An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life

By Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus

A gripping narrative of the love and betrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told through the lives of three unique women.

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison—both were members of the Communist Party—and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities.

Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781618580788

Book preview

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PRAISE FOR AN ATOMIC LOVE STORY

Through diligent research, brilliant insights, and clear, incisive writing, Streshinsky and Klaus have deepened our understanding of Robert Oppenheimer's emotional life and loves. To comprehend his fascinating complexity, readers interested in the 20th century's most intriguing American scientist must now supplement the many biographical Oppenheimer tomes with this marvelous concise and precise book. Anyone with the slightest interest in Oppenheimer's biography will not be able to put it down.

—Martin J. Sherwin, co-author of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize–winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

"An Atomic Love Story is a story of many loves. A whole new range of Robert Oppenheimer's life emerges, a deeper and richer view of one of the pivotal figures of the 20th century."

—Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"It is impossible to see Robert Oppenheimer whole without understanding the three great loves of his life. A closed book to most of the world, he opened himself to these three women, showing them the depth and intensity of his longing for the intimacies of the spirit as well as those of the flesh. An Atomic Love Story gives us the missing piece of the man."

—Patricia O'Toole, author of The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends and When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House

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ALSO BY SHIRLEY STRESHINSKY

Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness

Gift of the Golden Mountain

A Time Between

The Shores of Paradise

Hers the Kingdom

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Turner Publishing Company

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445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor New York, NY 10022

www.turnerpublishing.com

An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life

Copyright © 2013 Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus. All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Gina Binkley

Book design: Kym Whitley

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Streshinsky, Shirley.

 An atomic love story: the extraordinary women in Robert Oppenheimer's life / Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus.

 pages cm

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-61858-019-1 (hardback)

1. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904–1967. 2. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904–1967--Relations with women. 3. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904–1967--Marriage. 4. Physicists--United States--Biography. 5. Women--United States--Biography. 6. Man-woman relationships--United States--History--20th century. 7. Sex role--United States--History--20th century.

I. Klaus, Patricia. II. Title.

 QC16.O62S696 2013

 530.092--dc23

 [B]

 2013024440

Printed in the United States of America

13 14 15 16 17 18 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For daughter Maria Streshinsky, who grew up listening to Oppenheimer stories, became a journalist and an editor, and deserves a place in the sun for her help in making An Atomic Love Story come true.

And for son Evan Klaus, who regularly called from 9,697 miles away in Africa to ask, How's the book? And for his inimitable PowerPoints, which have never failed to make me laugh at many times in my life.

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CONTENTS

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HE WON EVERYONE QUICKLY WITH AN EXQUISITE CONSIDERATION AND A POLITENESS THAT MOVED SO FAST AND INTUITIVELY THAT IT COULD BE EXAMINED ONLY IN ITS EFFECT. THEN, WITHOUT CAUTION, LEST THE FIRST BLOOM OF THE RELATION WITHER, HE OPENED THE GATE TO HIS AMUSING WORLD.

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1923

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CAST OF CHARACTERS

The Oppenheimers

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ella Oppenheimer: his mother

Julius Oppenheimer: his father

Frank Oppenheimer: his only brother, also a physicist

Kitty Oppenheimer: Robert's wife (see also Puening/Vissering)

Peter and Katherine (Toni) Oppenheimer: Robert and Kitty's children

Jackie Oppenheimer: Frank's wife; with him joined Communist Party in 1937

Robert's Friends*

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* Title Dr. intentionally removed because so many were either medical doctors or Ph.D.s.

