Authors: Jennet Conant
In the midst of the session, Oppenheimer turned to Lansdale and pointedly observed that when it came to his own staff, although he would not be concerned about a physicist’s past affiliations if his present frame of mind was constructive, he definitely did not want any
current
members of the Communist Party working at Los Alamos because there would always be a “question of divided loyalties.” The strong statement was surprising coming from Oppenheimer, and to Lansdale seemed out of character. It was one of many statements Oppenheimer would make that would later be hard for security officials to know how to interpret and would leave them wondering if he was simply trying to be conciliatory or was attempting to lead them astray.
Oppenheimer not only ignored Lansdale’s warning, he interjected himself even further into the Lomanitz mess. On August 25, he again traveled to Berkeley on business, and while he was there, he stopped by the campus security office in Durant Hall and asked the local chief, Lieutenant Lyall Johnson, if it would be all right if he met briefly with Lomanitz. Johnson discouraged the idea, stating that he thought the young physicist was trouble, but allowed the Los Alamos director to do as he saw fit. Oppenheimer went on to have a brief but unsatisfactory meeting with Lomanitz, who admitted that he was still a party activist and claimed he was being framed. Annoyed and fed up, Oppenheimer, according to his own account, parted on bad terms with his ex-student. That might have been the end of it, but before leaving Johnson’s security office in Durant Hall that day, Oppenheimer mentioned in passing that he had been told by a friend that a certain British engineer named George C. Eltenton, who was employed by the Shell Development Corporation, had offered to supply technical data to the Russians. It is not clear why Oppenheimer chose that moment to help security by volunteering the tip about Eltenton, particularly since the conversation with his friend had taken place some eight months earlier. It is almost certain that he had no idea how inflammatory this action would prove to be.
As soon as Oppenheimer left, Johnson relayed the Eltenton tip to Colonel Pash, his superior, whose jurisdiction over the West Coast atomic facilities included Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory. Pash, who was already investigating leads that the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, called Oppenheimer and asked him to come back the next day for a friendly chat.
On August 26, 1943, Pash and Johnson sat down with Oppenheimer in the security office on campus and asked him to elaborate on the Eltenton tip. Unbeknownst to Oppenheimer, Pash had arranged for an officer to surreptitiously tape the interview. Pash quickly got down to business and asked for the identity of his contact, but Oppenheimer balked at naming names. Oppenheimer was reluctant to drag in his old friend Haakon Chevalier, a lecturer in Romance languages at the University of California, whom he had met through the Teachers’ Union during his early dabblings in left-wing politics. Whether Oppenheimer was apprehensive about what his past might yield, or greatly underestimated his interrogators and the importance they attached to his Communist associations, is difficult to gauge. Certainly he wanted to protect Chevalier, who had stood by him after his scandalous elopement with Kitty and was so trusted a friend that the Oppenheimers had left their two-month-old baby son in the care of Chevalier and his wife while they took a badly needed vacation to New Mexico in the spring of 1941. Tired and distracted, he may not have seen why he should waste time and energy on something he regarded as a trifling matter.
In any case, under several hours of Pash’s persistent questioning, Oppenheimer refused to give up Eltenton’s contact and failed to give a coherent account of how he came to be approached by someone soliciting technical information about the bomb project for the Russians. He told Pash that the go-between was acting on Eltenton’s behalf and knew a man proficient at “microfilming” who could pass the information on to the Soviet consulate. He also added, according to the transcript of their conversation, that three other approaches had been made and that these three scientists “were troubled by them, and sometimes came and discussed them” with him. When Pash insisted again that Oppenheimer had a duty to furnish the name of the man involved in such subversive activity, Oppenheimer refused, saying that he had rebuffed the approach. Since no information was leaked, and the mission had failed, he did not see the need to impeach his friend.
A week after their meeting, Pash fired off a memo to Groves summarizing the interview. Drawing a direct connection between the Lomanitz situation and the Eltenton tip, Pash concluded that the reason Oppenheimer had suddenly spoken up about an incident that had occurred eight months earlier was that G-2 agents were closing in on his secret contacts, and he wanted to throw them off the trail and distract them from where his true sympathies lay.
