Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (11 page)

From their first meeting, Oppenheimer and Horgan took to each other warmly. Despite their differences in background and the fact that Horgan had little interest in science, they seemed to see in each other a kindred spirit. Indeed, among Oppenheimer, Fergusson and Horgan there quickly developed a shared sense of mutual admiration and liking, and, for the first time in his life, Oppenheimer found himself a member of a group of friends who shared interests, thoughts, confidences and experiences. They quickly began to think of themselves as a unit, a set of self-styled ‘polymaths’ that Horgan would later describe as ‘this pygmy triumvirate’ or ‘this great troika’. At the age of eighteen, it seems, Oppenheimer had finally found a group of people his own age to which he felt he
belonged
, and to whom he did not seem strange and alien.

That Oppenheimer could find this sense of belonging only among gentiles in the South-west is indicative not only of his sense of
not
belonging to the community within which he had been brought up, but also of his desire to actively distance himself from that community and to become a different person with a different social milieu. Before they set out for the South-west, Oppenheimer startled Herbert Smith by asking him if they could both travel under the name ‘Smith’, passing Oppenheimer off as Smith’s younger brother. Smith would have nothing to do with this plan, which he saw as one among many signs of discomfort on Oppenheimer’s part with his Jewishness. This discomfort, Smith believed, also lay at the heart of Oppenheimer’s illnesses, both his dysentery and his colitis, which, he thought, had more likely psychological than biological origins. After all, Smith wondered, how could Oppenheimer have contracted dysentery when his family were so scrupulous in avoiding all contact with the outside world and drank nothing but bottled water? As for Oppenheimer’s colitis, Smith noted that it disappeared very suddenly as soon as they arrived in the South-west, but reappeared whenever ‘someone disparaged the Jews’. One telling recollection of Smith’s concerns an occasion when, in a hurry to get his clothes packed, he asked Oppenheimer for help in folding a jacket. ‘He looked at me sharply,’ Smith remembered, ‘and said, “Oh yes, the tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?”’

In New Mexico, among the ‘great troika’ of himself, Fergusson and
Horgan,
^fn4
Oppenheimer could, at least temporarily, escape from being the Jewish ‘tailor’s son’ from New York City and be part of a culture that defined itself in opposition to trade and business, that saw itself rooted in the mountains, rivers and valleys of the South-western countryside and the noble and courageous adventurousness of the pioneers that had tamed it. As Erna Fergusson puts it in her book,
Our South West
:

This emphasis on the role of the South-west in ‘renewing’ the soul pervades much of the work of Horgan and the Fergussons. In the same book, for example, Erna writes:

The conquering of the West as a metaphor for conquering the self was one that Horgan was very fond of. For example, in an essay he wrote in the 1940s, he suggested: ‘Maybe everyone has a kind of early West within himself that has to be discovered, and pioneered, and settled. We did it as a country once. I think plenty of people have done it for themselves as individuals.’

That Oppenheimer had, to some extent, ‘found himself’ during his trip to the South-west, that it enabled him to blossom in ways that had been impossible in New York, is attested to by the way his new friends remembered him during this summer. ‘He was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known,’ Paul Horgan said. ‘And with this, in that period of his life, he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . He had a great superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity at that time.’ He also noted Oppenheimer’s ‘exquisite manners’, adding: ‘I’ve always been puzzled by later reports of his arrogance and his self-centredness . . . I can’t identify that in him at all.’ The man he describes
seems barely recognisable as the awkward, arrogant, socially maladroit teenager remembered by Oppenheimer’s schoolmates during his time at the Ethical Culture School, to whom the words ‘charm’, ‘gaiety’ and ‘high spirits’ certainly would not have suggested themselves when attempting to describe his personality.

One of the many ways in which the summer of 1922 brought forward a newly invigorated Oppenheimer was with respect to his interest in, and attraction to, girls. He later confided to his brother Frank that he had become strongly attracted to Horgan’s sister, Rosemary, and, later on in the trip, he met a woman with whom it would probably not be too much to say he fell in love. Her name was Katherine Chaves Page and she was then twenty-eight years old and just married to a man twice her age, an ‘Anglo’
^fn5
businessman called Winthrop Page who lived in Chicago.

