109 East Palace (54 page)

Among the various awards handed out, every laboratory employee received a tiny sterling silver pin, no bigger than a dime, bearing a large “A” and in smaller letters, the word “
BOMB
.” It was a strangely diminutive token to commemorate such a monumental undertaking, but they probably had their penny-pinching general to thank for that. According to the papers, Groves was already busy defending their $2 billion budget and charges that their man-made town was so expensive that the handful of aspens planted by the Army Corps of Engineers were referred to as “twenty-four-carat trees.” But that did not matter. While Groves may have been head of the Manhattan District, and the University of California their actual employer, according to their paychecks, Dorothy, like most people on the mesa, had always thought of herself as working for Oppie. He had been their undisputed leader, loved or despised, and was already well on his way to becoming a legendary figure.

Now that Oppenheimer was leaving, and had handed over the directorship to Norris Bradbury, the project was officially over. The laboratory might continue to exist, but it would never be the same. Only those who had been there from the very beginning, who had answered his urgent call for help, who had been sworn to silence and had labored long hours under conditions of extreme secrecy, could know what an adventure it had been. “It was sort of like falling in love,” Dorothy told an interviewer years later. “You carry on and everything, and then you’re aware of this fact that’s hit you.” Smiling, she shook her head, as if trying, and failing, to describe an unknown phenomenon, the Oppenheimer mystique. “I don’t mean to compare this project—the atomic bomb—to love,” she added. “I’m just trying to tell you …”

On another occasion, she put it all down to Oppenheimer’s peculiarly vivid blue eyes, a visionary’s eyes, the exact color of the gentians that carpeted the valleys, and the matchless New Mexico sky. “He hypnotized me with those blue eyes,” she said.

He mesmerized them all. Dorothy’s allegiance to Oppenheimer was deeply personal to the end, but it was not unique. In many ways, it was emblematic of his leadership style and the profound mark he made on everyone who came to the Hill. He inspired love, loyalty, hard work, and dedication. He seemed to expect no less, and he reciprocated with his warmth and solicitude, and by living up to his own high standards and never dictating what should be done. “He brought out the best in all of us,” said Hans Bethe, when he spoke at Oppenheimer’s memorial service in 1967. “Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories … but I have never observed in any of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives.”

TWENTY

Elysian Dreamer

W
ITH THE PROJECT
winding down, the pressure at 109 East Palace eased. Dorothy, like everyone else, was preoccupied with tidying up loose ends. The laboratory, like the country, would have to find a new way to go forward. A number of physicists who had fallen in love with the setting, and still savored the technical challenges, wanted to stay on. It looked as if the government might allow Los Alamos, which the papers had dubbed “Uncle Sam’s town,” to continue as a weapons research center for at least a few years, producing more bombs for the country’s stockpile and working on necessary improvements.

Most of the younger scientists were dead set against this and insisted the laboratory should be closed down. A group of them had even taken a bus to Washington to protest the May-Johnson bill, hastily introduced before Congress on October 3, 1945, which left open the possibility for military control over all atomic energy work. The problem was that the vaguely worded bill, which was being rushed through hearings, did not go far enough in promising that nuclear research would be wrested from the military and put in the hands of a civilian commission. Complicating matters, Oppenheimer, along with the other members of the scientific panel, had sided with Groves and endorsed the legislation. Older, wiser, and weary, Oppie thought it would make for a smoother transition to leave the bomb initially in military control. He maintained that this was only an interim measure, and he believed the military authority would eventually yield to a world body. He was already drafting an amendment he hope would explicate this and placate his critics.

At Los Alamos, politics had replaced physics as the topic of conversation, and as the arguments intensified, both sides became more entrenched. Morale was at a lower point that at any time during the war. The scientists seemed to have lost their sense of purpose and direction. The dissent that fomented on the mesa reflected the growing public tension and confusion about the country’s atomic policy in the months after the war. In the meantime, with Los Alamos’s future far from certain, Dorothy had been asked by Norris Bradbury to remain on as manager of the Santa Fe office. She agreed, girding herself for the troubled times ahead.

