POSSIBLY IT WAS RICHARD WHO told Ruth about Jean's death or, more likely, Lillie Margaret or Edward's wife Kathleen. Or Robert. Possibly someone sent the newspaper clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Bay Area psychology group was intertwined; the Tolmans and the Tatlocks knew each other, professionally and socially, even politically. Jean Macfarlane had been a good friend to Marjorie Tatlock. All of them had known Robert's "sweetheart."
Long before he knew Jean, Ruth had been Robert's good and close friend. She had been a witness to his courtship of Jean, to his attempts to help her. It would be Ruth who would understand the nature of his time with Jean, Ruth who was to become his touchstone to a life and a love that was now lost to him.
22 JULY 1944
"My dear Winifred," John Tatlock wrote to his wife's best friend,"The hideous gash in my landscape stands out the same as ever; I wonder if it will ever fill with vines and shrubs. I wonder too if such a tragedy is not worse for a man than for a woman, because more serenity and usual activity is expected of a man—which of course in the long run is best for him. Most people, though not quite all, have been perceptive and have helped me to carry on.
"I know full well your loyal love for darling Jean (as well as for Marjorie). One of the hardest things has been her exclusion of me from her thoughts and intimacy, as she tragically excluded everyone. I could never show her that she had no idea what pain a human being can go through, and pass on beyond, even; for my policy was always to try to make her feel that I was always there, serene and with what solidity the Lord had given me, these to back her up; but never to encroach. I overdid this last. Yet in the worst moments my judgment tells me that I have not been blameworthy. So the inevitable self-vivisection of the last months does not prevent me from carrying on. At bottom the cause of the tragedy was a pitiful resistance to growing up.
Yours most sincerely,
J.S.P. Tatlock."315
THE SUMMER WORE ON IN Los Alamos, with August temperatures in the 80s. Kitty was bored and tired and five months pregnant. The unseen weight on Robert's shoulders was pressing him into a stoop. There was nothing Kitty could do about it; she scarcely saw him.
As librarian, Charlotte Serber had her own little duchy, and it became an insider's center for social gatherings. Kitty was left outside, with all the young twenty-something mothers whose hands were full managing babies and the difficulties of keeping house on the Hill. She might have found friends in what Oppenheimer's secretary called "the Frau Doctor sorts of people," but most were European Jews who may have been uncomfortable with Kitty's background. Even if they did not know her Nazi connections, they would have resented her sense of superiority; in short, she made people nervous. Kitty was just thirty-six, but she could not work up enthusiasm for the women's clubs and teas or community-building efforts. She had her house, the American Indian woman who worked more hours for her than for any of the others, and her own horses. And some of the Army wives joined her afternoon cocktail group.
Emily Morrison, wife of one of Robert's protégés, explained, "Kitty was a very strange woman. She would pick a pet, one of the wives, and be extraordinarily friendly with her, and then drop her for no reason. She had temporary favorites. That's the way she was. She did it to one person after another . . . She could be a very bewitching person but she was someone to be wary of."316
One of the women Kitty turned her attention to for a time was Shirley Barnett, the young wife of the project's pediatrician. Kitty would ask Shirley to lunch and shopping trips to Santa Fe, or even Albuquerque. "Kitty always had a bottle of something with her when she was driving," Shirley remembered, "and you could always tell when she was getting drunk because she would talk more freely . . . She was fascinating but not very nice. She was not very happy and you got the sense that she never really had been."317
ONE YEAR INTO THE ASSIGNMENT, Los Alamos was beginning to wear on its residents. Louis Hempelmann didn't mind saying what others were thinking: At first it was lots of fun, but "after a while everybody got tired and tense and irritable." On December 7, exactly three years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Kitty gave birth to a daughter at the Los Alamos hospital. Named Katherine for her mother, her first nickname was "Tyke," but her lasting pet name became "Toni."
It was cold that January and Kitty spent her days with drapes drawn, stretched out on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and probably drinking as the afternoon wore on. The pediatrician's wife came to visit and was alarmed by Kitty's languor. The house seemed morose. Then Kitty declared she had to get away, to go home to Pennsylvania. She would agree to take Peter—her mother could deal with a three-year-old, but not with a four-month-old baby. Kitty had trouble dealing with either of them.
