Authors: Jennet Conant
On July 12, 1947, Los Alamos was transferred to civilian control under the auspices of the AEC. With its future no longer in doubt, and the living conditions becoming more attractive, new scientists began coming to the laboratory, and high-level military leaders and VIPs again became frequent visitors. Teller returned on a part-time basis to continue his work on the hydrogen bomb, and familiar faces like Bethe, Fermi, and Lawrence often came through to see how he was progressing. Dorothy continued welcoming newcomers to the Hill, screening employees, and running the one-of-a-kind information bureau she had pioneered during the early days of the project. Over time, her duties increased as she continued to help service the needs of the expanding, clamoring city on the Hill. After the war, in an effort to improve the quality of life for those remaining on the mesa, she established a shopping service that tracked down items not stocked in the army PX. As more new personnel started arriving, she also started an official hostess program to provide information and assistance to project employees. Even when the construction workers’ ugly old temporary quarters were razed, and new upscale bedroom communities began to grow up around Los Alamos, housing remained a problem, and Dorothy continued to help people find adequate accommodations.
Tourists continued to poke their heads into her office at 109 and pester her with questions about Los Alamos. She blamed Hollywood for fanning the flames of notoriety. The 1946 March of Time newsreel about the project,
Atomic Power
, had brought droves of people to her door, but it was nothing compared to the numbers who came after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s A-bomb blockbuster
The Beginning or the End
, which premiered to much fanfare in Washington, D.C, in February 1947. Hume Cronyn starred as Oppenheimer and Spencer Tracy as General Groves, and publicity posters of the duo were plastered all over town. Dorothy thought Cronyn did not begin to capture Oppie’s good looks or charisma, and she agreed with the
Times
’ critic who found the film to be imbecilic. She was pleased as punch when the picture flopped.
As the pace slowed, there was more time to socialize with the project scientists who had become her close friends. Dorothy would invite them to her home for dinner parties, and they finally had a chance to meet her friends from Santa Fe, including the painter Cady Wells, the writer Witter Bynner, and other local luminaries. For the wartime scientists, who had spent two years living next to the centuries-old town without knowing a soul other than Dorothy, it was a wonderful opportunity to finally meet members of the artistic community they had heard and read so much about. Up till then, they had had to satisfy themselves with pouring over guidebooks and taking walking tours of the town, peering through the gates of the old pink adobe houses, and at the lush walled gardens tucked inside, and wondering about the poets or painters who lived there.
As one of Santa Fe’s most prominent citizens, Dorothy was now much in demand, and she became a leading figure in the city’s cultural affairs, sitting on the boards of several museums and the opera, and through her the separate communities became better acquainted and formed enduring ties. The “Atomic Lady,” as she was affectionately known, was a public relations force, and she did much to secure the laboratory’s good reputation at a time when many communities were unhappy about having bomb factories next door. With her encouragement, the Santa Fe Committee for Atomic Energy was formed, with Witter Bynner as its president. He even dedicated a series of poems in praise of the new atomic age.
Dorothy’s wedding chapel, which had served thirteen couples during the war years when there was no place else for them to go, continued to do a flourishing business. Many of the young project scientists chose to return to Santa Fe to get married at her beautiful adobe farmhouse, where they had such happy memories. One of these couples, Becky and Ben Diven, exchanged vows in her garden in 1951. “Dorothy was in many ways the heart of the project,” said Betty Diven, and “we all considered both Oppie and Dorothy to be part of our most intimate family.” Many others echoed the sentiment. “We were all so young in the beginning, and the town was so new, we sort of grew up together,” said Marge Bradner, who was secretly married there in 1943. In that intense twenty-seven month period, 173 babies were born on the Hill, and Dorothy helped look after them all. “They were like our parents,” agreed Marguerite Schreiber, “Dorothy and Oppie. They got us through it.”
