Robert Oppenheimer died in his sleep in the evening of February 18. Kaysen spent the following days organizing a memorial ceremony and taking care of a large number of distingished guests who came to pay their respects to Robert. Among those who came was General Leslie Groves, the leader of the wartime Manhattan Project, who had personally picked Oppenheimer to direct the bomb laboratory at Los Alamos. Groves and Oppenheimer were as different as two people could be, but they worked harmoniously together to get the job done. After the ceremonies were over, with moving reminiscences from George Kennan and Hans Bethe and other friends and colleagues of Oppenheimer, Kaysen remarked to me, “Well, if they fire me from the institute, I can always make a living as a funeral director.”
APRIL 23, 1967
On Friday came the news of Stalin’s daughter. [Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin, had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union and was living a restless life as an exile, first in India and later in Switzerland. Various people in Princeton with an interest in Soviet history were anxious to talk to her.] Edward Greenbaum is a friend of ours and a trustee of the institute. He happens to live next door to Helen Dukas, and so Helen knew when he went off on a secret mission to Switzerland a week ago. Helen immediately guessed that he would be bringing Stalin’s daughter back with him. Nobody believed her until it was in the newspapers on Saturday. Now she is enjoying her triumph. We were glad that Kennan played a courageous role in this affair. He has been as a historian intensely interested in Stalin and took the initiative in going to see Svetlana in Switzerland and persuading her to come here.
JUNE 10, 1967
This week has been spent in a state of wild excitement over the Middle East war. Princeton being a heavily Jewish town, many of our friends have brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles “over there.” I was never very friendly to Israel. [I had lived in England through the years when British soldiers were stationed in Palestine, trying to keep the peace between Arab and Jewish populations, and our soldiers had been repeatedly attacked by Jewish guerrillas.] But this war leaves me profoundly grateful to these people for managing everything so well without our help. I never believed it was possible in this century to fight and win a war in four days. It seems there has been nothing like it since Agincourt. On the first day of the war Dorothy had a lot of her pictures exhibited at an art show at the Princeton Synagogue. In the same school there is a little Israeli girl called Tamar, and we met Tamar with her mother at the show. Tamar is also very gifted. Her mother was saying good-bye to everybody because she was flying home to Israel on Tuesday. I thought, how irresponsible to take a child like that into the middle of the maelstrom. But the mother was completely confident. Another lady offered to keep Tamar in Princeton for a few weeks, and the mother refused without hesitation. I have to admit now she was right.
Our sixth child, Rebecca, was born on July 2. There is no letter describing the birth. The transatlantic telephone had become cheap and convenient enough, so that important events would be reported by telephone. When we first told the girls that a new member of the family would be arriving, Dorothy said, “No, that is wrong. If a new baby was coming, it would have come last year. We had babies in 1959, 1961, and 1963, so the next one would have come in 1965.” We had to explain to her that babies are sometimes allowed to break the rules. Rebecca was an easy baby and grew up with a startling resemblance to childhood pictures of my mother. The same telephone calls that told my mother of Rebecca’s birth brought to us the sad news, that my mother was going to hospital for an operation with a suspected colon cancer. Like Dr. Jung, she needed two operations. Unlike Dr. Jung, she survived them both and lived for seven more years. The following letter was written in response to the alarming news from my mother.
JULY 27, 1967
Dear Mamma, I was thinking, what a bright and charming little girl you must have been in the days when you were given young larks and partridges to take care of, and now there is not one person left alive in the world who remembers you as you were then. All the time I am enjoying the wise talk and tender love of the three little girls, Dorothy’s shrewdness, Emily’s sweetness, and Miriam’s mischievousness, and I am thinking how evanescent this all is. You are perhaps coming near to the end of the road, and we are at the beginning of it, but it is the same road for all of us.
In these days I think of the years when I was close to you and spending many days walking and talking with you, the years we lived in London until I went to America, from 1937 to 1947. I was lucky to have you then to see me through the years of Sturm und Drang, to broaden my mind and share with me your rich knowledge of people. I remember reading aloud with you Sons and Lovers by Lawrence, knowing that you and I were a little like Lawrence and his mother, and that this perfect intellectual companionship which we had together could not last forever. I am grateful for those years, and for the many weeks of renewed companionship that we have had since. I hope this letter does not sound too solemn. I expect to come and see you many times still in the future. I write you these thoughts, just in case you should slip away.
JULY 30, 1967
Did you notice that you and I both used the phrase “if you should slip away” in the letters which we wrote to each other on July 27? I am quite willing to believe that some kind of telepathy may happen at moments of intense feeling such as this. I would like to believe it, because it would be consistent with the idea that some kind of world-soul may exist, an idea that has appealed to both of us. I am a total agnostic, but the laws of physics and chemistry do not exclude a world-soul any more than they exclude our individual beings.
