Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

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

  Lansdale began with an obvious attempt to flatter Oppenheimer. “I want to say this without any intent of flattery . . . you’re probably the most intelligent man I ever met.” He then confessed that he had not been entirely straight with him during their previous conversations, but now he wanted to be “perfectly frank.” Lansdale then explained that “we have known since February that several people were transmitting information about this project to the Soviet Government.” He claimed that the Soviets knew the scale of the project, knew about the facilities at Los Alamos, Chicago and Oak Ridge—and had a general sense of the project’s timetable.

  Oppenheimer seemed genuinely shocked by this news. “I might say that I have not known that,” he told Lansdale. “I knew of this one attempt to obtain information which was earlier, or I don’t, I can’t remember the date, though I’ve tried.”

  The conversation soon turned to the role of the Communist Party, and both men agreed on having heard that it was Party policy that anyone doing confidential war work should resign their Party membership. Robert volunteered that his own brother, Frank, had severed his ties to the Party. Moreover, eighteen months before, when they had started work on the project, Robert said he had told Frank’s wife, Jackie, that she should stop socializing with CP members. “Whether they have, in fact, done that, I don’t know.” He confessed that it still worried him that his brother’s friends were “very left wing, and I think it is not always necessary to call a unit meeting for it to be a pretty good contact.”

  Lansdale in turn explained his approach to the whole problem of security. “You know as well as I do,” Lansdale told Oppenheimer, “how difficult it is to prove communism.” Besides, their goal was to build the “gadget,” and Lansdale suggested that a man’s politics really didn’t matter so long as he was contributing to the project. After all, everyone was risking their lives to get the job done, and “we don’t want to protect the thing [the project] to death.” But if they thought a man was engaged in espionage, they had to make a decision on whether to prosecute him or just weed him out of the project.

  At this point, Lansdale brought up what Oppenheimer had told Pash about Eltenton—and Oppenheimer once again said he didn’t think it would be right to name the individual who had approached him. Lansdale pointed out that Oppenheimer had spoken of “three persons on the project” who had been contacted and all three told this intermediary “to go to hell in substance.” Oppenheimer agreed. So Lansdale asked him how he could be sure that Eltenton hadn’t approached other scientists. “I don’t,” Oppenheimer replied. “I can’t know that.” He understood why Lansdale thought it important to discover the channel through which this initial approach had been made, but he still felt it would be wrong to involve these other people.

  “I hesitate to mention any more names because of the fact that the other names I have do not seem to be people who were guilty of anything. . . . They are not people who are going to get tied up in it in any other way. That is, I have a feeling that this is an extremely erratic and unsystematic thing.” He therefore felt “justified” in withholding the name of the intermediary “because of a sense of duty.”

  Changing direction, Lansdale asked Oppenheimer for the names of those individuals working on the project in Berkeley who he thought were Party members or had once been Party members. Oppenheimer named some names. He said he had learned on his last visit to Berkeley that both Rossi Lomanitz and Joe Weinberg were Party members. He thought a secretary named Jane Muir was a member. At Los Alamos, he said, he knew that Charlotte Serber had at one time been a Party member. As to his good friend, Bob Serber, “I think it is possible, but I don’t know.”

  “How about Dave Hawkins?” Lansdale asked.

  “I don’t think he was, I would not say so.”

  “Now,” said Lansdale, “have you yourself ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  “No,” replied Oppenheimer.

  “You’ve probably belonged to every front organization on the Coast,” Lansdale suggested.12

  “Just about,” Oppenheimer replied casually.

  “Would you in fact have considered yourself at one time a fellow traveler?”

  “I think so,” replied Oppenheimer. “My association with these things was very brief and very intense.”

  At a later point, Lansdale got Oppenheimer to explain why he might have gone through a relatively brief period of intense association with the Party—yet never joined. Oppenheimer remarked that a lot of these people they had been discussing had joined the Party out of “a very deep sense of right and wrong.” Some of these people, Oppenheimer said, “have a very deep fervor,” something akin to a religious commitment.

  “But I can’t understand;” interrupted Lansdale, “here’s the particular thing about it. They are not adhering to any constant ideals. . . . They may be adhering to Marxism, but they follow the twistings and turnings of a line designed to assist the foreign policy of another country.”

  Oppenheimer agreed, saying, “This conviction makes it not only hysterical. . . . I think absolutely unthinkable[.] My membership in the Communist Party. [Quite clearly, what he means here is that actually joining the Communist Party was for him “unthinkable.”] At the period in which I was involved there were so many positions in which I did fervently believe, in correctments [sic] and aims of the party. . . .”

  Lansdale: “Can I ask what period that was?”

  Oppenheimer: “That was the time of the Spanish War, up to the [Nazi-Soviet] pact.”

  Lansdale: “Up to the pact. That is the time you broke, you might say?”

  Oppenheimer: “I never broke. I never had anything to break. I gradually disappeared from one after another of the organizations.” (Emphasis added.)

  When Lansdale once again pressed him for names, Oppenheimer replied, “I would regard it as a low trick to involve someone where I would be[t] dollars to doughnuts he wasn’t involved.”

  Lansdale ended the interview with a sigh and said, “O.K., sir.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, on September 14, 1943, Groves and Lansdale had another conversation with Oppenheimer about Eltenton. They were on a train ride between Cheyenne and Chicago, and Lansdale wrote up a memorandum of the conversation. Groves brought up the Eltenton affair, but Oppenheimer said he would only name the intermediary if ordered to do so. A month later, Oppenheimer again refused to name the intermediary. But curiously, Groves accepted Robert’s position. He attributed it to Oppenheimer’s “typical American schoolboy attitude that there is something wicked about telling on a friend.” Pressed by the FBI for more information about the whole affair, Lansdale informed the Bureau that both he and Groves “believed that Oppenheimer is telling the truth. . . .”

  MOST OF GROVES’ subordinates did not share his trust in Oppenheimer. Early in September 1943, Groves had a conversation with another of the Manhattan Project’s security officers, James Murray. Frustrated that Oppenheimer had finally been awarded a security clearance, Murray posed a hypothetical question for Groves: Suppose twenty individuals in Los Alamos were found to be definite communists and this evidence was laid before Oppenheimer. How would Oppenheimer react? Groves replied that Dr. Oppenheimer would say that all scientists are liberals and that this was nothing to be alarmed about. Groves then told Murray a story. Some months earlier, he said, Oppenheimer was asked to sign a secrecy pledge that among other things stated that he would “always be loyal to the United States.” Oppenheimer signed the pledge, but he first struck out those words and wrote, “I stake my reputation as a scientist.” If a “loyalty” oath was personally distasteful, Oppenheimer was nevertheless pledging his absolute trustworthiness as a scientist. It was an arrogant act—but one calculated to make it clear to Groves that science was the altar at which Oppenheimer worshipped and that he had pledged his unreserved commitment to the success of the project.

  Groves went on to explain to Murray that he believed Oppenheimer would regard any subversive activity at Los Alamos as a personal
betrayal. “In other words,” Groves said, “it is not a question of the country’s safety, but rather whether a person might be working against OPP [Oppenheimer] in stopping him from obtaining the reputation which will be his, with the complete development of the project.” In Groves’ eyes, Oppenheimer’s personal ambitions guaranteed his loyalty. According to Murray’s notes of the conversation, Groves explained that Oppenheimer’s “wife is pressing him for fame and that his wife’s attitude is that [Ernest] Lawrence has received all the limelight and honors in this matter so far, and she would rather that Dr. OPP have these honors because she thinks her own husband is more deserving. . . . this is the Doctor’s one big chance to gain a name for himself in the history of the world.” For this reason, Groves concluded, “it is believed that he will continue to be loyal to the United States. . . .”

  Fierce ambition was a character trait Groves respected and trusted. It was a trait he shared with Oppie, and together they had a single transcendent goal—to build this primordial weapon that would defeat fascism and win the war.

