THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY was founded in 1930. The intent was to create a world center for intellectual inquiry to "pursue advanced learning in fields of pure science and high scholarship." Built on one square mile of beautifully wooded land just next to the Princeton University campus, the two were separate, but shared close ties. The Institute offered no classes, no exams, no degrees; most of those invited already had advanced degrees from some of the world's most formidable universities. Both setting and idea were idyllic: those invited would be free to think about whatever they wished and, in the community of thinkers, perhaps arrive at altogether new knowledge. (After a visit to the Institute twelve years before, Robert had written to Frank that it was "a madhouse, its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation."367) The place could accommodate 150 visiting members, along with a small number of permanent faculty. Albert Einstein was the most celebrated; he spent the war years there, and would stay for the rest of his life.
In 1946, as Robert continued to put off final decisions about teaching, the Institute's Board of Trustees asked him to be their new director. Robert was known for the wide range of his intellectual pursuits, not only history and literature, but also some of the new social sciences (which many of the mathematicians did not consider to be science at all).
The trustee chosen to ask Robert was Lewis Strauss, who was on the Atomic Energy Commission. A self-made man, Strauss had not gone to college, but had worked his way to Wall Street, where he made millions. Jewish, and from the South—where his name was pronounced "Straws"—he would maintain his Southern drawl. As a protégé of Herbert Hoover, he had managed to get an appointment in the Office of the Navy during the war, and emerged an honorary Rear Admiral. Strauss, who liked to be addressed as "Admiral," understood how bureaucracy could be manipulated. Though Robert didn't realize it, the Admiral was a man to be reckoned with. Like Robert he could be critical and arrogant; but unlike Robert he was also petty and vindictive.
In December, Strauss had flown to Berkeley on business for the Commission; Ernest Lawrence and Robert met his plane. Strauss drew Robert aside and right on the tarmac offered him the directorship of the Institute. Robert played for time. Berkeley felt like home. Still, he was determined to keep trying to influence the nation's atomic energy policies, and that could only be done in Washington. The Princeton position would give him better proximity, and time. He knew now that he was talented as an administrator, and the Institute needed strong management. Finally, Robert decided that if he planned to continue taking part in the fate of the atom, the Institute would be an ideal home base from which to make an even greater impact in his field.
To tempt Kitty, he told her that Strauss had said the gardens were elaborate. Before long, she couldn't wait to get to New Jersey. This time she was sure her life would be different.
Not realizing that Strauss would be insulted by his wavering, Robert continued to delay. At the same time, he was undergoing another full security check for the top secret "Q" clearance required for his appointment as chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) on scientific matters for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
As part of this clearance investigation, FBI agents questioned Robert's colleagues. The chairman of the Berkeley physics department said that Robert was "about as radical as Franklin Delano Roosevelt." Ernest Lawrence, Robert's old pal, said he regarded Dr. Oppenheimer as "a grand person in every way." At Caltech, Linus Pauling told the FBI Robert was "unpredictable because he was volatile, complex and brilliant." For good measure he added that while Oppenheimer "might be an extreme radical," he now seems to "hold the views of the more conservative scientists such as those associated with the Army and Navy." Either Pauling was having fun with the FBI, or he was being sarcastic. Only Richard kept it to the point and curtly reminded the FBI agent that Oppenheimer had been in charge of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.
One of those permitted to read the FBI reports was Lewis Strauss, the most conservative member of the Commission. He was shaken by the extent of Robert's liberal, pre-war politics. But in the end, he came to believe the new investigation had turned up nothing that should prevent Robert from becoming the GAC chairman or the director of the Institute of Advanced Study. The rest of the commissioners agreed. The government granted Robert's "Q" clearance.
On April 5, 1947, an FBI teletype was sent from San Francisco to J. Edgar Hoover, advising that J. Robert Oppenheimer had accepted an important position at Princeton. The agent noted that Robert had returned to Berkeley, and that it was his opinion that "physical surveillance in this area has indicated no association with known communists, and is being discontinued today."368
J. Edgar Hoover did not agree.
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RICHARD IS AN "APPRECIATOR OF THE ODD FORMS THE HUMAN SPIRIT TAKES," ROBERT REDISCOVERS THE "SWEETNESS" OF PHYSICS, AND WHAT KITTY DOES WELL
"My heart is very full of many many things I want to say," Ruth wrote to Robert on August 24, 1947. "Like you," she went on, "I am grateful to be writing. Like you, I cannot yet quite accept the fact that the monthly visits will not be resumed." The Oppenheimers were spending the end of summer at Perro Caliente before leaving for Princeton and their new life. Ruth was writing in answer to what she called a "weary little letter" from Robert. The correspondence had troubled her, she told him, because of what, at first, she thought was his "sense of panic" about the future. She corrected herself and said, "It was not really panic. 'Appalled' was the word you used." Earlier in the summer she had written Robert, saying, "I think of you often there in that marvelous spot, riding the horses, enjoying the country . . . Here we miss you badly . . . thinking wistfully of your monthly calls."369
Robert had found himself in the West. He had built the most important theoretical physics program in the country at Berkeley, had become excited about teaching, had made close friends. He and his brother had challenged the mountains together and gathered their friends at Perro Caliente. It was in the West that he had found Jean, and had lost her. In the West he had been swept away in a tempestuous romance with Kitty, and had married her. It was where his children were born.
