American Prometheus (102 page)

IN THE autumn of 1965, Oppie visited his doctor for a physical checkup. It was not something he did very often, but he came home that day and announced that he had been given a clean bill of health. “I am going to outlive every one of you,” he said jocularly. But two months later, his smoker’s cough became noticeably worse. In St. John that Christmas, he complained to Sis Frank of a “terrible sore throat,” and mused, “Maybe I’m smoking too much.” Kitty thought he just had a bad cold. Finally, in February 1966, she took him to a doctor in New York. The diagnosis was clear and devastating. Kitty phoned Verna Hobson with the news: “Robert has cancer,” she whispered.

Four decades of heavy tobacco smoke had taken its toll on his throat. When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., heard the “dreadful news,” he immediately wrote him, “I can only dimly imagine how hard these next months will be for you. You have faced more terrible things than most men in this terrible age, and you have provided all of us with an example of moral courage, purpose and discipline.”

Though no longer a chain-smoker, Oppenheimer was still seen puffing on his pipe. In March, he underwent a painful and inconclusive operation on his larynx—and then he began receiving cobalt radiation therapy at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York. He talked quite candidly about his cancer with friends. He told Francis Fergusson that he had a “faint hope that it could be stopped where it was.” By late May, however, all could see that he was “wasting away.”

On a beautiful spring day in 1966, Lilienthal went by Olden Manor and found Anne Marks, Robert’s Los Alamos secretary, visiting the Oppenheimers. Lilienthal was shocked by Robert’s appearance. “For the first time Robert himself is ‘uncertain about the future,’ as he says, so white and— scared.” Walking alone with Kitty around the garden, Lilienthal asked her how he was getting along. Kitty froze, biting her lip; uncharacteristically, she seemed at a loss for words. When Lilienthal bent down and gently kissed her cheek, she uttered a deep moan and began to cry. A moment later, she straightened up, wiped her tears away and suggested they should go back inside and join Anne and Robert. “I have never admired the strength of a woman more,” Lilienthal noted in his diary that evening. “Robert is not only her husband, he is her past, the happy past and the tortured one, and he is her hero and now her great ‘problem.’ ”

In June 1966, Robert accepted an honorary degree at Princeton’s commencement, where he was hailed as a “physicist and sailor, philosopher and horseman, linguist and cook, lover of fine wine and better poetry.” But he appeared exhausted and spent; suffering from a pinched nerve, he couldn’t walk without a cane and a leg brace.

Frail and clearly battered by his illness, Robert nevertheless somehow seemed to grow in stature. Freeman Dyson observed that “his spirit grew stronger as his bodily powers declined. . . . He accepted his fate gracefully; he carried on with his job; he never complained; he became quite suddenly simple and no longer trying to impress anybody.” He had been a man with a talent for self-dramatization, but now, Dyson noticed, “he was simple, straightforward, and indomitably courageous.” At times, Lilienthal noted, Robert seemed “vigorous and almost gay.”

In mid-July, his doctor found no traces of the malignancy in his throat. The radiation treatment had tired him out, but it appeared to have done the job. So on July 20, he and Kitty returned to St. John. Friends on the island who had not seen him in a year thought he looked like a “ghost, an absolute ghost.” He quietly complained that while he wanted to go swimming, the always warm waters around St. John now made him feel cold. Instead he managed some walks along the beach and was courteous and patient with everyone whom he met—even strangers. Learning that Sis Frank’s husband, Carl, was recuperating from a serious heart operation, Robert went to visit him. “Robert was so kind to him,” recalled Sis, “trying to get him over this terrible trauma.”

Robert was on a liquid diet at that point, supplemented with protein powder. He told Sis Frank, “You don’t know what I would give you if I could have that chicken salad sandwich.” Invited to dinner at Immu and Inga Hiilivirta’s new home, Robert couldn’t eat the lamb chops and managed to get down only a glass of milk. “I felt very sorry for him,” Inga said.

