Authors: Jennet Conant
While traveling through the mountains in New Mexico, Oppenheimer and Smith stayed at the fashionable Los Pinos Ranch in the Pecos Valley, north of Santa Fe, which during the heyday of dude ranches was known as a particularly elegant establishment with a high-class clientele. Los Pinos’s appeal lay in its rustic lodge, glorious setting, and lovely proprietress, Katherine Chaves Page. The beautiful, aristocratic, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of an old Santa Fe family and prominent statesman, Page had studied in the East, held a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and was newly married to a New Yorker named Bernard Winthrop Page. An accomplished horsewoman, Katherine Page knew the high country like the back of her hand, preferring to get off the beaten trails and explore out-of-the-way places. She utterly captivated the impressionable eighteen-year-old Oppenheimer, encouraging his interest in riding, as he showed an unusual feel for horses. Together, they went on long excursions into the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo Mountains. On one leisurely trip, the two came across a beautiful blue-green lake hidden high in the upper Pecos, and at the urging of the smitten teenager, they called their discovery “Lake Katherine,” as it has been known to hikers ever since.
In the intimacy of quiet trails and campfires, Oppenheimer and Page struck up a close friendship, and for the rest of her life they would keep up a warm correspondence and he would return to the mountains, and to her, as often as he could. It was on one of their most memorable rides that Katherine Page took Oppie up to the Los Alamos Ranch School. “I first knew the Pajarito Plateau in the summer of 1922,” he recalled later, “when we took a pack trip up from Frijoles and into the Valle Grande.” It was a trip he would make again and again in the years to come, perhaps feeling some connection to the frail boys he saw playing on the fields.
During that trip to the Southwest, the solitary Oppenheimer permitted himself his first really close friends. He solidified his budding friendship with a high school classmate, Francis Fergusson, who was also bound for Harvard, and whose family was from Albuquerque. During his visit with Fergusson, he met another gifted student, Paul Horgan, and they instantly became “this great troika,” as Horgan remembered, all “polymaths,” precocious and driven to excel in their chosen fields—Oppie as a physicist, Fergusson as a literary scholar, and Horgan as a novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “[Oppenheimer] was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known, the most brilliantly endowed intellectually,” said Horgan. “He had this lovely social quality that permitted him to enter into the moment very strongly, wherever it was and whenever it was. So one didn’t see him as eventually the incredibly great scientist or the celebrity at all. He had a great superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity at that time.” Even in the early days his young companions were aware that Oppenheimer battled “deep, deep depressions,” during which he would withdraw and become incommunicado for a day or two. To Fergusson, it seemed that out west Oppie found some release from the pressures back home, “his Jewishness and his wealth, and his eastern connections, and [that] his going to New Mexico was partly to escape from that.”
The change in Oppenheimer’s outlook wrought by his time in the desert was evident in the witty, confident tone of a letter to Smith written during his freshman year at Harvard. Noting that he was amused to hear that his old teacher had decided to go west with “two new neurotics,” he added wistfully, “I am of course insanely jealous”:
I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos “in September, when I’ll want my friends to comfort me, you know,” spending the moonlight on Grass mountain; I see you vending the marvels of the upper Loch, of the upper amphitheater at Ouray, of the waterfall at Telluride, the Punch Bowl at San Ysidro—even the prairies of Antonito—to philistine eyes.
In 1928, during his postdoctoral studies in Europe, a bout of tuberculosis brought Oppie back to the Pecos Valley for an extended stay. At Katherine Page’s suggestion, Oppie and his brother leased a homestead in Cowles, a mile or so from her guest ranch, eventually purchasing it outright and turning it into a shared retreat. Katherine Page christened it Perro Caliente, Spanish for “hot dog,” and a more mellifluous translation of the idiom Oppie reportedly uttered upon laying eyes on it for the first time. Once again, the climate proved therapeutic, and after a summer of “miscellaneous debauch,” his condition had improved enough to allow him to return to Europe as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow. Oppenheimer divided his fellowship year between three European centers of physics—Leiden, Utrecht, and Zurich—but when a stubborn cough worsened even in the invigorating altitudes of Switzerland, it was recommended that he return a month early to the United States to prepare for his unusual joint appointment at Berkeley and Caltech.