Dorothy remained close to Oppenheimer, and they kept up a warm, steady correspondence. For the first few years after the war, he was a regular visitor. Whenever he was in town, he would come to the house and they would fix their ritual dinner of steak and asparagus and sip the strong martinis, expertly prepared by him, on the patio. He and the children would often stay the night with her on their way to and from their ranch in the Pecos, and she kept a storeroom full of their sleeping bags and other camping supplies. Other times, Dorothy and Kevin would go up and spend the day with them at Perro Caliente and go on hikes and picnics as in the old days. She had promised to keep an eye on the ranch for Oppie and often drove up with mutual friends and reported back to him about broken windows and water pipes. As the years went by, she saw less and less of him. In the fall of 1947, Oppenheimer assumed the prestigious post of director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He bought a large, stately white house, called Olden Manor, and added a greenhouse so that Kitty, who studied mycology, could finally grow the plants she had tried in vain to coax out of the arid soil at Los Alamos. They spent their last extended summer at Perro Caliente in 1950. Beginning the following year, the Oppenheimers started vacationing in the Caribbean. The island of St. John, where they built a house, became their preferred holiday retreat.
Dorothy’s feelings for Oppenheimer were not diminished. “In a word, she loved him,” said Kevin. “He was the finest man she would meet, and she devoted herself to him. He took my father’s place, no question about it. He filled a void in her life. Beyond the devotion there was a genuine understanding and acceptance of the man, his family, and their many problems—the whole complicated equation. Kitty knew this, and came to rely on it. Over the years the two women became closer, establishing an entente only they understood. Perhaps because they shared a love for the same man, they learned to share his triumphs and failures, happiness and heartache.
Kitty continued to be in a bad way, and Oppenheimer blamed himself for her problems. Dorothy would hear both sides of the sad story, first from one and then from the other. Kitty’s nerves were not good, and it did not help that she was drinking heavily. (Less charitable members of the Princeton faculty had renamed the director’s house “Bourbon Manor.”) Kitty had also begun to suffer from the recurrent intestinal ailments—“la grippe,” as Dorothy called it in consoling letters—that would often leave her bedridden and unable to travel. On those occasions, Dorothy would accompany Oppie on trips, as she did when she went with him to the inaugural “Conference on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,” held on Shelter Island, New York, in June 1947. All during those first years after the war, when Oppenheimer was commuting to Washington, and Kitty was alone and depressed, she took to calling Dorothy. Kevin remembered seeing his mother taking the phone into another room and disappearing for hours while she patiently listened to Kitty pour out her troubles. “It might have been her husband’s difficulties or her own demons,” he said. “Either way, my mother would try to talk her down.”
As the 1940s came to a close, Oppenheimer was the most admired and certainly best known of the World War II physicists, his gaunt visage with the haunted eyes almost as recognizable as Einstein’s, who was one of his colleagues at Princeton. Oppenheimer had become a highly influential figure in Washington and a much-sought-after confidential advisor in international relations, which, as he had accurately foreseen, was now dominated by nuclear policy. He had been appointed to a six-year term on the AECs General Advisory Committee (GAC), along with eight other distinguished scientists including Conant, Fermi, and Rabi. At their first meeting, they unanimously elected him chairman. In their first year, Oppenheimer’s committee worked with Groves to set a new, productive course for the Manhattan Project’s moribund laboratories and, most significantly, recommended that Los Alamos develop a wide range of nuclear weapons.
As director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Oppenheimer was regarded as the intellectual guru to an amazing roster of talent that ran the gamut from Nobel Prize-winning physicists Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac to the poet T S. Eliot and the historian Arnold Toynbee. As
Life
magazine wrote in a reverent cover story in October 1949, “Unlike many scientists, Oppenheimer has a Da Vincian range of interests and knowledge, encompassing the arts and humanities, the social sciences, current affairs and oriental philosophy. He is a linguist who finds himself at home in half a dozen languages including Sanskrit. His own rhetoric, both written and ad lib, is rich and exquisite. Over and above his scholarly achievements he has revealed himself as a graceful executive and diplomat, as astute and imaginative in the performance of his public role as leader of the nation’s scientists.”
