An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  THAT KITTY'S BEHAVIOR WAS BECOMING increasingly dangerous was clear to those who saw her every day. Cigarette burns scarred the bedsheets; once she set the bedroom on fire, resulting in minor damage and a small mention in the New York Times. (Robert and his family were still considered newsworthy.) Along with boredom and loneliness, Kitty suffered from pancreatitis, most often caused by excessive drinking over a period of time. The intense abdominal pain she endured would help explain her increasingly frequent bursts of anger.

  Robert's two secretaries became part of what could only be called Robert's management plan for Kitty's problems. When she took too many pills by accident, he called on the secretaries to help him control Kitty's medications. Once, early on, he confided in Hobson that others had suggested he send Kitty to a treatment center for her alcoholism, but he refused. "He would be her doctor, nurse and psychiatrist," Robert told Hobson, adding that he had made the decision "with his eyes open and he would take the consequences."464 That is, when he was in town.

  In an attempt to explain Kitty, Robert looked for answers in the psychoanalytic theory that had so fascinated him. He told Hobson, "Kitty had some confusions about her own sex and perhaps . . . [had] some resentment toward a male." Her confusions were not about her sexuality, but rather her view of herself as superior to some of the men around her, when she was consistently treated as inferior. Francis Fergusson, Robert's old friend who would spend two terms at the Institute, agreed that as much as Kitty worried about Robert, she "had this repressed hostility toward him."465

  Others confirmed that Kitty was intensely jealous of Robert, so much so that she could stand neither to see him praised or blamed. It was as if she were caught up in the need to be Robert—to live, as ever, through a man.

  IN SEPTEMBER OF THAT YEAR—1954—Ruth's "subconscious fear of disaster" would prove prescient. Her plan to visit Robert and Kitty in Princeton after the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in New York was canceled abruptly when her sister Lillie Margaret fell seriously ill and Ruth rushed back to Berkeley to be with her. This was not the first time Lillie Margaret's illnesses had altered Ruth and Robert's plans: "I felt so disappointed not to have our precious visit," Ruth had written to Robert from the hospital in California several years earlier. "I had been counting on it so happily and with great desire to see all of you."466 This time, Lillie Margaret was to be diagnosed with inoperable cancer.

  ON JANUARY 4, 1955, ROBERT appeared on the influential CBS television show See It Now, hosted by Edward R. Murrow, who had been one of the few reporters to challenge Joe McCarthy. Robert agreed to appear on the condition that the show be about the Institute, not about him, and the Hearing be out of bounds. CBS agreed. The interview proved so compelling that the full half-hour of the broadcast was given over to Robert, with only one mention of the Institute. An hour-long version was made available to colleges and schools. Robert hadn't lost his ability to engage and delight, and through Murrow he reached a wider audience than ever before. The success of the program, linked with the enigma—the father of the atom bomb renounced by his government as a possible traitor—created a swarm of invitations for Robert to speak all over the country.

  The controversy, though, was still alive. When the president of the University of Washington canceled a speaking invitation, students and faculty rebelled and the scientific community threatened a boycott. Adding to the annoyances, Lewis Strauss, his obsession unabated, became convinced that Robert was about to defect to the Soviet Union. (In fact, Strauss had been obsessed with this idea since 1953.467) At his request, Hoover ordered another series of wiretaps and sent agents to follow the Oppenheimers on a February trip to the Caribbean. Their movements in St. Croix were reported by three FBI informants ("T-4, T-5 and T-6 . . . of known reliability" the FBI memo noted). "Mrs. Oppenheimer was drinking heavily and other guests were horrified at her conduct," T-6 reported, and, "On one occasion she was so intoxicated that she fell into the hotel swimming pool." The informant offered the opinion that "the subject conducted himself soberly and at times had his hands full keeping Mrs. Oppenheimer in check."468 The islands seemed to be Kitty's place to do as she pleased, even if it meant demolishing hotel rooms and making a public spectacle of herself.

