Pandora's Keepers (17 page)

Dear Ernest
,

It has not been easy to write to you before this; but I want you to have some little word from me. I know your understanding and your sympathy; and very deeply I appreciate it.

I found my mother terribly low, almost beyond hope…. She is in very great pain and piteously terribly weak…. I have been able to talk with her a little; she is tired and sad, but without desperation; she is unbelievably sweet.

For my father alone I should have been glad to come. I think that it has been something of a comfort. He is brave and strong and gentle beyond all telling…. You know that I shall come back as soon as I possibly can, and that, if I stay away so long, it is only because what I can do here seems incommensurate with the Berkeley duties.

I hope things are going well, that you are by now done wholly with the administrative horrors, and are having time for work and tennis and an occasional ride. I feel pretty awful to be away so long; you will do what you can for the fatherless theoretical children, won’t you?

Affectionately,
Robert
55

It helped, of course, that they were not rivals. Instead, they perfectly complemented each other. Lawrence’s cyclotrons yielded precious physical data that Oppenheimer then used to construct exciting new theories. Their collaboration minimized the gulf separating them culturally and temperamentally. It also allowed Lawrence to dominate American experimental physics much as Oppenheimer dominated American theoretical physics.

Where they differed was in politics. Oppenheimer’s political engagement mystified Lawrence, who thought his friend was wasting his time and talent. “You’re too good a physicist to get mixed up in politics and causes,” Lawrence told him. One day Oppenheimer came into the Rad Lab and wrote on the blackboard: “Cocktail Party Benefit for Spanish Loyalists, everyone at the Lab invited.” When Lawrence saw Oppenheimer’s message, he stood silently for a minute clenching his jaw, then furiously erased it. Their political differences would sunder their close friendship after the war.

Oppenheimer, like Lawrence, had followed the discovery of fission in December 1938 with great interest. But he had not learned about the secret bomb project until September 1941—and only then because Mark Oliphant talked indiscreetly to Lawrence in Oppenheimer’s presence. Assuming Oppenheimer already knew about the bomb project, Oliphant suggested using him in a more active way. Lawrence agreed. There was opposition in some quarters in Washington to Oppenheimer’s participation because of his leftist politics, but Lawrence personally vouched for his reliability and considered the project too important to forgo his talents. “I have a great deal of confidence in Oppenheimer,” Lawrence wrote Compton, “and, when I see you, I will tell you why I am anxious to have the benefit of his judgment in our deliberations.”
56
On October 21, 1941, Lawrence took Oppenheimer to a meeting that Compton had called at General Electric’s research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, to discuss problems of assembly and critical mass (the smallest amount of fissionable material that will support a self-sustaining chain reaction). The final report of the meeting, containing Oppenheimer’s estimate of how much U-235 would be needed, became the blueprint for the bomb.

Oppenheimer became intensely interested in the project, even as he continued to teach. He was stirred not only by the technical challenge but also by a sense of mission: he loathed Nazism and wanted to do what he could to help defeat it. After Pearl Harbor, Oppenheimer was invited to meetings in Chicago, where Compton was organizing the Met Lab. Compton felt that a group of physicists should start studying bomb design and construction in addition to the work on a plutonium-producing pile. Oppenheimer was eager for such work, but he told a colleague that his leftist past probably meant that he would not receive the necessary security clearance.
57
A temporary clearance came through, however—owing to Compton’s intervention in Washington—and Oppenheimer moved to Chicago at the beginning of 1942.

