Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

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

  THROUGHOUT THESE YEARS, Oppenheimer was convinced that his phones were wiretapped. One day in 1948, a Los Alamos colleague, the physicist Ralph Lapp, came to Oppie’s Princeton office to discuss his (Lapp’s) educational work on arms control issues. Lapp was startled when Oppenheimer suddenly rose and took him outside, muttering as they went, “Even the walls have ears.” He was aware that he was under scrutiny. “He was always conscious of being followed,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelmann, his physician friend from Los Alamos and now a frequent visitor to Olden Manor. “He gave us the sense that he thought people were actually trailing him.”

  His phones had been monitored at Los Alamos, and his Berkeley home was wiretapped by the FBI throughout 1946–47. When he moved to Princeton, the FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, field office was instructed to monitor his activities—but a decision was made that electronic surveillance was not warranted. Every effort would be made, however, “to develop confidential discreet sources close to Oppenheimer.” By 1949, the bureau had recruited at least one confidential informant, a woman acquainted with Oppenheimer socially and through her university job. In the spring of 1949, the Newark office informed J. Edgar Hoover, “No additional information has been obtained or developed concerning Dr. Oppenheimer that would indicate he is disloyal.” Years later, Oppenheimer claimed wryly that, “The government paid far more to tap my telephone than they ever paid me at Los Alamos.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “I Am Sure That Is Why She Threw Things at Him”

  His family relationships seemed to be so terrible. And yet you never would have known it from Robert.

  PRISCILLA DUFFIELD

  WHILE FRANK AND JACKIE STRUGGLED to turn their Colorado spread into a working cattle ranch, Robert presided over his intellectual fiefdom in Princeton. The directorship did not absorb all his energy. He spent about a third of his time on Institute business, a third on physics or other intellectual pursuits, and a third traveling, giving speeches and attending classified meetings in Washington. One day his old friend Harold Cherniss chided him, “The time has come, Robert, for you to give up the political life and return to physics.” When Robert stood silent, seeming to weigh this advice, Cherniss pressed him: “Are you like the man who has a tiger by the tail?” To this Robert finally replied, “Yes.”

  It was sometimes a relief to be on the road, away from Princeton—and his wife. To readers of Life, Time and other popular magazines, Robert’s family life may have seemed idyllic. Photographs depicted a pipe-smoking father reading a book to his two young children as his pretty wife looked over his shoulder and the family’s German shepherd, Buddy, lay at his feet. “He is warmly affectionate,” wrote a reporter for a cover story on Oppenheimer for Life magazine, “with his wife and children (who are well fed and very fond of him), and attentively polite to everybody. . . .” According to Life, Oppenheimer walked home each evening at 6:30 p.m. to play with the children. Each Sunday, they took Peter and Toni out to hunt for four-leaf clovers. “Mrs. Oppenheimer, whose thinking is also direct, keeps her children from cluttering the house with four-leaf clovers by making them eat all they find right on the spot.”

  But those who knew the Oppenheimers well realized that life at Olden Manor was difficult. “His family relationships seemed to be so terrible,” said his former Los Alamos secretary Priscilla Duffield, who became a Princeton neighbor. “And yet you never would have known it from Robert.”

  Oppenheimer’s home life was painfully complicated. Robert relied on Kitty for a great deal in his life. “She was Robert’s greatest confidante and adviser,” Verna Hobson said. “He told her everything. . . . He leaned on her tremendously.” He took his Institute work home with him and she often became involved in his decisions. “She loved him very much and he loved her very much,” Hobson insisted. But she and other close friends in Princeton knew Kitty had a relentless intensity that drained anyone near her: “What a strange person she was; all that fury and soreness and intelligence and wit. She had a constant state of the hives. She was just tensed up all the time.”

  Hobson got to know both Robert and Kitty as few others ever did. She and her husband, Wilder Hobson, met the Oppenheimers in 1952 at a New Year’s Eve dinner hosted by their mutual friend, the novelist John O’Hara. Soon afterwards, Hobson went to work for Robert—and she stayed with him for the next thirteen years. “He was an extraordinarily demanding person to work for and Kitty demanded just as much from his secretaries, so it was like working for two demanding bosses who took you right into their lives and expected you to be at their home half the time.”