After nearly five weeks, he and Kitty returned to Princeton in late August. Robert felt better. He still had a sore throat, but he thought himself stronger. His doctors again examined his throat and found no trace of cancer. “They were, in fact, convinced that I was cured,” Oppenheimer wrote one friend. After only five days back in Princeton, he flew out to Berkeley and spent a week seeing old friends. Upon his return in September, he complained to his doctors of continued soreness, “but they were not very thorough and attributed my discomfort to radiation. . . .”

Early that autumn, the Oppenheimers had to move out of their beloved Olden Manor to make way for the Institute’s new director, Carl Kaysen. Temporarily, Robert and Kitty decided to move into a house at 284 Mercer Road formerly occupied by the physicist C. N. Yang. Unoccupied for some years, it was a rather dreary place. Their neighbors were Freeman and Imme Dyson. The Dysons’ young son, George, recalled growing up on the grounds of the Institute during the years of Oppenheimer’s directorship: “He [Oppenheimer] was a very, very strong presence—a benevolent but mysterious ruler of the world in which we lived.” But when Oppenheimer moved next door, “To us children he seemed like a ghost, deprived of his kingdom, pacing around the yard next door, very pale and thin.”

Robert didn’t see his doctor again until October 3. “By then,” Oppenheimer wrote “Nico” Nabokov, his friend from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “the cancer was very manifest and had spread into the palate, the base of the tongue, and the left Eustachian tube.” It was not operable, and so his doctors prescribed thrice-weekly radiation treatments, this time with a betatron: “Everybody knows that reradiation with a still ulcerated throat is no great joy. It is not bad yet, but I cannot be very sure of the future.”

He faced the prospect of an early death with resignation. In mid-October, Lilienthal dropped by and learned the news. Robert’s once brilliant blue eyes now seemed bleary with pain. “The last mile for Robert Oppenheimer,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary afterwards, “and it may be a very short one. . . . Kitty had all she could do to suppress the tears.” In November, Robert wrote a friend, “I am much less able to speak and eat now.” He had hoped to visit Paris in December, but his doctors insisted they wanted to continue with regular radiation treatments until Christmas. Instead, he stayed at home, seeing such old friends as Francis Fergusson and Lilienthal. Early in December, Frank visited from Colorado.

In early December 1966, Oppenheimer heard from his former student, David Bohm, who had spent most of his career in Brazil and later, England. Bohm wrote to say that he had seen the Kipphardt play and a television program on Los Alamos in which Oppenheimer had been interviewed. “I was rather disturbed,” Bohm wrote, “especially by a statement you made, indicating a feeling of guilt on your part. I feel it to be a waste of the life that is left to you for you to be caught up in such guilt feelings.” He then reminded Oppenheimer of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre “in which the hero is finally freed of guilt by recognizing responsibility. As I understand it, one feels guilty for past actions, because they grew out of what one
was
and still
is.
” Bohm believed that mere guilt feelings are meaningless. “I can understand that your dilemma was a peculiarly difficult one. Only you can assess the way in which you were responsible for what happened. . . .”

Oppenheimer replied promptly: “The play and such things have been rattling around for a long time. What I have never done is to express regret for doing what I did and could at Los Alamos; in fact, on varied and recurrent occasions, I have reaffirmed my sense that, with all the black and white, that was something I did not regret.” And then, in words he edited out before mailing the letter, he wrote, “My principal remaining disgust with Kipphardt’s text is the long and totally improvised final speech I am supposed to have made, which indeed affirms such regret. My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me.”

Oppenheimer may well have had this exchange with Bohm in mind when Thomas B. Morgan—a
Look
magazine journalist—dropped by to interview him at his Institute office in early December. Morgan found him gazing at the autumn woods and the pond outside his window. On the wall of his office there now hung an old photograph of Kitty jumping her horse gracefully over a fence. Morgan could see that he was dying. “He was very frail and no longer the lean, lank man who impressed you as a cowboy genius. There were deep lines in his face. His hair was hardly more than a white mist. And yet, he prevailed with that grace.” As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word “responsibility”— and when Morgan suggested he was using the word in an almost religious sense, Oppenheimer agreed it was a “secular device for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word ‘ethical’ here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before—although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now, I don’t know how to describe my life without using some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do. . . . There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself—but increased knowledge, increased wealth, leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable.”

