this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”
14
Physics and Desert Country
Robert Oppenheimer was thirty-eight years old in 1942. He had done by then what Hans Bethe calls “massive scientific work.” He was known and respected as a theoretician throughout the world of physics. Up to the time of the Berkeley summer study, however, few of his peers seem to have thought him capable of decisive leadership. Though he had matured deeply across the decade of the 1930s, his persistent mannerisms, especially his caustic tongue, may have screened his maturity from his colleagues' eyes. Yet the 1930s shaped Oppenheimer for the work that was now to challenge him.
His distinctive appearance sharpens the memory of an admiring new friend of that decade, a Berkeley professor and translator of French literature named Haakon Chevalier:
[Oppenheimer] was tall, nervous and intent, and he moved with an odd gait, a kind of jog, with a great deal of swinging of his limbs, his head always a little to one side, one shoulder higher than the other. But it was the head that was the most striking: the halo of wispy black curly hair, the fine, sharp nose, and especially the eyes, surprisingly blue, having a strange depth and intensity, and yet expressive of a candor that was altogether disarming. He looked like a young Einstein, and at the same time like an overgrown choir boy.
Chevalier's portrait identifies Oppenheimer's youthfulness and sensitivity but misses the self- destructiveness: the chain-smoking, the persistent cough persistently ignored, the ravaged teeth, the usually empty stomach assaulted by highly praised martinis and highly spiced food. Oppenheimer's emaciation suggests he had an aversion to incorporating the world. His body embarrassed him and he seldom allowed himself to appear, as at the beach, undressed. At school he wore gray suits, blue shirts and well-polished black shoes. At home (a small spare apartment at first; later, after his marriage, the elegant house in the Berkeley hills he bought with a check the day he first toured it) he preferred jeans and blue chambray work shirts, the jeans hung on his narrow hips with a wide Western silver-buckled belt. It was not a common look in the 1930s — he had picked it up in New Mexico — and it was another detail that made him seem different.
Women thought him handsome and dashing. Before a party he might send gardenias not only to his own date but to his friends' dates as well. “He was great at a party,” a female acquaintance of his later adulthood comments, “and women simply loved him.” His unfailing attentiveness probably elicited that admiration: “He was always,” writes Chevalier, “without seeming effort, aware of, and responsive to, everyone in the room, and was constantly anticipating unspoken wishes.”
Men he could antagonize or amuse. Edward Teller first met Oppenheimer in 1937. The meeting, Teller says, was “painful but characteristic. On the evening I was to talk at a Berkeley colloquium, he took me out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. I didn't have the practice in speaking that I've had since, and I was already a little nervous. The plates were so hot, and the spices were so hot — as you might suspect if you knew Oppenheimer — and his personality was so overpowering, that I lost my voice.” Emilio Segre notes that Oppenheimer “sometimes appeared amateurish and snobbish.” Out of curiosity in 1940, while visiting Berkeley to deliver a lecture, Enrico Fermi attended a seminar one of Oppenheimer's protegds led in the master's style. “Emilio,” Fermi joked afterward with Segre, “I am getting rusty and old. I cannot follow the highbrow theory developed by Oppenheimer's pupils anymore. I went to their seminar and was depressed by my inability to understand them. Only the last sentence cheered me up; it was: ‘and this is Fermi's theory of beta decay.’” Although Segre found Oppenheimer “the fastest thinker I've ever met,” with “an iron memory… brilliance and solid merits,” he also saw “grave defects” including “occasional arrogance… [that] stung scientific colleagues where they were most sensitive.” “Robert could make people feel they were fools,” Bethe says simply. “He made me, but I didn't mind. Lawrence did. The two disagreed while they were both still at Berkeley. I think Robert would give Lawrence a feeling that he didn't know physics, and since that is what cyclotrons are for, Lawrence didn't like it.” Oppenheimer recognized the habit without diagnosing it in a letter to his younger brother Frank: “But it is not easy — at least it is not easy for me — to be quite free of the desire to browbeat somebody or something.” He called the behavior “beasthness.” It did not win him friends.
Oppenheimer's mother died after a long battle with leukemia in late 1931; that was when he announced himself to Herbert Smith, his former Ethical Culture teacher, to be “the loneliest man in the world.” His father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1937. The two deaths frame the beginning years of the unworldly physicist's discovery of the suffering in the world. Later he testified to the surprise of that discovery:
My friends, both in Pasadena and in Berkeley, were mostly faculty people, scientists, classicists, and artists. I studied and read Sanskrit with Arthur Ryder. I read very widely, mostly classics, novels, plays, and poetry; and I read something of other parts of science. I was not interested in and did not read about economics or politics. I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country. I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like
Beginning in late 1936, my interests began to change.
Oppenheimer reports three reasons for the change. “I had had a continuing, smouldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany,” he mentions first. “I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country.” They arrived only a few days after his father's death and he and Frank volunteered responsibihty for them.
Second, says Oppenheimer, “I saw what the Depression was doing to my students.” Philip Morrison, one of the wittiest of the young theoreticians, polio-crippled and poor, remembers in compensation the “very grave, very profound involvement in physics, the love of the whole thing, which we all had in those days.” Oppenheimer could take his admiring students to dinner; he was unable to find them jobs. “And through them,” he testifies, “I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”
He had no framework yet. A woman would help him with that, her involvement the third reason he gives for his entry into the world: Jean Tat-lock, the lithe, chiaroscuro daughter of an anti-Semite Berkeley medievalist. “In the autumn [of 1936], I began to court her, and we grew close to each other. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.” Tatlock was bright, passionate and compassionate, frequently depressed; their relationship was an ocean of storms. But so were Tatlock's other commitments. “She told me about her Communist Party memberships; they were on again, off again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking.” The couple began to move together among what he calls “leftwing friends… I liked the new sense of companionship, and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country.” He was taken with the causes of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and the migrant workers in California, to both of which he contributed time and money. He read Engels and Feuer-bach and all of Marx, finding their dialectics less rigorous than his taste: “I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me.
He met his wife, Kitty, in the summer of 1939 in Pasadena. She was petite and dark, with a broad, high forehead, brown eyes, prominent cheekbones and a wide, expressive mouth. On the rebound she had married a young British physician, “Dr. [Stewart] Harrison, who was a friend and associate of the [Richard] Tolmans, [Charles C] Lauritsens, and others of the California Institute of Technology faculty [Harrison was doing cancer research]. I learned of her earlier marriage to Joe Dallet, and of his death fighting in Spain. He had been a Communist Party official, and for a year or two during their brief marriage my wife was a Communist Party member. When I met her I found in her a deep loyalty to her former 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.”
