Authors: Jennet Conant
Regardless of how most people felt about Kitty, no woman dared turn down an invitation to one of her dinners or tea parties for fear of the repercussions, not just for herself, but also for her husband. Kitty had an unkind word for everyone, and the women worried her comments might reach Oppenheimer’s ears. “Kitty was a very strange woman,” said Emily Morrison, the wife of Phil Morrison, one of Oppie’s protégés. “She would pick a pet, one of the wives, and be extraordinarily friendly with her, and then drop her for no reason. She had temporary favorites. That’s the way she was. She did it to one person after another.” They all saw how she went through people, picking fights with old friends and then snubbing them publicly “She could be a very bewitching person,” said Morrison, “but she was someone to be wary of.”
At one point, Kitty’s wrath turned on Charlotte Serber, one of the most prominent and popular women at Los Alamos. “Kitty threw a hate on Charlotte,” said Shirley Barnett. “She would boycott her and throw parties and not invite the Serbers, which was ridiculous. Everybody was aware of it, and it was very hurtful. But Kitty was capable of that.” Oppie knew better, she said, but “went along with it; it was probably a matter of keeping the peace at home.”
When it came to Kitty, Oppenheimer was so passive as to be complicit. Even when she was at her worst, he would look the other way. He was an intensely private person, and while it was always hard to read his feelings, her sabotaging of the Serbers had to have been particularly awkward and embarrassing, as they were among his oldest and closest friends and he continued to see them daily in the Tech Area. Nevertheless, he did not intervene, and the Serbers were dropped from their cocktail crowd. This followed a pattern that had emerged shortly after their marriage, when Oppie broke off from many of his old Berkeley pals, either because they did not get on with his new wife or because they failed to meet with her approval. “He was very aware, but what could he do?” said Priscilla Greene. “It was such a bad, stupid marriage in the first place. I don’t think he had terribly good taste in women. And in a way, he felt responsible for Kitty.”
At Los Alamos, Kitty kept to herself. She brooded, and it showed in her face, which was pretty and animated when she smiled, but was increasingly closed and drawn down into a scowl. She wanted desperately to be a good wife to Oppenheimer, but he was not an easy man at the best of times, and at Los Alamos he was tense, distracted, and remote. No longer free to make the leisurely overnight pack trips they used to take into the mountains, he left their five horses to her to look after. In his whole time at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer found time for only one weekend excursion. Lonely and bored, Kitty reached out to Shirley Barnett, who had begun helping out in Oppie’s office and whose husband was already her trusted pediatrician. “Kitty needed companionship, and I was young and less threatening than the others,” she recalled. “She would invite me to spend my days off with her, and we’d go for lunch and shopping trips to Santa Fe, or as far as Albuquerque. She always had a bottle of something with her when she was driving, and you could always tell when she was getting drunk because she would talk more freely.”
On those long, alcohol-fueled drives, Kitty would often reminisce about when she had first visited New Mexico with Oppie, when they would ride over to the Ranch School and Miss Warner’s on horseback, and it was apparent that those were fond memories for her. When she had been drinking more than usual, she would touch on her past, though she rarely mentioned her family and remained circumspect. “She was fascinating, but not very nice,” reflected Shirley. “She was not very happy, and you got the sense she never really had been. I think it stemmed from the fact that she’d had a complicated life and had been married before. The great love of her life was her first husband [
sic
], the one who was killed in the Spanish Civil War, and she never really got over it.”
Kitty had indeed had a complicated life, and that made her particularly vulnerable to the emotional and intellectual pressure cooker that was Los Alamos. She was born Kathryn Puening in Germany in 1910, was brought to the United States at the age of three by her parents, Franz and Kathe Vissering Puening, and became a citizen by virtue of her father’s naturalization in 1922. Her father was a mining engineer, and her family settled in Pittsburgh, where Franz Puening made a comfortable living in the steel industry. Kitty had wanted for nothing. But from the bright, attractive, and indulged only child of successful immigrants, Kitty grew to be a willful and rebellious young woman, whose first essays at independence were marred by an impetuousness that bordered on recklessness. After graduating from high school in 1928, Kitty entered the University of Pittsburgh, but, restless and unfocused, she left after only a year and headed for Paris. She drifted through courses at the Sorbonne and then did a stint at the University of Grenoble, but she was by her own admission more interested in the nightlife than her studies. Her European sojourn reportedly climaxed in a brief, unhappy alliance with a young musician from Boston, Frank Wells Ramseyer, Jr., in the spring of 1933. She never spoke of it and later grudgingly revealed to the FBI that the union was annulled in September after only a few months. Kitty clearly considered the matter closed and not worthy of mention. That fall, she enrolled in the University of Wisconsin, only to abandon her studies again a few months later to run off with the man whom she would always refer to as her first husband.
