by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Epilogue:
“There’s Only One Robert”
Within a year or two of Oppie’s death, Kitty began living with Bob Serber, Robert’s close friend and former student. When a friend mistakenly called Serber “Robert,” Kitty reprimanded her sharply: “Don’t you call him Robert—there’s only one Robert.” In 1972, Kitty bought a magnificent fifty-two-foot teak ketch, christened the Moonraker. The name refers to the topmost sail on a large sailing vessel—or to someone touched with madness. Kitty persuaded Serber to sail with her around the world in May 1972. But they didn’t make it very far. Off the coast of Colombia, Kitty became so ill that Serber turned the boat around and made for port at Panama. Kitty died of an embolism on October 27, 1972, in Panama City’s Gorgas Hospital. Her ashes were scattered near Carval Rock, in the same spot off the coast of St. John where Robert’s urn had been sent to the sea’s bottom in 1967.
In 1959, ten years after his banishment, Frank Oppenheimer finally made it back into academia when the University of Colorado gave him an appointment in the physics department. In 1965, he won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to do bubble chamber research at University College in London. While in Europe that year, he and Jackie visited a number of science museums; they were particularly impressed by the Palais de la Découverte, which used models to demonstrate basic scientific concepts. Upon their return to America, he and Jackie began to develop plans for a science museum that would give children and adults a “hands-on” experience with physics, chemistry and other scientific fields. The idea took hold, and in August 1969, with grants from various foundations, Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium opened its doors on the grounds of San Francisco’s renovated Palace of Fine Arts, a monumental exhibition hall built in 1915. The Exploratorium quickly became a showcase in the “participatory museum movement,” and Frank became its charismatic director. Jackie and their son Michael worked closely with Frank, and the museum became a family endeavor—and possibly the world’s most interesting pedagogical museum of science.
Robert would have been proud of Frank. Everything the two brothers had learned in two lives devoted to science, art and politics was brought together in the Exploratorium. “The whole point of the Exploratorium,” Frank said, “is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.” If Frank ran his Exploratorium as a “benevolent despot” until his death in 1985, it was always with the egalitarian notion that “human understanding will cease to be an instrument of power . . . for the benefit of a few, and will instead become a source of empowerment and pleasure to all.”
Peter Oppenheimer moved to New Mexico, living in his father’s Perro Caliente cabin overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Over the years, he raised three children. Twice divorced, he eventually settled in Santa Fe, and made a living as a contractor and carpenter. Peter never advertised his familial connections to the father of the atomic bomb—even when he occasionally went canvassing door-to-door as an environmental activist, lobbying against nuclear waste hazards in the region.
After her father’s death, Toni floundered. “Toni always felt inferior to Kitty,” recalled Serber. “Kitty managed her life so much that Toni never became independent.” Her strong-willed mother had pressured her into going to graduate school, but after a while she dropped out. She lived alone in a small apartment in New York City for a time, but she had few close friends. Eventually she moved out of her apartment and lived in a back room of Serber’s large Riverside Drive apartment. Using her facility for languages, she got a temporary job in 1969 as a trilingual translator for the United Nations. “She could shift from one language to another without any problem whatsoever,” recalled Sabra Ericson. “But somehow or other, she was always getting slapped in the face.” The position required a security clearance. The FBI opened a full field investigation—and dredged up all the old charges about her father. In what must have been a painful and ironic blow to a tender ego, the security clearance never came through.
Toni eventually returned to St. John, resigned to making the island her home. “She made the mistake of staying on St. John,” Serber said. “I mean, it’s so limited. There was nobody there she could talk to, really . . . nobody her own age.” Twice married and twice divorced, Toni enjoyed only fleeting happiness. Denied her chosen career by the FBI, she never seemed to recover her footing.
After her second divorce, she became good friends with another recent arrival on the island, June Katherine Barlas, a woman eight years older. With Barlas and others, Toni rarely talked about her parents. “But when she did mention her father,” recalled Barlas, “it was always lovingly.” She often wore a ponytail holder that had been given to her by Robert—and she’d become very upset if she ever misplaced it. She avoided discussing the 1954 hearing, other than to say on occasion “that those men had destroyed her father.”
But clearly, she still had issues with her parents. For a time, she saw a psychiatrist in St. Thomas, and she told her friend Inga Hiilivirta that this experience had helped her to understand “her resentment toward her parents from the way she had been treated as a young child.” She suffered from fits of depression. One day, determined to drown herself, she started swimming out from Hawksnest Bay toward Carval Rock, where Robert’s ashes rested on the sea bottom in an urn. She swam for a long time straight out across the ocean—and then, as she later confided to a friend—she suddenly felt better and turned back to shore.
On a Sunday afternoon in January 1977, she hanged herself in the beach cottage Robert had built on Hawksnest Bay. Her suicide was clearly premeditated. On her bed Toni had left a $10,000 bond and a will deeding the house to “the people of St. John.” She was beloved throughout the island. “Everybody loved her,” Barlas said, “but she didn’t know that.” Hundreds came to the funeral—so many, in fact, that scores had to stand outside the small church in Cruz Bay.
