains shooting down his left leg. For all these reasons, the Army doctors deemed him “permanently incapacitated for active service.” But because Groves had already instructed the doctors that Oppenheimer had to be cleared for duty, he was asked to sign a note acknowledging the existence of “the above physical defects,” and requesting that he nevertheless be placed on extended active duty.

  After the physical, Oppenheimer had an officer’s uniform tailored for him. His motivations were complex. Perhaps donning a colonel’s uniform was a visible sign of acceptance important to a man who was self-conscious about his Jewish heritage. But wearing a uniform was also the patriotic thing to do in 1942. Across the country, men and women were donning military uniforms in a symbolic, primordial ritual of defending the tribe, the country—and the uniform was a visible statement of this commitment. There was a lot of apple pie in Robert’s psyche. “Oppie would get a faraway look in his eyes,” recalled Robert Wilson, “and tell me that this war was different from any war ever fought before; it was a war about the principles of freedom. . . . He was convinced that the war effort was a mass effort to overthrow the Nazis and upset Fascism and he talked of a people’s army and a people’s war. . . . The language had changed so little. It’s the same kind of [political] language, except that now it has a patriotic flavor, whereas before it had just a radical flavor.”

  Soon after Oppenheimer began making his rounds to recruit physicists to Los Alamos, however, he discovered that his peers flatly opposed the notion of having to work under military discipline. By February 1943, his old friend Isidor Rabi and several other physicists had persuaded him that the “laboratory must demilitarize.” Rabi was one of the few among Oppie’s friends who could tell him when he was being foolish. “He thought it would be fine to go in uniform because we were at war; it would bring us closer to the American people, that sort of crap. I know he wanted seriously to win the war, but we couldn’t make a bomb that way.” In addition to being “very wise, he was very foolish.”

  By the end of that month, Groves agreed to a compromise: During the lab’s experimental work, the scientists would remain civilians, but when the time came to test the weapon, everyone would don a uniform. Los Alamos would be fenced and designated an Army post—but within the “Technical Area” of the lab itself, the scientists would report to Oppenheimer as “Scientific Director.” The Army would control access to the community, but it would not control the exchange of information among the scientists; that was Oppenheimer’s responsibility. Hans Bethe congratulated Oppie on his negotiations with the Army, writing him that “I think that you have now earned a degree in High Diplomacy.”

  Rabi played a critical role in this and other organizational issues. “Without Rabi,” Bethe later said, “it would have been a mess because Oppie did not want to have an organization. Rabi and [Lee] Dubridge [then head of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory] came to Oppie and said, ‘You have to have an organization. The laboratory has to be organized in divisions and the divisions into groups. Otherwise, nothing will ever come of it.’ And Oppie, well, that was all new to him. Rabi made Oppie more practical. He talked Oppie out of putting on a uniform.”

  One of Oppenheimer’s great disappointments was his failure to persuade Isidor Rabi to relocate to Los Alamos. He so wanted Rabi aboard that he offered him the associate directorship of the laboratory—but to no avail. Rabi had fundamental doubts about the whole notion of building a bomb. “I was strongly opposed to bombing ever since 1931, when I saw those pictures of the Japanese bombing that suburb of Shanghai. You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from it. The prudent man can’t escape, [nor] the honest man. . . . During the war with Germany, we [in the Rad Lab] certainly helped to develop devices for bombing . . . but this was a real enemy
and a serious matter. But atomic bombing just carried the principle one step further and I didn’t like it then and I don’t now. I think it’s terrible.” To Rabi’s way of thinking, this war would be won with a far less exotic technology—radar. “I thought it over,” Rabi recalled, “and turned him down. I said, ‘I’m very serious about this war. We could lose it with insufficient radar.’ ”

  Rabi also gave a less practical but more profound reason for not joining: He did not, he told Oppenheimer, wish to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a weapon of mass destruction. This was an extraordinary statement, one that Rabi knew might well resonate with a man of Oppenheimer’s philosophical bent. But if Rabi was already thinking about the moral consequences of an atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, in the midst of this war, for once had no patience for the metaphysical. He now brushed aside his friend’s objection. “I think if I believed with you that this project was ‘the culmination of three centuries of physics,’ ” he wrote Rabi, “I should take a different stand. To me it is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence. I do not think that the Nazis allow us the option of [not] carrying out that development.” Only one thing mattered now to Oppenheimer: building the weapon before the Nazis did.

  If Rabi refused to move to Los Alamos, Oppenheimer nevertheless prevailed upon him to come to the first colloquium, and thereafter to serve as one of the project’s rare visiting consultants. Rabi became, as Hans Bethe put it, “the fatherly adviser to Oppie.” “I never went on the payroll at Los Alamos,” Rabi said. “I refused to. I wanted to have my lines of communication clear. I was not a member of any of their important committees, or anything of the sort, but just Oppenheimer’s adviser.”

  Moreover, Rabi was instrumental in persuading both Hans Bethe and many others to move to Los Alamos. He also urged Oppenheimer to appoint Bethe as chief of the theoretical division, which he called “the nerve center of the project.” Oppenheimer trusted Rabi’s judgments in all these matters and acted quickly upon his suggestions.

  When Rabi warned him that “morale is sinking” among the group of physicists working in Princeton, Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman. Oppenheimer had immediately recognized the genius in Feynman and knew he wanted him at Los Alamos. However, Feynman’s wife, Arline, was battling tuberculosis and Feynman made it clear he could not move to Los Alamos without her. Feynman thought that had ended the matter, but one day in the winter of early 1943 he received a long-distance phone call from Chicago. It was Oppenheimer, calling to say that he had located a tuberculosis sanatorium for Arline in Albuquerque. Feynman, he assured him, could work in Los Alamos and visit Arline on the weekends. Feynman was touched, and persuaded.