Compton initially put Oppenheimer to work under Gregory Breit, a University of Wisconsin theoretical physicist. Breit was a good scientist but a poor administrator with a weak personality and an inordinate obsession with secrecy. He interpreted his duties as “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture” by locking all documents he was given in a big safe and making sure that nobody else had the combination or copies. Compton eased out Breit in May 1942 and named Oppenheimer his successor. It was the job for which Oppenheimer had been born. “Under Oppenheimer,” Compton later wrote, “something really got done, and done at astonishing speed.”
58

The biggest obstacle to progress in Oppenheimer’s mind was the lack of coordination among physicists working on bomb design. To fix this problem, Oppenheimer summoned the nation’s top theoretical physicists to Berkeley in July 1942 for a brainstorming conference. Heading the list of those he invited was Hans Bethe. Bethe was a theoretical physicist who talked slowly and deliberately but possessed immense intellectual strength and self-confidence. He reminded one of seeing an elephant run: what was astonishing was the rate of progress of an apparently lumbering giant. He was famous for the quantity of food he ate, and in a way, that was similar to his appetite for physical problems. For Bethe, problems existed to be solved—not worried about. And by knowing what to do and where to go, he usually got there with remarkable speed and success.

Born in Strasbourg in 1906 when the Alsacian city was part of the German empire, Bethe was the son of a Prussian professor of physiology and a Jewish mother who converted to Lutheranism before she married. Their only son, Hans, was brought up a Lutheran, but religion did not interest him much. Hans was more interested in numbers. His godfather often asked him questions about arithmetic. Once, when Hans was five years old, his godfather asked, “What is point five divided by two?” A few days later Hans figured it out and ran across the street through thick traffic to tell him the answer.
59

Before long, Bethe was astonishing his teachers with his ability to do long calculations in his head and to make big tables of the powers of numbers. He loved algebra and calculus. Deciding to pursue a career in analytical mathematics, he enrolled at the University of Frankfurt in 1924. There, a sympathetic professor counseled him to leave for a university that specialized in theoretical physics. Bethe did so, and went to study with Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. Sommerfeld was a great physics teacher—perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century—whose students included Heisen-berg and Wolfgang Pauli, both future Nobel Prize winners.

Bethe was present one afternoon in the spring of 1931 when Sommerfeld entered his seminar room and immediately noticed his students’ shocked silence. Curious as to what was wrong, Sommerfeld glanced toward the blackboard and saw scrawled in bold, angry letters the words
Verdammte Juden
—“Damned Jews!”
60
Such an expression of hatred in a German university—particularly toward someone of Sommerfeld’s stature—shocked Bethe.

Shortly after finishing his doctorate, Bethe took a job as lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of Tübingen. Tübingen was a conservative Bavarian town near Stuttgart that seethed with the resentments that would soon bring Hitler to power. It was a hotbed of the Nazi Party, and most of Bethe’s faculty colleagues were ultra-nationalists who fantasized about restoring the German empire and railed against the unfair treatment it had received since World War I. Many of his students wore brown shirts and swastika armbands. The night Hitler became chancellor, Nazis marched with torchlights through the city.

Bethe did not feel threatened by what was happening—at first. A month after the Nazis came to power, he told friends that Hitler could never do all the things he proclaimed he would do in
Mein Kampf
. It was inconceivable. Bethe’s uneasiness grew, however, when he began hearing rumors about how prisoners were being treated at nearby Dachau concentration camp. Bethe openly discussed these rumors with visiting American postdoctoral students. One day the departmental handyman—a wise old man—approached him and whispered, “Child, don’t do that. Don’t talk so loud, because there are Nazis here. You don’t want to go to Dachau.”
61

In the spring of 1933 the Nazis promulgated their Orwellian Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which decreed that “civil servants of non-Aryan descent must retire.” Bethe did not think that the law applied to him—even though his mother was Jewish—because he identified with his Protestant father and had been brought up a Lutheran. He felt safe until one day a student called and said he had seen a story in the local newspaper listing Bethe among those to be dismissed. A short time later Bethe received a curt, officious note informing him that he was fired.
62

He left Nazi Germany, knowing that his life would never be the same. He took temporary posts at the Universities of Manchester and Bristol in Britain, where he met Arthur Compton at a physics conference in London. Bethe never thought of emigrating to the United States, but when Cornell University sought to strengthen its physics department by appointing him an assistant professor—a post that held the possibility of tenure—he immediately accepted. After his ship docked in New York in January 1935, he spent a day walking the streets of Manhattan, marveling at the skyscrapers and the sidewalk bustle, listening to conversations and trying to pick up the thread of American life. The energy of America amid the Depression lifted his spirits. The next morning he took the train to Ithaca and gazed with astonishment at the open fields and dense forests west of the Hudson River—it seemed such a big and empty country, full of promise.

