Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

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

  Robertson and many other friends were unaware that Tatlock was struggling to cope with issues surrounding her sexual orientation. Jackie Oppenheimer later reported Jean as telling her that her psychoanalysis had revealed latent homosexual tendencies. At the time, Freudian analysts regarded homosexuality as a pathological condition to be overcome.

  Some time after Jean’s death, one of her friends, Edith Arnstein Jenkins, went for a walk with Mason Roberson, an editor of People’s World. Roberson had known Jean well and he said that Jean had confided to him that she was a lesbian; she told Roberson that in an effort to overcome her attraction to women she “had slept with every ‘bull’ she could find.” This prompted Jenkins to recall one occasion when she had entered the Shasta Road house on a weekend morning and seen Mary Ellen Washburn and Jean Tatlock “sitting up and smoking over the newspaper in Mary Ellen’s double bed.” In remarks suggesting her perception of a lesbian relationship, Jenkins later wrote in her memoir that “Jean seemed to need Mary Ellen,” and she quoted Washburn as saying, “When I first met Jean, I was put off by her [large] breasts and her thick ankles.”

  Mary Ellen Washburn had a particular reason to be devastated when she heard the news of Tatlock’s death; she confided to a friend that Jean had called her the night before she died and had asked her to come over. Jean had said she was “very depressed.” Unable to come that night, Mary Ellen was understandably filled with remorse and guilt afterwards.

  The taking of one’s own life invariably becomes an imponderable, a mystery to the living. For Oppenheimer, Jean Tatlock’s suicide was a profound loss. He had invested much of himself in this young woman. He had wanted to marry her, and even after his marriage to Kitty, he had remained a loyal friend to her in her need—and an occasional lover. He had spent many hours walking and talking her out of her depressions. And now she was gone. He had failed.

  The day after the suicide was discovered, Washburn cabled the Serbers in Los Alamos. When Robert Serber went to tell Oppenheimer the sad news, he could see that Oppie had already heard. “He was deeply grieved,” Serber recalled. Oppenheimer then left the house and went for one of his long, lonely walks high into the pines surrounding Los Alamos. Given what he knew about Jean’s psychological state over the years, Oppenheimer must have felt a basketful of painfully conflicting emotions. Together with regret, anger, frustration and deep sadness, he surely also felt a sense of remorse and even guilt. For if Jean had become a “paralyzed soul,” his looming presence in her life must somehow have contributed to this paralysis.

  For reasons of love and compassion, he had become a key member of Jean’s psychological support structure—and then he had vanished, mysteriously. He had tried to maintain the connection, but after June 1943 it was made very clear to him that he could not continue his relationship with Jean without jeopardizing his work in Los Alamos. He was trapped by circumstances. He had obligations to a wife he loved and a child. He had responsibilities to his colleagues in Los Alamos. From this perspective, he had acted reasonably. But in Jean’s eyes, it may have seemed as if ambition had trumped love. In this sense, Jean Tatlock might be considered the first casualty of Oppenheimer’s directorship of Los Alamos.

  Tatlock’s suicide was front-page news in San Francisco newspapers. That morning, the FBI office in San Francisco cabled J. Edgar Hoover a summary of what had been reported in the papers. The cable concluded: “No direct action will be taken by this office due possible unfavorable publicity. Direct inquiries will be made discreetly in view of elapse of time and Bureau will be advised.”

  In the years since, a number of historians and journalists have speculated about Tatlock’s suicide. According to the coroner, Tatlock had eaten a full meal shortly before her death. If it was her intention to drug and then drown herself, as a doctor she had to have known that undigested food slows the metabolizing of drugs into the system. The autopsy report contains no evidence that the barbiturates had reached her liver or other vital organs. Neither does the report indicate whether she had taken a sufficiently large dose of barbiturates to cause death. To the contrary, as previously noted, the autopsy determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation by drowning. These curious circumstances are suspicious enough—but the disturbing information contained in the autopsy report is the assertion that the coroner found “a faint trace of chloral hydrate” in her system. If administered with alcohol, chloral hydrate is the active ingredient of what was then commonly called a “Mickey Finn”—knockout drops. In short, several investigators have speculated, Jean may have been “slipped a Mickey,” and then forcibly drowned in her bathtub.