Throughout the 1930s, Oppenheimer spent part of every summer in the mountains of New Mexico, and the Serbers, who were frequent visitors, took part in the spartan and vigorous life he led there. They discovered that for someone so slight, Oppie was deceptively strong, apparently immune to cold and hunger, and a fearless rider. He had a beautiful quarter horse, aptly named Crisis, that was every bit as high-strung as its owner. The “ranch,” as he called it, was a bare-bones operation, consisting of little more than a rough-hewn log cabin and corral with a half dozen horses, situated on a meadow at the base of Grass Mountain. There was no heat, except for the large wood stove in the kitchen, and no plumbing, save for the makeshift outhouse at the far end of the porch. In his autobiography, Serber noted that Oppie had formed the habit of sleeping outdoors during his spot of TB and seemed not to notice that his guests froze at night on their cots on the porch and that, at two miles above sea level, the smallest exertion left them “gasping for air.”
Although the Serbers were inexperienced riders, Oppie insisted on taking them on weeklong expeditions into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, rising up 13,500 feet to the Truchas Peaks. “Always very solicitous about the horses and concerned they didn’t bear too much weight,” Serber wrote, Oppenheimer would pack plenty of oats for the animals, but barely enough provisions to keep his two-footed companions from starving to death. Oppie, who often neglected to eat, thought nothing of heading into the mountains alone for days on end with only a few chocolate bars in his pocket. In his autobiography, Serber repeats a telling, if apocryphal, description of a typical Oppie excursion as told to him by Ruth Valentine, a Pasadena psychologist and mutual friend: “It is midnight, and we are riding along a mountain ridge in a cold downpour, with lightning striking all around us. We come to a fork in the trail, and Oppie says, ‘That way it’s seven miles home, but this way it’s only a little longer, and it’s much more beautiful!’”
It was in the spring of 1940 during a quick getaway to New Mexico that Oppie asked the Serbers to bring the married Kitty Harrison along, saying in passing, “I’ll leave it up to you. But if you do it might have serious consequences.” Kitty came, and Oppie rode off with her for an overnight visit to the Los Pinos ranch. The following day, a bemused Katherine Page trotted over to the ranch and hand-delivered Kitty’s nightgown, which had been discovered that morning under Oppie’s pillow. That fall, Kitty went to Nevada to obtain a divorce. On November 1, the same day her divorce was finalized, she and Oppenheimer were quietly married in Virginia City, Nevada. It all happened so quickly that when Oppie took Serber aside and disclosed that he had “some news,” Serber automatically assumed he had tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, with whom he had been having a tempestuous, on-again, off-again affair. Tatlock suffered from severe mood swings and was unstable. She had broken off with him once and for all a year earlier, and Oppie had been mourning her loss ever since. “I just gaped at him, trying to figure out whether he’d said Kitty or Jean,” recalled Serber. “Charlotte had to kick me to remind me to make the appropriate salutary noises.”
The Serbers were not the only ones Oppenheimer invited out to spend time with him in his favorite habitat. Over the years, many of his colleagues ventured to the ranch, including Ernest Lawrence, Ed McMillan, George Gamow, George Placzek, Victor Weisskopf, and Hans and Rose Bethe, whom he happened to run into one day hiking in the area and brought home. Oppie would treat his guests to one of his incendiary chili dinners, known to some as “nasty gory,” and his brother, Frank, who played the flute almost as well as a professional, provided the entertainment. As a rule, talk of physics was forbidden, with exceptions made for special guests.
Sustained by the grandeur and serenity of the mountains, Oppenheimer had conquered first illness and then loneliness. “My two great loves are physics and desert country,” he once wrote a friend. “It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” As in most things up to then, Oppenheimer eventually got his way.