In the two years after the war, Robert's connection with Ruth had become more profound. Her love and respect for Richard was not diminished (a close friend would judge Ruth and Richard to be "totally suited for one another"370), but a growing intimacy with Robert seemed inevitable, stemming from the remarkable events they had witnessed together and from their mutual interests in each other's fields. Ruth radiated warmth; she would tilt her head when speaking to someone, inclining slightly toward them as if to indicate: tell me more. She had a curious mind; she made few demands; she listened and, at the right moment, offered thoughtful advice or asked the right question.
Robert and Ruth would speak often on the telephone—but rarely from his home or office lines, monitored by the FBI. They consistently worked to find little islands of time together. At the end of August in 1947, Ruth ended a chatty letter, "I am going East . . . but only to Detroit. If you should be there (I confess I can't quite imagine why) I am going to APA meetings. My address will be Hotel Statler. Come to us when you can, Robert. The guest house is always and completely yours."371 Her affection floated between the lines.
Even so, neither Ruth nor Robert had any intention of damaging their marriages. Richard had known Robert for almost twenty years (and was "close and dear to him," as Robert would say many years later) and he knew Ruth's capacity for affection. Richard was, as Jerry Bruner of Harvard (one of those who had a key to the Tolman house in Washington) noted, "A man of wry humor and enormous generosity, an appreciator of the odd forms the human spirit takes."372 He seemed to understand the nature of his wife's relationship to his younger friend. Kitty, congenitally jealous, could not.
In one letter to Robert, Ruth wrote that she and Richard had just returned from Northern California. With Lillie Margaret, they drove to the Chickering family summer home in the Sierras. "It was interesting afte
r ten years," Ruth wrote, "seeing the huge family of children and grandchildren—such a great clan now, with a most heartening stability and closeness. This way of life which is theirs provides a wonderful cushioning against neurosis and anxiety, in large part, I suppose, by its promise of security against loneliness."373 Ruth's perception of her cousin Alma's "great clan" as an antidote to loneliness would explain her need to hold close her small family and her circle of friends, especially after the upheaval of war.
ROBERT AND KITTY CLOSED, BUT didn't sell, the Eagle Hill house. They intended to spend part of their summers in the Bay Area. They went to a series of going away parties, and then arrived in Princeton in the middle of a very hot July.
In 1947, Princeton's population was 25,000. The Institute was situated on 600 acres of rolling meadows and woodlands. Olden Manor, the three-story colonial house set aside for the director, was right in the middle. Kitty and Robert, with six-year-old Peter and three-year-old Toni, had landed in a historic Early American countryside—George Washington had fought the Battle of Princeton there in 1777. The original Olden farmhouse had been built in 1696, a wing added in 1720. Generations of Oldens had added parlors, a music room, a library, a capacious country kitchen and ten bedrooms—eighteen rooms in all. The house was not grand, but pleasant and commodious enough for entertaining. It also came with a full-time live-in cook and groundskeeper. Robert and Kitty were expected to host cocktail parties and frequent dinners for visiting luminaries.
But all too soon, Kitty must have felt she had been banished to the countryside. The town had only one stoplight; Manhattan was about an hour train ride to the north and Washington, a three-and-a-half-hour ride south. Good for Robert, not so for Kitty. The people Robert was seeing to the north and south were the ones she wanted to know. Princeton, it has been said, was a community with character but no soul. Kitty had no interest in becoming part of the social life of this small and stuffy university town.
The Oppenheimers preferred an austere setting. Almost every room had been lined with bookshelves, and Robert had most of them torn out, leaving only one wall in the library. The "pictures" as he tended to call the art he had inherited from his father, were brought out of storage and Van Gogh's Enclosed Field with Rising Sun (Saint-Rémy, 1889) took the place of honor over the formal fireplace in the living room. For the dining room he chose a Derain, and a Vuillard for the music room.
Kitty put on her jeans and shirt and started on a large flower garden, enclosed by the crumbling stone remnants of an old barn. There was a paddock for their horses as well, and Topper and Step-up joined Peter's dog Buddy. To the outsiders, a perfect young family had moved in (even if the horses occasionally got loose and trampled the neighbor's garden374).
Robert understood Kitty well enough to play to her strengths; his gift-giving was legend and for her birthday not long after their arrival he had a large greenhouse built and attached to the back of the house. It was Robert's statement: she was a botanist. At least one guest was impressed by how seriously she took this work; others dismissed her passion for plants as pretentious. Kitty's particular interest was orchids; for birthdays or holidays Robert had exotic varieties shipped to her from the Big Island of Hawaii.
FOR ROBERT, THE INSTITUTE FOR Advanced Study was the base from which he launched the rest of his life, and where he would pick up where he had left off in Berkeley. The Institute became one of the centers where new boundaries of theoretical physics would be set. Robert's plan was to integrate other disciplines—literature, history, psychology—with the sciences. For Kitty, the Institute was simply a stage from which to begin yet again, a new and dynamic life.