It did not help matters that Los Alamos’s brash young security officer, Captain Peer de Silva, a handsome twenty-six-year-old who was two years out of West Point, had also taken an instant dislike to Oppenheimer. Cold, correct, and a stickler for details, de Silva, who was under Pash’s command, was one of several agents investigating whether Oppenheimer should be given final clearance, an issue that security was reluctant to sign off on. De Silva was appalled by the inconsistencies in Oppenheimer’s file and wrote Pash that the physicist “must either be incredibly naïve and almost childlike in his sense of reality, or he himself is extremely clever and disloyal.” Clearly de Silva inclined toward the latter. No doubt prompted by Pash, he sent his own memo to Washington on September 2 charging that Oppenheimer was involved in treachery:
The writer wishes to go on record as saying J. R. Oppenheimer is playing a key part in the attempt of the Soviet Union to secure, by espionage, highly secret information which is vital to the United States.
All of these charges cast rather a dark shadow over the man Groves had chosen to head the Los Alamos laboratory. Moreover, their timing could not have been more awkward. The nervous sleuths in army intelligence had been proceeding at such a snail’s pace in granting clearances to the top physicists that Conant had worried this might “seriously delay” the bomb project and had pushed Vannevar Bush to recommend quick approval for Oppenheimer and other vital scientists despite their “unusual” backgrounds. Goaded into action, Groves ordered the directive on July 20, only five weeks before his top security officers would accuse the Los Alamos director of treason:
In accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued for the employment of Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr. Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.
Despite the blemishes already on Oppenheimer’s record by that July, Groves had decided to back him. There was much not to like about Oppenheimer’s politics, and his lapses in judgment and occasionally undiplomatic comportment caused them all to worry if they had selected the right man to be the leader. But Groves had come to the same inescapable conclusion as Bob Bacher: there was no one else. Not one to take unnecessary chances, however, Groves decided to hedge his bet. Intent on assuring that Oppenheimer behaved and the project proceeded smoothly, Groves installed de Silva as head of security at Los Alamos. That way, his man could keep an eye on the restless laboratory director’s movements for the duration of the project and make sure he did not wander too far off the reservation.
If G-2’s intrusions into his life left Oppenheimer feeling he was no longer his own man, a letter from Groves on July 29 sealed his fate. Not only was he to be held accountable for his past indiscretions, Groves made it clear he was now a prisoner in a jail of his own making:
In view of the nature of the work on which you are engaged, the knowledge of it which is possessed by you and the dependence which rests upon you for its successful accomplishment, it seems necessary to ask you to take certain practical precautions with respect to your personal safety.
It is requested that:
(a) You refrain from flying in airplanes of any description; the time saved is not worth the risk. (If emergency demands their use my prior consent should be requested.)
(b) You refrain from driving an automobile for any appreciable distance (above a few miles) and from being without suitable protection on any lonely road, such as the road from Los Alamos to Santa Fe. On such trips you should be accompanied by a competent, able bodied, armed guard. There is no objection to the guard serving as chauffeur.
(c) Your cars be driven with due regard to safety and that in driving about town a guard of some kind should be used, particularly during the hours of darkness. The cost of such a guard is a proper charge against the United States.
I realize that some of these precautions may be personally burdensome and that they may appear to you to be unduly restrictive but I am asking you to bear with them until our work is successfully completed.
