Robb: What were the occasions for your seeing her?
Robert: Of course, sometimes we saw each other socially with other people. I remember visiting her around New Year's of 1941.
Robb: Where?
Oppenheimer: I went to her home or to the hospital. I don't know which, and we went out for a drink at the Top of the Mark. I remember that she came more than once to visit our home in Berkeley.
Robb: You and Mrs. Oppenheimer?
Robert: Right. Her father lived around the corner not far from us in Berkeley. I visited her there once. I visited her, as I think I said earlier, in June or July of 1943.
Robb: I believe you said in connection with that that you had to see her.
Robert: Yes.
Robb: Why did you have to see her?
Robert: She had indicated a great desire to see me before we left. At that time I couldn't go. For one thing, I wasn't supposed to say where we were going or anything. I felt that she had to see me. She was undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was extremely unhappy.
Robb was building to the moment when he would take Robert's confession: Did you find out why she had to see you?
Robert: Because she was still in love with me.
Robb did not ask if Robert was still in love with her; he didn't need to, because the FBI files on their desks described the scene when Robert had met Jean that fateful day ten years before: "He rushed to meet a young lady . . . long dark hair, slim, attractive . . . whom he kissed and they walked away arm in arm." Not unhappy, not that day.
The questions flew back and forth:
Where did you see her? At her home.
Where was that? On Telegraph Hill.
When did you see her after that? She took me to the airport, and I never saw her again.
That was in 1943? Yes.
Was she a Communist at that time? We didn't even talk about it. I doubt it.
You have said in your answer that you knew she had been a Communist?
Yes. I knew that in the fall of 1937.
Was there any reason for you to believe that she wasn't still a Communist in 1943? No.
Pardon? There wasn't, except that I have stated in general terms what I thought and think of her relations with the Communist Party. I do not know what she was doing in 1943.
You have no reason to believe she wasn't a Communist, do you? No.
And then at last:
You spent the night with her, didn't you?
Yes.
With that, Robb attacked: That is when you were working on a secret war project? Did you think that consistent with good security?
Robert stumbled: It was, as a matter of fact. Not a word . . . it was as if he wanted to stop himself, to say no more—not a word—He recovered and finished with a curt: It was not good practice.
Robb paused: Didn't you think that put you in a rather difficult position had she been the kind of Communist that you have described her?
Robert wouldn't go that far. He answered: Oh, but she wasn't.
How did you know?
I knew her.
John Lansdale, the officer in charge of wartime security for General Groves, took the stand as a friendly witness. Garrison anticipated that Lansdale would give a positive answer to his somewhat innocuous question about Robert's ability to be discreet. Yes; I believed him to be discreet. Lansdale answered, then added, I thought it was indiscreet of him to visit Miss Tatlock.
Robb seized on Lansdale's response: You said that you thought Oppenheimer's discretion was very good, is that correct?
Lansdale: Yes sir.
Robb: You had no doubt, did you, that Jean Tatlock was a Communist?
Lansdale: She was certainly on our suspect list. I know now that she was a Communist. I cannot recall at the moment whether we were sure she was a Communist at that time.
Robb: Did your definition of very good discretion include spending the night with a known Communist woman?
Lansdale: No, it didn't. Our impression was that the interest was more romantic than otherwise, and that is the sole instance that I know . . . 446
Robb changed the subject abruptly, cutting Lansdale off before he could add anything positive about Robert.
