Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Szilard was not alone: another maverick had joined the Manhattan Project by 1942. Nearly every physicist involved in the project knew of him because he was the kind of man one talked about, the sort of character that makes a novelist’s fingers itch. Mood-swept and arrogant, yet insecure. A brilliant and charismatic man, a genuine heavyweight of personality, he was a gifted theoretical physicist at Berkeley named Robert Oppenheimer. Famed for his genius, Oppenheimer was the object of admiration and jealousy by colleagues.

  The grandson of German Jewish immigrants, Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904. He grew up in a large apartment at Eighty-eighth Street and Riverside Drive alongside the Hudson. A van Gogh painting graced the family dining room, and they summered at a comfortable cottage on Long Island Sound. Oppenheimer stood apart from other youths in more ways than just his family’s wealth. He collected minerals, read poetry, and studied languages as well as a great deal of science. Although tremendously gifted intellectually, Oppenheimer was weighted down by his mother’s demanding expectations and his Jewishness—both of which he carried as a personal burden. “He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be president of the B’nai B’rith or the Knights of Columbus,” said I. I. Rabi, who came to know Oppenheimer well. “Perhaps he really wanted to be both, simultaneously.” 27

  Oppenheimer’s outlook grew out of his education at the elite Ethical Culture School facing Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The progressive school imparted a liberal ethos to its students that stressed ethical values over moral laws. The result was a pragmatism leavened by selflessness—doing “the noble thing,” as it was known at the school. Oppenheimer learned well; he was valedictorian of his class. 28

  To toughen him up and round him out, Oppenheimer’s parents had one of his teachers, Herbert Smith, take him out West during the summer before he entered Harvard College. 29 For several weeks during June and July 1922, Oppenheimer and his teacher roamed the southern Rockies together on horseback. The trip opened a whole new world to Oppenheimer. For starters, he learned to appreciate the breathtaking beauty of the West. He also learned that he could stand on his own feet, that he could do what he thought ought to be done, that he did not need to lean on anyone for approval. It was the discovery of an internal grit and stamina that gave him much needed self-confidence.

  The high point of the summer was a pack trip in the mountains and volcanic mesas of northern New Mexico. On one of these mesas, Oppenheimer and Smith came upon a cluster of rustic cabins shaded in cottonwood trees: the elite Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. Oppenheimer loved the extraordinary light and breathtaking vistas of the high desert, the fragrant juniper cedars and piñon pines, the wild-flowers colored a palette of muted browns, reds, and yellows. It made an indelible impression on him. He would return two decades later for a very different reason.

  Oppenheimer entered Harvard that fall with an astonishing appetite for work. Typical was this note he wrote: “I am now going regularly to 10 courses, & doing my research, & I have started to learn Chinese.” 30 He spent hours alone in his dorm room overlooking the Charles River, surrounded by oils, etchings, and a samovar, subsisting on chocolate-covered raisins. He found studying easy but socializing difficult. “He was often very unhappy,” a roommate recalled. “He was lonely and felt he didn’t fit in well with the human environment. There was something that he lacked, perhaps some more personal and deep emotional contact with people.” 31 Exhibiting symptoms of a manic-depressive, he alternated between periods of furious study and severe depression that led to periodic sessions with a psychiatrist, which continued for several years after Harvard. 32 He struck his friends with the pathos of a sensitive and thoughtful young man, lacking in self-knowledge, constantly struggling with a major repression or conflict that he could neither dislodge nor resolve.

