Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Frank Oppenheimer’s approach to politics is perfectly captured in these quotations. As he drifted further and further to the left, he did so quite openly, feeling that he had nothing to hide, and feeling also that not only was there nothing unpatriotic about left-wing politics, but indeed such politics were perfectly in keeping with the spirit and the history of America. If you were brought up, as Frank and Robert Oppenheimer were, to believe that America was the embodiment of the tolerance, freedom and egalitarianism that the German Jews of the nineteenth century had left their homeland to find, then it would have been – and was – utterly alien to think of its spirit as being represented and defended by such people as the Ku Klux Klan or, later, the paranoid anti-communists of the McCarthy period. It was, as Al Smith had said, the bigotry of those people, not the targets of their bigotry, that was ‘un-American’.

  ‘When I went to Hopkins,’ Frank continued in the interview quoted above, ‘I knew quite a few people . . . I didn’t know whether they were party members or not, but they were interested in left-wing politics, and I learned about it.’ In England, he was ‘a little more on the fringe’ of radical politics, but in Italy ‘there were people there of varying degrees of leftness’, including Patrick Blackett’s co-worker on the discovery of the the positron, Giuseppe Occhialini, who by then had returned to the University of Florence and was, according to Frank, ‘quite left’. Mussolini’s Italy, which had been a Fascist state for many years, had, during Frank’s time there, just embarked on its aggressive foreign policy: ‘It was the year before the Abyssinian War. There was a brigade of soldiers just below the lab there, who were always singing and cheering.’

  The singing and cheering of the Italian soldiers, though a constant reminder of the nature of the military dictatorship that ruled the country, was not felt by Frank to be especially menacing. ‘In Italy,’ Frank remembers, ‘the soldiers didn’t seem especially aggressive. I never saw any of them marching. The policemen weren’t any different, and were probably gentler, than New York policemen. The towns seemed very relaxed to me.’ In Germany the previous year, however: ‘I had seen people marching down the streets, and really sort of lots of this behaviour in the bars, and the whole society seemed corrupt. And then I had some relatives there who could tell me some of the terrible things.’ Having mixed with left-wing people at Johns Hopkins, the Cavendish and the University of Florence, and having seen for himself the viciousness of the Nazi regime in Germany, it was only natural that, when he went to California, Frank should choose as his friends people concerned about the threat of fascism and interested in improving the lot of the poor and the dispossessed.

  In fact, Frank already knew a number of such people, namely some of his brother’s students, among whom were a few who would later achieve fame because their politics offended the American right. One of these was the unassuming Wendell Furry, who had left for Harvard in 1934. At Harvard, Furry joined the Communist Party and therefore became a target for McCarthyites in the 1950s. Furry won the admiration of many by refusing either to take cover behind the Fifth Amendment or to name any of his comrades in the Party. Likewise, Harvard won admiration for refusing to sack Furry. The case left deep scars, however. In a book called Moscow Stories, published in 2006, the writer and expert in Russian affairs Loren R. Graham describes how, coming himself from Farmersburg, the same small town in Indiana in which Furry had grown up, he became fascinated by Furry’s story. As a small child, he had been told by his schoolteacher that he was the cleverest boy she had ever taught, with one exception: Wendell Furry. And yet, she said, she was ashamed of Furry and hoped that Graham did not end up like him. ‘How did he end up?’ Graham asked. ‘He is a communist,’ came the reply. That was in 1941. Many years later, in 1974, Graham met Furry and they swapped stories about Farmersburg. A short while after that meeting Furry retired and a few years later he died. ‘In the last months of his life’, according to Graham:

  after the death of his wife Betty from cancer, the old physicist was confined to a nursing home near Fresh Pond in Cambridge, where he had nightmares about the persecution he and his family endured years earlier. In the night, to the stupefaction of the attendants, he would cry out, ‘The FBI, the FBI, they are after me! Call the American Civil Liberties Union and Gerald Berlin [Furry’s lawyer]!’

  Melba Phillips came from a remarkably similar background to Wendell Furry. She, too, was raised by a Methodist family in a small town in a farming community in Indiana, in a place called Hazleton, just fifty or sixty miles south of Farmersburg. And she, too, became politically radical, though it is not clear whether she ever became a member of the Communist Party. When, in the McCarthy period, she was summoned to answer questions about her political activities in the 1930s, she refused to say whether or not she had ever been a member of the Party, pleading the Fifth Amendment. For this, she was sacked from her position at Brooklyn College.

  There is no documentary record of Frank Oppenheimer ever meeting Wendell Furry, but, given how much time Furry spent with Robert Oppenheimer between 1932 and 1934, it would be surprising if they had never come across each other. Certainly, Frank knew Melba Phillips very well indeed, and the two of them became close friends and remained so until Frank’s death. Her memories of Frank are particularly warm. She met him first, she remembers, at Perro Caliente in the summer of 1932, ‘when I stopped for a few days on the way back to school from a visit to my family in Indiana’.

  As I got off the train at Glorietta Pass there they were – Robert, whom I knew from Berkeley, Frank, and Roger Lewis, who was the Damon to Frank’s Pythias or vice versa. Frank was turning 20 that summer; I was five years older and working on a PhD. The back of the car was already loaded with supplies for the ranch, but we crowded in, drove up to Cowles in relative comfort, thence up the dirt road to the cabin . . .

  Perro Caliente, our destination, had many visitors over the years . . . We ate, and later slept, on the porch, looking toward the mountains across the valley, but the evenings were cold even in August. After dinner there was a roaring fire in the big living room, good talk, and Frank playing the flute. I have a vivid memory of Frank playing . . . He usually played in the evening, at least during my first visit there.

  ‘We were not political in any overt way,’ Melba said of herself, Oppenheimer and her fellow students, but, her biographer writes, ‘the grim news from Germany in 1933–4, and the labor unrest that hit California during the Great Depression, motivated them to take an active interest in world affairs’.

  As we have seen, in the year 1933–4 there is little in Oppenheimer’s correspondence or anywhere else to indicate the ‘active interest’ in politics described here, but, coinciding with the arrival of Robert Serber and his wife, Charlotte, in the summer of 1934, there is at least some indication of such interest. In Serber’s autobiography there is an intriguing account of a rally in support of the longshoremen’s strike in 1934, which Oppenheimer was invited to attend. He, in turn, invited Serber, Charlotte and Melba Phillips to come along.As Serber remembers it: ‘We were sitting up high in a balcony, and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”’

  This makes it sound as if the rally they attended was being held to decide upon strike action, but this cannot be right, since the strike (which was a major event in the history of both unionisation and the Communist Party in America) had begun in May 1934, before Serber met Oppenheimer. More likely, it was one of the meetings held in July 1934, when the longshoremen’s strike escalated into a general strike, after two strikers had been killed by police firing into a crowd of pickets. The general strike ended soon afterwards, but the result was an increase in the power of the longshoremen’s union and an improvement in their terms of employment – victories that the Communist Party would claim for itself.

  At the time of Frank’s arrival at Caltech, Robert Serber had been a National Research Fellow at Berkeley for a year and had become the person closest to O
ppenheimer, both personally and scientifically, and would remain so until his departure in 1938. Though Serber was, like Oppenheimer himself, more interested in physics than politics, he had grown up in an environment of which political engagement was an accepted and expected part. He and his wife both came from fairly well-off Jewish families in Philadelphia. His father was a lawyer active in the local Democratic Party, while Charlotte’s father, a doctor, was a well-known leftist radical. In the 1940s, both Robert and Charlotte Serber would receive close attention from the FBI, though their agents could never gather enough incriminating evidence against Robert to justify taking any action against him. This almost certainly means that Robert Serber never joined the Communist Party. When the question was put directly to him in the 1940s, however, Oppenheimer expressed the belief that Charlotte probably was a member.

  Almost certainly, the first contact that either of the Oppenheimer brothers had with someone happy to call themselves a communist was when, in the spring of 1936, halfway through Frank’s first year at Caltech, they met a twenty-four-year-old graduate student of economics at Berkeley called Jacquenette Quann. ‘Jackie’ (as everyone called her) was a working-class French-Canadian woman, who worked as a waitress and babysitter to pay her way through university. While an undergraduate, she had joined the Young Communist League, attracted to it not through any intellectual commitment to Marxist-Leninism, but rather through its involvement with practical issues, such as the rights of workers and the threat of fascism, about which she was concerned. She came into the Oppenheimers’ lives quite by accident one evening when she was babysitting for Wenonah Nedelsky, the estranged wife of Oppenheimer’s student Leo Nedelsky. Robert, accompanied by Frank, went to visit Wenonah and the two of them met Jackie, whose plain-speaking exuberance quickly won Frank over. Within a short time he and Jackie were lovers, and that summer he invited her to Perro Caliente. On 15 September 1936, they were married.

  Oppenheimer did not approve of his younger brother’s rush into matrimony. ‘He tried to put us off from getting married,’ Jackie later said. ‘He was always saying things like “Of course, you’re much older than Frank” – I’m eight months older actually – and saying that Frank wasn’t ready for it. Later he used to refer to me as “the waitress my brother has married”.’ In a formal statement he wrote at the time of his security hearing in 1954, Oppenheimer wrote tersely: ‘My brother Frank married in 1936. Our relations thereafter were inevitably less intimate than before.’ Under cross-examination, he elaborated on this a little, adding that not only were relations between him and Frank less intimate after Frank’s marriage, but they were also ‘occasionally perhaps somewhat more strained’. More expansive is a statement quoted by Peter Michelmore in his 1969 book, The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story, the source of which Michelmore does not give. Frank’s ‘defection’, Michelmore writes, ‘hurt Robert deeply, for he wrote petulantly of his brother’s marriage, “It was an act of emancipation and rebellion on his part against his dependence on me. Our early intimacy was never again established.”’

  Apart from his evident anxiety at losing the most intimate, most important relationship he had, another worry Robert had about Jackie’s influence on Frank was that it was bad for his physics. Frank, Robert later said, ‘worked fairly well at physics but he was slow. It took him a long time to get his doctor’s degree. He was very much distracted by his other interests.’ It is sometimes assumed that something similar happened to Robert Oppenheimer – that after he began to take an interest in politics his work in physics lost some of its earlier intensity. In fact, the opposite is true: the very best physics he ever wrote was produced precisely during the period of his political awakening.