  LILLIE MARGARET AND RUTH SPENT Christmas together in Pasadena, but on February 22, 1955, Ruth was back in Berkeley, anguishing over her older sister's illness. Val wrote to Margaret Mead that she was on her way to Berkeley. "Ruth Tolman's sister is dying . . . and I belong to the rescue squad."469 Robert and Kitty left St. Croix the same day. Five days later, Lillie Margaret died. Once again, Ruth needed comforting, and Robert would find his way west to her.

  At the University of Oregon, Robert delivered a series of lectures on physics; 2,500 people showed up to hear a talk that only a few in the audience could understand; it didn't matter. When the auditorium filled, spectators spilled into other rooms. Two years later, 1,200 people would crowd into Harvard's largest lecture hall, with an additional 800 listening in an adjacent room. Robert became a scientific superstar, and his legend grew.

  DURING SPRING BREAK IN 1955, Lynn Alexander, a sixteen-year-old junior at the University of Chicago, joined her boyfriend, fellow student Carl Sagan, for the drive to his New Jersey hometown.* Worried that his mother would not approve of them traveling together, he dropped his girlfriend off at an inn in Princeton. Lynn, who had enrolled at the university at the age of fourteen, had seen the Murrow interview so she decided to pay a visit—unannounced—to Dr. Oppenheimer. Soon after, she would write an account of her Sunday afternoon encounter with the Oppenheimer family.470 How she, with dark eyes, dark hair and a wide, engaging smile like a young Kitty Oppenheimer, had walked up Olden Lane and was approaching the front door when she ran into the family on their way into town. How she introduced herself to Robert, told him she was a science student from Chicago. How he invited her to come with them, and she had piled into the Cadillac convertible with Peter and Toni in the backseat.

  * * *

  * Lynn Alexander would marry Carl Sagan three years later; after eight years they would divorce and she would marry Thomas Margulis (divorced in 1980). She became an important evolutionary biologist and professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was presented the National Medal of Science in 1999 by President Clinton.

  At some point, Peter—almost fourteen himself—had said to her, "You must be smart." She would write that she didn't know how to answer, so she said nothing. But Kitty spoke up "speaking slowly, too distinctly" and told her that Peter had just published his first article, a television column in the university paper. "With his byline," Kitty added. Lynn wondered "if Dr O felt as oppressed by his wife as I did." By the time they arrived in downtown Princeton, it was clear that Kitty objected to this bright young stranger joining their outing. And yet, when Lynn had a chance to speak with Robert about the Murrow interview, he had smiled and "those eyes looking directly at me, he asked warmly if I would like to come back to their home again." Kitty overheard and grimaced.

  "Would I be disturbing you?" Lynn said she asked. Kitty answered sharply, "a purposefully unmistakable tension in her voice. 'Quite frankly, you'd be welcome only if you stayed just a little. This is the only chance we have to be with the children, isn't it, Robert dear?'"

  Robert said, so softly his wife didn't hear, "Come, do come home with us. I have something to show you." Lynn described Peter as being "sheepishly buried in the Sunday papers, hunkering down in the back seat with sullen Toni, the 10-year-old daughter."

  Lynn did go back to Olden Manor with them and Robert showed her the famous Van Gogh in the living room, then settled down with the Sunday papers: one with an article on the Oppenheimers (in which Kitty was described as "petite, chic, witty, tense and vivacious") and the other containing Peter's first column. When Robert handed this paper to the girl to read, Kitty muttered, "Unfair," and asked "rather fiercely" to see it first.

  Robert, Lynn wrote, chided Kitty for "not being very
entertaining."

  The girl said: "You'd rather entertain your children, I'm sure." And Kitty answered bluntly, "We will, after you leave." In Lynn's account, Robert said to her, "'Oh no. Do stay and eat with us.' He invited me with real feeling in his voice. He seemed sincerely to want me to stay."

  She was flattered and it was hard to say no, she admitted, but when she rose to leave, "Mrs. O flashed him a triumphant smile." And then: "Furtively glancing at his tight-lipped wife . . . he checked that she wasn't looking and smiled, warmly, deeply. He meant it; I tingled with pleasure. He shook my hand, gazed affectionately at me, then blankly at the street, with melancholy gleaming blue eyes."