No doubt General Groves wished that the families had never been allowed to come to Los Alamos, but he knew that if he were to succeed with this $2 billion project that would define his career, he was going to have to keep the "crackpots" as he referred to the scientists, focused.318 He decided it was time to loosen security and allow the civilians a few days off, even a week. He made an exception for Kitty and granted her request to go home to Pittsburgh for an indefinite period, even if her mother was the cousin of one of Hitler's top generals.
Henry Barnett, the pediatrician, crafted a plan to help Kitty get away. Pat Sherr, the wife of one of the young Princeton physicists, had a four-year-old daughter and was expecting again. But she was also in mourning for her son Michael, who had died that winter. Barnett asked Pat if she would consider taking care of a baby—the director's baby—for a short time. Kitty, he explained, was feeling depressed and needed to go home to her parents. Pat didn't know either of the Oppenheimers, she was just twenty-four, her husband, Rubby, twenty-seven. And she didn't understand the request. Barnett tried to explain: he thought it would help her come to terms with Michael's death. And it would be doing a tremendous favor to the Oppenheimers, to know that someone so responsible would be taking care of their baby.
After Peter's birth, the Chevaliers had cared for Peter for two months so Kitty could get away. Now Pat Sherr was taking on a four-month-old whose parents were all but strangers. Kitty would be gone for three-and-a-half months; Robert would stop by the Sherr's house twice a week, as if fulfilling a responsibility. At first he would sit and visit with Pat, and not ask to see his daughter. When Pat brought Toni to him, he held her awkwardly. "He held your attention by speaking in the lowest of low voices so that you had to sit at the edge of you chair to catch all of those gorgeous words," Pat recalled. And yet one afternoon, after several months of these duty visits, Robert—usually so verbally adept—mumbled out a few words about how much Pat seemed to love the baby. He then asked Pat if she "would like to adopt her?" Pat was dumbstruck. Her answer was unequivocal: "Of course not . . . She has two perfectly good parents." Why, she wanted to know, would he even think of such a thing?
Robert's reply was heartbreakingly simple: "I can't love her."319
At that moment his wracked body was eroding under the pressure of the battalions of people that needed his time and attention. The science was only part of it; the demands of family only part; since his arrival at Los Alamos, and especially after what was to be his last time with Jean, the intelligence officers had pushed at him, questioned him, challenged him. They read his mail, tapped his phone, followed him, prodded him for something—anything—that might turn up an enemy spy ring or a lingering Communist connection.
Kitty, sensing it was the right maneuver, and ambitious for Robert, now vehemently denounced Communism and her past. Robert had alarmed the security officers in August 1943 (not quite two months after his last visit with Jean) when he told them that the Shell Oil chemist who had spoken with Chevalier "might bear watching." All the alarms had gone off. Lt. Colonel Pash immediately questioned Robert, who gave him the later-to-be-famous cock-and-bull story of two, maybe three, persons being involved. Chevalier had been the messenger, but Robert refused to bring his friend's name into it. For a time he gave Pash and
Military Intelligence obscure answers instead of a name; he embroidered the story, a strategy that was to backfire. Finally, after holding off for many long months, when ordered by General Groves, he named Haakon Chevalier.
The security detail at Los Alamos spent their days checking passes, reading mail, keeping a watchful eye over everyone in their search for spies, and hounding Robert Oppenheimer. As it would turn out, they were looking in all the wrong places. The elaborate security apparatus in place at Los Alamos failed to find the several real traitors in their midst who did pass information to the Soviets: the most important of these was Klaus Fuchs, a physicist with the British contingent.320
22
FRANK JOINS ROBERT FOR THE COUNTDOWN TO TRINITY, AND KITTY WAITS TO HEAR IF SHE SHOULD CHANGE THE SHEETS
Early in the spring of 1945, Kitty and Peter boarded the eastward-bound Acheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe at Lamy station and headed for Riegelsville, Pennsylvania. The journey would take them almost 2,000 miles to the Puenings' comfortable home near the city of Bethlehem. Keeping a lively four-year-old occupied on the crowded trains, with soldiers standing or sitting in the aisles, was demanding. But somehow they made their connections and arrived at Kitty's parents' home. Most likely, an agent tracked Kitty and Peter all the while, and probably kept watch on her parents as well.