In the article, one of his institute colleagues pointed out that Oppenheimer encompassed “two antithetic but complementary natures—the man of science and the man of affairs, creator and administrator, introvert and exponent.” Three years later, those contradictory sides of his personality would be subjected to merciless national scrutiny.
TWENTY-ONE
Scorpions in a Bottle
T
HE YEAR
1950 began a dangerous decade in American politics. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s rabid Cold War anti-communism and campaign of vicious denunciation was spreading fear and uncertainty throughout the country. The sensational allegations drummed up by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in the fall of 1947, which pressured motion picture studio heads to “name names” of prominent Communists in the film business and resulted in the blacklisting of hundreds of writers, actors, and directors, had already cut a wide swath through Hollywood. The following August, Washington was rocked by Whittaker Chambers’ accusation during a HUAC hearing that Alger Hiss, a senior State Department aide, was a member of a Communist cell scheming to infiltrate the American government. Hiss’s guilty verdict on January 21, 1950, followed less than two weeks later by the shocking news from London that Klaus Fuchs, one of the Los Alamos atomic physicists, had confessed to being a Soviet spy, threw the government into a state of virtual panic.
Exploiting the turmoil, the junior senator from Wisconsin decided he could make headlines by exposing the Communist infiltration of the State Department and the army. On February 12, 1950, after a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy tauntingly waved in front of reporters a sheet of paper that he claimed contained “a list of 205” names of known Communists who were “working and shaping policy in the State Department.” He made the same charge again and again in the days to come, changing the number of “bad risks” to 57 and then 81, as the press clamored for details of McCarthy’s witch hunt.
Given the virulent times, it was a wonder Oppenheimer was able to go on operating in Washington as well as he did, advising both the State and Defense Departments, and preaching his increasingly unrealistic and unpopular doctrine of international control. He had more reason than most to be apprehensive, if not downright paranoid, given the complex and strained personal and professional entanglements that littered his past. It was the heyday of wild rumors, informers, and smear campaigns, and Oppenheimer was beginning to realize, possibly for the first time, that he was terribly vulnerable. Despite the fact that he knew he had many enemies, he made no attempt to temper his rhetoric. But the more he bucked the tide, and defied public and political opinion by holding fast to Bohr’s humanist message to stop building bombs for the sake of the future, the more he drew fire. As McCarthy’s fanaticism swept the halls of government and hardened the lines of debate, Oppenheimer’s usual ability to charm and cajole deserted him, and he began to lash out at critics he saw as stupid or ignorant with his acid tongue, humiliating antagonists in ways they never forgave or forgot. In private, he admitted to close friends that the ruthless “Red scare” tactics and political thuggery of the new Cold War era frightened him, and he had already begun looking nervously over his shoulder to see if McCarthy’s bloodhounds were on his trail.
Oppenheimer had already had a narrow escape after his appointment to the AEC in 1946, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was now in the possession of all the Manhattan Project security files, personally sent a voluminous file of “derogatory information” to Lilienthal, charging that the nation’s foremost physicist might be a Communist and could represent a dangerous security risk. Lilienthal did not believe Oppenheimer was a security risk, but after reading the dossier, he and his four AEC commissioners recognized they had a political disaster on their hands if any of it were leaked to the press. Lilienthal quickly called Conant and Bush for character references, and the two senior scientists confirmed that there was no doubt as to Oppenheimer’s loyalty and patriotism. Conant put his opinion in a letter to Lilienthal later that month:
I can say without hesitation that there can be absolutely no question of Dr. Oppenheimer’s loyalty. Furthermore, I can state categorically that, in my opinion, his attitude about the future course of the United States government in matters of high policy is in accordance with the soundest American tradition. … Any rumor that Dr. Oppenheimer is a Communist or toward Russia is an absurdity. As I wrote above, I base this statement on what I consider intimate knowledge of the workings of his mind.