  GROVES CONSIDERED himself a good judge of character, and in Oppenheimer he believed he had found a man of unswerving integrity. Still, he also knew that the Army-FBI investigation of the Eltenton affair would go nowhere without further names. So finally, in early December 1943, Groves ordered Oppenheimer to name the intermediary who had approached him with Eltenton’s request. Oppenheimer, having committed himself to respond frankly if ordered, reluctantly named Chevalier, insisting that his friend was harmless and innocent of espionage. Putting together what Robert had told Pash on August 26 with this new information, Colonel Lansdale wrote the FBI on December 13, “Professor J. R. Oppenheimer stated that three members of the DSM project [an early designation for the bomb program] had advised him that they were approached by an unnamed professor at the University of California to commit espionage.” When ordered to name the professor, Lansdale said, Oppenheimer had identified Chevalier as the intermediary. Lansdale’s letter mentioned no other names, either because Oppenheimer was still refusing to identify the three men approached by Chevalier, or more likely, because Groves had asked him only for the name of the intermediary. This so rankled the FBI that two months later, on February 25, 1944, the Bureau pressed Groves to get Oppenheimer to reveal the names of the “other scientists.” Groves apparently did not even bother to reply to this request, for the Bureau was never able to find a reply in its records.

  And yet, in Rashomon fashion, there is yet another version of this story. On March 5, 1944, FBI agent William Harvey wrote a summary memorandum titled “Cinrad.” “In March 1944,”13 Harvey reported, “General Leslie R. Groves conferred with Oppenheimer. . . . Oppenheimer finally stated that only one person had been approached by Chevalier, that one person being his brother, Frank Oppenheimer.” In this version, Chevalier is supposed to have approached Frank—not Robert—in the fall of 1941. Frank is reported to have immediately informed his brother—who promptly phoned Chevalier and “gave him hell.”

  If Frank was involved, this of course would put the story in a quite different light. But the story is not only problematic, it is certainly incorrect. Why would Chevalier approach Frank, whom he hardly knew, rather than Robert, his closest friend? And it seems quite ridiculous that anyone would ask Frank for information in the autumn of 1941 about a project that didn’t get started until the summer of 1942, at the earliest. Moreover, both Chevalier and Eltenton, in simultaneous interviews with the FBI, confirmed that the Eagle Hill kitchen conversation was between Oppenheimer and Chevalier and it occurred in the winter of 1942–43. Furthermore, Harvey’s March 5 memo is the only roughly contemporaneous document that mentions Frank Oppenheimer, and after searching its files the FBI reported that “the original source of the story involving Frank Oppenheimer has not been located in Bureau files.” Nevertheless, because Harvey’s report was now part of Oppenheimer’s FBI dossier, this part of the story would acquire a robust life of its own.14

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Suicide, Motive Unknown”

  I am disgusted with everything. . . .

  JEAN TATLOCK January 1944

  LT. COL. BORIS PASH had spent two frustrating months in the autumn of 1943 trying to discover who had talked to Oppenheimer about passing information to the Soviet consulate. To no avail, he and his agents had repeatedly interviewed various Berkeley students and faculty members. Pash had been dogged and stubborn in his investigation— and so antagonistic toward Oppenheimer as to finally lead Groves to conclude that Pash was wasting the Army’s time and resources on an investigation that was going nowhere. This was what had finally prompted Groves, in early December 1943, to order Oppenheimer to name the contact—Chevalier. At the same time, Groves decided that Pash’s talents could be put to better use elsewhere. In November, he was made military commander of a secret mission, code-named Alsos, to determine the status of the Nazi regime’s bomb program by capturing German scientists. Pash was transferred to London, where he would spend the next six months preparing a top-secret team of scientists and soldiers to follow the Allied troops into Europe. But even after Pash’s departure, his friends at the FBI office in San Francisco continued monitoring Jean Tatlock’s phone conversations from her apartment on Telegraph Hill. Months had gone by, and they had learned nothing to confirm their suspicions that the young psychiatrist was Oppenheimer’s (or anyone’s) conduit for passing information to the Soviets. But no one at Bureau headquarters in Washington told them to stop the surveillance.