Katherine herself was a member of an aristocratic Spanish hidalgo family, who had lived in the South-west for many generations and had been in their day still more prominent than the Hunings and Fergussons. Their history was even more romantic and evocative of the ‘Old West’. Her grandfather, Manuel Chaves, had been a famous soldier, nicknamed ‘El Lioncito’ (‘the little lion’) because of his bravery. He was a cousin of the aforementioned governor of New Mexico, Manuel Armijo, and boasted that his lineage could be traced back to one of the original Spanish conquistadors. Having fought the Navajos and the Americans on behalf of the Mexicans, he swore an oath to the United States in 1848 after the American victory in the Mexican-American War and proceeded to fight Apaches and Mexicans on behalf on his newly adopted nation. In the Civil War he fought on the Union side and helped them to defeat an attempt to take New Mexico for the Confederacy. After his famous last battle as an Indian-fighter in 1863, in which he led fifteen men against 100 Navajos, he established a home for himself in the San Mateo Mountains, west of Albuquerque, where he made a living ranching and where he built a family chapel, in which he, his wife and his children were buried.

Katherine’s father was Amado Chaves, the second son of Manuel Chaves, whose life story could hardly have been in sharper contrast to that of his Indian-, American- and Mexican-fighting father. After studying law and business in Washington DC, Amado Chaves returned to New Mexico and pursued a career as a lawyer and politician, becoming mayor of Santa Fe, and then speaker of the legislative assembly of New Mexico and superintendent of the state’s public education system. In both capacities he would no doubt have had much contact with H.B. Fergusson,
which is presumably how the links between the two families – later cemented by the close friendship of Katherine and Erna Fergusson – began. In 1893, Amado Chaves married the ‘Anglo’ Kate Nichols Foster, the daughter of an English-born architect, and the following year Katherine was born.

As well as the ranch that Amado had inherited from his father in San Mateo, the Chaves family also had a house in Albuquerque that Kate Nichols Foster had designed. In addition they acquired some land in the Upper Pecos Valley, near the town of Cowles, some twenty miles or so north of Santa Fe, where they built a guest ranch (or ‘dude ranch’) called ‘Los Pinos’, high up on the hills with splendid views of the Pecos Valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It was here that Oppenheimer spent the most memorable part of his summer trip to the South-west, developing not only an attachment to Katherine, but also a deep affection for this part of New Mexico.

To Oppenheimer, the Chaveses, their history, the countryside of northern New Mexico and, especially, Katherine herself were all excitingly and wonderfully grand and he became infatuated. According to Fergusson, Oppenheimer would bring flowers to Katherine ‘all the time’ and would ‘flatter her to death whenever he saw her’. Katherine seems to have enjoyed the attention and to have returned it. ‘For the first time in his life,’ Smith later recalled of the time they spent in Los Pinos, Oppenheimer ‘found himself loved, admired, sought after’. Inspired by Katherine’s example, Oppenheimer developed a love of horse riding and, together with the rest of the group, explored the slopes and valleys of the area around Cowles; this included – most momentously from a historical point of view – the Pajarito Plateau, upon which stands what is now the town of Los Alamos, but which in the summer of 1922 contained nothing but the Los Alamos Ranch School. A lasting memento of the horse rides Oppenheimer and Katherine took together is what to this day is still called ‘Lake Katherine’, one of the highest lakes in New Mexico, which is contained in a cirque (what in England would be called a coombe) just below Santa Fe Baldy, one of the tallest summits of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. On one of their rides together, Oppenheimer and Katherine, or so the story goes, discovered this hitherto unknown lake.

By the time he and Smith left New Mexico, Oppenheimer was a skilled and proud horseman and was, it seems, determined to prove himself to be as adventurous and as brave as the ancestors of the Fergussons and the Chaveses. On their way back to New York, Oppenheimer and Smith decided to ride on horseback through Colorado. The question thus arose as to which route they should take. Oppenheimer’s suggestion was that they should take a trail that led through the highest pass of the snowcapped mountains, a route Smith felt sure would lead to their death by
freezing. Eventually they settled the matter by tossing a coin, and, as Smith later commented: ‘Thank God I won.’