William Boyd: Harvard classmate

Haakon Chevalier: professor of French literature at UC Berkeley, involved in Spanish refugee activity and Communist Party

Jane Didisheim Kayser: classmate at Ethical Culture School

John T. Edsall: Harvard classmate, received M.D. at Harvard, later a professor of biological chemistry there

Francis Fergusson: Ethical Culture School classmate; was at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship when Robert was at Cambridge; became a drama and literature critic; a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1947–48 and again in 1967

Paul Horgan: along with Francis Fergusson, was with Robert at Los Pinos in New Mexico; writer of fiction and nonfiction and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes

Roger Lewis: Frank's friend who spent time at Perro Caliente

Katherine Chaves Page (Katy): descended from an old hidalgo family; owner of Los Pinos Ranch in New Mexico where Robert spent summers as a young man

Robert Serber: physicist and Robert's right-hand man before and after Los Alamos; after the deaths of his wife Charlotte and Robert, he became Kitty's companion

George Uhlenbeck: physicist from the Netherlands; he and wife Else were friends at Berkeley and Perro Caliente

Jeffries Wyman: Harvard classmate; professor of molecular biology at Harvard 1928–1951; scientific advisor to the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 1954; close friend to John Edsall and Robert

The Tatlocks

Jean Tatlock

Marjorie Fenton Tatlock: her mother

J. S. P. Tatlock: her father, a medieval scholar and professor at Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley

Hugh Tatlock: Jean's brother; a medical doctor

Anne Fisher Tatlock: Hugh's wife; Jean's sister-in-law

Jessie Tatlock: J.S.P. Tatlock's sister; Jean's aunt; professor of history at Mt. Holyoke College

Winifred Smith: Marjorie Tatlock's lifelong friend; professor of English and drama at Vassar College; Jean's mentor

Priscilla Smith (Robertson): reared by Winifred Smith; Jean's girlhood friend; became a historian

Jean and Donald Macfarlane: Marjorie's friends; psychologists at UC Berkeley; followers of Jung

Elizabeth Whitney: a close friend of Marjorie's; a medical doctor and Jungian analyst; briefly married to J. S. P. Tatlock after Marjorie's death

Jean's Friends and Colleagues

Thomas Addis: renowned hematologist and kidney specialist at Stanford University Hospital; sympathetic to Communism and deeply committed to social/political causes, especially the Spanish Civil War refugees

Siegfried Bernfeld: Jewish Freud-trained psychoanalyst who emigrated from Europe in 1936; Jean's mentor and psychoanalyst at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco

Leni Cahn: young German friend of Field family who watched over Margot Clark and Jean in Switzerland, 1930–1931

Eleanor Clarke: Jean's best friend at Vassar; a well-known poet, married Robert Penn Warren

Jean Clark: Cambridge girlhood friend; daughter of Harvard professor

Margot Clark: Jean Clark's younger sister; spent year in Europe with Jean

Letty Field: Cambridge girlhood friend; lived with brothers and her widowed mother; the Clark sisters, May Sarton, and Field attended Shady Hill School; Jean joined them at Cambridge High and Latin

Edith Arnstein Jenkins: daughter of a friend of Marjorie Tatlock's; graduated from UC Berkeley; deeply involved in left-wing and labor politics in the San Francisco Bay Area

Jackie Oppenheimer: see Oppenheimer Family

Hannah Peters: medical doctor who fled Germany with her husband Bernard Peters; she would become Robert's personal physician and a close friend of Jean's; far left-wing in her politics, though she and her husband denied being members of the Communist Party

May Sarton: Cambridge girlhood friend (one of the Snabs); daughter of a Harvard historian of science; after a brief acting career, Sarton became a well-known poet and novelist

Katherine Warren: stage actress who befriended Jean

Mary Ellen Washburn: a friend of both Jean and Robert who lived in the Berkeley hills; Robert's landlady for a time

Tolman/Sherman Family

Ruth Sherman Tolman

Richard Tolman: her physicist husband; dean at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena

Edward Tolman: Richard's younger brother; professor of psychology at UC Berkeley; one of founders of the field of behavioral psychology

Kathleen Tolman: Edward Tolman's wife; mother of Deborah Tolman Whitney and Mary Tolman Kent

Lillie Margaret Sherman: Ruth's older sister; worked with the YWCA her entire career

Alma Sherman Chickering: Ruth's first cousin; married into a prominent San Francisco Bay Area family

