Pandora's Keepers (16 page)

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 Soviet 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.

Though Oppenheimer’s conscience had been awakened, his activism had a quality of immature gullibility to it. He relied on Tat-lock and her circle of radical friends as political mentors. One of them was a handsome, charming, and cultivated thirty-five-year-old professor of French literature at Berkeley named Haakon Chevalier, whom Oppenheimer first met in 1937. They became close friends, founding a campus branch of a teacher’s union and sponsoring benefits for leftist causes. Chevalier was fascinated by Oppenheimer’s intellect and restlessness. When Oppenheimer sat, he shifted constantly—flicking his fingers stained with nicotine from chain-smoking, crossing and uncrossing his legs. There was a driven—almost Byronic—quality to his life that reflected an inner turmoil.

Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil made what had now become a full-fledged affair with Tatlock a stormy one. Despite their intimacy, their relationship swung back and forth. They were on again, then off again. “We were at least twice close enough to marriage to consider ourselves engaged,” said Oppenheimer later.
49
Each time, it was Jean who shied away from commitment. Much of the problem stemmed from her severe bouts of depression. Their love affair continued tempestuously for three years, but it never seemed to provide Jean with what she was seeking. In early 1939 their relationship ended.

In August of that year Oppenheimer met Kathryn Puening Dallet Harrison at a party given by mutual friends in Pasadena, where Oppenheimer spent part of each year teaching at Caltech. Petite and dark, with a broad, high forehead, brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a wide, expressive mouth, “Kitty” Harrison resembled Jean Tatlock in many ways. She was politically engaged. She was bright, strong-willed, and controversial. The wife of a young British doctor in residence at a Pasadena hospital (a marriage that was not working out), Kitty had been married twice before—the first time to a European musician (the marriage had been annulled), the second time to an American communist union organizer who had been killed fighting for the Loyalists in Spain. When she met Oppenheimer, the effect on both of them was electric. Their secret affair did not last long. On November 1, 1940, Kitty obtained a quick Nevada divorce and married Oppenheimer the same day. They returned to Berkeley to make a home for themselves and their expected child, a boy named Peter, who was born on May 15, 1941.

“When I met her,” Oppenheimer later said of Kitty, “I found in her a deep loyalty to her [deceased second] husband, a complete disengagement from any political activity, and a certain disappointment and contempt that the Communist Party was not in fact what she had once thought it was.”
50
Oppenheimer had also begun to reexamine his own political views. Because of his earlier insulation from politics, he had suffered a late awakening to the totalitarian realities beneath the socialist facade of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. In 1938 two physicists who had just returned from an extended stay in Russia, Victor Weisskopf and George Placzek, paid him a long visit at Perro Caliente. What they told Oppenheimer of purge trials, tyranny, and the lack of personal and scientific freedom shocked him. He later described their reports as “so solid, so unfanatical, so true, that they made a great impression” on me.
51
The fall of France in June 1940 further jolted him. He was deeply troubled by the turn of events in the war—France had just fallen and Britain was in imminent danger. “What are we going to do about Europe?” he asked another physicist that summer.
52
Hitler seemed unstoppable, and Oppenheimer suddenly realized not only that something had to be done but that communism wasn’t going to do it. A friend recalled this moment as “the first occasion when Oppenheimer talked about political matters not from the standpoint of the Left, but from the standpoint of the West.”
53

And then it was clear. Although he was the intellectual equal of the greatest physicists of his generation, Oppenheimer knew he was never going to make a grand success out of pure physics. He was a proud man and scientifically ambitious, but he was never able to immerse himself completely in a particular problem with the intensity of a Bohr or Fermi. His wide range of interests worked to his disadvantage and he lacked the creative confidence shared by those who made major discoveries. He had no great scientific achievement to his name, he had won no Nobel Prize; yet he now saw a way to achieve lasting distinction: by using his scientific knowledge in the fight against Nazi Germany. He began plotting a story with himself as the hero.

It was Lawrence who brought Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project. The two first met when Oppenheimer arrived at Berkeley in August 1929, and quickly began a friendship that shaped the rest of their lives. It was an unlikely relationship. Lawrence—highly intuitive and extroverted, by turns taciturn and brash—was a doer who built big and never doubted himself. Oppenheimer—highly cerebral and introspective, by turns arrogant and charming—was a dreamer who used a piece of chalk as his basic working tool and suffered severe depressions. Lawrence was practical and pragmatic; Oppenheimer was bookish and intellectual. Lawrence liked sports and movies; Oppenheimer liked poetry and music. Lawrence wore three-piece suits and behaved like an industrialist; Oppenheimer dressed in a bohemian manner and was proud of his reputation for mixing drinks.

“Between us was always the distance of different temperaments,” Oppenheimer later said, “but even so, we were very close.”
54
They dined together at Jack’s, an upscale restaurant in San Francisco; rode horses together in the Berkeley and Piedmont hills; and took long drives together to Yosemite and Death Valley. They grew so close that Lawrence named his second son Robert. When Oppenheimer rushed East in the summer of 1931 to the bedside of his gravely ill mother, he wrote to Lawrence: