An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

ONE BY ONE, ROBERT'S COLLEAGUES began to receive appointments. Ernest Lawrence wanted—and needed—Robert to be in on the planning stages but there was a problem. Robert would need a security clearance to work on such a top-secret project. It was clear to Lawrence, and it aggravated him to no end, that Robert had been foolish enough to involve himself in left-wing politics. That Kitty's mother's cousin was a member of Hitler's inner circle didn't seem to alarm Army security or the FBI nearly as much as her Communist connections. It didn't help that Robert was surrounded by friends of all shades of red, and had three Communists in his own family.

  TOO OFTEN HISTORY ERASES THE trenchant moment; no one knows what Robert said the first time he saw Jean either before or after Reno, if he told her he was to be married, if he confessed that he was about to become a father, if he tried to explain anything. His relationship with Jean always had been private and remained so. (Serber, who was close to Robert, had never seen them together except for once at a distance, walking along an avenue near Robert and Kitty's home.) Some of the conversation between Robert and Jean can be inferred by what was not said. He did not say, "I cannot see you again." He did not say that his marriage would exclude her from his life. He did not say that he no longer loved her.

  And much later, when asked if, after he met Kitty, his relationship with Jean had become "fairly casual," he answered no, it would be wrong to say his feelings for her were casual; there was always deep feeling when they saw each other. And they did continue to see each other. Sometimes he would drive to the hospital to see her, or to her home in the city. They had been together at New Year's in 1941. Once they had met at the elegant bar in the Mark Hopkins hotel, the "Top of the Mark," at the very peak of Nob Hill, one of the highest points in the city. It was a poignantly romantic place, often fog-shrouded. During the war, the Top of the Mark would become legendary as a place where young men in uniform took their girlfriends or wives to say goodbye.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1941, Kitty and Robert drove the Cadillac south to Pasadena, where they rented a house with a garden and a guest cottage. The Tolmans and Val were in Washington, and with Kitty in her last month of pregnancy and Robert down with a case of mononucleosis, their social life was drastically curtailed. On May 21, their eight-pound son was born—"premature," Kitty would offer with a grin. They named him Peter. Two weeks later, Robert and Kitty invited the Chevaliers to visit and stay in their guest cottage. They came at once; sometime that week the Oppenheimers hosted a party for about twenty-five physicists.

  On Sunday, June 22, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The Oppenheimers and Chevaliers sat up until early in the morning listening to the radio newscasts, to Churchill's speech excoriating Hitler and offering the Soviet Union British aid. Chevalier remembered that Robert said the invasion was a major blunder on Hitler's part, and would probably cost him the war. "The communist and democratic forces were now allies committed to fighting their common fascist enemy," Chevalier wrote.260 He did not guess that the security apparatus of the U.S. government was not so sanguine about America's new ally.

  Both couples returned to Berkeley later that July. Robert did a quick walk-through of a house for sale only a few blocks away from their sublet, at the top of a knoll at One Eagle Hill. The Spanish style house had a baronial living room with high ceilings, a massive fireplace and windows that offered wide views of San Francisco and the Bay. A tiled dining room opened onto a terrace; there was a modern kitchen and laundry, a servant's room, and gardens dripping with wisteria. Perfect for entertaining, for raising a family and for hanging some of the paintings Robert had inherited (then in storage at a San Francisco museum). He made an instant decision on the house, paid the full asking price ($22,500 plus $3,500 for the adjoining lots). Robert and Kitty said they would move in a month later. They wanted to spend the rest of the summer at Perro Caliente. The only problem was six-week-old Peter.

  "Opje and Kitty came to us with a proposal that deeply flattered us," Chevalier would write. "Opje felt that Kitty badly needed a thorough rest. They would like to go and spend several quiet weeks on Opje's ranch in New Mexico. But the ranch was too remote and conditions there too primitive for them to think of taking the baby with them. Besides, Kitty needed to be relieved for a while of the responsibility of taking care of the baby."261 Opje proposed that they leave Peter with the Chevaliers, along with their newly-hired German nurse. Peter and the nurse were deposited with the Chevaliers, and Kitty and Robert turned Bombsight south towards Perro Caliente.