ON APRIL 15, THE THIRD day of the Hearing, the Pittsburg Sun-Telegraph447 ran a front-page story, "Oppenheimer's Wife Bright Student." Kitty was identified as formerly from Aspinwall, and "an intellectual girl with an inclination to leftist views." The article concluded, "Kitty is one of the reasons her husband has been barred from atomic work."Her parents might have clipped the story from their local paper. Kitty was called to the witness chair two times. Dressed in a dark tailored suit with a white blouse, she sat up straight with her hands folded, (as a child she had been taught to sit still and not fidget, she would explain.) She answered in a clear and sometimes feisty voice. A lawyer from Garrison's firm guided Kitty though her carefully rehearsed testimony. He asked about her relationship with Joe Dallet and let her explain why she had joined the Party—and how she had drifted from it.448
Her joining the party was because, Kitty said, Joe very much wanted me to, and I didn't mind. The work she did was mostly office work, she typed and mimeographed leaflets and letters. And she had paid dues. Yes, she offered, 10 cents a week. Working to establish that Kitty had been an accidental Communist, the lawyer asked her to define her devotion to the Party. I don't think I could ever describe it as a devotion or even attachment. What interest I had in it decreased. She had become a Communist because she was in love with Joe. Her lack of commitment caused her to leave him. She said, I felt I didn't want to attend party meetings or do the kind of work that I was doing in the office. That made him unhappy. We agreed that we couldn't go on that way. Anyone who knew Kitty as the director's wife—at Los Alamos and the Institute—would recognize in her words the woman who did what she wanted to do.
Her association with Steve Nelson was certain to come up. At that moment, he was in jail charged with attempting to overthrow the government and was awaiting trial. The plan was to describe Nelson as a kind friend who took care of Kitty in the difficult weeks after Joe was killed in Spain. When asked why Nelson was invited to their home in Berkeley Kitty explained: We had a picnic lunch . . . We talked about the old days, family matters.
On the delicate matter of her own membership, Kitty was asked when she left the Party. In 1936, she answered, when she left Youngstown. She conveniently left out her plans to join Joe in Spain. Had she paid any dues since? No. How would she describe her current views on Communism? Very strongly against.
The chairman of the panel, Gordon Gray, then posed another version of the same question: Mrs. Oppenheimer, how did you leave the Communist Party?
Kitty: By walking away.
Gray became literal. The phrase "card-carrying Communist" was an epithet in common usage, and he wanted to know if she had a card. While I was in Youngstown, yes. What she had done with the card? Kitty brushed him off with: I have no idea.
The chairman shifted his attention to the matter of Steve Nelson, and whether or not he had discussed the Communist Party with Kitty. Her response was almost defiant: I would like to make it clear that I have always felt very friendly to Steve Nelson after he returned from Spain and spent the week with me in Paris. He helped me a great deal and the much later meeting with him was something that was simply friendship and nothing else.
ON MAY 4, KITTY RETURNED to the witness chair to be questioned by Gray and Robb. They wanted to know if Robert contributed to the Communist Party. Kitty said she knew that he did from time to time give money. But when Gray pressed her, and asked if money was given on a regular or periodic basis, Kitty retorted: Do you mean regular, or do you mean periodic?449
When Gray said he really meant "regular," Kitty observed: I think he did not.
Gray had a point to make. He asked if it was fair to say that Robert had made contributions to the Communist Party as late as 1942, which would mean that he had not stopped having anything to do with
the Party, as Kitty had testified. Gray added: I don't insist that you answer yes or no. You can answer that any way you wish.
Kitty shot back: I know that. Thank you. Then she said: I don't think that question is properly phrased.
Probably with more than a hint of exasperation, Gray asked: Do you understand what I am trying to get at? When Kitty said simply yes, he urged, Why don't you answer it that way? Kitty took her time: The reason I didn't like the phrase 'stopped having anything to do with the Communist Party' was because I don't think that Robert ever did—
Gray persisted in trying to pinpoint a date, until Kitty told him: Mr. Gray, Robert and I don't agree about everything. He sometimes remembers something different than the way I remember it.
Kitty was not losing her temper; she was contemptuous of the men she saw attempting to destroy her husband, but she managed to control her inclination to slash at them. When she gave a simple answer—That is right—and was then asked if she could be mistaken, she replied: I could be mistaken about almost anything, but I do not think I am.