Kaethe and Franz had experienced enough of their daughter's unexpected homecomings to wonder what she was running away from this time. She had all but disappeared from sight for two years, and if her letters offered any hint of where she might have been, it was redacted with heavy black pen. Her parents had no idea of what their son-in-law's mysterious role was, except that it seemed important.
IN AMERICA'S REVOLUTIONARY WAR, GENERAL George Washington had crossed the Delaware at Riegelsville to attack the British. George Washington didn't seem particularly historic to Kaethe Puening, who liked to repeat the family lore that one of her noble ancestors had fought in the Crusades in 1150.
Kitty's parents were living in England when the war broke out. In 1940 they had made their way back to America via the "spy route" to Lisbon, where they departed on the SS Exochorda, a luxury steamer that picked up stranded Americans and deposited them in New York City. By 1944, Allied forces were demolishing the German war machine. It was cause for celebration in most American homes, but though the Puenings wanted the Allies to win and the war to be over, the vanquished enemy included their families and the victory over them would involve destruction of places they knew and loved.
All across America, families listened to bulletins from the front on CBS's World News. Americans scoured newspapers, followed the battles on maps. The Puenings listened for mention of Münster, where Franz's sisters lived and which, as a headquarters for Panzer and Luftwaffe divisions, had endured heavy Allied bombing. On October 5, 1944, as the Allies advanced across France and entered Germany, the New York Times wrote "1,100 Flying Fortresses and Liberators, escorted by 750 Thunderbolt and Mustang fighter planes had 'delivered a series of smashing blows' on Münster."321
On April 3, about the time Kitty and Peter arrived in Riegelsville, the New York Times headlines reported fighting on the streets in Münster, and that the German commandant was refusing to surrender. The following day, a front page story reported that the tanks of the British Second Army and doughboys of the U.S. Seventeenth Airborne had found the city in flames. Some 90 percent of the old city was destroyed.322 The story that gave heart to Americans longing for an end to the war would have distressed the Puenings, worried about the fate of their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and their nephews who were still fighting for Germany.
Kaethe, sixty-three that spring, was the eldest of six in the Vissering clan. Two of her sisters had sons fighting in the war, and her brother's son was a Panzer commander. Another sister, Hildegard, was an assistant film director, most notoriously on the film J'Accuse, a Goebbels sponsored film supporting the Nazi euthanasia program in 1941.323* Kaethe had other cousins who were officers in the Wehrmacht. Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel was now the head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces); his brother Bodewin Keitel was a Lieutenant General and First General Staff Officer. On July 20, 1944, Kaethe and Franz would have heard radio reports of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler; from the front page headline of the New York Times the next day, they learned that Wilhelm Keitel, far from supporting the assassination attempt, "issued all the necessary instructions to all the fighting services and . . . military commanders" that Hitler was alive and in command, and that the suspects were to be arrested.324
* * *
* Kitty's aunt Hilde had worked with Wolfgang Liebeneiner, director of J'Accuse, a film supporting the euthanasia of a woman with multiple sclerosis, in collaboration with Josef Geobbel's Nazi Propoganda Ministry. He also directed, in 1956, the film The Trapp Family, which became the hit musical and film, The Sound of Music.
Kaethe no longer mentioned that she had once been engaged to Keitel.
On May 8, 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide, Field Marshal Keitel was left to sign the official surrender to the Russians in Berlin.325 That day was declared VE Day: Victory in Europe.