In 1967 Esther and George were still happy to baby-sit and fool around with their little sisters, but they were moving rapidly into a different world. They were teenagers and needed to take charge of their own lives. They were growing up and metamorphizing like caterpillars. You do not know, when the caterpillar becomes a pupa, whether it will emerge as a beetle or a butterfly. Esther applied for early admission at Radcliffe College and got a letter saying she was admitted but strongly advised to wait a year before enrolling. She fought back and enrolled at age sixteen. George at age fourteen became silent and withdrawn.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1967
Today I am driving Esther with ten pieces of luggage to Boston. Esther had her Youth-of-the-Month award. More exciting to me was a certificate from the New Jersey authorities certifying her to be the best high school Russian student of the year for the whole of New Jersey. George is hardly visible. He spends much of his time at the Catacomb, a club for teenagers in the cellar of the Presbyterian church. When at home he mostly plays very quiet sithar music. His bedroom is furnished in the style of a Hindu temple, and with the sithar music and constantly burning incense, the Indian tapestries and paintings covering the walls, the effect on the nerves is very soothing. I think he is beginning to find himself in this pseudo-oriental milieu.
NOVEMBER 17, 1967
It is your golden wedding day, and I cannot let it pass without writing. You can have some satisfaction in looking back, to see how much better the world is in so many ways than it was in 1917. That was a low point in human hisory. You have much to be proud of. Two satisfactory children, forty-six years of sustaining Papa through the ups and downs of a productive life. It is good that you were able to see him through to the end. He would have been much more lost without you than you are without him. You have been the rock on which he built his life.
My parents were married on November 17, 1917, when World War I had destroyed a whole generation of young people, the Germans had won huge victories on the Eastern Front, and the end of the war was not in sight. My father was lucky to have been sent home from the Western Front as a mental casualty, suffering from the disease that was then called shell-shock and is now called Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. My mother nursed him back to health.
Last night I was in Ithaca at the banquet to celebrate Hans Bethe’s Nobel Prize. Ithaca was beautiful, already under snow. Hans was entirely himself, as impe
rturbable as ever. Rose Bethe said she is glad the prize came to them so late. She said if they had had the prize ten or twenty years ago, many of their friends would have been slightly jealous or doubtful about it. Now everybody considers it overdue and is genuinely happy about it. She is right. It was an outstandingly warm and happy occasion.
DECEMBER 26, 1967
Esther turned up here for two days. I learned a few things about her life at Radcliffe. The main thing is, she has been elected to the Crimson board. As usual, she got what she wanted. The board consists of thirty people of whom only two are first-year students, from Harvard and Radcliffe together. So she had stiff competition to get in. She seems to be firmly set on a career in some kind of journalism. For this the Crimson is an excellent starter. However, I told her in the best fatherly tone that if all she wants from Radcliffe is on-the-job training in journalism, she should take a job on a real newspaper right away and save me about $15,000. She agreed she will now let the Crimson slide a bit and concentrate more on her formal education.
JANUARY 25, 1968
Imme and I had a hilarious evening at the Kaysens. We were invited to supper with Jim Watson (the DNA man) and other people. It was an informal affair, a different atmosphere from such parties in Oppenheimer’s time. The guests were all Harvard people, and there was much talk about Cambridge, Mass. Kaysen started out by saying, “Well, I hear that your Esther has taken Cambridge by storm.” Being elected to the Crimson has really impressed people there. Kaysen said, if you want to get a good education at Harvard, the thing to do is to go onto the Crimson. What I find impressive is that Esther understood so fast that this was the thing to do, quite apart from her performance in actually doing it.
Meanwhile we are watching George move in a very different direction. He has as quick an eye for the road to perdition as Esther has for the road to success. He chooses his friends among the hardcore rebels whose main amusement is taking illegal drugs. Possibly he gained entry into this circle, as difficult in its way as breaking into the Crimson, by bringing some supplies from San Francisco. The hardcore drug circle has a rigid code of honour, the basic rule being omertà, silence, not to talk even under the severest pressure. If they accept George, he must have in some way proved his worth. The other night I had a real father-to-son talk with George, the first in several years. We talked for more than two hours. I told George as emphatically as I could of the many young people I have known who went to pieces as a result of drugs. He replied that he knows many more drug-takers than I do and that they all lead sane and satisfactory lives. That was round one. We continued arguing passionately but politely on both sides. In the end I told him that I will do everything in my power to stop him handling drugs, including bringing in the police if I get any hard evidence. I said I would rather see him in gaol than in a mental institution. He took this all calmly, said he respects my frankness and hopes we can continue to respect each other on both sides. One thing at least is clear as a result of this conversation. George is as formidable in his way as Esther is in hers.