  The coroner’s report indicated that no alcohol was found in her blood. (The coroner, however, did find some pancreatic damage, indicating that Tatlock had been a heavy drinker.) Medical doctors who have studied suicides—and read the Tatlock autopsy report—say that it is possible she drowned herself. In this scenario, Tatlock could have eaten a last meal with some barbiturates to make herself sleepy and then self-administered chloral hydrate to knock herself out while kneeling over the bathtub. If the dose of chloral hydrate was large enough, Tatlock could have plunged her head into the bathtub water and never revived. She then would have died from asphyxiation. Tatlock’s “psychological autopsy” fits the profile of a high-functioning individual suffering from “retarded depression.” As a psychiatrist working in a hospital, Jean had easy access to potent sedatives, including chloral hydrate. On the other hand, said one doctor shown the Tatlock records, “If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it.”

  Some investigators, as well as Jean’s brother, Dr. Hugh Tatlock, have continued to question the bizarre nature of Jean’s death. In 1975 they became increasingly suspicious of the conclusion that she had committed suicide after the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee hearings on CIA assassination plots were made public. One of the star witnesses was none other than the irrepressible Boris Pash, who had not only directed the wiretapping of Jean’s phone but had also proposed to interrogate Weinberg, Lomanitz, Bohm and Friedman “in the Russian manner” and then dispose of their bodies at sea.

  Pash served from 1949 through 1952 as the CIA’s Chief of Program Branch 7 (PB/7), a special operations unit within the Office of Policy Coordination, the original CIA clandestine service. Pash’s boss, the Director of Operations Planning for OPC, told the Senate investigators that Colonel Pash’s Program Branch 7 unit was responsible for assassinations and kidnapping as well as other “special operations.” Pash denied that he had been delegated responsibility for assassinations, but acknowledged that it was “understandable” that others in the CIA “could have had the impression that my unit would undertake such planning.” Former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, Jr., told the New York Times on December 26, 1975, that in the mid-1950s he had been informed by his superiors that Boris T. Pash was in charge of a special operations unit responsible for the “assassination of suspected double agents and similar low-ranking officials. . . .”

  Despite the CIA’s claim that it had no records dealing with assassinations, the Senate Committee staff investigation concluded that Pash’s unit was indeed assigned “responsibility for assassinations and kidnappings.” It was documented, for example, that while working in the CIA’s Technical Services Division in the early 1960s, Pash was involved in the attempt to design poisoned cigars destined for Fidel Castro.

  Clearly, Col. Boris Pash, a veteran anti-Bolshevik turned counterintelligence officer, had all the credentials requisite for an assassin in a Cold War spy novel. But despite his colorful résumé, no one has produced evidence linking him to Tatlock’s death. Indeed, by January 1944, Pash had been transferred to London. Jean’s unsigned suicide note suggests that she died by her own hand—a “paralyzed soul”—and this is certainly what Oppenheimer always believed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Would You Like to Adopt Her?”

  Here at Los Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic
.

  JAMES TUCK

  LOS ALAMOS WAS ALWAYS AN ANOMALY. Hardly anyone was over fifty, and the average age was a mere twenty-five. “We had no invalids, no in-laws, no unemployed, no idle rich and no poor,” wrote Bernice Brode in a memoir. Everyone’s driver’s license had numbers and no name; their address was simply P.O. Box 1663. Surrounded by barbed wire, on the inside Los Alamos was transforming itself into a self-contained community of scientists, sponsored and protected by the U.S. Army. Ruth Marshak recalled arriving at Los Alamos and feeling “as if we shut a great door behind us. The world I had known of friends and family would no longer be real to me.”