In the U.S., all radio programs were interrupted, a short burst of static and then the voice of President Harry Truman proclaimed, "This is a solemn but glorious hour . . . The flags of freedom fly all over Europe." In Washington, spontaneous celebrations broke out. In England, Prime Minister Winston Churchill intoned, "We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead."326
GENERAL GROVES, WITH RICHARD TOLMAN'S assistance, had ordered the top-secret Alsos Mission to determine Germany's progress on an atomic bomb. In command of Alsos was Colonel Boris Pash, a passionate anti-Communist (the same Boris Pash who had attempted to have Robert removed as director of Los Alamos after he spent the night with Jean, and who had Jean's phone tapped). Alsos headquarters in London was under the command of Major Robert Furman, the intelligence officer Tolman had briefed in the middle of Buzzard's Bay. Once again, Richard became the liaison between the Americans and the British.
The mission began in 1943 in Italy, its agents following immediately behind the Allied army as it battled across Europe. Finally, when the armies made their way into Strasbourg near the end of 1944, the Alsos team found what they had been looking for—the documents revealing that the Nazis did not have an atomic weapon. There had never been a race.327
Alsos' goal shifted quickly to keeping the German scientists and their laboratories out of Soviet hands. Between mid-April and VE Day, Pash and his men rounded up leading German physicists, including Heisenberg; they were then spirited them off to a country house in England.
VE DAY AT LOS ALAMOS was a mass of colliding emotions. Joy from the many who did not know the secrets of the Tech Area, and who assumed that with the Nazis defeated, and the Allies moving toward victory in the Pacific, they would all be going home soon. Some who did know the truth were disappointed that they hadn't produced an atomic bomb in time to shorten the war in Europe. Many felt a sense of relief that the Germans didn't have the weapon after all. Still others, including some scientists, wondered why work on the Gadget should continue now. Some admitted, in the exhausting buildup to complete this doomsday weapon, to having qualms. Yet no one actually stopped working; they were close now. And the government was footing the bill for the whole Manhattan Project, including other centers in Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Met Lab in Chicago. With such an enormous investment, results were expected. The race to develop the bomb shifted its focus to ending the war against Japan and the postwar struggle with the USSR.
Prime Minister Churchill was for staying the course: "Japan with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued."
JUST OUTSIDE OF GENERAL GROVES' office in Washington sat Anne Wilson, a pretty and spirited twenty-year-old who, when Groves offered her a job as his secretary in 1943, probably wrin
kled her nose and told him, "you're too ornery." Groves and Wilson had played tennis at the Army-Navy Club—her father was an admiral. Anne did take the job despite Groves' temperament, and found herself privy to the secrets of the Manhattan Project. She was often asked to listen to Groves-Oppenheimer conversations so she could take notes. When Robert came to Washington, he would stop by Anne's desk to chat. "I was just practically dumbstruck," Anne recalled, "because here was this legendary character and part of his legend was that all women fell on their faces in front of him."328 Anne did not fall on her face; Robert was twice her age, after all.
When Robert needed a new secretary in Los Alamos, he seemed in no hurry to find a replacement and turned down several possibilities. Finally Groves, exasperated, asked if he had anybody in mind. Robert rather coolly answered, "I think I'd like to have Miss Wilson." Groves called Miss Wilson. Knowing something about the exciting project in New Mexico, she said yes, she would like to go. (But when Lansdale, head of security for the Manhattan Project, offered to pay her to send monthly "reports" on Robert, she retorted that he should forget he ever said such a thing.)329
Then a curious thing happened. Anne had scarcely settled in at Los Alamos when, every three days, a florist from Santa Fe delivered a single rose. Pretty young woman that she was, Anne wondered out loud if she had a "secret lover." No one knew anything, but finally one person floated the notion that it was just the kind of thing Robert would do. Anne didn't know the identity of her secret admirer, but the whispers moved like the wind: the Boss was having an affair.
The whispers somehow reached Kitty. She went straight to Anne and, dispensing with the pleasantries, asked if she was seducing her husband. Anne must have stared at her as if she had lost her mind. Robert was . . . old. How could Kitty think she would be in the least interested in her husband? Kitty could not have misread the look on Anne's face. Anne and Kitty began a friendship that would survive for many years.
An Atomic Love Story Page 21