After this soliloquy, Morgan wrote, “Oppenheimer then turned his palms up, the long, slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘neither of us is rich. But as far as responsibility goes, we are both in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.”

This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica: that “indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.” Far from being indifferent, Robert was acutely aware of the suffering he had caused others in his life—and yet he would not allow himself to succumb to guilt. He would accept responsibility; he had never tried to deny his responsibility. But since the security hearing, he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the “cruelty” of indifference. In that sense, Rabi had been right: “They achieved their goal. They killed him.”

On January 6, 1967, Robert’s doctor told him that the radiation therapy was proving ineffective against his cancer. The next day, he and Kitty had some friends over for lunch, including Lilienthal. They served a very expensive goose liver, and Kitty acted like a perfect hostess. But as Lilienthal was leaving, Robert helped him with his coat and confided, “I don’t feel very gay; the doctor gave us bad news yesterday.” Kitty then walked Lilienthal outside the house and suddenly broke down into sobs. “Impending death is no new story,” Lilienthal recorded that evening, “but this is one that seems so wasteful and cruel. But Robert, in my presence at least, looks at it with those eyes of the doomed, that seem to look inward, rigid, caught up in the final reality.”

On January 10 he wrote Sir James Chadwick, a friend from the Los Alamos years, to acknowledge that he was “battling a cancerous throat . . . with only indifferent success.” He added, “It reminds me of the virulent strictures of Ehrenfest on the evils of smoking. We did live in a lucky time, didn’t we, to have even our critics so full of love and light?”

One day late that January, Robert called in his secretary of fourteen years, Verna Hobson, and gently encouraged her to leave Princeton. Hobson had intended to retire when he stepped down as director. But she had delayed, knowing that he was sick and that Kitty was still very dependent on her. “I knew what he was saying was that he was dying soon,” said Hobson, “and that if I didn’t go then, it would be so difficult for me to leave Kitty that I’d never make it.”

By mid-February 1967, Robert knew the end was near. “I am in some pain . . . my hearing and my speech are very poor,” he wrote a friend. His doctors had decided he couldn’t take any more radiation, so they ordered a strong regimen of chemotherapy. But he remained at home, and sent word to a few friends that he would welcome a visit. Nico Nabokov came by the house repeatedly and urged other friends to visit Robert.

On Wednesday, February 15, Robert made a supreme effort to attend a committee meeting at the Institute to select the candidates for the following year’s visiting fellows. It was the last time Freeman Dyson saw him. But like everyone else, Oppenheimer had done his homework, reading through scores of applications. “He could speak only with great difficulty,” Dyson later wrote, but he nevertheless “remembered accurately the weak or strong points of the various candidates. The last words I heard him say were, ‘We should say yes to Weinstein. He is good.’ ”

The next day, Louis Fischer dropped by. In recent years, Fischer and Oppenheimer had become casual, respectful friends. An acclaimed, globe-trotting journalist, Fischer was the author of more than two dozen books— including such popular volumes as
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi
(1950) and
The Life and Death of Stalin
(1953). Robert particularly liked his 1964 biography of Lenin. Kitty had encouraged Fischer to bring along some chapters from his current book project to divert Robert.

But when Fischer rang the doorbell, he waited in silence for several minutes—and, giving up, started to walk away when he heard knocking on an upstairs window. Looking up, he saw Robert motioning for him to return. A moment later, Robert opened the front door. He had lost much of his hearing and so hadn’t heard the ringing doorbell. Robert tried awkwardly to help Fischer out of his coat, and then the two friends sat down on opposite sides of a bare table. Fischer remarked that he had recently talked with Toni, who was using her Russian-language skills to do some research for George Kennan. When Robert tried to talk, “he mumbled so badly that I suppose I understood about one word out of five.” But he managed to convey that Kitty was napping—she had been sleeping badly at night—and no one else was in the house.