Robert, however, did not react with as much poise during his long days of interrogation. He was especially distraught when the Hearings turned to the time when Haakon Chevalier had passed a request to Robert, from another scientist, to share information with the Soviets. Robert had concocted several different answers. All the old questions were asked and all the same answers repeated, except for one moment when Robert seemed exhausted by it all. He answered rashly when Robb demanded, yet again, if he had once said that "X"—meaning Chevalier—had approached three people. Robert answered probably. Robb came right back with, Why did you do that, Doctor? That was when Robert said: Because I was an idiot.450
Robb continued the rapid-fire questioning about "X," making Robert seem confused and evasive. Then, after Robert had said that he had not wanted to implicate Chevalier, Robb asked, Did you know Chevalier as a fellow traveler?
Robert: I so told the FBI in 1946. . .
Robb: You knew he was quite a "red," didn't you?
Robert: Yes, I would say quite pink.
When Kitty was on the stand and Gray mentioned the friendship with Chevalier and asked how one "disassociated" oneself from Communism, Kitty answered with defiance: I think it varies from person to person, Mr. Gray. Some people do the bump, like that, and even write an article about it. Other people do it quite slowly. I left the Communist Party. I did not leave my past, the friendships, just like that.451
BY A VOTE OF TWO to one, the Security Board panel recommended to the Atomic Energy Commission that Robert should be denied a security clearance. The one surprising dissenting vote came from the professor of chemistry, a conservative who concluded that the only new charge he had heard was Robert's lack of enthusiasm for the "Super."
Robert's trial by fire came in two stages. Kenneth Nichols, the general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, was pleased with the outcome of the Hearing. He had called Robert "a slippery sonuvabitch" and said, "We're going to get him this time."452 They did. On June 12, the four Atomic Energy Commissioners accepted the Hearing panel's decision and voted (again with one dissenting voice, physicist Henry Smyth) to deny Robert Oppenheimer a top-secret clearance, effectively expelling him from government service. Strauss crowed: "We find Dr. Oppenheimer is not entitled to the continued confidence of the Government . . . because of the proof of fundamental defects in his character."453
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IN THE SUMMER SEASON RUTH SUBCONSCIOUSLY EXPECTS DISASTER, KITTY SETS FIRE TO THE BEDROOM, AND SOME HARVARD ALUMS QUESTION ROBERT'S MORAL QUALIFICATIONS
"Dear Robert and Kitty," Edward Tolman wrote during the Hearing, "All my love, sympathy and understanding and (if I believed in God) my prayers. You are fighting the most important fight in the world today."454 But the fight had been lost and a formidable voice in the struggle for international control of atomic energy was now compromised. Robert's reputation had been battered. He wasn't certain how the decision would affect his position at the Institute, especially with Lewis Strauss on the Board of Trustees.
Robert needn't have worried; everyone at the Institute was stunned and all of the permanent faculty including emeriti, Einstein among them, made a strong statement of support for Robert.455 Even the mathematicians who so often tried Robert's patience were with him. With such overwhelming support, the trustees could make no move to replace Robert without creating a firestorm. Strauss was left to scheme from the sidelines.
IN JULY, THE OPPENHEIMER FAMILY went to nurse their wounds on St. John in the Virgin Islands, "that place of warm water, bright fish, and soft trade winds," as Robert once described it to Ruth.456 Kitty, stung by the defeat, treated the pain with alcohol, and exploded at times in angry tantrums. When Robert wrote to Anne Marks, he as usual glossed over the difficulties with Kitty. Anne would write to her, "Robert tells us that your sailing summer was a great success, & that you are restored in mind, body & spirit."457 The FBI could not follow them to this remote island—there were no paved roads on St. John, no telephone service—but the reprieve was brief. When the family returned to the U.S. at the end of August, FBI agents were waiting at the airport in New York to question Robert.
SOME WHO SAW ROBERT IN the weeks following the Hearing found him changed, aged, tragic. Many who saw him every day found him to switch from worn and tired one day to his old, energetic self the next. Jeremy Bernstein, a young physicist new to the Institute at about this time, wondered how Robert could have been any more captivating. He moved in and out of lectures and discussions—always, as physicist Hans Bethe said, "adding an electric charge to any room he entered."458 Robert also began to spend more time traveling, lecturing and teaching. Kitty sometimes traveled with him, often leaving Peter and Toni in the care of the secretaries.