Groves also ordered special MPs to stand guard outside the Oppenheimers’ house on Bathtub Row. The additional surveillance was uncomfortable, and Kitty found the lack of privacy particularly grating. It also caused no end of problems when she dashed out of the house without her badge, only to find on her return that the uniformed men outside the door would not allow her to enter her own home. No matter how many times she insisted she was the laboratory director’s wife, the guards would refuse her entry. On more than one occasion, she had to appeal to a neighbor to prove she was who she claimed to be, and only then would the guards let her in to retrieve her pass and put the matter to rest. Never one to be easily intimidated, Kitty soon found a way to turn the situation to her advantage. She put the MPs to work as babysitters, relying on them to watch little Peter, who would be asleep in his crib, while she went out to do errands. Elsie McMillan recalled returning home one day from the Commissary to find a grinning young officer at her back door. He saluted and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Oppenheimer, the baby you left in the bedroom is quite all right.” She replied, “Thank you very much, but I am not Mrs. Oppenheimer and I didn’t leave a baby in my house.” He said, “My God, I’m guarding the wrong house!” and took off at a run. Shortly thereafter, a fence was put around the Oppenheimers’ home, though she could not help wondering if it was meant to ward off spies or keep future guards from making the same mistake.
Kitty Oppenheimer was the unofficial hostess of Los Alamos, but while she enjoyed the status and perks of the role, and was not above occasionally lording it over others, she remained for the most part a reluctant member of the community. Not everyone thrived on the enforced togetherness and small-town clubbiness that characterized life on an isolated army post, and Kitty, brittle and taciturn by nature, was less suited to it than most. She never really seemed to fit in, and she failed to rise to the occasion and become a social force in the small colony as might have been expected of the laboratory director’s wife. Instead, she ceded that role to more outgoing women, such as Martha Parsons, who did most of the large entertaining, and Rose Bethe, a beautiful Ingrid Bergman lookalike, who tackled the Housing Office and was a great organizer and cheerleader in the early days of Los Alamos. Kitty was imperious, unconventional, and, as demonstrated by her rapid succession of marriages, generally indifferent to the middle class mores that prevailed on the mesa. Every bit as quick and cutting as Oppie, she had the same strong opinions on matters of style and comportment, and it was never hard to tell whom she favored and whom she did not. Unlike her husband, however, she did not worry about staff morale and made little effort to temper her frankness or sarcasm.
To visiting VIPs, she appeared clever, vivacious, and charming, and she threw delightful tipsy parties. She was a wonderful cook, and her dinners were made all the more memorable by a guest list studded with Nobel laureates. To newly arriving friends and eminent male physicists, she could be solicitous, showing up at their door that first disconcerting morning with a ready-made “welcome basket” of essentials, including milk, bread, assorted dishes, flatware, and a can opener to tide them over until they were unpacked and settled. On a day-to-day basis, however, she was a difficult and divisive presence. Despite the fact that the Indian and Spanish American maids who were bused in daily were in short supply and allotted strictly on the basis of need, she felt entitled to the services of a daily housekeeper, inspiring considerable resentment in the other wives. And at a time when rationing also dictated that Hill wives had to save C-coupons and carpool to have enough gas for the eighty-mile round-trip drive to Santa Fe once a month—and that was with coasting downhill—she could often be seen tearing off to town in her pickup truck. A fearless driver, she thought nothing of tackling the winding, treacherous road on her own.
All this might have mattered less had she not been the director’s wife. But in their narrow little world, she wielded enormous power and, according to Priscilla Greene, often wielded it quite mercilessly. If she had no use for someone, it showed. She was coldly dismissive of Rose Bethe, who was as congenial as her husband and well liked by everyone. But Rose was also a favorite of Oppie’s, which may have been all the excuse Kitty needed to turn against her. “Kitty was impossible,” said Priscilla Greene. “She was not friendly, she was the boss’s wife, and she could really be mean. She could also cause trouble for you, so you had to be very careful.”
Kitty warily regarded her husband’s endearing way with the opposite sex and jealously guarded his affections. All of Oppenheimer’s assistants quickly learned to give her a wide berth. Kitty taught Priscilla Greene that lesson upon her arrival in Santa Fe. Priscilla had accompanied baby Peter and his nurse out west and had settled into the room adjoining the family’s suite at La Fonda. Joe Stevenson had booked her the room next door for convenience, but Kitty was not pleased with the arrangement. She marched straight into Priscilla’s room, locked the connecting door, and walked out without so much as a word. The next day, Priscilla discovered she had been removed to the opposite side of the hotel.