  Robert, caught in the act of intellectual seduction.

  After that, Alexander wrote that she wandered back down Olden Lane, "drunk with Dr. O and scents of spring," on her way to the Inn, "in a dream, wondering about my foray into the Oppenheimer family, I was certain that although Ms. O still resided with him, she had long since deserted him. . . . He had wanted me to stay. I had been permitted to catch a glimpse of, to feel the 'intellectual sex appeal' that had attracted physicists to Los Alamos in 1943. He seemed like an aging stallion staggering from a broken spirit."

  With that, the bright sixteen-year-old wondered if he ever thought of Jean Tatlock (her memory resurrected by the Hearing). "Or if he had ever enjoyed a relationship of higher quality, a special plane of intimacy?" Lynn wrote with the same emotional hyperbole of the adolescent Jean, yearning for a depth of love she had not yet experienced.

  Lynn Alexander's account of the afternoon was no doubt factually true, yet she was not mature enough to read the other possibilities: that Robert was taunting his wife, and ignoring his children, that he was encouraging her in spite of his wife's clear notice that she considered the girl to be an interloper. The episode offers a disturbing glimpse into the dynamics of the Oppenheimer ménage in the wake of the Hearing. Alexander follows a familiar script about Kitty: rude, a bitch. She does not fault Robert as an intellectual seducer. But it was a role he had, time and again, assumed with both women and men. His mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him—male, female, almost everybody.

  AFTER LILLIE MARGARET DIED, RUTH returned to Pasadena and her job at the Mental Hygiene Clinic in Los Angeles. Val moved back to Pasadena after Ruth Benedict's death, established a private practice as a therapist, and was now living with Gloria Gartz. Ruth was on the planning committee for the American Psychological Association's 1955 meeting in San Francisco, and had asked Robert to be the keynote speaker. He rearranged his schedule to accommodate her; it was a coup for Ruth.

  On September 1, Robert telegraphed Ruth at the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco, an elegant old hotel from the city's glory days. "Will arrive Saturday morning United flight 717. Shall come straight to the hotel and try to find you or word of you before lunch."471 She was a major participant and he was the famous speaker, but they were staying in the same hotel, and with luck could find a little private time together.

  That fall, while Robert was in San Francisco with Ruth, Kitty sent fourteen-year-old Peter to board at the Quakers' George School in Pennsylvania. At the same time Kitty's parents were in need of support. Franz was increasingly frail and Kaethe wanted her help. But Kaethe—who sometimes called herself "Kate"—criticized her daughter's drinking.472 The Puenings lived only an hour's drive from Princeton; Kitty rarely saw them. Kaethe was stung by the neglect and she and Kitty became estranged.* When Franz Puening died in the fall of 1955, Kitty sent Verna Hobson in her place. Kate Puening's loneliness was now complete. All she could think to do was to return to Germany to live with her younger sister Hilde.

  * * *

  * Anne Wilson once referred to Kitty's mother as a "real dragon."

  RUTH WAS STILL GLOWING FROM her time with Robert in San Francisco, where she was able to introduce her good friend to her colleagues. When Robert sent her a copy of the speech he had given, she wrote, "I have just finished reading it again. Really, it is even more wonderful than I had remembered—just beautiful in word and in idea and in feeling." She added wistfully that she had felt "more than ordinarily in need of communication with you these days." It had been a year since Lillie's death, and Ruth was tormented that she had not done enough for her sister at the end of her life. She wrote to Robert, "It seems as if I go through life with that feeling, and so surely much of it must be in me rather than in the reality."473 But understanding didn't make things better, she said. What she needed was to talk to Robert, who could help her assuage not just her grief, but her guilt.