Bill Chickering: Alma Chickering's son; war correspondent for Time/Life

Ruth's Friends and Colleagues

Jean Bacher: wife of Bob Bacher, a physicist at Los Alamos, then Caltech

Ruth Benedict: renowned anthropologist and author of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword; teacher and sometime partner of Margaret Mead

Edward Boring: an experimental psychologist; taught at Clark University and Harvard; president of the American Psychological Association; concerned with the work of women in the field of psychology

Jerome Bruner: worked in Washington with Ruth at Office of War Information; later professor of psychology at Harvard, Oxford, and NYU; a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology

Charles Charlie Lauritsen: emigrated from Denmark; a physicist at Caltech and with wife Sigrid were close friends of the Tolmans

Margery Freeman: Ruth Benedict's sister; lived in Pasadena; wife of a Presbyterian minister

Natalie Raymond: daughter of prominent Pasadena family; close friend of Robert Oppenheimer, Ruth Valentine and Ruth Tolman; also sometime partner of Ruth Benedict

David Shakow: educated at Harvard; expert in the study of schizophrenia; worked with Ruth on research papers and in the American Psychological Association

Ruth Val Valentine: Pasadena neighbor and best friend; from a prominent San Francisco Bay Area family; had Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley and worked in the Los Angeles school system as a psychologist; sometime partner of Ruth Benedict

Vissering/Puening Family

Katherine (Kitty) Vissering Puening

Franz Puening: her father; a German-born chemical engineer

Kaethe Vissering Puening: her mother; also born in Germany

Gen. Wilhelm Keitel: Kitty's first cousin once removed; German field marshal and head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces during World War II

Hilde Vissering de Blonay: Kitty's aunt; an assistant director in German films who worked for Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda during the Nazi era

Kitty's Friends and Husbands

Zelma Baker Bake: high school friend; a successful research scientist; stayed in touch with Kitty through the 1930s

Shirley Barnett: wife of Los Alamos physician Dr. Henry Barnett; sometime confidante of Kitty

Barbara Chevalier: wife of Haakon; the couple cared for Peter Oppenheimer when he was a baby

Hilda Dallet: Joe's mother who lived in New York City and Long Island

Priscilla Duffield: Robert's first secretary at Los Alamos

Verna Hobson: one of Robert's Princeton secretaries who became a confidant

Anne Wilson Marks: Robert's last secretary at Los Alamos; married Herbert Marks and after his death worked for international arms control

Steve Nelson: Communist Party member and organizer; best friend of Joe Dallet in Spain; met Robert through his friendship with Kitty

Charlotte Serber: from a left-wing literary-political family in Philadelphia; scientific librarian at Los Alamos; wife of physicist Robert Serber

Pat Sherr: wife of a Los Alamos physicist; a sometime confidante of Kitty's; cared for baby Toni Oppenheimer for four months

Fiona St. Clair: friend from St. John; later married Robert Serber

Jane Wilson: wife of physicist Robert Wilson; at Los Alamos

Frank Ramseyer: Kitty's first husband; a Harvard-trained musician and later professor of music at Wheaton College outside Boston

Joe Dallet: Kitty's second husband; a doctrinaire Communist who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War

Stewart Harrison: Kitty's third husband; a medical doctor who worked on the therapeutic use of X-rays at Caltech; friend of the Tolmans

Military Intelligence at Los Alamos and Washington, D.C.

General Leslie Groves: military director of the Manhattan Project

Major Robert Furman: a civil engineer, appointed by Groves to be head of Military Intelligence for the Manhattan Project

Lt. Col. John Lansdale: a lawyer by profession; head of security for the Manhattan Project; Groves' personal assistant

Lt. Col. Boris Pash: Army counterintelligence officer assigned to San Francisco; later military leader of the ALSOS Mission; strongly anti-Communist

Peer de Silva: head of security at Los Alamos; worked with Pash and Lansdale

The Scientists

Robert Bacher: Robert's right-hand man at Los Alamos; became chairman of division of physics at Caltech and dean of faculty; he and his wife, Jean, were close friends of the Tolmans

