The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  Oppenheimer could also be dismissive to the point of rudeness. He had a habit of interrupting people mid-sentence by nodding and saying quickly, in a slightly affected Germanic accent, “Ja, ja, ja” as though he understood exactly what they were thinking and where their argument was headed—an argument he would then proceed to rip apart in brutal fashion. After witnessing one such performance, Enrico Fermi, who was every bit as agile if not more so, observed that Oppie’s cleverness sometimes allowed him to sound far more knowledgeable about a subject than he might be in practice. But with his magnetic presence, astonishing quickness of mind, and wide range of intellectual interests, Oppenheimer was an exciting figure to be around, and students and colleagues were drawn to him as much by his great capacity as a physicist as by his immense charm. “We were all completely under his spell,” said Philip Morrison, one of the brightest of the young physicists who studied with him. “He was enormously impressive. There was no one like him.”

  His allure extended well beyond the lecture hall. Oppenheimer had the powerful charisma of those who know from birth that they are especially gifted. He expected to dazzle—the implacable blue eyes said as much in a glance. It was his mind that burned so brightly, with an intensity that he brought into every room, every relationship, every conversation, so that he somehow managed to invest even an offhand gesture or remark with some extra meaning or significance. Everyone wanted to be initiated into his inner circle. Even his younger brother, an astute observer of the Oppie effect, was not immune. “He wanted everything and everyone to be special and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special,” said Frank, who was eight years his junior and idolized his talented brother, following him into physics even though he knew he would never be in the same league. “He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up these enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special. His sunsets were always the best.”

  What drew people to Oppenheimer was that he was so very serious and he took those he collected around him so seriously, endowing them with rare qualities and facets they did not know they possessed. He would focus on them suddenly and relentlessly, showering them with phone calls, letters, favors, and unexpected, generous gifts. His attention could be unnerving, but at the same time exhilarating and gratifying. He was far from perfect, but his flaws, like his dark moods and savage sarcasm, were part of his fascination. He liked to show off, but the performance disguised a deep well of melancholy and self-loathing he carried with him from his cosseted New York childhood. It was the loneliness of a prodigy. He was named for his father, Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, but was always known simply as Robert or Bob until his early twenties, when he felt compelled to embellish his name, perhaps in the belief that “J. Robert Oppenheimer” sounded more distinguished. He suffered from serious bouts of depression as a student first at Harvard, and then later at Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge, England, and even flirted with the idea of suicide. After failing to find satisfaction in psychiatry—one high-priced London doctor diagnosed his condition as “dementia praecox” and a “hopeless case”—he immersed himself in Eastern mysticism and became a fervent admirer of the Bhagavad Gita, the seven-hundred-stanza Hindu devotional poem, which he read in the original, after studying Sanskrit for that purpose. For a scientist, his search for wisdom in religion, philosophy, and politics was so unusual as to be considered “bohemian.” While it got him into trouble at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology), where he also taught, and the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Millikan refused him a promotion on the grounds that he was too much of a dilettante, at Berkeley it only added to his appeal.

  His style was to be the tormented genius, and his spare frame and angular face reflected his ascetic character, as if his desire to engage every moment fully and completely were consuming his inner resources. He had been a delicate child, and when he pushed himself too hard, he became almost skeletal, resembling a fifteenth-century portrait of a saint with eyes peering out of a hollowed face. There was something terribly vulnerable about him—a certain innocence, an idealized view of life that was only saved from being adolescent by the sheer force of his intellect—that touched both sexes. His students all adored him, and he inspired the kind of devoted following which led some jealous colleagues to sneer that it was more a cult of personality, that Oppenheimer was the high priest of his own posse. He was trailed everywhere by a tight, talented group of graduate students, the stars of their class, and Greene learned to easily identify them by their pompous attempts to imitate Oppenheimer’s elegant speech, gestures, and highbrow allusions. She sometimes had the impression that Oppie was conscious of his ability to enthrall. It was no accident that people wanted to help him and would go to extraordinary lengths to earn his approbation.

  Greene, who had graduated from Berkeley the previous year and still wore her long, blond hair loose on her shoulders like a schoolgirl, found him “unbelievably charming and gracious.” His voice was one of the most mesmerizing things about him. When he singled her out for attention, he was “so warm and enveloping,” he made her feel like the most pleasing guest at the party. “When he came into a room, my most characteristic memory of him is [his] coming across to shake your hand, with a slight tilt and a marvelous smile,” she said. “And what secretary wasn’t going to be absolutely overwhelmed by somebody who, in the middle of a letter—we all smoked in those days—whipped his lighter out of his pocket and lighted your cigarette while you were taking dictation and he was talking.”