  SINCE THE PREVIOUS SUMMER WHEN Kitty had appeared so dramatically, the social situation had shifted. Kitty now saw herself as part of the academic elite, or at least assumed that she would be when she got her doctorate. The Serbers did not turn up until mid-July that summer and when they did, they found Jackie, who took pride in her working class origins, and Kitty locked in conflicting roles.262 It was a situation that was to tear at the brothers.

  That summer Kitty pitched in to help shingle the roof of the cabin, and entertained the others by standing on her horse while circling one of the meadows. But Serber complained that it was "a bad luck summer." In the corral, Charlotte's horse had kicked Robert on the knee, leaving him with a painful bruise. A few days later Kitty was driving the Cadillac into Santa Fe when she slammed into a car in front of her, hurt her leg and had to go to the hospital. With Kitty and Robert unable to ride, the ranch didn't offer enough excitement. They were suddenly eager to get back to their new house, so they left New Mexico at the beginning of August—not a moment too soon for Jackie. She, Frank, Charlotte and Bob immediately saddled up and headed into the wilderness for a six-day pack trip before closing the cabin for the season.

  The Serbers had a month before classes started in Illinois, so they drove back north to help with the move into One Eagle Hill. Kitty and Robert were to leave Peter and his Germany nanny at the Chevaliers for another month. Looking back on this period, Robert would wonder if, so soon after the intensity of their courtship, Kitty had been ready for motherhood. Certainly she did not see herself as the kind of wife and mother who would make family her life's work. What she had at the moment was a baby and no doctorate. It was Robert who showed Peter off when friends came; Kitty spent time hiring household help and continuing her studies. With her botany classes starting later in August, she had little time to spend cooing over a newborn.

  ONE MONTH AFTER PETER OPPENHEIMER'S birth, Jean graduated from Stanford. During the winter of 1940–41, not long after Robert married Kitty, Jean had applied for an internship at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. She may have wanted to get away from the Bay Area. For someone who wanted to become a psychiatrist, with a focus on children, St. Elizabeth's was a good choice. It was the nation's oldest public facility for treating the mentally ill.

  By June of 1941, the imposing redbrick Gothic Revival structure had more than 1,000 psychiatric patients. By the time Jean arrived, the director Winfred Overholser had begun to introduce innovative treatments—therapy, art, psychodrama, electro-shock therapy and tranquilizing drugs. As an intern, Jean would have started her intensive training working with mentally ill children, many of them poor and black. Six months after she arrived, St. Elizabeth's opened a new Theater for Psychodrama. Dr. Jacob Levi Moreno, who rejected reliance on Freudian methods, began to develop alternate treatments that stressed interpersonal relationships, including group therapy and psychodrama. Jean, with her love of acting and the theater, would have been fascinated with the therapy Moreno described as "'Shakespearean' psychiatry as we are all improvisational actors on the stage of life."263

  On December 7, 1941, Ruth and Jean were living on opposite sides of the District of Columbia when they heard the Japanese had made a sunrise attack on Hawaii, decimating the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. Across the continent in Berkeley, Kitty and Robert heard the news as they were finishing breakfast that Sunday morning. The night before, they had attended a Spanish Relief party. Robert suddenly decided he'd had enough of the Spanish cause, and turne
d his attention to the coming crises. On December 8, the United States declared war on Japan, and three days later, on Germany and Italy.

  18

  WORK BEGINS ON THE BOMBS, RICHARD TOLMAN VOUCHES FOR ROBERT, AND RUTH THINKS, "THOUGH THE WOODS ARE FULL OF WONDERFUL PEOPLE, MAYBE THERE OUGHT NEVER TO HAVE BEEN ANY PSYCHOLOGISTS IN D.C."

  With America suddenly in the war that Sunday in December, the government began to take the building of an atomic bomb more seriously. In the spring, Britain's uranium research group, the MAUD Committee,264 reported that the bomb was not only feasible, but would take only a year or two to develop. (Patrick Blackett, Robert's one-time tutor at Oxford, and the recipient of "the poison apple," was a MAUD committee member.) The British, preoccupied by the Germans in North Africa, and without the considerable resources such a project required, turned to the Americans.