  Kitty, a creature of habit, presided every Monday afternoon over a gathering of women at Olden Manor; they would sit around gossiping, some drinking all afternoon. Kitty called it her “Club.” The wife of a Princeton University physicist labeled these women Kitty’s “crew of birds with broken wings. . . . Kitty had a ring of damaged women around her, all of them somewhat alcoholic.” Kitty had drunk her fair share of martinis at Los Alamos. But now her drinking sometimes led to horrendous scenes. Hobson, who drank only in moderation, recalled, “She would get drunk sometimes to the point of falling down and not making much sense. Sometimes she passed out. But so many times I have seen her pull herself together when you didn’t believe she possibly could.”

  Pat Sherr, Kitty’s friend from Los Alamos—and the woman who had taken care of Toni as an infant for three months—was one of her regular drinking companions. The Sherrs had moved to Princeton in 1946, and soon after the Oppenheimers moved into Olden Manor, Kitty made a habit of dropping by Pat’s home two or three times a week. Kitty was clearly lonely. “She would arrive at eleven in the morning,” recalled Sherr, “and wouldn’t leave until four in the afternoon,” after having consumed a lot of Sherr’s scotch. But one day Pat announced she just couldn’t afford to replace the liquor. “Oh, how stupid of me,” Kitty said. “I’ll bring my own bottle and you’ll just keep it aside for me.”

  Kitty’s friendships were at once intense and ephemeral. She would latch onto someone and bare her soul in a torrent of intimacy. Sherr saw her do this repeatedly. She’d tell her new friend absolutely everything about herself—including her sex life. “I mean, she just had to talk about this sort of thing all the time,” recalled Sherr. She could be a good friend, but she was always conscious of being a good friend. And inevitably, at some point, she would turn on her friend and publicly denigrate her. “Kitty had a certain need to hurt people,” Hobson said.

  Kitty had always been accident-prone, and her drinking contributed to a string of such episodes. In Princeton, she regularly had minor auto accidents. Almost every night she fell asleep in bed smoking. Her bedding was full of cigarette holes. One night she awoke startled—the room was on fire; but she put it out with a fire extinguisher that she or Robert had wisely placed in the bedroom. Oddly enough, Robert rarely intervened. He instead reacted to his wife’s self-destructive behavior with stoic resignation. “He knew of Kitty’s traits,” observed Frank Oppenheimer, “but was unwilling to admit them—again perhaps because he couldn’t admit failure.”

  On one occasion, Abraham Pais was talking with Oppenheimer in his office when the two men saw Kitty walking, clearly tipsy, across the lawn from Olden Manor. As she approached the door to his office, Robert turned to Pais and said, “Don’t go away.” It was moments like these, Pais later wrote, “when I hurt for him.” In his pity for Robert, Pais nevertheless could not understand why his friend tolerated such a woman. “Quite independently from her drinking,” Pais wrote, “I have found Kitty the most despicable female I have ever known, because of her cruelty.”

  Hobson saw past Kitty’s failings and she understood why Robert loved her. He accepted her for who she was and knew she would never really change her ways. Robert once confided to Hobson that, prior to Princeton, he had consulted a psychiatrist about Kitty. In an extraordinary admission, he said he had been advised to check her into an institution, at least for a time. This he could not do. Inste
ad, he would be Kitty’s “doctor, nurse and psychiatrist.” He told Hobson that he had taken this decision “with his eyes open and that he accepted the consequences of it.”

  Freeman Dyson had a similar observation: “Robert just liked Kitty the way she was, and he wouldn’t have tried to force a different way of life on her any more than she would onto him. . . . I would say that Oppenheimer himself was certainly completely dependent on her—she was really the rock on which he stood. I think for him to have tried to treat her as a clinical case and try to reorganize her life, I think that would have been just out of character for him, and out of character for her too.” Another Princeton friend, the journalist Robert Strunsky, agreed: “He was just as loyal to her as anybody could be. He really wanted to protect her as much as anything. . . . He resented any criticism of her.”

