109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Shortly after Agnew deposited his equipment, he set off for the Big House, where he was told he would be sleeping for the time being. On his way, he spotted Los Alamos’s tall, thin director walking in the distance, wearing his distinctive porkpie hat. “Like a little puppy I bounded over to him and said, ‘Hello, Dr. Oppenheimer!’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Hello, Harold. Where’s Beverly?’” Oppie knew that Agnew’s pretty blonde wife had worked for the head of the Met Lab back in Chicago and had handed out the security passes. Given how seriously shorthanded they were on the Hill, his only thought was that an experienced secretary was of far greater importance than the addition of yet another physics student. A much chagrined Agnew found himself stammering an apology for his wife’s absence, explaining that Beverly had been given special dispensation to delay her arrival in order to visit her brother before he was shipped overseas and would be there shortly.

  The project was in desperate need of day laborers, and the years of poverty in the region meant that volunteers were not in short supply For the men and women from the neighboring pueblos of San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque, the meager wages the project offered seemed like a fortune. From her office at 109 East Palace, Dorothy helped screen hundreds of applicants, some of whom had packed their families into trailers and traveled across the state on the rumor of good wages. If they were at all qualified, they were given extensive applications to fill out. “We asked most of the questions,” she wrote. “All kinds, ages, and conditions of people came in seeking employment.” Some left an indelible impression. Under the heading “Occupation,” one officer who had been overseas with several different combat units listed his profession as “murder.” Under the heading “Equipment Used,” a woman who had worked in mess halls described her personal arsenal as “blue uniform and hair nets.” Waiting for security clearance to work on the site was hard on many of the prospective employees, particularly those who had traveled across the state for the interview, and Dorothy went through the long, painful process with them. “The two weeks required for that often consumed their funds and also their spirits,” she wrote. “They were tossed out of their hotels every three days, and the scarcity of housing in the ‘Land of Enchantment’ made the waiting doubly difficult.”

  The worst part was that security had ruled that employees from certain defense projects could not work on the Hill. The decision, however arbitrary it seemed, was final. There would be no explanation provided, and no room for appeal. A highly skilled man might present himself at Dorothy’s office and ask for work at Los Alamos, and she had no choice but to follow G-2’s instructions and look him straight in the eye and deny the project’s existence. “I can’t understand wherever you got that idea,” she would say through gritted teeth. “There’s nothing of that sort in Santa Fe that we know of.” Some of them had come so far, it broke her heart to send them away. “We were put in bad spots,” she said. “It was tragic sometimes.”

  Eventually, the new telephone line was installed and enough of the main structures had been completed to allow nearly a hundred scientists and their families to move up to the Hill. Groves had ordered the construction of technical buildings, an administration building, a mess hall, a theater, an infirmary, officers’ quarters, apartments, and barracks for the military personnel. On the south side of Ashley Pond was the Technical Area, consisting of five long, barnlike laboratory buildings, ringed by barbed wire and heavily guarded. West of the pond were row upon row of prefabricated apartment complexes all painted the regulation “o.d.” (olive drab), ending in barracks and dormitories, which overlooked the horse pastures. Oppenheimer had directed that the apartment buildings be laid out along the natural contours of the land and at an angle that retained as much of the magnificent mountain views as possible, but the effect was rather odd, as if they had been scattered by a storm. The rest of the town conformed to the gridiron pattern common to most military posts, dirt roads outlining the minimal housing section from the business section.

  To the east was what remained of the old school buildings, together with more ghastly green duplexes. The Big House served as bachelor quarters, recreation room, and library; the Arts and Crafts Building became schoolrooms and two residences; and the five-car garage was converted into a fire station. Fuller Lodge was turned into a hotel and restaurant, and the classrooms into the Post Exchange and assorted shops. The old Guest Cottage was reserved for General Groves and visiting dignitaries. There was a Commissary, where they could buy food, and the original Trading Post, which still sold an odd assortment of supplies, including animal feed, mousetraps, kerosene lamps, small boys’ T-shirts, underwear, and moccasins. The army turned it into another PX, and added basic drugstore supplies, cigarettes, souvenirs, and newspapers and periodicals. Everyone knew that Oppenheimer had battled the army engineers, so fond of cheek-by-jowl construction, to preserve the few tall trees on the mesa and the remaining vestiges of the old school’s charm. Groves had yielded to his wishes, but reportedly had grumbled, “All this nonsense because the families have to live here. If I could have my way and put all these scientists in uniform and in barracks, there would be no fuss and feathers.”

  The peaceful mesa Dorothy remembered was gone, replaced by the deafening roar of a rising war factory. Los Alamos looked like a frontier boomtown, “humming with rush and hurry,” she recalled. “Military cars swarm all over its winding streets. Buildings are erected overnight and they look it and feel it.” There was not much there, and what was there was raw and, for the most part, very ugly. The unpaved streets had no names, and the uniform military architecture made it next to impossible for Dorothy to get her bearings. The only way she could orient herself was by where the Serbers parked their red convertible. If they were not home, she had to rely on the tall wooden water tower, still prominent on the highest part of town.