FEBRUARY 15, 1968
I am still hopeful that George will come through all this and make something good of his life. I enclose a couple of poems which he wrote recently, probably in a marijuana trance. They are technically imperfect, certainly not on the level of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” but I enjoy the dreamlike flow of the words and images.
And the red knight he tottered from his silken velvet throne
Because the fair one he had wanted was to be no more his own.
And now that he was gone the place was opened to despair
When up upon the hill there cried a youth with long black hair,
And often did he scream, and often he would yell,
That because of the young and fair one, the world would rest in Hell.
And often did they speak of silver silk and gold
To come in times of peace and happiness untold.
And Gods would win their fortunes and Kings let down their hair
Till times would come again when evil was laid bare.
And the ground would bring forth flowers of colors yet unknown
To bathe our mind and body in thoughts our very own.
—GEORGE DYSON, January 1968
Things went much faster than we expected. On Tuesday two big policemen came to the house and asked if they could search George’s room. Then they picked him up directly from school. He has been for three days in the youth house in Trenton, and we are due to get him back tomorrow. In the evening one of the two policemen came again to talk to Imme and me. He seemed to us a very sound and understanding person. He is youth officer for Princeton and handles all the juvenile delinquents here. He said the first thing they did to George at the youth house was to cut his hair. This will cause George tremendous grief. As you can see from his poems, the long hair is important to him. As the policeman said, they do not want to maltreat the boys at the youth house, and yet they want to make sure that the boys really try to keep out of it. This symbolic indignity of the haircut is an essential part of the treatment.
I heard good news of George from a lady who was with him on a camping trip in the High Sierras. She said George was the leading spirit in a group of teenagers who were at the camp and impressed everybody with his flamboyant clothes and behaviour.
Last weekend Esther turned up here, on her way from a reporting trip to Haverford College in Pennsylvania. I took Esther down to the Youth House to have an hour with George, who was still incarcerated. The youth house is a little modern building in Trenton. It is boring rather than punitive. George said he was not badly treated there. The following day he was released and came home looking greatly improved with his haircut. On Tuesday his case will come to the juvenile court, and the court will no doubt put him on probation. I am glad they caught him so early.
MARCH 24, 1968
Last week Imme and I had to appear at the courthouse for a social investigation, which meant that each of us plus George had a half-hour interview with a benevolent but not very bright social worker. Next week there will be a psychological examination. After that finally will be the second hearing by the court, at which the judge will announce his decision. The whole procedure is made inconvenient and time-consuming for the parents, because in the majority of cases the parents are negligent or uncooperative, and this is a good way to convince them that it is worth their while to keep their kids out of trouble.
APRIL 5, 1968
To my mind the shooting of King was a far worse thing than the shooting of Kennedy. I heard King speak in Berkeley about fifteen years ago, before he became famous, and I always had a great belief in him. He was far and away the greatest and most far-sighted of the Negro leaders. I do not blame the negroes at all for rioting now. If I were black, I would be out in the streets with them. Esther talks of going to Europe this summer at her own expense. George is not really changed. Still surly and insolent by turns, but at least he is now working at his schoolwork and getting some A and B grades. The psychologist pronounced him only normally maladjusted.
APRIL 21, 1968
I ran into a problem which you may be able to elucidate. I wanted to refer to the scene at the end of Faust where Faust is talking about organizing a group of people to drain a swamp. I had in mind a vivid picture of this scene, Faust with a shovel in his hand working at the dike, finally taken out of himself by the comradeship of a common effort. When I looked for this scene in the play, I found it is not there. What is there is a philosophical discourse rather than a dramatic picture. Looking back into the past, I wonder where this beautiful and spurious Faust-scene came from, and I believe it must have come from Mamma. Do you have any recollection of having told it to me? And if you did, was your improvement of the original version conscious or unconscious? It is a good illustration of the limited value of education, when the only piece of Goethe that made a deep impression on me turns out to be by you and not by Goethe.
The institute is lively, there are te
n physicists here and I am working hard at some good problems. Today I discovered a little theorem which gave me some intense moments of pleasure. It is beautiful and fell into my hand like a jewel from the sky.
This theorem was published in a little paper with the title “A New Symmetry of Partitions” in a mathematics journal (1969). Through all my years in America, I took occasional short holidays from physics and returned to my first love, the theory of numbers.
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