Joseph Dallet, the tall, good-looking son of a Boston investment banker, had spurned his family to dedicate himself to, of all things, unionizing steel workers. Kitty probably could not have chosen anyone more unsettling to her upright German father. Dallet had dropped out of Dartmouth in his junior year and had distanced himself from his well-to-do family, which was “conservative in political and social outlook,” according to the brief biography that accompanies a published collection of his letters. After traveling in Europe and trying his hand at business, he finally went to work as a longshoreman “not because of economic pressure, but because he felt then that failure to earn his living by productive labor was to be a parasite.” By the time he and Kitty met at a New Year’s Eve party, he had joined the Communist Party and was a steel union organizer in Youngstown, Ohio. While he may have struck Kitty as a dashing and romantic revolutionary, leading strikes and trying to persuade workers to join the ranks of organized labor was not child’s play. It was a hard and dangerous occupation. Dallet and his militant comrades were repeatedly arrested, and they regularly squared off with the steel trust gunmen and sluggers.
In the first throes of love, Kitty left college for Youngstown and impulsively joined the party. She tried to immerse herself in his union work, typing letters, mimeographing leaflets, and doing odd jobs around the office. To prove her commitment to the class struggle, however, she was also expected to get her hands dirty distributing pamphlets and hawking
The Daily Worker
, the Communist Party newspaper, in the streets around the mills. She and Dallet had no money, shared a rundown communal house with other party members, and lived in the kind of squalor she had never in her life countenanced. After two years, poverty got the better of her politics, and she had had enough. In June 1936, she told Dallet she wanted a separation. “I felt I didn’t want to attend party meetings or do the kind of work that I was doing in the office,” she would state later at Oppenheimer’s loyalty hearing. “That made him unhappy. We agreed that we couldn’t go on that way.” Kitty’s mother, who had never approved of the marriage, welcomed her back with open arms. But after several months of brooding in England with her parents, who had relocated abroad, she wrote Dallet saying she would rejoin him. Months went by with no word from him, and the waiting left her dejected and depressed. It was then she learned to her horror that her mother had been hiding Dallet’s letters. “When she finally discovered this, Kitty was heartbroken,” recalled Anne Wilson, knew Kitty better than most. “Her mother was a real dragon, a very hard, repressive woman. She disappeared one day over the side of a transatlantic ship, and nobody missed her. That says it all.”
Furious at her mother’s treachery, Kitty ran straight back to her estranged husband, whose tender missives were all addressed to “Kitty Darling” or “Dearest Love.” Kitty was briefly reunited with Dallet in early March 1937, meeting him in Cherbourg, where the
Queen Mary
docked. They took the train to Paris, where they had ten days together before he left for Spain to join the large contingent of idealistic young American volunteers fighting for the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Infected by his enthusiasm for the cause, she wrote begging him to allow her to come fight by his side in Spain. He wrote back that he was “compelled to say no,” as wives were not welcome on the front lines, though he added, “Personally, I think you would make a first-rate tank-driver in addition to the other things you’ve listed.” Kitty, with no choice but to wait for him, returned to England. She wrote him faithfully several times a week and sent dozens of “snaps” of herself for him to show around. In July, Dallet hastily wrote, “Wonderful news. You can come.” They made plans to meet in Spain, but a burst appendix delayed her trip, and it was weeks before she was fit to travel.
In October, still very much in love, she was en route to Spain to spend several days leave with him when a telegram reached her in Paris that Dallet had been shot and killed during an advance of the International Brigade. Devastated, she remained in Paris for a week, where she was comforted by Steve Nelson, her husband’s close friend and comrade in arms, who brought her news of his bravery. To Nelson, Dallet died a hero, falling in battle against the fascists “without flinching an eyelash.” He convinced Kitty to contribute to a monument to his memory and leading role in the party by allowing the Workers Library to publish Dallet’s private letters to her from Spain, for which Nelson penned a laudatory introduction. To Kitty, though, it must have been small consolation that her husband gave his life to the cause before theirs had had a chance to begin.