  Robert suddenly found himself with the odd title of "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture"; his job was to gather a group of the country's top theoretical physicists to confirm that the British were right about the bomb, and if they were, to come up with a design. Robert brought in, among others, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller—Jews who had fled the Nazis. Richard Tolman was there in a dual role, as vice chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and as a physicist. He took part in the discussions about not just how to make an atomic bomb, but how to make one small enough to be dropped from an airplane. The theorists agreed almost immediately: the bomb was possible, and they drafted a potential design.

  The Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall approved the project, code named Manhattan Engineering District, usually called the Manhattan Project. What had been the physicists' deepest dream— to unlock the secrets of nature—shifted to making an astounding new weapon that would almost certainly win the war. In September 1942, Army General Leslie Groves became Military Director of the project. Groves knew how to get things done—he had supervised the building of the Pentagon—but he knew little, if anything, about nuclear physics. Richard became Groves' personal scientific advisor and helped him select a director to coordinate the building of the bomb.265 Robert's name was on a short list of the men deemed capable, but the War Department made it clear that he would not be given security clearance. Too many close Communist connections, and there were rumors that he had even joined the Party himself, though he consistently denied it.

  Groves was an arrogant, self-assured West Pointer, brusque of manner, with solidly embedded conservative opinions, and was often dismissive of academics. Robert was his polar opposite. Richard, who commanded respect in both military and academic worlds, assured Groves that Robert had "integrity, discretion, and loyalty to the United States."266 The General had no patience for those who dabbled in what he considered political nonsense, and he was not impressed with Robert's breadth of esoteric knowledge. But he sensed something in Robert—and to everybody's surprise, Groves named him director of a secret laboratory that did not yet exist. Suddenly, all the university cocktail-party chatter fueled by physicists about weapons of almost unimaginable destructive power ceased. Official secrecy wrapped around the project, until all talk of atomic bombs was stifled.

  During the Christmas holidays that year, Oppenheimer took the first of what would become a series of recruiting trips. Serber signed on as Robert's assistant. When Charlotte and Bob arrived in Berkeley some months later, they were amazed by the changes war had brought. The Richmond shipyards were up and running, workers had flocked in, and vacant housing was all but nonexistent. The couple moved into the room over the garage at One Eagle Hill. Blackouts were enforced at night; cars had headlights painted black, with only a slit to let out light. The only problem, Serber pointed out, was that from Eagle Hill, the night sky was lit up by what would be a major target: the Richmond shipyard, which was turning out warships at a record pace.267

  Robert took a leave of absence; Kitty gave up her graduate classes to sign on for 50 cents an hour at one of the labs at the university, working with the Department of Agriculture. She was also presiding over dinners for the many physicists who kept turning up in Berkeley and a household staff that included a maid and the German nurse for young Peter. Robert and Kitty now had less time together; during the week they would drive to campus, park the Cadillac, give each other a goodbye kiss and go to their separate buildings.268

  JEAN HAD RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO from the East Coast, to a residency program at Mt. Zion Hospital, where she worked alongside some of the Stanford psychologists that Robert admired. Their circles remained intertwined. He continued to attend the psychoanalytic study group started by Siegfried Bernfeld, along with Edward Tolman, Erik Erikson, Jean Macfarlane and a host of other Bay area luminaries in the field of psychotherapy. Bernfeld remained Jean's mentor at Mt. Zion, and would also become her psychoanalyst.

  Kitty could tell herself that she understood how Robert might feel about a former lover. She had loved Joe, would always love Joe. Still, it must have rankled that Jean was well-connected and warmly accepted by academics as well as the left-wing political movement. Even if Jean, like Joe, dismissed the idea of social class and professed herself a Communist, Kitty would have recognized that Jean was part of the American elite. Kitty herself had spent a short stint as a Harvard man's wife; she knew the terrain.