The physics department at Cornell University and the community of Ithaca, New York, welcomed Bethe with open arms. They were eager to get to know him and to learn about nuclear physics. He encountered no native anti-Semitism and very little professional jealousy. He was treated as an equal—a new American, not a foreigner. “I felt at home almost immediately,” he said later with much affection and appreciation. “I was one of the group, which I had not felt even in Germany.”
63

Bethe found that he enjoyed far greater scope and opportunity as a physicist in America than he would have in Germany, even without the Nazis. In Germany it was customary for a professor to lecture his class from an Olympian distance; in America students asked questions whenever they wished, about whatever they wished. Bethe was unprepared for such informality and lack of hierarchy at first, but he quickly grew to like and thrive on it. His straightforward demeanor and strong voice were well suited to the American classroom. His decency and sense of humor made him popular in the faculty lounge and the lecture hall alike.

Of course, there were some drawbacks. One in particular was the phenomenon of faculty meetings, a ritual of participatory democracy that did not take place in highly authoritarian and centralized German universities. The first faculty meeting he attended at Cornell in the fall of 1935 was held in a conference room that was overheated and was devoted almost entirely to the question of whether there should be a vending machine in the basement of the physics department building. It went on for hours.

Bethe came to love his adopted country as much as he hated what the Nazis had done to his native land. When he returned briefly to Germany in the summer of 1936 to visit his parents, he bittersweetly realized that it was no longer home. Bethe expressed his mixed feelings in a letter to his mentor Sommerfeld after the war. “For those of us who were expelled from our positions in Germany,” he wrote bitterly, “it is not possible to forget.” More important than Bethe’s negative memories of Germany, however, were his positive feelings about America:

It seems to me (already for many years) that I am much more at home in America than I ever was in Germany. As if I was born in Germany only by mistake, and only came to my true homeland at age 28. The Americans (nearly all of them) are friendly, not stiff or reserved, nor brusque (
gar ablehnend
), as most Germans. It is natural here to approach all other people in a friendly way. Professors and students relate in a collegiate way without any artificially erected barrier. Scientific research is mostly cooperative, and one does not see competitive jealousy between researchers anywhere. Politically most professors and students are liberal and reflect about the world outside—that was a revelation to me, because in Germany it was customary to be reactionary (long before the Nazis) and to parrot the slogans of the German National (
Deutschnationaler
) Party. In brief, I find it far more congenial to live with Americans than with my German
Volksgenossen
.

On top of that, America has treated me very well. I came here under circumstances which did not permit me to be very choosy. In a very short time I had a full professorship, probably more quickly than I would have gotten it in Germany if Hitler had not come. Although a fairly recent immigrant, I was allowed to participate in work and to have a prominent position…. Understand what I love in America and that I owe America much gratitude (disregarding the fact that I like it here). Understand what shadows lie between myself and Germany. And most of all understand… I am very grateful to you.
64

Bethe eased his adjustment to America by befriending fellow refugee Edward Teller. When Bethe began courting Rose Ewald, the daughter of a German physicist who had been one of Teller’s teachers, Teller and his wife, Mici, assumed the role of chaperones. In the summer of 1937 the four of them made a driving trip across the country. Their first destination was Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. From there, they drove to the Tetons in Wyoming, then on to Mount Rainier in Washington and Crater Lake in Oregon before ending their journey at a physics conference in California. “It was a happy time for the Tellers and for me,” recalled Bethe.
65
Although they did not know it at the time, their warm friendship would later bend and break under the pressure of war and politics.