  That first winter of 1943–44, the snows came early and stayed late. “Only the oldest men in the Pueblo,” wrote a longtime resident, “remember so much snow on the ground for so many weeks.” On some mornings the temperature fell to well below zero, draping the valley below in a thick fog. But the harshness of the winter served only to enhance the natural beauty of the mesa, and to connect the transplanted urbanites to this strange new mystical landscape. Some Los Alamos residents skied until May. When the snows finally melted, the drenched highlands blossomed with lavender mariposas and other wildflowers. Almost every day in the spring and summer, dramatic thunderstorms rolled in over the mountains for an hour or two in the late afternoon, cooling the terrain. Flocks of bluebirds, juncos and towhees perched in the spring-green cottonwoods around Los Alamos. “We learned to watch the snow on the Sangres, and to look for deer in Water Canyon,” Phil Morrison later wrote, with a lyricism that reflected the emotional attachment to the land that seized many residents. “We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture; there were our neighbors, the people of the pueblos, and there were the caves in Otowi canyon to remind us that other men had sought water in the dry land.”

  LOS ALAMOS was an army camp—but it also had many of the characteristics of a mountain resort. Just before arriving, Robert Wilson had finished reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and sometimes he now felt as if he had been transported to that magical dominion. It was a “golden time,” said the English physicist James Tuck: “Here at Los Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic.” It was an “island in the sky,” or, as some new arrivals dubbed it, “Shangri-La.”

  Within a very few months, Los Alamos’ residents forged a sense of community—and many of the wives credited Oppenheimer. Early on, in a nod to participatory democracy, he appointed a Town Council; later it became an elected body and, though it had no formal power, it met regularly and helped Oppie keep in touch with the community’s needs. Here the mundane complaints of life—the quality of PX food, housing conditions and parking tickets—could be vented. By the end of 1943, Los Alamos had a low-power radio station that broadcast news, community announcements and music, the last drawn in part from Oppenheimer’s large personal collection of classical records. In small ways, he made it known that he understood and appreciated the sacrifices everyone was making. Despite the lack of privacy, the spartan conditions and the recurring shortages in water, milk and even electricity, he infected people with his own special sense of jocular élan. “Everyone in your house is quite mad,” Oppie told Bernice Brode one day. “You should get on fine together.” (The Brodes lived in an apartment above Cyril and Alice Kimball Smith and Edward and Mici Teller.) When the local theater group put on a production of Arsenic and Old Lace, the audience was stunned and delighted to see Oppenheimer, powdered white with flour and looking stiff as a corpse, carried on stage and laid out on the floor with the other victims in Joseph Kesselring’s comedy. And when, in the autumn of 1943, a young woman, the wife of a group leader, suddenly died of a mysterious paralysis—and the community feared a polio contagion—Oppenheimer was the first to visit the grieving husband.

  At home, Oppie was the cook. He was still partial to exotic hot dishes like nasi goreng, but one of his stock dinners included steak, fresh asparagus and potatoes, prefaced by a gin sour or martini. On April 22, 1943, he hosted the first big party on The Hill—to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday. He plied his guests with the driest of dry martinis and gourmet food, though the food was always on the scanty side. “The alcohol hits you harder at 8,000 feet,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelmann, “so everybody, even the most sober people, like Rabi, was just feeling no pain at all. Everyone was dancing.” Oppie danced the fox-trot in his usual Old World style, holding his arm stiffly in front of him. Rabi amused everyone that night when he took out his comb and played it like a harmonica.

  Kitty refused to play the social role of a director’s wife. “Kitty was strictly a blue jeans and Brooks Brothers shirt kind of gal,” recalled one Los Alamos friend. Initially, she worked part-time as a lab technician under the supervision of Dr. Hempelmann, whose job it was to study the health hazards of radiation. “She was awful bossy,” he recalled. Only occasionally did she invite old Berkeley friends over for dinner, and she seldom hosted open house parties. However, Deke and Martha Parsons, the Oppenheimers’ next-door neighbors, did like to entertain, and held many such events. Oppie encouraged everyone to work hard and play hard. “On Saturdays we raised whoopee,” wrote Bernice Brode, “on Sundays we took trips, the rest of the week we worked.”

  On Saturday evenings, the lodge was often packed with square dancers, the men dressed in jeans, cowboy boots and colorful shirts, the women wearing long dresses bulging with petticoats. Not surprisingly, the resident bachelors hosted the rowdiest parties. These dorm parties were fueled by a concoction of half lab alcohol and half grapefruit juice mixed in a thirty-two gallon G.I. can and chilled with a chunk of smoking dry ice. One of the younger scientists, Mike Michnoviicz, sometimes played his accordion while everyone danced.