Patrick Blackett: British physicist at University of Cambridge; the tutor on whose desk Robert left the poison apple

Hans Bethe: influential theoretical physicist who left Europe in the 1930s for Cornell, where he spent his entire career except for the years at Los Alamos

Neils Bohr: the great man of physics; fled Denmark in 1943; was at Washington and Los Alamos during the war; returned to Denmark

Freeman Dyson: physicist who came to Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in 1953; in 2013 still a member of IAS

Werner Heisenberg: outstanding physicist spearheading the German effort to built an atomic bomb; known to many at Los Alamos

Charles Lauritsen: see Ruth's Friends and Colleagues

Ernest Lawrence: professor of experimental physics at UC Berkeley; director of the Radiation Lab at UC Berkeley; co-founder of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; supported development of the hydrogen bomb

Edward Lofgren: physicist friend of Frank Oppenheimer at UC Berkeley and at University of Minnesota

Linus Pauling: a professor of theoretical chemistry at Caltech; with wife, Ava Helen, was close friend to Robert early in career

Edward Teller: Hungarian theoretical physicist at Los Alamos; founder (with Ernest Lawrence) and director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; strong proponent of the hydrogen bomb

Robert Serber: at University of Illinois, Los Alamos, then professor of physics at Columbia; close friend and colleague of Robert's

Richard Tolman: see Ruth Tolman

Robert Wilson: experimental physicist; worked closely with Robert at Los Alamos; helped organize Association of Los Alamos Scientists after the war; urged international control of nuclear weapons

The Statesmen

Dean Acheson: served as Secretary of State under President Truman, 1949–1853; principal architect of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine

Vannevar Bush: vice-president of MIT, dean of MIT School of Engineering, head of Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war; informal scientific advisor to President Roosevelt

George Kennan: diplomat, advisor, and historian; played important role in development of Cold War policy in the 1950s; came to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1953 and became Robert's close friend

David Lilienthal: head of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s; chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 1946–1950; friend and neighbor of the Oppenheimers in Princeton

Bernard Baruch: investment banker, business partner, and close friend of Lewis Strauss; advised various presidents on economic policy

James Conant: professor of chemistry and president of Harvard until appointed first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany; during the war, served as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee

Robert's Opponents

William L. Borden: former executive director of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy; worked with Strauss and Hoover to have Robert's security clearance revoked

J. Edgar Hoover: director of the FBI; always suspicious of Robert's Communist connections

Sen. Joseph McCarthy: junior senator from Wisconsin; led virulent campaign against supposed Communists and Communist sympathizers

Kenneth Nichols: general manager of the AEC

Lewis Strauss: businessman and investment banker; Rear Admiral in the Naval Reserve; chairman of the AEC, 1947–1950, 1953–1958; worked with Hoover to remove Oppenheimer from consulting position with the AEC; trustee of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton

Oppenheimer Security Clearance Hearing

Lloyd Garrison: Robert's defense attorney at the hearing

Gordon Gray: chairman of the panel appointed by the AEC; president of the University of North Carolina

Herbert Marks: Robert's defense lawyer at the Hearing; worked with David Lilienthal at TVA and then at AEC; with wife Anne became close friend of the Oppenheimers

Roger Robb: the prosecuting attorney chosen by Lewis Strauss to represent the AEC

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WHAT IS IT ABOUT ROBERT?

Almost everyone who knew the adult Robert Oppenheimer found him enormously appealing. They gathered round him, warming themselves in his light. Women wanted to be part of whatever he was doing. A secretary at Los Alamos admitted to being more than a little in love with him. His graduate students adopted his mannerisms, even his walk. What was the man's appeal?

He was the most brilliantly endowed intellectually of anybody I've ever known . . . He combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . a superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity . . . great simplicity . . . I've rarely known anyone with more beautiful manners.

—Paul Horgan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and close friend since boyhood

He was interested in almost anything you could think of. His mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him—male, female, almost everybody. . . . He was terrifically attractive.