  Robert must have known that Kitty’s drinking was a symptom of a deep pain, a pain he understood would always be there. He never tried to stop her from drinking, and neither did he sacrifice his own evening cocktail ritual. His martinis were strong and he drank them with pleasure. Unlike Kitty, he took his liquor steady and slow. Pais, who believed the cocktail hour a “barbaric custom,” nevertheless thought that Robert “invariably held his liquor well.” Even so, the fact that Robert continued to drink alongside his clearly alcoholic wife did not go unnoticed. “He served the most delicious and the coldest martinis,” Sherr said. “Oppie made everyone drunk quite consciously.” Robert himself mixed the gin martinis with just a droplet of vermouth and then poured the concoction into long-stemmed glasses he had sitting in the freezer. One faculty member renamed Olden Manor “Bourbon Manor.”

  Robert’s passivity in the face of Kitty’s drinking seemed strange to some. Whatever she did to him or to herself, he would be there for her all his life. Another old Los Alamos friend, Dr. Louis Hempelmann, admired Robert’s devotion to his wife. Louis and Elinor Hempelmann visited the Oppenheimers two or three times each year and felt they knew the family well. Robert never asked him for professional advice about Kitty—but he calmly, matter-of-factly, told Hempelmann what the situation was. “He was really just a saint to her,” Hempelmann recalled. “He was always sympathetic and didn’t ever seem to get irritated at her. He really stuck with her very well. He was a marvelous husband.”

  On one occasion, however, Robert was compelled to intervene. Kitty not only drank; she often took sleeping pills to fight her insomnia. One night she accidentally took an overdose and had to be rushed to the Princeton hospital. After that, Oppenheimer asked his secretary to buy him a box with a lock on it. In the future, he said, Kitty could only get her pills by asking him for them. This arrangement lasted for a time, but over time fell by the way-side. Years later, Robert Serber insisted that Kitty “never drank excessively for a normal person.” He thought Kitty’s behavior could be explained by a persistent medical condition: “Kitty suffered from pancreatitis . . . and she would have to take very strong sedatives, and it gave the appearance of being drunk. I’d often seen it, staying with the Oppenheimers.” Bracing herself to attend a social function, Serber said Kitty would “pull herself together at the last minute and take a Demerol to get her through the evening and then she would appear drunk. Well, it wasn’t that at all.”

  The source of Kitty’s unhappiness was no doubt rooted in her own psyche. But the pressures to play the role of the “director’s wife” didn’t help matters. At formal receptions, when she was required as hostess to stand and greet a long line of people, she often asked Pat Sherr to stand beside her. When Sherr asked why this was necessary, Kitty responded, “I need you at my side because when I start to fall, you’re going to hold me up.” Sherr realized that her friend was “very nervous and unsure of herself.” Kitty could intimidate those who did not know her well. And at times she could seem perfectly animated. But it was all an act. Sherr believed that, when required to put on a performance, Kitty was “really scared out of her wits.”

  A free-spirited, whimsical woman, Kitty found it impossible to fit into Princeton’s stiff, small-town, high-society scene. A colleague of Abraham Pais’ once said of Princeton: “If you are single, you’ll go crazy; or, if you are married, your wife will go crazy.” Princeton drove Kitty crazy.

  The Oppenheimers made no effort to accommodate Princeton society. “People left [calling] cards for them and they never returned the calls,” recalled Mildred Goldberger. “They never somehow cared for that part of Princeton which in our experience was really the best part.” The Goldbergers, in fact, developed a strong dislike for the Oppenheimers. Mildred literally thought Kitty a “wicked” woman, filled with “unfocused malice.” Her husband, the physicist Marvin Goldberger, who later became president of Caltech, saw Robert as “an extraordinarily arrogant and difficult person to be with. He was very caustic and patronizing. . . . Kitty was just too impossible.”

  Kitty Oppenheimer was like a tigress caged in Princeton. If invited to the Oppenheimers’ for dinner, Princetonians learned from experience not to count on anything substantial to eat; the quality of the dinner was directly related to Kitty’s mood. Guests would be greeted by Robert holding a pitcher of his potent martinis. “You would sit in the kitchen,” recalled Jackie Oppenheimer, “just gossiping and drinking, with not a thing to eat. Then, about ten o’clock, Kitty would throw some eggs and chili into a pan and, with all that drink, that’s all you had.” Neither Robert nor Kitty ever seemed hungry. One summer evening, Pais was invited over for dinner and after the usual martinis, Kitty served a bowl of vichyssoise soup. The soup was quite delicious, and Robert and Kitty “indulged in a rather extravagant exchange about its superb quality.” Pais thought to himself, “Fine, now let’s get on with the dinner.” But no more food was forthcoming, and after a decent interval, a famished Pais politely excused himself and drove into Princeton, where he bought two hamburgers.

