Cooksey—it was his office—stopped by long enough to take a photograph of the group laughing at a joke. A figure at the edge of the picture, partly cut out of the scene, was Alfred Loomis, the man who had summoned the great and powerful for the occasion yet remained virtually unknown outside the room.22
Loomis was a former Wall Street financier and eccentric whose real avocation was physics, which he indulged at a well-equipped private laboratory on his Tuxedo Park estate some thirty-five miles north of New York City. The Loomis Institute for Scientific Research was located in a Tudor-style stone mansion, complete with turrets and battlements, to which the world’s eminent physicists were invited annually to carry out research at their host’s expense.23 Loomis was so taken with Lawrence’s project that he promised not only to help raise foundation money but to supplement the budget with his own funds if necessary.
Karl Compton left immediately after the Berkeley meeting to carry the group’s endorsement to Rockefeller trustees in New York. Lawrence and Cooksey drove those remaining down the coast to Carmel, where they spent the weekend at Del Monte Lodge, a posh resort overlooking Monterey Bay, at Loomis’s expense. Between passing rain squalls, Lawrence and Loomis led picnic excursions to view the sea lions at nearby Point Lobos.24
But this seaside idyll was soon spoiled by talk of the war. Arthur Compton was surprised to find Lawrence moody and distracted by events in Europe. Conant and Bush, both recently returned from a tour of England’s laboratories, spoke of rumors among British scientists that the Germans were working to harness the energy of fission for a revolutionary new kind of weapon.25
* * *
Although Oppenheimer had seen the Nazis in action while a student at Heidelberg, the war in Europe initially seemed an abstraction. It only became real when a favorite aunt escaped from Germany in 1937 and moved to nearby Oakland with her son and his family.26
Like many on the political left, Oppenheimer remained resolutely opposed to U.S. intervention in the struggle—particularly after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact in August 1939. “I know Charlie [Lauritsen] will say a melancholy I told you so over the Nazisoviet pact, but I am not paying any bets yet on any aspect of the hocuspocus except maybe that the Germans are pretty well into Poland. Quel stink,” Oppie wrote to a Caltech colleague that fall.27
Oppenheimer’s political awakening had occurred only a few years earlier, the result of his association with two individuals.28
Jean Tatlock was an attractive green-eyed brunette whom Oppenheimer had met in spring 1936 at a benefit for the Spanish Loyalists organized by his landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn. Tatlock was working on a graduate degree in psychology at Stanford University; her father was a professor of English literature at Berkeley, an expert on Chaucer.
Oppenheimer’s students believed that Jean Tatlock had a humanizing influence upon their mentor. (“I need physics more than friends,” Robert once wrote to Frank during his bachelor days.)29 Jean introduced Oppie to the romantic poetry of John Donne.30
Theirs was a tempestuous, on-again, off-again relationship. Twice Oppie had come close to proposing marriage, but Jean had drawn away. Finally, after graduation, she had gone back east to medical school, and their passion had cooled with distance. Given to frequent and prolonged bouts of depression, Tatlock wanted to become a psychiatrist.31
Intense about politics as well as poetry, Jean had belonged to several organizations on campus and felt a particular affinity for the Loyalist cause. At one point she joined the local branch of the Communist Party. That first fall, when they had begun dating regularly, Tatlock introduced Oppie to Rudy Lambert, a party functionary in nearby Alameda County, and also to Dr. Thomas Addis, a physician at Stanford Medical School who was a recruiter for the party.32
Another among Tatlock’s circle of radical friends was Haakon Chevalier, a thirty-five-year-old assistant professor of French literature at Berkeley when Oppenheimer first met him in early 1937.33 Born in Lakewood, New Jersey, of French and Norwegian parents, Chevalier was a big man who combined continental manners with Viking good looks. (“6 ft. 1 in.; 175 lbs.; slender; left cheek twitch, large hands” is how the FBI would later describe Chevalier.) He had led a picaresque life—including a stint as a deckhand on a four-masted schooner during an around-the-world voyage in 1921—before returning to the United States and entering academe.34
Following visits in 1932–33 to New York and Paris—the site of what he later described as his own political awakening—Chevalier began attending Communist Party meetings shortly after he came home to Berkeley.35 Having literary ambitions of his own, Chevalier dreamed of one day writing a semiautobiographical novel describing his private intellectual journey to radicalism. (“A gradual disintegration, disgust with the contemporary world, modern America, various escapes, until at the end he finds a hope in Communism” is how he outlined the protagonist’s role in notes taken on the steamer back from Europe.)*36
For the interim, however, Chevalier’s heroic deeds, like his novel, remained the stuff of fantasy. In 1931, he had married a former student, Barbara Lansburgh, an heiress whose grandfather had built San Francisco’s first department store during the Gold Rush. By 1939, the couple had rented a ten-room, Tudor mansion high in the Berkeley hills. The house became the venue for political benefits which the Chevaliers hosted. Money raised from the sale of drinks and orchid corsages went to the Spanish Loyalists, California’s farmworkers, and other progressive causes of the day.37
Despite surrounding himself with the trappings of affluence, Chevalier remained a zealous defender of the party line throughout the Stalinist purges. When Berkeley radicals, protesting the expulsion of a Communist student from a nearby junior college, were followed