  Oppenheimer started out at Harvard in chemistry but was soon drawn to the physics underlying it. The study of nature’s harmony and order touched a deep chord in Oppenheimer, appealing to the philosopher and poet in him. After graduating summa cum laude in just three years, he applied for postgraduate work under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge. His Harvard mentor, the future Nobel laureate Percy Bridgman, wrote a letter about him to Rutherford that was perceptive and prophetic. Oppenheimer had a “perfectly prodigious power of assimilation,” Bridgman wrote, and “his problems have in many cases shown a high degree of originality in treatment and much mathematical power.” He conceded that “it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe that he will be a very unusual success.” 33

  Rutherford was unimpressed with Oppenheimer’s credentials and rejected his application. Oppenheimer next wrote to J. J. Thomson, another renowned experimentalist at the Cavendish. Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as a research student and put him to work in a corner of the laboratory. “I am having a pretty bad time,” he wrote to a high school friend in November 1925. “The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything.” When Max Born visited the Cavendish in the summer of 1926 and suggested that Oppenheimer pursue graduate studies at the University of Göttingen, a center for theoretical physics, Oppenheimer readily accepted the plan. It was at Göttingen that Oppenheimer first became aware of the problems perplexing European physicists. At that time, Born, Heisenberg, and Pascual Jordan were all in Göttingen, formulating the theory of quantum mechanics. Oppenheimer profited a great deal from his association with such prominent European physicists.

  In 1929 he returned home to take up a prestigious joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Before Oppenheimer, American theoretical physics did not inspire high blood pressure in the seminar rooms of Europe. There were a few adept experimentalists, such as Lawrence, Compton, and Rabi, but most universities had no theoretical physicists as such. At the University of Hamburg in the late 1920s, the Physical Review, the research journal of the American Physical Society, was considered to be of such scientific insignificance that copies of the monthly magazine were permitted to pile up for a year before being unwrapped for use in the library.

  Young Professor Oppenheimer cut a very dramatic figure. He was six feet tall, slightly stooped, with a mobile, expressive face and a body as thin as the wisps from the cigarettes he constantly smoked. His gestures and temperament were much closer to the coffeehouses of Europe than to anything American. He led an almost prototypical ivory tower existence. “I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country,” he later said. “I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like Time or Harper’s. I had no radio, no telephone. The first time I ever voted was in the Presidential election of 1936.” 34 He learned of the Wall Street crash from Ernest Lawrence six months after it happened. “Tell me,” Oppenheimer once said to a student, “what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?” 35 To his brother, Frank, he wrote, “I need physics more than friends.” 36

  An inherited income allowed Oppenheimer to live far better than most during the Depression. His first residence was an apartment on Shasta Road built into the wall of a steep canyon in the hills above campus. The furniture was simple, and a few lovely Navajo rugs covered the floors. “I have a little house up on the hill,” he wrote Frank, “with a view of the cities [of Oakland and San Francisco] and of the most beautiful harbor in the world. There is a sleeping porch; and I sleep under the stars.” 37 His second residence was an elegant house on the crest of Eagle Hill Road that he bought with a check the afternoon he toured it. “I do not have much time for diversions, but I ride about once a week,” he wrote in another letter to Frank. “There are good horses, and lovely country among the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. From time to time I take out the Chrysler, and scare one of my friends out of all sanity by wheeling corners
at seventy.” 38

  At Berkeley, Oppenheimer wore gray suits, blue shirts, and blue ties. He was finely cultivated, ever poised and graceful. As a host, he had impeccable manners, made potent martinis (icing them first), cooked gourmet meals, and told droll stories. Spouses of colleagues received red roses; dates received gardenias—both found him irresistible. It was his intellect, however, that impressed people most. He had a mind that could penetrate to the heart of things, that could grasp the essential nature of a physical phenomenon, a book, even a person. Many of those who encountered Oppenheimer considered him the fastest thinker they had ever met—a true genius. In scientific conversation he always assumed that others knew as much as he did. This seldom being the case, and few persons being willing to admit their ignorance, his partner often felt at a distinct disadvantage.