  Compared to Ernest Lawrence, Oppenheimer was a person of enormous culture and education. Lawrence was celebrated for his invention of the cyclotron, the powerful atom smasher, but was proletarian in his pursuits outside of physics. Oppie was from a wealthy New York family, wore good suits, and tooled around campus in a Packard roadster he nicknamed “Garuda,” in honor of the Sanskrit messenger to the gods. He spoke six languages, quoted poetry in the course of everyday conversation, and could be snobbish about music and art. “Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were acceptable,” noted his protégé, Robert Serber. “Ditto the Impressionists.” He had fierce opinions when it came to food and wine. “Martinis had to be strong. Coffee had to be black.… Steak had to be rare,” listed the British physicist Rudolf Peierls. Once, Oppenheimer took Peierls and a group of graduate students out to a steak restaurant for dinner. He proceeded to order his entrée rare, and this was echoed by everyone in turn until the last student at the table requested his, “Well done.” Oppie looked at him for a moment and said, “Why don’t you have fish?”

  He spent a great deal of time cultivating people and interests that had nothing to do with science, and even Greene could not help being struck by the wide variety of his correspondence. One of the first things he asked her to do was take down a letter to a San Francisco museum to which he was planning to give a painting by Van Gogh, which he had inherited from his father. He had pronounced the artist’s name in the guttural German style with lots of breath—“Van Gaaaccchhh”—which was beyond her, and in the end he had to spell it. “The people he thought about, wrote about, and talked to, he had such a wonderful feeling for, that you really wanted to be part of whatever he was doing,” she said. “It was very hard to resist him.”

  His personal life was equally flamboyant, and a subject of much comment. Two years earlier in 1940, he had shocked friends and colleagues by marrying Kitty Puening after a whirlwind romance, and their son Peter had been born so soon afterward that Oppie had attempted to jokingly defuse the scandal by dubbing him “Pronto.” Kitty was dramatic, dark-haired, and petite; claimed to be a German princess; and was prone to putting on airs. She had also been married three times before the age of twenty-nine and had been with her previous husband for less than a year when Oppie met her at a Pasadena garden party. It was characteristic of Oppie that he would fall for someone so exotic, utterly unsuitable, and beyond reach as Kitty, who, among her many problems, was at th
e time another man’s wife. Oppenheimer, who was besotted, called her “Golden.” His close-knit circle was less charitable, considering the poetic young wunderkind—who was so bereft after his mother’s death in 1930 that he described himself to a friend as “the loneliest man in the world”—easy prey for a calculating woman. The faculty wives who had doted on Oppie, who was known for bringing flowers to dinner, took an instant dislike to her. After his marriage, many of his peers felt he became more socially ambitious than ever, as though seeking to remove himself from the dreary confines of academic life, and came to regard him with a mixture of envy and resentment. To Greene, however, he seemed even more of a romantic figure. While she would never have admitted it at the time, she was, she said, “more than a little in love” with her boss.

  Appeasing General Groves

  The relationship between General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer was a delicate balancing act. Among other issues, the two men disagreed over matters of security. Early on, Groves’s “extreme concern with security” led Edward Condon, Oppenheimer’s associate director at the Los Alamos laboratory, to resign. To Condon’s surprise, Oppenheimer was apparently unwilling to challenge Groves.

  From American Prometheus

  BY KAI BIRD AND MARTIN SHERWIN

  In late April 1943, Groves was angered to learn that Oppenheimer had traveled to the University of Chicago, where he had discussed the production schedule for plutonium with the director of the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Lab (Met Lab), the physicist Arthur Compton. The general blamed [Edward] Condon for this ostensible infringement of security. Descending on Los Alamos, Groves stormed into Oppenheimer’s office and confronted the two men. Condon stood his ground against the General, but, to his astonishment, he realized that Oppenheimer was not backing him up. Within a week, Condon decided to tender his resignation. He had intended to stay for the project’s duration, but had lasted just six weeks.

  “The thing which upsets me most is the extraordinarily close security policy,” he wrote Oppenheimer in his resignation letter. “I do not feel qualified to question the wisdom of this since I am totally unaware of the extent of enemy espionage and sabotage activities. I only want to say that in my case I found that the extreme concern with security was morbidly depressing—especially the discussion about censoring mail and telephone calls.” Condon explained that he was “so shocked that I could hardly believe my ears when General Groves undertook to reprove us.… I feel so strongly that this policy puts you in the position of trying to do an extremely difficult job with three hands tied behind your back.…” If he and Oppenheimer truly could not meet with a man like Compton without violating security, then “I would say the scientific position of the project is hopeless.”

  Condon concluded that he could better contribute to the war effort by returning to Westinghouse and working on radar technology. He left saddened and perplexed by Oppie’s apparent unwillingness to defy Groves. Condon was unaware that Oppenheimer had yet to receive his own security clearance. The Army’s security bureaucracy was still trying to block Oppenheimer’s clearance and Oppie knew he could not press Groves about security—not if he wanted to keep his job.