  Oppenheimer and his family were already ensconced in the old Ranch School headmaster’s house at the end of a quiet road that was close to the heart of wartime Los Alamos. It was a sturdy cottage built of log and stone that was partly shielded by a small lawn, flowering shrubs, crab apple trees, and the wisteria that grew by the door. In the meritocracy of Los Alamos, individual importance to the laboratory dictated not only people’s social prestige but also the quality of housing they were assigned. Without doubt, the eight attractive old masters’ cottages were the most desirable, the Park Avenue of the plateau. The house opposite the Oppenheimers’ would go to another top administrator, Captain William (“Deke”) S. Parsons, an affable and experienced Annapolis graduate whom Groves brought in to run interference between the scientists and the military, and who would become assistant laboratory director. As one of the few men at Los Alamos with explosives training, he was also head of the Ordnance Division and would be in charge of dropping the bomb. His wife, Martha, was a “navy brat”—an admiral’s daughter. She had lived on bases all her life and so adapted quickly to Los Alamos. Despite being military people, the Parsons immediately endeared themselves to the scientists with their big, informal house parties. The remaining masters’ houses were divided into apartments, and the McMillans felt lucky to have snagged one next door to the Oppenheimers. Their residential street was a small oasis of serenity bequeathed by the previous owners, and was the first and most prominent class division in the pioneer town. Word quickly spread that Oppie and company were the privileged few to have private homes with all the amenities, and in honor of the luxury they alone enjoyed, the street was soon christened “Bathtub Row.”

  Over the next few weeks, the rest of the laboratory staff and their families migrated from the ranches in the valley to the new housing at Los Alamos as soon as the paint was dry. Nothing was ready, and almost no one’s belongings arrived on schedule, so in the beginning they slept on army-issue cots, supplied with sheets and blankets stamped “USED” in bold black letters, which bothered people no end until they learned this was an acronym for “United States Engineer Detachment.” Adjacent to Bathtub Row was
the area that quickly became known as Snob Hollow, where a dozen identical, green, four-family apartment houses were built along a street that started on the summit of the town, by the water tower, and sloped down to the edge of the mesa, where it faded into the green forest. There, senior scientists shared a quadriplex, occupying mirror-image apartments that were small and spare, but sufficient. Each family was shoe-horned into a two- or three-bedroom unit, with front porches that actually faced the mountain views and were seldom used, and narrow back stoops just steps off the road that were the actual entrances, and where folks stood and sipped their morning coffee in the sun and traded gossip.

  The close quarters were bound to make for bad neighbors. Some friction quickly developed between Alice and Cyril Smith and the Tellers, who lived downstairs from them, as Edward was a nocturnal creature who thought nothing of banging away on his grand piano at all hours of the night, disturbing those who worked more normal hours. But it could have been worse. The duplexes were even more claustrophobic; these were doled out to younger couples who did not have children, such as the Serbers and Agnews. Finally, all the Sundt apartments, named for the contractor, came with showers only and were much cursed for their shoddy construction and paper-thin walls, which permitted neighbors to hear every cough, quarrel, and baby’s cry. But Dorothy told those with a roof over their heads to count themselves lucky. She had some young couples sleeping on the portal of the lodge while they waited for the construction on their unit to be completed. Still others had to be housed at the old guest lodge at Bandelier National Monument, the site of spectacular Indian ruins, where archaeological excavations had revealed the remnants of huge pueblos carved into the soft rock of the cliff sides. Dorothy ruefully reflected that the Anasazi had once managed to find housing for thousands on the mountain, creating a complex network of ancient cities that stretched over seventeen miles in the canyons below.

  The whole administrative operation of Los Alamos was based at 109 East Palace from mid-March to the first of May, when Oppenheimer and company packed up their offices and disappeared “upstairs” for good. It was a big day, but also a moment for some sad farewells. It was not the distance so much as the heavy secrecy that made the separation seem so great. Dorothy promised to visit them all on the Hill as often as she could. Oppenheimer asked her to come with him and offered her a position on his personal staff. She also received similar invitations from Duane Muncy and his assistant, Isabel Bemis. But reluctant to leave her home in Santa Fe and uproot her son, Dorothy chose to stay behind. She would stick to her desk at the “housing office” and run the project’s lone outpost in town. She was the gatekeeper, safeguarding their secret city and shepherding newcomers up the primitive road and through the labyrinthine canyons like so many stray goats or cattle. What she did not tell them was that she had come to enjoy the importance of her position and the unique responsibility of being the porthole to the unknown. The scientists who passed through her door, she wrote, left behind everything they knew and cared about and “walked into the thick-walled quietness of the old Spanish dwelling at 109 East Palace as if into another world.”