FIVE
The Gatekeeper
F
OR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS
in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer and his key staff worked out of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the early mornings and made daily trips up to Los Alamos to inspect the progress of the construction. “The laboratories at the site were in a sketchy state, but that did not deter the workers,” Dorothy wrote of those hectic early days. “In the morning buses, consisting of station wagons, sedans or trucks, would leave 109 and pick up the men at the ranches and take them up the Hill. Occasionally, a driver would forget to stop at one or another of the ranches and the stranded and frustrated scientists would call in a white heat.”
The “mañana spirit” indigenous to the area did not help matters. The local Spanish American drivers never understood why they had to make so many round-trips up the steep-sided, winding road, or why everyone was in such a hurry to get to such a barren settlement. Dorothy could never think of a good reason and instead tended to fall back on the project’s overused catchphrase, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” The drivers maintained such a slow, meandering pace that some scientists swore they would go mad. To hurry things along, Hugh Bradner commandeered anything with wheels and helped ferry men and equipment up to the site. Watching the motley-looking caravan come rolling back at the end of the day, Dorothy could only shake her head. It reminded her of what she had read about the Battle of the Marne in World War I, when the Parisians jumped into anything that could move and “hordes of taxis drove the French soldiers to the front.”
Since none of the eating facilities on the mesa were operational yet, one of Dorothy’s first tasks was to procure the two dozen picnic lunches every day that were taken up to the scientists for their noontime meal. Because so many of the battered cars consigned to carry the lunches were in poor condition and frequently waylaid by flat tires, just feeding the physicists working on the site during those first few weeks proved a challenge. In order to avoid any unnecessary questions about their activities, Dorothy was careful not to buy all the sandwiches in one place; she went all over Santa Fe in search of different restaurants and cafés. It was a snowy spring, and given the wet weather, she knew any local shopkeeper “would have thought you were crazy to have a lot of boxed lunches.” She politely but firmly rebuffed the curious and, when required, told some tall tales to cover her tracks. Dorothy did not like lying, but became adept at it.
Oppenheimer’s presence at 109 East Palace, and his importance to the project, not to mention the many classified documents he kept in his office, meant they were under surveillance at all times by army intelligence known as G-2. It was ironic that in this most secret of projects, Groves’ field safe was the only secure file in the director’s office and therefore by necessity served as a combination bank vault and lockbox for all the project’s valuables, including reserves of cash, confidential reports, and registered mail, as well as precious laboratory materials, including platinum and gold foils. Despite the gravity of the situation, Dorothy could not help laughing at the sight of the G-2 agents, who she learned to spot “a mile away.” Dressed in their matching three-piece suits and wingtips and positioned at the street corners, casually leaning against the drugstore, and loitering on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, they stood out in sharp contrast to the other pedestrians on the street. They wore snap-brimmed felt hats in winter, and when the weather turned warmer, snap-brimmed straw hats. They cruised the Plaza in identical black Chevy sedans, and Kevin told her that at night they parked in neat rows behind the Chevrolet garage at the edge of town. She was none too amused, however when two burly security guards manhandled her son at the entranceway to 109 not long after she started working there. When Kevin sauntered into the office after school one day in hopes of catching a ride home with his mother, they pulled him up short with a stern, “And where do you think you’re going, sonny?” After pleading with the guards to check with Mrs. McKibbin inside, he had the satisfaction of seeing them told off by his mother, who rushed out onto the patio flushed with anger. “She got them set straight pretty quick,” he said. After that, Kevin, who was fascinated by guns, took to dropping by after school every afternoon and became an expert on the different caliber guns the MPs carried.
As the weeks went by, the town was crawling with clean-cut young FBI agents. No matter how well Dorothy got to know some of the men, the rule held that if they passed on the street, there could be no sign of recognition. If a suspicious person showed up at the office, or someone pestered her with too many prying questions, she had only to make a quick call to G-2 and one of the agents would be on the trail “by the time he hit the street.” For someone new to the spy game, Dorothy thought she showed great composure and believed she scared off her share of snoops. It seemed like a game at first, and she could not help being imaginative about German spies. But after a few unnerving encounters, she learned to be grateful for the added protection and the watchful gaze of her big gray standard poodle, Cloudy, who accompanied her to work every day.