  During the period 1935–8 – while he was in his early thirties – the focus of that work was provided by Oppenheimer’s continued interest in cosmic rays. During the 1930s, there were two reasons for a physicist to be interested in cosmic rays: first, they were an interesting and puzzling phenomenon in their own right, presenting physicists with the challenge of saying what they were made of and how they originated; and second, their tremendous energy allowed physicists their only opportunity (until the advent of particle accelerators many times more powerful than Lawrence’s early cyclotrons) of seeing whether physical theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, successfully held up when used to measure and predict the behaviour of particles travelling at something approaching the speed of light, which is when relativistic effects become relevant.

  For these reasons, the study of cosmic rays became the focus in the 1930s for some of the most interesting experimental physics and some of the leading theoretical work; the experimentalists would take off on adventurous expeditions to far-flung corners of the world to measure radiations at high altitudes, and the theorists would use the information thus obtained to test the validity of theories and to inspire new insights into the make-up of the physical world, which with every step forward seemed to be more complicated and stranger than anybody had imagined.

  Oppenheimer was well placed to contribute to this work, since some of the most important observations of cosmic rays were being undertaken by two experimentalists at Caltech: Carl Anderson, the discoverer of the positron, and his colleague Seth Neddermeyer. In a paper he published at the end of 1934 entitled ‘Are the Formulae for the Absorption of High Energy Radiations Valid?’, Oppenheimer paid tribute to the work of these two in a footnote that read: ‘Such clarity as there is in this account of the experimental situation I owe entirely to Dr Anderson and Mr Neddermeyer, who have with great patience explained to me just what the evidence is, what it indicates, and how little it proves.’

  At the beginning of that paper Oppenheimer notes that the observations of cosmic rays made by Anderson and Neddermeyer have ‘made it possible to extend our knowledge of the specific ionization and energy loss of electrons from particles of a few million volts on up to a few billion’. Despite the progress made at Berkeley by Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory, it would be some time before that kind of energy could be created artificially. With regard to what those observations of such extraordinary energies reveal about the accepted formulae for calculating high-energy radiation, Oppenheimer remarks that it is ‘possible to do justice to the great penetration of the cosmic rays only by admitting that the formulae are wrong, or by postulating some other and less absorbable component of the rays to account for their penetration’. It is a dichotomy reminiscent of that which Oppenheimer had earlier posed in relation to positively charged electrons: either Dirac’s theory of the electron was wrong, or such particles had to exist. And just as in this earlier case, Oppenheimer missed out on an important advance in physical theory by choosing the wrong side of the dichotomy, saying that the theory was wrong, rather than insisting that this ‘less absorbable component’ of cosmic rays had to exist. For, as would be revealed in the ensuing years, this ‘less absorbable component’ was yet another new particle.

  During 1935, Oppenheimer’s intellectual energies, as we have seen, were directed towards the questions that arose from the artificial creation of radioactive isotopes, questions that gave rise to the paper he and Melba Phillips wrote in the summer of 1935, which introduced the ‘Oppenheimer–Phillips process’. In turning from the analysis of what happens when a deuteron splits into a proton and a neutron to the consideration of cosmic rays, Oppenheimer may have thought that he was, temporarily at least, leaving nuclear physics behind. However, nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics were about to come together in an unexpected way. In the early part of 1935, an article appeared in an obscure journal that remained completely unknown to people researching cosmic rays and would not have seemed relevant to their research even if they had known of it. Nevertheless, that article was to play a major role in the subsequent development of cosmic-ray physics, to provide a theory that is still accepted today in fundamental nuclear physics, and to change the subsequent course of particle physics.

  The article in question was entitled
‘On the Interaction of Elementary Particles I’ and appeared in the Proceedings of the Physical and Mathematical Society of Japan, which had received it at the end of November 1934. Its author was a Japanese theoretical physicist called Hideki Yukawa, who had come up with a novel theory to answer a fundamental question in nuclear physics: what holds the particles in a nucleus – the protons and the neutrons – together? Clearly, protons and neutrons are not held together by electrostatic forces, since neutrons do not have any charge. Nor can they be held together by gravity, as the gravitational force is very many orders of magnitude too weak to account for the binding energies observed. Yukawa put forward the bold suggestion that there is a hitherto-unknown basic physical force – now known as the ‘strong nuclear force’ – that exerts a pull between the protons and the neutrons in the nucleus. He further hypothesised that there must be a hitherto-unknown particle, which would have a mass somewhere between an electron and a proton, that would carry the force, in much the same way that, in quantum electrodynamics, electromagnetism is carried by the photon. Yukawa even speculated that this new particle ‘may also have some bearing on the shower produced by cosmic rays’. American university libraries did not, as a rule, subscribe to Proceedings of the Physical and Mathematical Society of Japan, but Yukawa sent Oppenheimer a copy of it. For about eighteen months after its publication Oppenheimer might well have been the only English-speaking scientist to have read it.