Robert's Harvard friend John Edsall visited Olden Manor a few months after the Hearing. His sense was that Robert "had survived this grim ordeal remarkably well and his spirit did not seem to be broken or even particularly depressed." At the time, Edsall said, it seemed as if the Oppenheimers were most worried about the children; Peter's classmates were calling his father a Communist. About Kitty, Edsall would comment: "There was a certain mixture of courage and frankness in talking about this ordeal they'd been through, with a certain kind of flightiness, as if she were trying to escape from painful memories, and yet trying to keep them in focus and face them at the same time."459 Edsall felt that Kitty acted as if the effects of the Hearing were harder on her than on Robert. He assumed she was feeling guilty for her part in Robert's fall from grace.
More likely Kitty was distressed to be cut off from a role she had wanted to play. She was still openly ambitious, as much for herself as for him, and she preferred the halls of power to the green meadows of the Institute. Now all that was gone, Robert had returned to academia, and once again, she was the odd woman out. There were a few light moments: at a Christmas Eve party at the house of the editor of Foreign Affairs, David Lilienthal would report that Kitty looked radiant and Robert looked happy (something Lilienthal said he couldn't remember ever thinking about him).460 But those moments for Kitty were becoming more elusive.
RUTH HAD SPENT MUCH OF 1953 recuperating from her heart attacks; Robert had been preoccupied through June of 1954 with the Hearing. The two had scarcely been in touch. But with Ruth regaining her energy, they resumed contact by telephone, letter and, whenever they could manage, in person. It required complicated planning. In one letter Ruth sent Robert an elaborate itinerary of her movements throughout the summer, including a trip to Europe. But then she wrote that she doubted she would go. She said she didn't know why "except perhaps that the summer season has become conditioned for me in such a way that subconsciously I expect disaster."461
With the Hearing, the nation was told the man who took the world into the Atomic Age was not to be trusted with national secrets. But at the Institute, Robert was in the perfect place to heal. Nothing excited him more than discovering an exceptionally bright young scientist
who was intrigued by the unlimited questions that nature, and society, posed. For the next twelve years he would cultivate the persona of public intellectual. He would become the Institute for Advanced Study's longest-lasting director.
PHYSICIST FREEMAN DYSON ARRIVED AT the Institute in 1953; he was twenty-nine, with a wife and two young children, and he encountered a Kitty others seemed to have missed. Sixty years later, his memory of her was largely compassionate. He remembered that Kitty helped to start the Crossroads Nursery School, which today remains an important community center for the young academic families that energize the Institute.462 Dyson recounted a painful time in his life; soon after he and his wife had decided to divorce, they were invited to a large dinner party at Olden Manor. It was to be their last public appearance as a couple, he wrote to his parents in England. Dyson took Robert aside and told him about the impending breakup. "This was the first time we told anybody here outside the family. Afterwards when we were leaving Mrs. Oppenheimer came with us to the door and kissed Verena, and tears were streaming down her face. Before I had always found Mrs. Oppenheimer tiresome, but I am grateful to her for those tears." Dyson went on to say that he knew Kitty had a drinking problem, but that he had seen her regularly at social events, and never saw her noticeably drunk.463
David Lilienthal, who came to live near the Institute in the mid-1950s, idolized Robert and enjoyed Kitty's company—he liked her barbed wit and unconventional manners, even though he did not see her frequently in the seven years they were neighbors. Others who saw Kitty offered glimpses, moments frozen in memory: Kitty staggering across the lawn; Kitty knocking over a drink and breaking the glass (with Robert instantly pouring her another and leaving the broken glass for the maid to clean up the next day). Kitty humiliating a young woman with a few harsh words. Kitty running to help a neighbor in an emergency with dirt from the garden still on her hands. Kitty entertaining through endless cocktail hours surrounded by academics discussing arcane subjects that too often shut her out of the conversation. A glass of gin with a splash of vermouth would have blunted the disappointment.
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