  As the dormitories and apartments were completed at Los Alamos, the scientists converged on the mountain, and the rudimentary beginnings of a miniature city, and a new culture, began to take shape. Another tribe was colonizing the Pajarito Plateau almost eight hundred years after the first known permanent inhabitants of the region, the Keres-speaking “Hopituh”—“the People of Peace,” as they called themselves—had taken shelter there to escape the warring desert nomads below. Dorothy knew the rocky mesas had once been their sun temples, high and safe, and everywhere the invading scientists walked, they trampled on the remains of that ancient cliff-dwelling civilization, the fragments of pottery and hewn stone. She could not miss the irony that this settlement was for a very different reason than that earlier one, yet somehow she believed it followed from the same primal forces. Peace was again the objective, and to accomplish that, she wrote, the new inhabitants would build their “fantastic modern scientific laboratory” on the old pueblo ruins:

  One is scarcely aware that his foot descending from the jeep is crunching against ground full of potshards, and as the sun hits the steel and wire installations one can see a brighter shine than that of an arrowhead. But the arrowheads are there, and the awls, and the pots and feathers, and the fibre rings and the turquoise. And one can look across the angular buildings and survey the Sangre de Cristo Range in its myriad changes from Santa Fe to Taos, and know that at evening the mountains in snow or in green will be the color of amethyst. And the Tesuque, Nambe, Santa Cruz valleys contain villages, Rio en Medio, Chimayo, Sanctuario, Cordova, Truchas, where few speak English and burros carry wood on their backs as they wind their reluctant way down the mountains as other burros have done for centuries.

  It was a strange twist of fate that Oppenheimer, who had originally ventured out to New Mexico for his health, should return twenty years later on such a different mission and cross paths with Dorothy McKibbin, a recovered consumptive and six years his senior, who had made the same journey, for the same reason. They had in common their love of the land—the red earth and the deep-rooted civilization—and the strength and freedom they found there. It was an unspoken bond that joined them from the outset and accounted for the warm and trusting relationship that was at once apparent, and the deep attachment that would form in the months to come. She was the most unlikely of people to help usher in the atomic age. But perhaps better than anyone except Oppenheimer himself, Dorothy understood the turbulent change they were bringing to the mountaintop and, in accordance with the ancestral rites and ceremonial songs of the great pueblos, the symbolic seven worlds through which man climbs on his evolutionary journey, the dangerous myth-making they were engaged in. The scientists would remake and reshape the world with their own powerful brand of magic, and nothing would ever be the same again. But believing absolutely in the lightness of Oppenheimer’s vision, she never questioned him; she devoted herself completely to the laboratory and its leader, who, she wrote, “hold[s] the sun in new and streamlined machines on the old worn plateau.”

  SIX

  The Professor and the General

  ON APRIL 15, 1943, the Los Alamos laboratory formally opened for business. There was no fanfare or ribbon cutting that anyone can remember, but General Groves did put in an appearance, greeting Oppenheimer’s scientific brain trust with his oddly limp handshake. “Like a dead fish,” recalled Major Carlisle Smith, known to everyone as “Smitty,” a chemist who served as the project’s patent lawyer and all-purpose attorney. “I think that’s one reason so many half-smart civilians here never appreciated him.” Given his officious nature, Groves could not resist giving an orientation address, which amounted to a short lecture. He may have intended it as a pep talk, but to the gathering of young scientists, many of whom were still strongly opposed to being under the thumb of the military, he came across as boorish and doctrinaire.

  Afterward the physicist David Inglis observed to Teller how “out of place” the general appeared, and while Teller shared his view, he thought Groves’ speech was “about what would be expected from a person who knew nothing about the project he was supervising.” The scientists could not conceal their disdain for Groves, and it showed in their mocking grins and flip asides. Their collective cockiness was fostered by the recent realization that they were no longer humble academics, but members of a profession of paramount importance to the defense of their country. They were immune to the draft, exempt from the usual “need to know” wartime restrictions on research, and they had been hand-picked for a classified project. In short, there was no telling them anything.

  Groves more than returned their lack of regard, and he responded by reasserting his authority whenever possible. On a good day, he tolerated the scientists as “tempermental people” who “detested the uniform.” On a bad day, he blamed them for making his life “hell on earth.” His attitude of paternal condes
cension was made clear early on in the instructions he had given Oppenheimer, who duly passed them on to his troops: “Here at great expense the government has assembled the worlds largest collection of crackpots. Take good care of them.” It did not help morale that word had spread across the project that Groves had intended to bugle his ivory-tower recruits out of bed at dawn for an antiparachutist drill and was only talked out of this at the last minute. “You could see clear across the mesa and for miles and miles beyond,” Sam Allison marveled later. “I thought it was the unlikeliest place in the world for parachutists.”