  Occasionally, some of the physicists gave piano and violin recitals. Oppenheimer dressed up for these Saturday evening affairs, wearing one of his tweedy suits. Invariably, he was the center of attraction. “If you were in a large hall,” Dorothy McKibbin recalled, “the largest group of people would be hovering around what, if you could get your way through, would be Oppenheimer. He was great at a party and women simply loved him.” On one occasion, someone threw a theme party: “Come As Your Suppressed Desire.” Oppie came dressed in his ordinary suit, with a napkin draped over his arm—as if to imply that he wished merely to be a waiter. It was a pose no doubt designed to reflect a studied humility rather than any real inner longing for anonymity. As the scientific director of the most important project in the war, Oppenheimer was actually living his “suppressed” desire.

  On Sundays, many residents went for hikes or picnics in the nearby mountains, or rented the horses boarded at the Los Alamos Ranch School’s former stables. Oppenheimer rode his own horse, Chico, a beautiful fourteen-year-old chestnut, on a regular route from the east side of town west toward the mountain trails. Oppie could make Chico “single-foot”—trot by placing each of his hooves down at a different time—over the roughest trails. Along the way, he greeted everyone he encountered with a wave of his mud-colored porkpie hat and a passing remark. Kitty was also a “very good horsewoman, really European trained”; initially, she rode Dixie, a full standardbred pacer who had once run the races in Albuquerque. Later she switched to a thoroughbred. An armed guard always accompanied them.

  Oppenheimer’s physical stamina atop a horse or hiking in the mountains invariably surprised his companions. “He always looked so frail,” recalled Dr. Hempelmann. “He was always so painfully thin, of course, but he was amazingly strong.” During the summer of 1944, he and Hempelmann rode together over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to his Perro Caliente ranch. “It nearly killed me,” said Hempelmann. “He was on his horse with the ‘singlefoot’ gait, perfectly comfortable, and my horse had to go into a hard trot to keep up with him. I think the first day we must have ridden thirty to thirtyfive miles, and I was nearly dead.” Though rarely sick, Oppie suffered from smoker’s cough, the result of a four- or five-pack-a-day habit. “I think he on
ly picked up a pipe,” said one of his secretaries, “as an interlude from the chain-smoking.” He was given to uncontrolled, protracted spasms of coughing, and his face would sometimes flush purple as he persisted in talking through his cough. Just as he made a ceremony of mixing his martinis, Oppie smoked his cigarettes with singular style. Where most men used their index finger to tap ashes off the end of their cigarettes, he had the peculiar mannerism of brushing the ash from the tip by using the end of his little finger. The habit had so callused the tip of his finger that it appeared almost charred.

  Gradually, life on the mesa became comfortable, if hardly luxurious. Soldiers chopped firewood and stacked it for use in each apartment’s kitchen and fireplace. The Army also collected the garbage and stoked the furnaces with coal. Every day the Army bused in Pueblo Indian women from the nearby settlement of San Ildefonso to work as housekeepers. Dressed in deerskin-wrapped boots and colorful Pueblo shawls and wearing abundant turquoise and silver jewelry, the Pueblo women quickly became a familiar sight around town. Early each morning, after checking in with the Army’s Maid Service Office near the town water tower, they could be seen walking along the dirt roads toward their assigned Los Alamos households for half a day—which was why the residents began calling them their “half-days.” The idea, endorsed by Oppenheimer and administered by the Army, was that such maid service would allow the wives of project scientists to work as secretaries, lab assistants, schoolteachers or “computing-machine operators” in the Tech Area. This in turn would help the Army keep the population of Los Alamos to a minimum and support the morale of so many intelligent and energetic women. Maid service was assigned largely on the basis of need, depending on the importance and hours of a housewife’s job and the number of young children, as well as on occasions of illness. Not always perfect, this bit of army socialism greatly eased life on the mesa and helped to turn the isolated laboratory into a fully employed, effective community.