  Oppenheimer had much invested in his relationship with Groves. The previous autumn, each man had taken the measure of the other and arrogantly calculated that he could dominate their relationship. Groves believed the charismatic physicist was essential to the success of the project. And precisely because Oppenheimer came with left-wing political baggage, Groves thought he could use Oppie’s past to control him. Robert’s calculation was equally straightforward. He understood that he could keep his job only if Groves continued to consider him far and away the best director available. He realized that his communist associations gave Groves a certain hold over him, but by demonstrating his unique competence, he believed, he would convince the general to allow him to run the laboratory as he saw fit. Oppenheimer didn’t disagree with Condon; he too was convinced that onerous security regulations could smother the scientists. But he was confident that over time he would prevail. After all, in the end, Groves needed Oppenheimer’s skills as much as Oppenheimer needed Groves’ approval.

  In retrospect, they were the perfect team to lead the effort to beat Germans in the race to build a nuclear weapon. If Robert’s style of charismatic authority tended to breed consensus, Groves exercised his authority through intimidation. “Basically his way of running projects,” observed Harvard chemist George Kistiakowsky, “was to scare his subordinates to a point of blind obedience.” Robert Serber thought that with Groves it was a “matter of policy to be as nasty as possible to his subordinates.” Oppie’s secretary, Priscilla Greene Duffield, always remembered how the general would stride past her desk and, without even a hello, say something rude such as, “Your face is dirty.” This crude behavior made Groves the object of most of the complaints on the mesa, and this deflected criticism from Oppenheimer. But Groves refrained from such behavior around Oppenheimer, and it was a measure of Oppenheimer’s leverage in the relationship that he usually got his way.

  Robert did what was necessary to appease Groves. He became what the general wanted, a deft and efficient administrator. At Berkeley, his office desk had typically been stacked with foot-high piles of paper. Dr. Louis Hempelmann, the Berkeley physician who came to Los Alamos and became the Oppenheimers’ close friend, observed that on the mesa, Robert “was a clean-desk man. Never any paper there.” There was also a physical transformation: Oppie cut his long, curly hair. “He had his hair [so] closely clipped,” remarked Hempelmann, “I almost didn’t recognize him.”

  Visions of Immortality

  Shared ambition and mutual respect were integral to the success of the relationship between Oppenheimer and Groves.

  From Racing for the Bomb

  BY ROBERT S. NORRIS

  That Oppenheimer and Groves should have worked so well together is really no mystery. Groves saw in Oppenheimer an “overweening ambition” that drove him. He understood that Oppenheimer was frustrated and disappointed; that his contributions to theoretical physics had not brought him the recognition he believed he deserved. This project could be his route to immortality. Part of Groves’s genius was to entwine other people’s ambitions with his own. Groves and Oppenheimer got on so well because each saw in the other the skills and intelligence necessary to fulfill their common goal, the successful use of the bomb in World War II. The bomb in fact would be the route to immortality for both of them.

  They treated each other in special ways. Oppenheimer could at times be sarcastic with students or colleagues who could not keep up with his quick mind. Not so with Groves. He patiently answered whatever query the general asked. On Groves’s part he treated Oppenheimer delicately, like a fine instrument that needed to be played just right. Groves’s normal approach with most of his subordinates was to push them as hard as he could. The pressure was a test to see what they were made of. The more they took, the tougher they were. The good ones would make it through; those who broke would be transferred, demoted, or replaced. The general saw that this approach would not work with Oppenheimer. Some men if pushed too hard will break.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  Collaboration between Groves and Oppenheimer was a key factor in the success of the Manhattan Project.

  An Audacious Gamble

  As Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin portray in American Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s performance as director of the laboratory at Los Alamos was marked by a quietly effective leadership style. However, resolving a crisis over the design of the plutonium bomb in the spring of 1944 required more forceful action. In a major turning point of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer launched a crash effort to develop the implosion design for the plutonium bomb. It was an audacious and brilliant gamble that worked.

  From American Prometheus

  BY KAI BIRD AND MARTIN SHERWIN

  Everyone sensed Oppie’s presence. He drove himself around The Hill in an Army jeep or in hi
s own large black Buick, dropping in unannounced on one of the laboratory’s scattered offices. Usually he’d sit in the back of the room, chain-smoking and listening quietly to the discussion. His mere presence seemed to galvanize people to greater efforts. “Vicki” Weisskopf marveled at how often Oppie seemed to be physically present at each new breakthrough in the project. “He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar room when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us.” Hans Bethe recalled the day Oppie dropped in to a session on metallurgy and listened to an inconclusive debate over what type of refractory container should be used for melting plutonium. After listening to the argument, Oppie summed up the discussion. He didn’t directly propose a solution, but by the time he left the room the right answer was clear to all.