  WHILE WORKING IN THE CHILDREN'S wards at St. Elizabeth's, Jean had become painfully aware of the many ways a child's mind can be ravaged. She wanted to believe that Bernfeld was right when he said there was a correlation between psychoanalysis and scientific principles, but the field of child psychology was still in its infancy, and could not yet offer effective treatments. The same was true of her own malady; there was no course of action that could ease the despair she felt when in the throes of one of her deep depressions. They could start with a period of elation, of excessive energy and racing thoughts, followed by feelings of utter desolation. Yet even as she struggled with depression, she was to present herself as the intelligent and engagingly competent young doctor she was.269 Most of her colleagues were not aware of her affliction.

  In the months after Jean's return from Washington, she would have guessed that Robert's frequent trips out of town had to do with his new role in the war effort. Jean was not the kind of woman who left things unsaid. They had been lovers and confidants. They knew each other too well not to explore what might be, and that would include how much they wanted or needed to be in each other's lives. That he made the effort to see her, not often but consistently, indicated he was conflicted. For Jean, the questions became: How strongly did she feel about him? And did it matter that he had a wife and child?

  About the imminent future, Robert would have given Jean some oblique hints. He had taken a leave of absence from the university and would be leaving Berkeley, but he couldn't say where he was going, or how long he would be gone. It was the same story thousands of young men were telling the people they loved as the country girded for war.

  Jean asked to see him before he left, and he said yes, he would see her to say goodbye.

  KITTY BEGAN TO MAKE REGULAR trips to the San Francisco airport to drop off or pick up Robert. He was using all of his charm and powers of persuasion to put together a team that would be "willing to disappear into the New Mexico desert for an indeterminate period."270 One by one they signed on; many were still graduate students, their doctorates would have to wait until after the war. Robert could not tell his new recruits exactly where they would be going, only that it would be for the duration. They could bring their families, but once they were on site they were not to leave, and those who left families behind could not divulge their location. The scientists were not to speak of their work to anyone, not even to the wives who might come with them to the secret mountain.271

  RUTH TOLMAN'S U.S. GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL file noted that the color of her eyes was brown; her hair, gray; her complexion "dark." She was 5 foot 5 inches tall and weighed 125 pounds. She had a slim, youthful figure, even if her hair wa
s beginning to turn gray. According to one of Edward Tolman's graduate students, one of Ruth's many young admirers, "She's 50 years old but she is as charming as a woman of 30."272

  In 1942 Ruth was transferred out of Agriculture,where she had been following trends in public opinion and attitudes, to the domestic branch of the Office of War Information, where she became a "Public Opinion Analyst," responsible for studying popular attitudes on war-related subjects. Ruth Benedict also came to the Office of War Information and analyzed overseas cultures, particularly the Japanese. (The Japanese studies were the basis for her book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which would become a bestseller.) She and Val stayed in the house that Margaret Mead had rented, but the two spent many weekends at the Tolmans', especially when Richard was away.273

  Nat Raymond found what seemed, for her, an improbable niche. As she wrote to Ruth Benedict: "I simply must tell you about induction into the Quartermaster Corps . . . I survived the four-page forms, to be filled out in duplicate; and the residence form for the FBI, and the application form for the Army; and the form saying that I could get to Jersey City without either gas or tires; and the form asking for fingerprints (and getting them); and the form asking for identification disk (and getting it). I survived sitting and waiting, and two colonels, and the accounting department, and a physical examination with emphasis on flat feet. But when it came to going down last night to the Barge Office, and getting a Coast Guard identification card I gave up. When the yeoman asked, in line of duty, 'What do you want this for?' I said, 'I don't want it.' But they gave it to me anyhow, after another five forms, and another set of fingerprints for the FBI. And now I am on the government payroll for three weeks."274

  WHEN A COLLEAGUE IN THE Psychology Department at UCLA wrote to Ruth with questions, she answered: "I don't wonder that you feel mystified by the problem of 'what Washington wants' and confused as to what happens to all the psychologists swallowed up here. To give you a little notion . . . the Bureau of Intelligence, in which Jack Hilgard, Ruth Tolman, Dan Katz and others [labored], has been liquidated . . . This is the second time in four months that some of us have been in one of these collapses." She added, "It's kinda frustrating—maybe there ought never to have been any psychologists in D.C."275