Almost immediately after the Army-Navy E Award ceremony, Oppenheimer went back to Washington. Dorothy knew it was the first of many good-byes leading up to his final departure for Pasadena later that fall. It was a time of many tearful farewells, but there was none she dreaded more. But at the same time, she could see how badly he wanted to get away. His beloved Sangre de Cristo Mountains were now “under the shadow of the mushroom cloud,” and the mountains and wooded trails would never again promise the same sweet escape and tranquility. There was nothing to hold him there anymore. He had made a tremendous sacrifice for his country, he had paid for it in pounds of flesh, and the time had come for him to move on to new challenges. War was a time when personal desires were of necessity subjugated to a singleness of purpose, and she had satisfied herself with being his most loyal and devoted lieutenant, his confidante, and his friend. She had done so readily, and without regret.

Oppenheimer had told her that after much indecision, he had finally made up his mind to rejoin the faculty at Caltech. It had not been an easy decision. He had turned down an invitation to go to Harvard, sending Conant a heartfelt note saying that his “one regret” was that he would not have him as a boss. “I would like to go back to California for the rest of my days,” he wrote. “I have a sense of belonging there which I will probably not get over.” He had still been undecided about returning to Berkeley, however, writing to his old professor Raymond Birge, “how hard it would be” not to return, but at the same time confessing real doubts about the kind of welcome he could expect. He had clashed with officers of the university when he was running Los Alamos and was wary that the high-profile role he sought as presidential advisor on atomic policy might result in further conflict. He added, “As you can see, I am worried about the wild oats of all kinds which I have sown in the past; nor am I quite willing in the future to be part of any institution which has any essential distrust or essential lack of confidence in me.”

Although Oppenheimer was anxious to join the arms control issue along political lines, realizing that the opportunity to use his influence might not come along again, some of his devoted staff members worried about how he would fare on the treacherous path from Los Alamos to Washington. His new secretary, Anne Wilson, who had been accompanying him to the capital, where he was testifying at Senate and House committee hearings, confided her doubts to her predecessor, Priscilla Greene Duffield, commenting that the theoretical physicist might not be cut out for the rough and tumble world of politics. “She said, ‘He’d better be careful. He is going to get into terrible trouble,’” recalled Priscilla. “I think she was referring to the fact that he spoke out immediately about what he was feeling, and that he perhaps had the wrong [mentors], the people he was admiring in Washington initially were the wrong people. She really was concerned about him and obviously knew what she was talking about.”

Wilson remembered her sense of foreboding that autumn. Oppenheimer’s new celebrity and talent for clear exposition made him an obvious choice for the administration, and he would not be able to resist the lure of the corridors of power. “He was riding high and enjoying it,” she said. “And he was very intense about trying to make something out of all this that was not all bad.” But Oppenheimer had more enemies than he knew, and she wondered who in Washington would watch his back. Wilson was particularly sensitive on this score as she had been adopted by the Tellers upon arriving at Los Alamos and had observed Edward’s deep antagonism toward Oppenheimer, even though she could see that the obstinate Hungarian had brought many of his problems on himself. Oppie had a gift for drawing people to him, like moths to a flame, and they either basked in his glow or got burnt. “The woods were always thick with people who had nasty things to say about Robert,” she said, noting that everyone knew that in some sense what he had achieved at Los Alamos went beyond any Nobel Prize. Jealousy was already afoot on the mesa: “There were always people who were vying for his attention, and those who felt snubbed by him, or felt hurt because they thought Robert didn’t love them anymore.”