  ON APRIL 26, 1956, THE American Foreign Service office in Genoa, Italy, filed a "Report of the Death of an American Citizen." The name on the passport was Kate Puening; she had disappeared from the Norwegian freighter Concordia Fjord, on April 23 or 24. Kitty's mother went missing "under circumstances indicating that passenger had crawled through a window and dropped into the sea. Body was not recovered." The Department of State sent a memo saying all the evidence pointed to suicide. International newspapers ran stories about the mysterious disappearance of Robert Oppenheimer's mother-in-law. The ship's log catalogued the facts: the door had been locked from the inside, no sign of violence, a chair was placed under a high window which was open. Cash had been left behind to cover her account with the ship. Underclothes were lying over a chair. She was naked when she crawled through the window. No note found.474

  Kaethe's sister Hilde rushed from Stuttgart to the American Consulate in Genoa. She was certain that Kaethe would have left her a message; she wanted to see—to search—her sister's luggage. She found a will and traveler's cheques, but there was no message. Desperate for information, Hilde wrote to one of the passengers known to have talked to her sister on the voyage. In touching English Hilde explained: "I would be very please to you, if you could tell me the impression you got of my sister. . . . Perhaps we never will know what happened that night to my poor sister. I loved her all my life, she was my mother always and so good to me and I hoped that I could give a new possibility to her to support her life without her husband and without her daughter. And now, I was in Genoa, and my loved sister was not coming and will never come to me anymore. Excuse me all my feelings saying to you—but I would be so fortunate if you could understand me and help me a little bit to get light in this darkness of tragedy. Excuse please the English in the same manner. Yours faithfully, Hilde Vissering de Blonay."475

  The gentleman sent a kindly reply, speaking of how strongly Mrs. Puening had spoken about her attachment to her husband, how lonely she was, and how her life seemed quite meaningless. He added, in light of the news articles, that, "Personally, I am convinced that her death had nothing to do with professor Robert Oppenheimer. She mentioned once that she was his mother-in-law and added that he was now rehabilitated, a fact that she was very glad about."476

  The American Foreign Service memo noted that Hilde Vissering had said that in addition to suffering grief over her husband's death, Mrs. Puening had had a "misunderstanding"—Hilde's word—with her daughter, and was consequently feeling very much alone. Hilde was also adamant that Kitty not be told that Hilde had said this.477

  Two weeks later, on May 15, Kitty sent a cable to her Aunt from Princeton: "Thanks for two loving letters, especially one I got yesterday about the sad events. The State Department telephoned . . . I believe you are correct that it was an accident. You've done everything you could do and you shouldn't let it torment you. Mutti gives you everything that is left, about $9,000 and her clothes. I had hoped in the end that you would get everything and now its true. . . . Kitty."478

  ROBERT'S ALMA MATER, HARVARD, INVITED him to give the prestigious William James Lectures in the spring of 1957. The topic would be ethics and philosophy. A small group of alumni questioned Robert's moral qualifications to lecture on the subject. A graduate of the class of 1918 wrote: "Why must Harvard insult a large body of loyal alumni by inviting so dubious a character to lecture?"479 But Harv
ard held firm, and the lectures were given. In the audience one night was the physicist Jeremy Bernstein, who had been accepted for a term at the Institute. As soon as Bernstein said he would be coming to the Institute that fall, Robert's face broke into a wide smile, which Bernstein said was like a sunrise. Robert then said, "We're going to have a ball!"480

  EARLIER THAT YEAR, ROBERT HAD written his Aunt Hedwig in Berkeley: "For no v. good reason I am going to be in SF between the 6th and 9th of March, judging of all things, architecture."481 One v. good reason to go to California would be to see Ruth.

  WHENEVER ROBERT AGREED TO AN interview with the news media, it was with the proviso that the Hearing was taboo. But midway through 1957, he relented and agreed to talk to a Minneapolis Sunday Tribune reporter—explicitly about the Hearing.482 The timing and the newspaper were curious choices; major papers had been clamoring for three years for such an interview. He clearly wanted to address all those who insisted the Hearing had destroyed him and that he was a shadow of his former self. The substance of the Tribune article has Ruth's imprimatur all over it.