  Oppenheimer was relentless in his pursuit of men to work on the mesa— “The Hill,” as it was soon nicknamed. He had begun in the autumn of 1942, even before Los Alamos had been selected as “Site Y.” “We should start now,” he wrote Manley, “on a policy of absolutely unscrupulous recruiting of anyone we can lay hands on.” Among his early targets was Robert Bacher, an MIT administrator and experimental physicist. Only after months of persistent lobbying did Bacher finally agree to move to Los Alamos in June 1943 and direct the project’s division of experimental physics. Oppenheimer wrote Bacher earlier that spring that his qualifications made him “very nearly unique, and that is why I have pursued you with such diligence for so many months.” He believed strongly, Oppenheimer wrote him, “in your stability and judgment, qualities on which this stormy enterprise puts a very high premium.” Bacher came—but warned that he would resign if he were ever asked to put on an Army uniform.

  ON MARCH 16, 1943, Oppie and Kitty boarded a train bound for Santa Fe, a sleepy town of 20,000 people. They checked into La Fonda, the best hotel in town, where Oppenheimer spent a few days recruiting people to run a Santa Fe liaison office for the laboratory. One day, Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin, a forty-five-year-old Smith College graduate, was standing in the lobby of La Fonda, waiting to be interviewed for a job she had been told nothing about. “I saw a man walking on the balls of his feet and garbed in a trench coat and porkpie hat,” McKibbin said. Oppenheimer introduced himself as “Mr. Bradley” and asked about her background. Widowed twelve years earlier, McKibbin had first moved to New Mexico to cure a mild case of tuberculosis and, like Oppenheimer, had fallen in love with the stark beauty of the place. By 1943, McKibbin knew everyone there was to know in Santa Fe society, including such artists and writers as the poet Peggy Pond Church, the watercolorist Cady Wells and the architect John Gaw Meem. She was also a friend of the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, who spent her summers in New Mexico during the late 1930s. Oppenheimer could see that this sophisticated, well-connected and self-confident woman would not be easily intimidated, and when he realized that McKibbin knew Santa Fe and its environs better than he did, he hired her to run a discreet office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the downtown area.

  McKibbin was immediately smitten by Oppenheimer’s easy grace and charming manners. “I knew that anything he was connected with would be alive,” she recalled, “and I made my decision. I thought to be associated with that person, whoever he was, would be simply great! I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast and so completely as his did. I didn’t know what he did. I thought maybe if he were digging trenches to put in a new road, I would love to do that. . . . I just wanted to be allied and have something to do with a person of such vitality and radiant force. That was for me.”

  McKibbin may have had no idea what Oppenheimer was doing, but she nevertheless soon became the “gatekeeper to Los Alamos.” From her unmarked office she greeted hundreds of scientists and their families bound for The Hill. Some days she fielded a hundred phone calls and issued dozens of passes. She would come to know everyone and everything about the new community—but it took her a year to figure out that they were building an atomic bomb. McKibbin and Oppenheimer were to become lifelong friends. Robert called her by her nickname, “Dink,” and quickly learned to rely on her good judgment and her ability to get things done.

  At thirty-nine, Oppenheimer seemed not to have aged in twenty years. He still had long, very black and crinkly hair that stood nearly straight up. “He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,” McKibbin said, “very clear blue.” They reminded her of the pale, icy blue color of gentians, a wildflower that grew on the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The eyes were mesmerizing. They were large and round and guarded by heavy eyelashes and thick, black eyebrows. “He always looked at the person he was talking to; he always gave everything he could to the person he was talking to.” He still spoke very softly, and though he could talk with great erudition about almost anything, he could still seem charmingly boyish. “When he was impressed with something,” McKibbin later recalled, “he’d say ‘Gee’ and it was just lovely to hear him say ‘Gee.’ ” Robert’s collection of admirers was growing exponentially at Los Alamos.

  BY THE END of the month, Robert, Kitty and Peter moved up to The Hill and settled into their new home—a rustic one-story log-and-stone house built in 1929 for May Connell, the sister of the Ranch School’s director and an artist who served as a matron for the Ranch School boys. “Master’s Cottage #2” sat at the end of “Bathtub Row”—named with impeccable logic because it and five other log homes from the Ranch School period were the only houses on the mesa equipped with bathtubs. Located on a quiet unpaved street in the middle of the new community, the Oppenheimer home was partially shielded by shrubbery and boasted a small garden. With two tiny bedrooms and a study, the house was modest compared to One Eagle Hill. Because the schoolmasters had taken all their meals in the school cafeteria, the house lacked a kitchen, a drawback soon rectified at Kitty’s insistence.
But its living room was pleasant, with high ceilings, a stone fireplace and an enormous plate-glass window overlooking the garden. It would be their home until the end of 1945.

  That first spring in 1943 was something of an unexpected nightmare for most of the new residents. With the melting of the snows, mud was everywhere and everyone’s shoes were constantly caked with it. On some days the mud engulfed car tires in a quicksand-like grip. By April, the population of scientists had risen to thirty. Most of the new arrivals were boarded in tin-roofed plywood barracks. In the one concession to aesthetics, Oppenheimer persuaded the Army’s engineers to lay out the housing so as to follow the natural contours of the land.

  Hans Bethe was disheartened by what he saw. “I was rather shocked,” he said. “I was shocked by the isolation, and I was shocked by the shoddy buildings . . . everybody was always afraid that a fire might break out and the whole project might burn down.” Still, Bethe had to admit that the setting was “absolutely beautiful. . . . Mountains behind us, desert in front of us, mountains again on the other side. It was late winter, and in April there’s still snow on the mountains, so it was lovely to look at. But clearly, we were very far from anything, very far from anybody. We learned to live with it.”