A year later, in November 1938, Kitty married again on the rebound, this time to the British doctor Richard Stewart Harrison, whom she had known off and on for years. She later described her third marriage as “singularly unsuccessful from the start” and told Shirley Barnett it was over almost before it began. On returning to America that fall, Kitty went back to college, majoring in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, while Harrison remained on the opposite coast, completing his internship at a California hospital. She had only just rejoined Harrison in Pasadena, moving into his apartment for the first time following her graduation, when she was introduced to Oppenheimer at an August faculty party. “I fell in love with Robert that day,” she wrote, “but hoped to conceal it. I had agreed to stay with Dick Harrison because of his conviction that a divorce might ruin a rising doctor.” But she was twenty-nine, and as impatient as ever. Fifteen months later, she was pregnant by her new lover and filing for a divorce in Reno.
A shotgun wedding was not Oppenheimer’s style, and all his old friends immediately suspected him of doing the honorable thing. The rumor was confirmed when it turned out that she was already “showing” on her wedding day. Kitty admitted the truth to Anne Wilson. “She’d set her hat for him. She did it the old-fashioned way, she got pregnant, and Robert was just innocent enough to go for it.”
They were two of a piece, from their early flirtation, and eventual disillusionment, with radicalism to their tormented past love affairs and the deep insecurities that lay barely concealed beneath the sophisticated facades. If people were moved to judge her more harshly, however, it was because of the way she threw herself across his path and forced his hand in marriage. Their relationship was, in the eyes of almost everyone who knew them, a
coup de foudre
—yet another destructive force in the life of a gifted and sensitive man fated, as Diana Trilling observed after the hearings, “to suffer as much for his virtue as his error,” since they were so interchangeable. Yet, that Kitty adored Oppenheimer, identified herself totally with him, and in her own way struggled to fortify and buttress him during the worst times at the end of the war and afterward, there could be no doubt. Her protectiveness brought out the tiger in her, and she would go to great lengths to keep him safe or subdue a perceived threat. In his wartime memoir, the British physicist Rudolf Peierls paid tribute to her mettle, noting that she was “a person of great courage, both in the saddle of a horse and when facing a hostile authority,” a reference to the later Oppenheimer hearings.
Kitty could not have foreseen when she married the Berkeley physicist that she would be thrust into the middle of such a vicious environment and subjected to the kind of intense personal scrutiny that she and Oppenheimer were to endure from his appointment as director of Los Alamos to the day, almost a decade later, when his security clearance was revoked in 1954. If she began to withdraw into herself at Los Alamos, it was partly because of her personality, but it may also have been partly because of a new wariness, a concern for her position and worries about her past. It was not an easy time to be German in this country, and it created conflicting feelings in Kitty, who alternated between defiance and defensiveness. She had been raised to be proud of her German ancestry, once boasting to the Serbers that she was descended from royalty and that in Europe she had been treated with deference because of her formidable family. She managed to permanently alienate her sister-in-law, Jackie Oppenheimer—Frank’s wife—by once too often playing the aristocrat to her working girl. The two women thoroughly disliked each other, and after Oppie’s marriage to Kitty, Frank saw less of his brother.
But at the same time, Kitty was burdened with the knowledge that she was closely related to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht. Keitel was with Hitler when the German army marched into Poland in September 1939 and was prominently by his side again at the Führer’s triumphant victory over France. It was Keitel who personally presented the humiliating terms of the armistice to the defeated French government at the railway coach at Rethondes, near Compiègne, on June 21, 1940, where twenty-two years earlier Germany had been similarly beaten and humiliated at the hands of the French. Kitty had told friends that when the war broke out, she had taken quite a punishing from some of her college classmates. With anti-Nazi propaganda flooding the airwaves and American popular opinion, so recently isolationist, now whipping itself into a fever pitch in its campaign against the “murderous Huns,” it would have been no small wonder if at times she felt embattled and alone.