  In her unhappiness, Kitty’s marriage was everything to her. She was utterly dependent upon Robert. She tried hard to play the role of a good housewife, “running around at his beck and call, making sure that everything was perfect for him.” One evening at a party, Oppenheimer was standing in a corner of their living room, talking with a group of people, when Kitty suddenly blurted out, “I love you.” Clearly embarrassed, Oppenheimer simply nodded his head. “It was obvious,” recalled Pat Sherr, “that he wasn’t terribly happy; he didn’t coo over her at that point. But she would do this kind of thing out of the blue.”

  Sherr had known the Oppenheimers since their years in Los Alamos, and during their first years in Princeton she was probably Kitty’s closest friend. Kitty seems to have confided to Sherr about her marriage. “She adored him,” Sherr said. “There was no doubt about that.” But in Sherr’s harsh view, Robert didn’t feel the same way. “I am sure he never would have married her had she not become pregnant. . . . I don’t think that he returned the love, and I don’t think that he was capable of returning any love.” By contrast, Verna Hobson always insisted that Robert loved Kitty. “I think he leaned on her tremendously,” Hobson said. “He didn’t always listen to her, but he respected her political and intellectual capacity.” Hobson tended to observe the marriage through Robert’s eyes. Both Sherr and Hobson admitted that the problem may have been one of clashing temperaments. Kitty was extreme in her passions, whereas Robert could be surprisingly disengaged. Kitty was somebody who needed to express her emotions or anger; but Robert provided no rebound, and instead just allowed all her emotions to be absorbed into a void. “I am sure that is why she threw things at him,” Hobson said.

  Kitty told Sherr that while she had slept with many men in her life, she had never been unfaithful to Robert. The same, of course, was not true for Robert. Though probably unaware of his affair with Ruth Tolman, Kitty was nevertheless intensely jealous of Robert’s affections. Another Los Alamos friend, Jean Bacher, thought Kitty was always resentful of anyone who got involved with Robert. Hobson reports that Robert himself confided to her one day that part of Kitt
y’s problem was that she “was insanely jealous of [him] and she could not stand it when he either got praise or blame because he was in the spotlight . . . she envied him.”

  Kitty also confided to Sherr that “Oppie had no sense of fun and play.” According to Kitty, he was “overly fastidious.” Kitty was surely right to think him maddeningly aloof and detached. He lived his emotional life introspectively. They were polar opposites. But that had always been the source of their mutual attraction. If their marriage was something less than a healthy partnership, after a decade of marriage—and two children—the Oppenheimers had developed a bond of mutual dependency.

  Soon after arriving in Princeton, Sherr was invited to Olden Manor for a picnic. After picnicking, one of the maids brought Toni, now aged three, down from her nap. Sherr hadn’t seen the child—the baby that Oppie had once asked if she wanted to adopt—since she had lived with her for three months at Los Alamos. “She was a very lovely child,” Sherr said. “She had Kitty’s high cheekbones and very dark eyes and dark hair—but she had something of Oppie there as well.” Sherr watched as Toni ran over to Oppenheimer and climbed into his lap: “She put her head on his chest and he enveloped her in his arms. And he looked at me and nodded.” Tearyeyed, Sherr knew what he meant. “It was a message between us that I was right, he did love her very much.”

  But there seems to have been little energy left in their lives for their parental obligations. “I think to be a child of Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer,” said Robert Strunsky, a Princeton neighbor, “is to have one of the greatest handicaps in the world.” “On the surface,” Sherr said, “he was very sweet with the children. I never saw him lose his temper.” But over the years, her view of Oppenheimer changed radically. Sherr observed that Peter, aged six, was quiet and extremely shy, and to help him socialize she encouraged Kitty to take him to a child psychiatrist. But after talking to Robert about it, Kitty reported that he had no confidence in the notion of subjecting his young son to a therapist—an experience Robert himself had endured and detested. This angered Sherr, who thought Oppenheimer’s attitude was that of a father who “could not have a son who needed help.” She eventually concluded that she “didn’t like him as a human being. . . . The more I saw of him, the more I disliked because it ended up by my feeling that he was a terrible father.”