Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (52 page)

It is possible, I think, that these
Reports to our Colleagues
help to explain the curious avoidance of research into fission and its possible use in explosives by Oppenheimer and his students, despite their evident excitement at, and absorption in, the issue when it was first announced. Given the emphasis manifest in these reports on the need for the United States to stay out of the war, together with the repeatedly expressed fear that America would
not
stay out of the war, but rather go into it with the intention of fighting Russia, it seems at least possible that Oppenheimer and his students avoided work on the physics of fission because they did not want to contribute to a war they passionately believed the United States should not be involved in. One is reminded here of Felix Adler’s argument for American neutrality in the First World War, and of his denunciation of any scientist willing to put his or her services at the disposal of the war effort: ‘The time will come when that scientist will be considered and will consider himself a disgrace to the human race who prostitutes his knowledge of Nature’s forces for the destruction of his fellow men.’

Report to our Colleagues
had originally been intended as an ongoing series of publications. The fact that there were only ever two of them, Chevalier says, is ‘for some reason which I have forgotten – possibly because of the rapidly changing perspectives in the world situation’. Certainly Oppenheimer’s own political perspective seems to have changed rapidly and fundamentally within just a few months of the publication of the second
Report
, the change prompted by sudden, drastic and shocking developments in the world. After the Nazi invasion of Denmark and
Norway in April 1940, the collapse of Holland and Belgium in May and the fall of France in June, was it possible for a liberal intellectual to continue to believe that it was of the utmost importance for the US to remain neutral? With most of Western Europe under the control of Hitler’s Germany, Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini, was it still possible to think that a socialist Europe was the ‘likely’ outcome of the war? And, finally, could Oppenheimer still believe, as he appears to have done up until April 1940, that the Soviet Union had acted wisely and in the interests of the ‘democratic front’ in signing a non-aggression pact with Germany, thereby standing by while this rapid expansion of the Reich took place?

If Hans Bethe’s recollections are accurate, the answer to all those questions is ‘no’. In the summer of 1940, Bethe met Oppenheimer at a conference held by the American Physical Society in Seattle from 18 to 21 June. On 20 June, Bethe and Oppenheimer (together with Volkoff and Snyder) took part in a seminar on ‘The Present Crisis in the Quantum Theory of Fields’. This was about a fortnight after the British evacuation from Dunkirk, two days after the German army marched into Paris and two days before the French surrender, when, at Hitler’s insistence, the armistice was signed in the very railway coach that had been used in November 1918 for the armistice that ended the First World War.

In these dark times, Bethe remembers a party of about ten people at the home of Edwin Uehling, previously a student of Oppenheimer’s and now a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. During his time at the conference Oppenheimer was a guest at the Uehlings’ house. At this party, Bethe recalls a conversation about the European situation in which there were expressed some deep anxieties about the future. Oppenheimer, Bethe remembers, addressed the group in the following words:

Bethe thinks this may have been ‘the first occasion in which Oppenheimer talked about political matters not from the standpoint of the left, but from the standpoint of the West’. If Bethe’s recollections are accurate, then a mere two months after the publication of the second
Report to our Colleagues
, Oppenheimer had adopted
exactly
the view that he was, in that report, concerned to refute: namely, that it was important to take sides in the war in order to protect democracy against fascism.

However, apart from the remark ‘we can have no truck with the Communists’, Oppenheimer’s views, as reported by Bethe, are not quite as far from those of the American Communist Party as they might at first appear. As Maurice Isserman writes in his history of the American Communist Party:

Isserman provides telling quotations from the communist press during the sequence of Nazi victories. After the fall of Norway, the
People’s World
attacked Britain as ‘the greatest danger to Europe and all mankind’; after Beligium and Holland were overrun, the
Daily Worker
could still maintain: ‘This is not our war’; but, writes Isserman: ‘The fall of France eventually provoked some anxious second thoughts among Communists.’ Communists who had previously excused the Nazi-Soviet pact ‘now had to face up to the possibility that Hitler got the better bargain’. In June, the
Daily Worker
even printed a letter from one of its readers, asking the question that was surely on the minds of many communists in the summer of 1940: ‘Will not Hitler, in the event of a crushing victory over Great Britain and France, turn his armies against the USSR?’

It may be, as Bethe believed, that Oppenheimer’s speech to his fellow physicists in Seattle represented a shift in his allegiance away from the Communist Party and towards the West, as represented by Britain, France and the US, but, after the fall of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France, and the apparent imminent fall of Britain, it is also clear that many American communists had begun to wonder whether their previous analysis of world events had been correct, whether the interests of the Soviet Union and socialism were
really
best served by the collapse of Great Britain and the non-intervention of the US. It was rather looking as though the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the US had a shared interest in defeating the (now massively extended) Third Reich.

Most Americans, of course, neither knew nor cared how American communists were reacting to the new, deeply alarming situation in Europe. What struck them was that the Communist Party was closely connected with the Soviet Union, which had signed a deal with Nazi Germany that had allowed – indeed, seemed designed to allow – that deeply alarming situation to occur. Thus was generated a ‘Red Scare’ that prefigured the
anti-communism of the 1950s and made life extremely uncomfortable for communists in America. In June 1940, soon after the collapse of France, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, better known as the Smith Act, which required all resident non-citizens to be registered and fingerprinted. It also authorised the deportation of foreigners belonging to revolutionary groups, and, most damagingly for the Communist Party, made it a crime to conspire to advocate or teach the necessity or desirability of overthrowing the government. After this Act came into force, it was no longer necessary to prove that an individual had, in fact, acted to overthrow the government, nor that he or she had advocated the overthrow of the government; all that was necessary was to show that the individual in question had joined an organisation that favoured such advocacy. The Smith Act was hotly followed by the Voorhis Act, which required all organisations ‘subject to foreign control’ to register with the Justice Department.