The cottage on Hawksnest Bay is now gone, swept away by a hurricane, but in its place is a community house standing on what is now called Oppenheimer Beach.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
“My Long Ride with Oppie”
BY MARTIN J. SHERWIN
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER was an accomplished horseman, and so it was not entirely bizarre that in the summer of 1979 I sought to give new meaning to the scholarly concept of Sitzfleisch (sitting flesh) by starting my research for his biography on horseback. My adventure began at the Los Pinos Ranch, located ten miles above Cowles, New Mexico, from which in the summer of 1922, Oppie had first explored the beautiful Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I had not ridden for decades and, to say the least, the prospect of the long ride ahead—actually and metaphorically—was daunting. My destination, several hours by horseback from Los Pinos, over the 10,000 foot summit of Grass Mountain, was the “Oppenheimer ranch,” Perro Caliente, the spare cabin on 154 acres of spectacular mountainside that Oppie had leased in the 1930s and purchased in 1947.
Bill McSweeney, the owner of Los Pinos, was our trail guide and local historian. Among other things, he told us (my wife and children were with me) about the tragic death—during a burglary of her Santa Fe home in 1961—of Oppie’s good friend, Katherine Chaves Page, the ranch’s previous owner. Oppie had met Katherine during his first visit to New Mexico and his youthful infatuation with her was one of the strong inducements repeatedly pulling him back to this beautiful country. After purchasing his own ranch, Oppie rented several of Katherine’s horses each summer, for himself, his younger brother, Frank (and, after 1940, his wife, Kitty), and their stream of guests, mostly physicists who had never mounted anything more independent-minded than a bicycle.
My trip had two purposes. The first was to share in a small way the experience that Oppie had so often shared with his friends, th
e liberating joy of riding on horseback through this awesome wilderness. The second purpose was to talk with his son, Peter, who was living in the family cabin. As I helped him build a corral, we talked for over an hour about his family and his life. It was a memorable beginning.
A few months earlier, I had signed a contract with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a biography of Robert Oppenheimer—physicist, founder in the 1930s of America’s leading school of theoretical physics, erstwhile political activist, “father of the atomic bomb,” prominent government adviser, director of the Institute for Advanced Study, public intellectual and the most prominent victim of the McCarthy era. The manuscript would be completed in four or five years, I assured my then editor, Angus Cameron, who is one of the dedicatees of this book.
During the next half-dozen years I traveled across the country and abroad, propelled from introduction to introduction, conducting many more interviews with those who had known Oppenheimer than I had imagined possible. I visited scores of archives and libraries, gathered tens of thousands of letters, memoranda and government documents—10,000 pages from the FBI alone—and eventually came to understand that any study of Robert Oppenheimer must necessarily encompass far more than his own life. His personal story, with all its public aspects and ramifications was more complicated, and shed vastly more light on the America of his day, than either Angus or I had anticipated. It is an indication of this complexity, this depth and wider resonance—of Oppenheimer’s iconic standing—that since his death, his story has taken on a new life, as books, movies, plays, articles and now an opera (Dr. Atomic), have etched his shadow ever more sharply on the pages of American and world history.
Twenty-five years after I started out on that ride to Perro Caliente, the writing of Oppenheimer’s life has given me a new understanding of the complexities of biography. It has been sometimes an arduous journey but always an exhilarating one. Five years ago, soon after my good friend Kai Bird completed The Color of Truth, a joint biography of McGeorge and William Bundy, I invited him to join me. Oppenheimer was big enough for both of us and I knew my pace would be quicker with Kai as my partner. Together we have finished what turned out to be a very long ride.
We both have many people who shared our journey and nurtured the dream of this book. Another worthy dedicatee of American Prometheus is the late Jean Mayer, president of Tufts University, a man whom I deeply admired. In 1986, Mayer appointed me the founding director of the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center (NAHHC), an organization devoted to the study of the dangers associated with the nuclear arms race that Oppenheimer had confronted. Oppenheimer’s life story also inspired the Global Classroom project, an American-Soviet program that from 1988 to 1992 connected students at universities in Moscow and Tufts University to discuss the nuclear arms race and other pressing issues. Several times a year our discussions were linked by TV satellite, and broadcast throughout the Soviet Union and on selected PBS stations in the United States. Oppenheimer’s ideas shaped many of these remarkable moments in the evolution of glasnost.
We’d also like to thank two talented and accomplished women, our long suffering wives, Susan Sherwin and Susan Goldmark; they also have shared our long ride—and kept us in our respective saddles. We love them, respect them, and thank them for their special blends of patience and exasperation with our obsession for this book.
We also thank Ann Close, a seasoned Knopf editor whose Southern patience and attention to the smallest of details has enriched this book. She expertly shepherded a long manuscript to publication under an incredibly tight schedule. Our copy editor, the legendary Mel Rosenthal, sharpened our focus, improved our prose, and taught us how not to dangle our modifiers. We also thank Millicent Bennett for making sure that nothing got lost. Stephanie Kloss executed an elegant design for the book’s jacket. We thank the Washington, D.C. artist Steve Frietch for initially proposing the Alfred Eisenstadt portrait of Oppenheimer for the cover.