  Early in 1944—just after the holiday season—Tatlock was coping with one of her black moods. When she visited her father in his Berkeley home on Monday, January 3, he found her “despondent.” Upon leaving him that day, she promised to phone him the next evening. When she failed to call on Tuesday night, John Tatlock tried phoning her, but Jean never answered. Wednesday morning he tried again, and then went to her apartment on Telegraph Hill. Arriving at about 1:00 p.m., he rang the doorbell and after getting no response, Professor Tatlock, age sixty-seven, climbed through a window.

  Inside the flat, he discovered Jean’s body “lying on a pile of pillows at the end of the bathtub, with her head submerged in the partly filled tub.” For whatever reason, Professor Tatlock did not call the police. Instead, he picked his daughter up and laid her on the sofa in the living room. On the dining room table, he found an unsigned suicide note, scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope. It read in part, “I am disgusted with everything. . . . To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t. . . . I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.” From there the words ran into a jagged, illegible line.

  Stunned, Tatlock began rummaging about the apartment. Eventually, he found a stack of Jean’s private correspondence and some photographs. Whatever he read in this correspondence inspired him to light a fire in the fireplace. With his dead daughter stretched out on the sofa beside him, he methodically burned her correspondence and a number of photographs. Hours passed. The first phone call he made was to a funeral parlor. Someone at the funeral parlor finally called the police. When they arrived at 5:30 p.m., accompanied by the city’s deputy coroner, papers were still smoldering in the fireplace. Tatlock told the police that the letters and photos had belonged to his daughter. Four and a half hours had passed since he had discovered her body.

  Professor Tatlock’s behavior was, to say the least, unusual. But relatives who stumble upon the suicide of a loved one often behave oddly. That he methodically searched the apartment, however, suggests that he may have known what he was looking for. Clearly, what he saw in Jean’s papers motivated him to destroy them. It wasn’t politics: Tatlock sympathized with many of his daughter’s political causes. His motive can only have been something more personal.

  The coroner’s report stated that death had occurred at lea
st twelve hours earlier. Jean had died sometime during the evening of Tuesday, January 4, 1944. Her stomach contained “considerable recently ingested, semi-solid food”—and an undetermined quantity of drugs. One bottle labeled “Abbott’s Nembutal C” was found in the apartment. It still contained two tablets of the sleeping pills. There was also an envelope marked “Codeine 1⁄2 gr” that contained only traces of white powder. Police also found a tin box labeled “Upjohn Racephedrine Hydrochloride, ⅜ grain.”The tin still contained eleven capsules. The coroner’s toxicological department conducted an analysis of her stomach and found “barbituric acid derivative, a derivative of salicylic acid and a faint trace of chloral hydrate (uncorroborated).” The actual cause of death was “acute edema of the lungs with pulmonary congestion.” Jean had drowned in her bathtub.

  At a formal inquest in February 1944, a jury determined Jean Tatlock’s death to be “Suicide, motive unknown.” The newspapers reported that a $732.50 bill from her analyst, Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, was found in the apartment, evidence that she had “taken her own troubles to a psychologist.” Actually, as a psychiatrist in training, Jean was required to undergo analysis and pay for it herself. If recurring episodes of manic depression drove her to suicide, it was tragic. By all accounts, her friends thought she had reached a new plateau in her life. Her achievements were considerable. Her colleagues at Mount Zion Hospital—the foremost center in Northern California for training analytic psychiatrists—thought her an “outstanding success” and were shocked that she had taken her own life.

  When Jean’s childhood friend Priscilla Robertson learned of her death, she wrote her a posthumous letter, trying to understand what had happened. Robertson did not think a “personal heartbreak” would have pushed Jean to suicide: “For you were never starved for affection—your insatiable hunger was for creativity. And you longed to find perfection in yourself, not out of pride but in order to have a good instrument to serve the world. When you found that your medical training, completed, did not give you all the power for good that you had hoped for, when you found yourself entangled in the small routine of hospital conventions and in the huge messes which the war made in the lives of your patients, far beyond any doctor’s power to patch up—then you turned, in your eleventh hour, again to psychoanalysis.” Robertson speculated that perhaps it was this experience, “which always brings introspective despair in mid-course,” that had stirred up agonies “too deep to be assuaged.”