—Dr. Harold Cherniss, professor of ancient Greek philosophy, longtime family friend, and colleague at Berkeley and Princeton

He was such an extraordinary man, his presence—and so verbal . . . and so sensitive to other people and their feelings; there was just an aura around him.

—Dr. Robert Serber, physicist, Oppenheimer's assistant and alter ego

One of the most important characteristics of my brother . . . involves the way in which he made people into heroes. He could like all manner of people but in liking them they became special and exceptional. And his own sense that they were special was transmitted both to the people involved and others . . . Anybody who struck him with their wisdom, talent, skill, decency, or devotion became, at least temporarily, a hero to him, to themselves, and to his friends.

—Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, physicist

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PROLOGUE

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki; after having his face splashed on Time magazine's cover as the Father of the Atom Bomb; after being excoriated during the McCarthy era as a Communist dupe and probable traitor, humiliated by a bogus hearing, then resurrected by a government that attempted to find its conscience, J. Robert Oppenheimer, an elegant puzzle of a man, was left to the historians.

     Had he not been married to one Communist Party member and loved another, he might never have become embroiled in the political and social movements of those times. Like many of his peers, he could have fulfilled his destiny in the Second World War, then returned safely to the ivory tower.

     Three women gave shape to his life, and together defined the promise and the tragedy of their times. Jean Tatlock, Katherine (Kitty) Oppenheimer, and Ruth Tolman exist in the historical accounts—but always in the background, there yet unformed, unexplored. In the 1930s, women were going to college in increasing numbers, but it was the extraordinary woman who chose higher education and a professional career. Jean Tatlock became a medical doctor and a psychiatrist; Kitty Oppenheimer wanted desperately to complete a doctorate in botany; Ruth Tolman had a Ph.D. and was a practicing psychologist.

     The three were intellectually engaging and wholly involved in their times—ambitious, earnest, risk-taking. Each loved Robert until the end of her life; he, in turn, remained devoted to each until the end of his. Their story would begin just before the turn of the twentieth century and last through two tortuous world wars, a global depression—in all, somewhat more than half of that brutal century.

     No man of science, with the possible exception of Albert Einstein, has received more attention than the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. His early life seemed to embody the promise of the new century. His parents were wealthy and doting, their first child was extraordinarily bright. He went to exclusive schools, read widely and well, discovered the thrill of mathematics and what he would call the sweetness of physics. He would write his younger brother, I know very well surely that physics has a beauty which no science can match, a rigor and austerity and depth.¹ He was a beautiful, obedient child who, after a difficult and prolonged adolescence, became a remarkably attractive young man. He would finish Harvard in three years, then go on to Cambridge in England and Gottingen in Germany at exactly the right time to catch the incoming tide of the new nuclear physics. In the next decade, he would find himself at a critical place in the midst of a desperate time.

     For a few years after the war, Oppenheimer was publicly lauded as a savior, but then he was accused by his own government of being a threat to the American people. This made him the most illustrious victim of McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade. After the Hearing, even people who knew Oppenheimer well saw him as broken, defeated. Yet had he not gone through the ordeal, at least one of his principal biographers believes, he might today be regarded as no better known than any of the other extraordinary physicists of his time.

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JUNE 14, 1943

The light was fading by the time Robert Oppenheimer left Le Conte Hall. He walked across campus at his usual fast clip, heading for the streetcar that would take him into San Francisco. He would have allowed his mind to skim over the consequences of what he was about to do. Not that he was weighing them; he had already made the decision to see Jean Tatlock. It would be more of an exercise to keep his mind occupied, to block the uncertainty of how he would find her. Radiant or remorseful. Perfect or flawed.

     There would be hell to pay, that he knew. He would have stopped to light a cigarette, maybe taking the opportunity to glance around for the Army security agent he knew would be there. He was too important to the war effort to be allowed to go loose in the world. His slender, six-foot frame and his signature porkpie hat made him an easy target to tail. The security agents would inform Pash, and Pash would be delighted to inform General Groves, and the general would be livid.