We are also deeply grateful to another wonderful editor, Bobbie Bristol, who nurtured and protected this book for decades before she retired and passed it on to Ann. But even under Bobbie’s protective care it could not have been sustained for a quarter of a century were it not for the serious intellectual culture and respect for authors that characterizes the publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf.
Gail Ross is both a lawyer and a book agent—and we are grateful to her for renegotiating the terms of a twenty-year-old contract with Knopf—and for many future lunches at La Tomate!
The “wily” Victor Navasky has been a friend and mentor to us both— and he deserves credit for having introduced us more than two decades ago. We are grateful for his wisdom and his friendship, and for his wonderful wife, Annie.
We are indebted to several eminent scholars who took the time to carefully read early versions of our manuscript. Jeremy Bernstein, also an Oppenheimer biographer, is an accomplished physicist and writer who did his patient best to correct our wrong-headed apprehensions of quantum physics.
Richard Polenberg, the Goldwin Smith Professor of American History at Cornell University, ruined his summer on our behalf by meticulously reading the entire manuscript and sharing with us both his knowledge of the Oppenheimer security case and his artful sensibility as a writer of history.
James Hershberg, William Lanouette, Howard Morland, Zygmunt Nagorski, Robert S. Norris, Marcus Raskin, Alex Sherwin and Andrea Sherwin Ripp also read all or parts of the manuscript and we are grateful for their insights and comments.
Over the years, we have benefited from the willingness of such formidable scholars as Gregg Herken, S. S. Schweber, Priscilla McMillan, Robert Crease, and the late Philip Stern to challenge us with their own ideas and scholarship about the controversial issues surrounding Oppenheimer’s life. Both of these fine historians have graciously shared documents and interview sources. Max Born’s biographer, Nancy Greenspan, generously shared the fruits of her research. We are indebted to Jim Hijiya for his scholarly interpretation of Oppenheimer’s fascination with the Bhagavad-Gita. More recently, we have encountered the work of the British historian of science, Charles Thorpe, and we thank him for permission to quote from his doctoral dissertation—a version of which will soon be published.
We wish to thank Drs. Curtis Bristol and Floyd Galler and the psychoanalyst Sharon Alperovitz for their psychological insights about Oppenheimer’s early life. Dr. Jeffrey Kelman graciously helped us to interpret the autopsy report and other medical records pertaining to the death of Dr. Jean Tatlock. Dr. Daniel Benveniste shared with us his insights on Oppenheimer’s study of psychoanalysis with Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld. We are indebted to the late Alice Kimball Smith and to Charles Weiner whose superbly annotated collection of Oppenheimer’s correspondence inspired many of our interpretations. We similarly owe a debt to Richard G. Hewlett and Jack Holl for their assistance during the earliest stages of this book, and for their excellent official histories of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Many dedicated archivists went out of their way to guide us through many thousands of pages of official documents and private papers. We wish to thank in particular Linda Sandoval and Roger A. Meade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives; Ben Primer at Princeton University; Dr. Peter Goddard, Georgia Whidden and Christine Ferrara, Rosanna Jaffin at the Institute for Advanced Study; John Stewart and Sheldon Stern at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics; John Earl Haynes at the Library of Congress; and the many others who assisted us at the libraries and archives listed on pages 601 and 602.
These and many other archivists at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and archives at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California’s Bancroft Library are working hard to preserve our history.
As both American citizens and historians we salute all who have supported and sustained the Freedom of Information/Privacy Act. It has not only made access to FBI, CIA and other previously closed government investigative files available
to historians and journalists, but more importantly, it has contributed to sustaining our democracy.
No book of this scope can be researched without the assistance of young and energetic students of history. A select group of them associated with the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center (NAHHC) at Tufts University prepared chronologies, analyzed and organized documents, researched articles and transcribed hundreds of hours of interviews. Susanne LaFeber Kahl and Meredith Mosier Pasciuto, both Tufts graduates, and both brilliantly efficient administrators, organized this work and contributed research of their own.
A remarkable group of research assistants and graduate students at NAHHC contributed in numerous ways. Miri Navasky, now a talented documentary filmmaker, spent many long hours searching out documents and creating a chronology of Kitty Oppenheimer’s life. Jim Hershberg constantly asked probing questions and enthusiastically shared documents that he had gathered for his magisterial biography of James Conant. Debbie Herron Hand efficiently transcribed interviews. Tanya Gassel, Hans Fenstermacher, Gerry Gendlin, Yaacov Tygiel, Dan Lieberfeld, Philip Nash, and Dan Hornig all provided intellectual and moral support.
Peter Schwartz did some of the early spadework in San Francisco Bay Area archives. Erin Dwyer and Cara Thomas typed corrections into the final chapters, Patrick J. Tweed, Pascal van der Pijl and Euijin Jung also assisted us in the research of this book.
Many other friends and colleagues have sustained us over the years it has taken to write this biography.