  Yet there was a flaw in his genius. He was brutally intolerant of anyone he considered slow or foolish. Those who struck him as intolerably stupid were denounced to their faces. It was called the “blue-glare treatment” in Berkeley circles: when aroused, Oppenheimer’s eyes seemed to turn a vivid blue, his voice dropped way down, and his caustic tongue erupted. “He could be devastating if he chose,” said one who witnessed the blue-glare treatment, “and sometimes he chose to be so at the wrong time.” 39 His cutting tongue wounded people where they were most sensitive. “Robert could make people feel they were fools,” a fellow physicist recalled. 40 Oppenheimer acknowledged his behavior in a letter to his brother, Frank, but added that “it is not easy—at least it is not easy for me—to be quite free of the desire to browbeat somebody or something.” 41 He called the behavior “beastliness.” Those at the receiving end of his cutting tongue put it differently: “He was very snooty,” said one. 42 Many victims of Oppenheimer’s tongue-lashings nursed a lingering resentment that would be repaid in later years.

  Oppenheimer grew into a teaching legend at Berkeley, but he was hardly one at first. He didn’t speak loud enough, he didn’t face his class, and he scrawled equations at random all over the blackboard while lacing his delivery with obscure references to classics of literature and philosophy. Although desperately eager to reach his pupils, he was too impatient. He lectured to the most advanced students in the class, leaving all the others lost. Frequently he would make big jumps in the presentation of some theory and then turn toward the class, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and say offhandedly, “I hope I’m not being too pedestrian.” 43 He applied his sharp tongue freely to students who were doing their best to keep up. Many took his course one year and then again the next in order to understand what it was all about. They would work in pairs, one taking notes and the other one listening.

  Gradually Oppenheimer realized this was not a good system. He began trying to connect with and hold all of his audience. He dropped his pace of delivery and took pains to make the links between ideas clearer. He learned to slow down when students could not keep up. He became more relaxed in the classroom. The brilliance of his ideas, the flow of his voice, and the feeling in his beautifully chosen words now began to hold students spellbound. His performance was a stimulating combination of sophistication and elegance mixed with a pinch of intellectual arrogance. Even non-physics majors found him one of the most charismatic professors on campus. Students cut other classes to sit in on his lectures, which were usually filled beyond capacity.

  If Oppenheimer was a good lecturer, he was a great mentor, caring openly and deeply about his graduate students. He inspired them with his passion for the excitement and discovery of physics. He praised them, patiently answered their questions in his office until midnight, even asked them to collaborate with him on scholarly articles. His charm, eloquence, and humor captivated them, and the scope of his knowledge and the quickness of his mind awed them. He had new and exciting concepts to communicate; it was as if physics seemed to be unfolding from week to week in his seminar. 44

  Oppenheimer’s magnetism extended far beyond class. He was cultivated, well read, and wealthy enough to indulge his tastes. He liked to have a coterie of students around him. His chats with them often spilled out into hallways, campus quadrangles, and local restaurants, where he ordered students living on tiny stipends expensive meals and picked up the bill. He played classical music albums for them—Bach’s Overture in B Minor was his favorite—took them to concerts, and read original Greek and Sanskrit literature to them. His style and his vision of life ignited them. In his presence they became more intelligent, more poetic, more prepared to discuss the nuances of any subject. He stretched them beyond their expectations and experiences. He was irresistible. 45

  Oppenheimer’s charisma was so great and the veneration of his students so deep that they imitated his gestures and mannerisms. They mumbled, “Ja, ja,” in affirmative response to questions. They held their heads a little to one side. They splayed their feet when they walked. They coughed slightly between sentences. They held their hands in front of their lips when they spoke. They clicked open a lighter whenever anyone took out a cigarette. They referred to him not as Professor Oppenheimer, but simply and reverently as “Oppie” (sometimes spelled Opje by the very in). “I was very much under his influence,” recalled Robert Christy, one of Oppenheimer’s graduate students, more than sixty years later. “I would effectively do anything that he wanted me to do.” 46

  During summers Oppenheimer would retreat to his northern New Mexico ranch, which he impishly named Perro Caliente (“hot dog” in Spanish). It was a beautiful, tranquil place nestled in the high alpine meadows of the Pecos Valley near Cowles. A rough-hewn log cabin on six acres, it had few conveniences and no electricity. The atmosphere was bohemian: everyone would sit in front of the fireplace, eating Indonesian food, playing tiddledywinks, and talking. Oppenheimer prepared wild strawberries with Cointreau for dessert. Guests rode horses by day—sometimes as far as Taos—and slept on Navajo rugs on the porch at night. 47