These two Acts signalled the start of a state-sponsored harassment of the Communist Party. Local party offices were raided by police, files were confiscated, suspected Communist Party members were purged from public office, and an official view was adopted that ‘the very acceptance of Communist Party membership is, in and of itself, an overt act incompatible with the public service’. It was widely believed that the rapid fall of France was attributable to ‘fifth columnists’, and that America urgently needed to identify and weed out those people in public life whose loyalties lay with foreign powers. By the autumn of 1940, the American Communist Party was an unpopular and beleaguered organisation, deeply distrusted by the government and the people and only barely legal. In the wake of the Voorhis Act, the party felt forced to end its formal affiliation with the Comintern. This helped preserve its legality, though it was not enough to guarantee its acceptance. In the presidential elections of November 1940, the Communist Party succeeded in getting Earl Browder onto only twenty-two state ballots; in the other states, its participation in the ballot was either refused outright or made impossible by the intimidation of sponsors and supporters.

Oppenheimer himself was a passionate supporter of Roosevelt during this election, urging upon his friends, colleagues and students the importance of returning the author of the New Deal for a third term. This does suggest a fairly complete volte-face from the view of Roosevelt as a ‘war monger’ that he had advocated in his April
Report
, though evidence as to why he changed his mind about the President is extremely scarce. From the point of view of his career, however, as he knew only too well, it would have been suicidal to have openly supported the communists.

In the summer of 1940, then, Oppenheimer had many good reasons for distancing himself from the Communist Party, one of which may
indeed have been, as Bethe thought, that his own views had changed, that he had been shocked by the collapse of France into seeing things from the perspective of defending the West rather than that of supporting ‘socialism’ as represented by the Soviet Union. That
something
important to him took place at the Uehlings’ Seattle home is confirmed by a letter that Oppenheimer wrote to them on 4 July, thanking them for their hospitality, the tone of which goes far beyond that of a normal ‘bread-and-butter’ thank-you letter. Oppenheimer, writing from the Tolmans’ house in Pasadena, told ‘Ruth & Ed’: ‘It is time now that I wrote a word to you of the sweet days together in your home . . . I hope you will still have warm memories of a visit which was to your visitor so sweet.’ Oppenheimer told the Uehlings that in about a week’s time he would be going to Perro Caliente with Frank, Jackie and their baby daughter, Judith. Oppenheimer does not mention this to the Uehlings, but he had also invited some other people to New Mexico that summer: Robert and Charlotte Serber and Katherine and Richard Harrison.

Oppenheimer had met Katherine (‘Kitty’) Harrison at a party at Charles Lauritsen’s house the previous summer, and the two had become strongly attracted to each other. She later said that she ‘fell in love with Robert that day, but hoped to conceal it’. At the time she was twenty-nine years old, six years younger than Oppenheimer. Richard Harrison was her third husband. The wedding had taken place in November 1938, less than a year before she met Oppenheimer, and already it was clear that the marriage was not a success. For most of those nine months Kitty had lived apart from her husband. He was a British doctor whom she had known as a teenager and then met again in Philadelphia in the spring of 1938, when she was studying biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly after their wedding, Harrison moved to Pasadena to take up a residency, while she stayed in Philadelphia to finish her degree. She had, by this time, decided that it was ‘an impossible marriage’ and that she was ready to leave him.

Kitty’s life up until her move to Pasadena had been eventful and emotionally tumultuous. She had been born Katherine Puening, in Germany, her family emigrating to the US when she was just two years old. Her father, Franz Puening, was an engineer; her mother, Kaethe Vissering, was from a prominent European aristocratic family, the main branches of which were Dutch and German. Through her mother, Kitty was related to (among many other members of Europe’s aristocracy) King Albert I of Belgium and Queen Victoria of Great Britain. Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s field marshal and de facto war minister, was her mother’s cousin. She liked to describe herself as a ‘German princess’, though it is not entirely clear what her claim to that title was. She told friends that her father was a ‘prince of a small principality in Westphalia’; if so, it is
something of a mystery why he chose to work as an engineer in a Pittsburgh steel company. He begged her to keep quiet about her aristocratic background, but somehow everybody who knew her knew all about it.

Throughout her life Kitty combined an aristocratic hauteur with a leaning towards bohemianism. At the age of twenty-two she married her first husband, a musician she met in Paris called Frank Ramseyer. After a few months, however, she discovered that he was both homosexual and a drug addict. The marriage was annulled and she returned to America. At a New Year’s Eve party in 1933 she was introduced to Joe Dallett, the son of a wealthy German Jewish businessman and a member of the Communist Party. ‘I fell in love with him at this party,’ Kitty later said, ‘and I never stopped loving him.’ Less than two months later she and Dallett were married and living in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked as a union organiser.

Very quickly Kitty discovered that life as the wife of a Communist Party union organiser was not as glamorous as she had perhaps imagined it to be. ‘These were days of poverty such as I had never before experienced,’ she recalled with horror.