On his return to New York, Oppenheimer seemed to everyone who knew him a changed person. His old classmate Jane Didisheim remarked: ‘He had become less shy. I think he had become gayer also.’ But his mother’s hopes that a romance might develop between Jane and Robert were forlorn. Not only was Robert infatuated with a
very
different kind of woman back west; but he had, emotionally at least, severed himself completely from ‘Our Crowd’ and become a different person – one who, he hoped, would be fit for Harvard.

^fn4
It is possible, I think, that Oppenheimer gave the name ‘Trinity’ to the first atomic-bomb test site in Alamagordo – not far from Albuquerque and Roswell – in memory of the New Mexican ‘troika’ that he had joined in the summer of 1922.

^fn5
In the South-west the word was used to describe anyone who was not either of Spanish or of Native American ancestry, so Germans, Norwegians, Danes, and so on, were as much ‘Anglos’ as English people were.

‘
THE SUMMER HOTEL
that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.’

These words were written not, as one might think, by an anti-Semitic commentator on the ‘Seligman Affair’, but by Abbot Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard. And they were written not in the 1870s, but in the early summer of 1922, just a few months before Oppenheimer was due to take up his place at Harvard to study chemistry. During that summer, Lowell sparked an acrimonious nationwide controversy by announcing publicly that he was seeking measures to restrict the number of Jews that his university admitted. In the previous decade, the proportion of Jews at Harvard had risen sharply from 10 to 20 per cent. This was much larger than at most of the other Ivy League universities – at Yale the figure was 7 per cent and at Princeton a mere 3 per cent – and among both staff and students there was growing talk about the ‘Jewish problem’. Harvard, it was said, was going the same way as the University of Columbia in New York City, where, by 1920, 40 per cent of the students were Jewish. For Lowell, the vice president of the Immigrant Restriction League and a firm believer in the superiority of both the Christian religion and the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, this was an intolerable prospect.

Unlike his famous predecessor, Charles Eliot, who had used his presidency to establish and build upon Harvard’s international reputation as a leading centre of academic research, Lowell’s first priority was to maintain and, if possible to increase, Harvard’s reputation for undergraduate teaching, and, in particular, its reputation for educating students who would go on to be leaders in their chosen field, not just in academic life, but also in commerce, law and politics. His models were Oxford and Cambridge, universities that recruited students of good ‘breeding’ and equipped them with the learning, the manners,
the contacts and the confidence to take their place at the very head of society.

The growth in the proportion of Jews at Harvard threatened this vision of what the college ought to be by raising the possibility of ‘WASP flight’, the desertion of the college by the families of the Protestant elite, something that had already occurred at Columbia. To prevent this, Lowell believed that it was necessary, openly and frankly, to restrict the numbers of Jews – that is, to introduce a quota system. It was no good, he thought, trying to limit the number of Jews by adopting criteria, whether of academic ability or of behaviour, which gentiles would pass but Jews would fail, since there simply were no such criteria. The problem was not that Jews were not good students, or that they were bad people; it was that, just by being Jews and for no other reason, they were unacceptable, except in small enough numbers, to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ elite that Lowell’s Harvard sought to attract.

Lowell’s initial move to restrict the number of Jews was an attempt to persuade Harvard’s admissions committee to adopt discriminatory procedures, imposing higher standards on members of the ‘Hebrew race’ than on other applicants, so that only those ‘Hebrews . . . possessed of extraordinary intellectual capacity together with character above criticism’ would be allowed in. When the chairman of the admissions committee refused to adopt such a fundamental change without the explicit assent of Harvard’s faculty, Lowell was forced to debate the issue, first with his academic colleagues and then with the public at large. At a faculty meeting on 23 May 1922, Lowell managed to pass a motion calling upon the admissions committee to ‘take into account the . . . proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College’, but, within a week, he received four separate petitions asking him to call a special meeting to allow the faculty to reconsider a move that one petition described as ‘a radical departure from the spirit and practice of the College’.