Robert's office in Fuld Hall, the Institute's main building, was an easy quarter of a mile from the house. Across a grassy field, Kitty had a clear view of the hall. On any given day she might see Albert Einstein walking to or from his corner office, or Robert heading for his, which looked out on woods and meadows.
But it was not all bucolic. Stationed just outside of Robert's office was a stolid, no-nonsense safe filled with classified documents, with it a military guard. Like an elephant in the room, the safe was a constant reminder that Robert was chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission—the group that advised the commission and the government on scientific and technical matters. The trustees encouraged Robert's participation in government work, but before many months had passed, Rear Admiral Strauss would be having serious doubts about his director.
BACK IN PASADENA, THE TOLMANS continued to gather with friends including Stewart Harrison, who had remarried and, as a physician, treated various Caltech faculty members including Linus Pauling, the Tolmans, and friend Ruth Valentine. Nat came and went; Ruth Benedict and Val too. The war had worn them all. Bob Bacher had, with Robert's strong recommendation, taken his position at Caltech, and he and his wife Jean quickly became part of the Tolman circle.
"For a decade after the war," wrote close friend Jerry Bruner, now at Harvard, "Ruth Tolman played an incomparable role in holding together her friends— psychologists, psychoanalysts and physicists from all over the world. She did so whether at her home in Pasadena, or whether visiting in Berkeley, in Cambridge, in Princeton at the Oppenheimers', wherever." She was, he wrote, "the perfect confidante, a wise woman. It is difficult for me to separate what is personal from what is 'profession' or intellectual about Ruth. And that, of course, was part of her genius."375 Robert may have been Ruth's favorite correspondent, but he was far from her only one.
RICHARD NOW MOVED LIKE AN old man, his once handsome face weighted with accumulated weariness. Still there were moments of surprise and delight. On July 23, 1948, Ruth and Richard boarded the 12,000-ton British cruiser HMS Sheffield, docked at the U.S. Naval Base on Terminal Island in Long Beach. In a ceremony marked by the pomp at which the British excel, Vice Admiral Sir William Tennant presented Richard with the Order of the British Empire from a grateful King of England. The whimsical Richard, who always referred to himself as "of the yeomanry not the gentry,"376 accepted the King's honor with his usual grace. Though his part in making the infernal bomb had sometimes troubled his Quaker ethos.
WITHOUT INFLUENCE FROM ROBERT, THE University of Minnesota offered Frank a position on the faculty of the physics department at the University of Minnesota in 1947. He would be researching the high-altitude cosmic rays that continually bombard the earth. The Minnesota group, including a friend from Los Alamos and Berkeley days, Ed Lofgren (one of "Lawrence's boys"), began building cloud chambers, detectors encased in spheres and packed with sensors to load on huge helium balloons that could reach high into the atmosphere. Ernest Lawrence had clapped Frank on the back and told him he could always come back to Berkeley.
Frank was making discoveries and his group was having an exhilarating time, according to Lofgren377, on U.S. Navy ships, releasing the balloons in different parts of the world and then racing to retrieve them. Sometimes this involved slashing their way through jungle terrain, Indiana-Jones style. (And losing them, which was always "heartbreaking.") Frank was teaching, which made him happy. Then, in July of 1947, the Washington Times-Herald ran a front page headline trumpeting: "U.S. Atom Scientist's Brother Exposed as Communist." Frank was accused of being a card-carrying Party member. The dean at Minnesota told Frank he would have to deny the charges. He did. Emphatically. With the Minnesota administration tugging at him, he had a lawyer draw up a statement with what was becoming standard phrasing: "I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist party."378 It was only a matter of time before Frank would be called before a committee that would require him to swear to tell the whole truth, and he would admit he had lied.
Two years later, trouble was also on Robert's horizon. His chairmanship of the General Advisory Committee (the GAC) was about to become more complicated, thanks in part to Lawrence and Teller's insistence that the U.S. government should focus on the "Super." Lawrence sought lucrative government contracts for everbigger laboratories. Soon La
wrence and Teller were on their way to Washington to promote a new generation of nuclear weapons. To a man, the scientific advisors on the GAC believed this to be a formula for genocide. As long as the U.S. had a monopoly on atomic weaponry, they agreed that there was no reason to plunge ahead with expensive bigger bombs.379
WHEN KITTY ARRIVED AT PRINCETON the summer of 1947, she knew one person: Pat Sherr, who at Los Alamos had cared for Toni for the months when Kitty had escaped to her parents' home. After the war, Pat's husband had rejoined the Princeton physics faculty. Kitty had asked Pat to recommend a school for Peter, and soon after their arrival that hot summer, she invited the Sherrs to Olden Manor for a picnic. It had been two years since Los Alamos, and Pat was eager to see Toni. After a time a maid came out, carrying a sleepy little girl, who crawled into her father's lap and rested her face against his chest. Pat gave herself credit for having nurtured this pretty little girl; even so, she had a lingering feeling that she had been badly used.380
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