Oppenheimer’s verbal knife play, which he had used over the years to dazzle or wound, had given more offense than he realized, and after the war it became more of a problem. His reputation as a great humanist, and his new seerlike role in world affairs, gave even his offhand comments an edge. Even some of his old friends, who were familiar with his sharp tongue and his habit of poking holes in people, including those he liked and admired, were finding it hard to overlook some of his behavior and had cooled toward him. “He was so arrogant after the bomb—his triumph,” said Emily Morrison. “This confirmed to many people, particularly those who never liked him, their worst suspicions about what he was really like. For his students, of course, he was still God, and they went on worshipping him.” But Morrison recalled that when Oppenheimer started casually dropping the names of four-star generals in conversation, and took to calling General Marshall “George,” even her husband, a longtime acolyte, decided to stop idolizing him. His fame as “Father of the Atomic Bomb” was having an intoxicating effect on him. “Oppie changed,” she said. “He was interested in being a great man and dealing with other great men.” Phil Morrison did not dispute his wife’s appraisal. “After the war, Oppenheimer thought he was powerful,” he said. “But he was not as powerful as he thought.”

Many of the project scientists were appalled by Oppenheimer’s support of the May-Johnson bill—which Harold Urey labeled “either a Communist bill or a Nazi bill, which ever you think is worse”—and felt betrayed by him. A few outraged young physicists argued that their former leader must have been duped and was unwittingly being used as a pawn by the War Department. How could the wizardlike Oppenheimer, who had achieved folk hero status as the philosopher-king of Los Alamos, acquiesce to the political elite? Leave science to the scientists, he had lectured them, and politics to the politicians. But for all his speeches, the only cause he appeared to be championing was his own. His name was all over the newspapers, and he talked sagely of the bomb peril, and constructive versus deconstructive uses of atomic power, but in the eyes of many physicists, he was achieving a dubious kind of notoriety. While putting himself forward as the nation’s atomic expert, he was fanning public fears about the deadly new threat facing the world and adding to the growing state of congressional alarm.

When a senator asked him if it was true that one raid on a U.S. city could kill 40 million Americans, Oppenheimer said: “I am afraid it is.” He was quoted in
Time
as suggesting that in the long run, the bomb would actually weaken, rather than strengthen, the U.S. military and international position because “atomic weapons ten or twenty years from now will be very cheap,” so America—and presumably Russia—would be able to afford to accumulate stockpiles of bombs in the near future. There was no limitation on man’s ability to destroy his fellow man, he warned, and future bombs would be “terribly more terrible.”

Watching Oppenheimer’s perplexing performance on Capitol Hill, in which he alternated between taking credit for the bomb’s creation and calling it “an evil thing,” as he told the National Academy of Sciences, even his loyalists at Los Alamos felt he had done a poor job of presenting to the public what he proposed to do about the weapon that had only recently decimated Hiroshima. Not surprisingly, neither the May-Johnson bill, which Oppie campaigned for, nor any of his amendments came to fruition. A few months later, a rival bill, introduced by Senator Brian McMahon of Connecticut and supported by the dissenting scientists, became law. Although Conant, who with Vannevar Bush helped draft the May-Johnson bill, maintained that it was never meant to turn atomic energy affairs over to the military, the bill did provide that one of the positions on the committee be filled by a military officer. Everyone assumed—however incorrectly—that the seat would automatically go to Groves, whom they suspected of trying to extend his wartime authority over atomic energy. As Conant noted, “The scientists could contemplate such a possibility only with extreme horror.” Oppenheimer had not proved an effective advocate for the cause of international control of nuclear weapons, and in part because of his close association with Groves, his reputation in the scientific community was somewhat tarnished.

The tempting possibilities of being involved in planning the future management and development of atomic energy had not materialized. Feeling demoralized, Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos in early November and gave a farewell address to the members of ALAS. A crowd of more than five hundred packed the largest of the two theaters to hear him speak. He began, as he usually did when speaking in public, in a quiet voice and slowly warmed to his theme of the enormous impact of the atom bomb, which “arrived in the world with such a shattering reality and suddenness.” Oppenheimer may not have succeeded as a statesman, but he still greatly impressed his fellow scientists as one of the most far-sighted thinkers, in a league only with Bohr. Even many years later, those who were present recall it as one of the most deeply affecting speeches they had ever heard.