  One visitor to Perro Caliente in 1936 was an attractive, complex young woman who captivated Oppenheimer. Her name was Jean Tat-lock. Tall and slender with green eyes and dark hair, always immaculately and severely dressed, she was pursuing a doctorate in psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. She was bright, passionate, and compassionate, an idealist and a rebel who was subject to fits of deep depression. Her spontaneity and forcefulness impressed Oppenheimer. Her beauty and intelligence entranced and infatuated him.

  The daughter of a right-wing English professor at Berkeley, Tat-lock had become increasingly involved in left-wing activities and was a member of the Communist Party by the time she met Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had lived up to then for himself alone, or at any rate in his own fashion. She awakened him to the suffering in the world around him, stimulated his social conscience, and introduced him to leftist intellectuals at a time when it seemed to many people that communism offered the only alternative to the failure of capitalism in Depression-ravaged America and to the fascism that was spreading in Europe.

  Oppenheimer had been remarkably ignorant of politics up to this point in his life. Whenever colleagues mentioned the rise of Nazism, he brushed them off. He wanted to discuss physics. Now he embraced politics with a neophyte’s passion. Once Oppenheimer got interested in something, he would jump in with both feet. He championed the progressive causes of the day, from the plight of migrant farmworkers to struggling labor unions to unemployment among university graduates. Said Oppenheimer, “I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives.” 48 He read the People’s Daily, made the acquaintance of a number of California communists, and belonged to nearly every communist-front organization on the West Coast. The Loyalist cause in Spain was for him, as for many others on the Left during the decade, of particular concern. The capitalist nations, such as Britain and France, had done nothing about Nazi intervention in the Spanish civil war. Instead, it was the So
viet Union that was fighting fascism.

  Although some people saw the American Communist Party as a cynical means to extend Soviet influence, this was an uncommon view in the 1930s. Many Americans believed the gloom and resignation caused by the Depression contrasted sharply with the hopefulness and purposefulness of workers in the Soviet Union. Thousands of Americans visited Russia in the 1930s and returned home with favorable accounts. Ignoring or discounting the human toll of collectivization and the terror famine, they regarded the rational planning of a command economy as superior to the vagaries and hardships of a market economy on the ropes. Even the news of Stalin’s bloody purges, which was slowly emerging from Russia, did little to shake their belief that communism was a movement with great potential for constructive social change. To them, even brutal communists were simply “progressives in a hurry.”

  The politically unsophisticated Oppenheimer sympathized with many of these views. Communism was attractive to the humanitarian in him because it presented itself as a utopian vision of society in which injustice and oppression would cease to exist. It was attractive to the scientist in him because it presented itself as a “logical” and “objective” philosophy of politics and history. In these senses, he was certainly a fellow traveler; he may have been even more. * But at a time when overt expressions of patriotism were unfashionable among intellectuals in general, and particularly among those on the Left, he never hid his love for America. Oppenheimer was naive in his understanding of communism, and he would pay dearly one day for his naïveté. His political flirtation would come back to haunt him.

  Other factors compelled Oppenheimer’s transformation from cloistered academic to social activist. His mother had died after a long battle with leukemia in late 1931; his father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1937. His attachment to his parents—especially his mother—had been exceptionally strong. For the first time in his life, he knew the pain of personal loss, the two deaths marking the unworldly physicist’s most intimate discovery of suffering in the world. And as the 1930s went on, human suffering was increasingly hard for a Jew to ignore. He later explained it this way: “I had a smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country.” His aunt Hedwig and her son escaped from Nazi Germany and settled nearby in Oakland. They arrived only a few days after his father’s death, and he and his brother, Frank, assumed responsibility for getting them on their feet.