     Oppenheimer was the new scientific director of the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project, hidden on a mesa high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. It was possible that seeing Jean could cause him to be removed from the project altogether. The idea was so disturbing that it would have had to be put out of his mind, along with the wife and two-year-old son he had left behind in Los Alamos.

     After one last deep drag of his cigarette, he would have flicked it away, then swung onto the Key System train that would carry him over the Oakland Bay Bridge and into the city. He was thirty-nine that June. Jean was twenty-nine. They had known each other, loved each other, for seven years. He would always want her; twice he had come close to marrying her.

     Three months before, when he had been about to leave Berkeley for Los Alamos, Jean had asked to see him, but he had not gone to her then. Too much was happening, too fast. He wasn't allowed to tell her why he was leaving or where he was going, could not confide what he and a remarkable band of scientists were attempting to create. Probably he was glad for that; Jean would not have approved. She was one of the most principled people he had ever known; she believed above all else in the sanctity of life. She was a physician now, a resident in psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, working with troubled children. She did not know that ending World War II might depend on his group's ability to develop a weapon of mass destruction so horrific it would defeat America's enemies, unless the Germans got it first. That grim possibility played on his mind. The Germans were intent on conquering all of Europe, the world. Would Jean, with her kind and open heart, be able to grasp the enormity of such a catastrophe?

     It was dark by the time the train rattled over the bridge. The FBI would have a file on Jean, on their relationship. What could they know about that relationship? All those years later, he would try to explain to strangers in a Washington, D.C., hearing room: We had been very much involved with one another and there was still very deep feeling when we saw each other.

     On that June evening in 1943, he knew that an agent would be lurking near her at the terminal in San Francisco where she would be waiting for him.

OPPENHEIMER ARRIVED AT 9:45 PWT, the FBI report reads. He rushed to meet a young lady, whom he kissed and they walked away arm in arm. They entered a 1935 green Plymouth coupe and the young lady drove. The car is registered to Jean Tatlock. She is five foot seven, 128 [pounds], long dark hair, slim, attractive.

SHE WAS SMILING, NOT HURTING, he could see that. The Jean he could not give up. He would have smiled as she raised her face to kiss him, would have studied her with that intensity that so unsettled others, the blue eyes riveted, as if he could record the synapses of her brain. Others wilted under this attention, Jean did not. She slipped her arm into his and led him to the roadster.

     She drove east along the Embarcadero—the scene of much of the labor unrest she had reported in the Western Worker—then turned west on Broadway. She had decided where they would eat; not one of the posh restaurants he would have chosen, but a shabby place not far from her apartment on Telegraph Hill, good for the spicy food he favored and some proletarian privacy. An agent waited outside. He would report: Drove to Xochiniloc Cafe, 787 Broadway, at 10 P.M. Cheap type bar, cafe, and dance hall operated by Mexicans. Had few drinks, something to eat, went to 1405 Montgomery where she lives on top floor . . . Appears to be very affectionate and intimate . . . At 11:30 lights went out.

     Within two weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, chief of counterintelligence for the Ninth Army Corps in San Francisco, would send a memo to the Pentagon recommending that Dr. Oppenheimer be denied a security clearance and be fired as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, citing among other things this overnight tryst with Jean Tatlock, identified as his mistress and a known Communist.

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I

BLOODLINES

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ON BLOODLINES: 1620–1920 WELL, NEITHER ONE OF US CAME OVER ON THE MAYFLOWER, ROBERT OPPENHEIMER OFFERED, PROBABLY WITH A SLIGHTLY SARDONIC SMILE

William Boyd, one of Robert's housemates at Harvard, would remember the remark. Boyd's own Scottish-German forebears would not have been on that iconic ship when it reached American shores in 1620 either, or on any of the other ships that followed soon after in the Winthrop Fleet, carrying English emigrants westward over the Atlantic at the beginning of what would come to be called the Great Migration. The ancestors of two other Harvard friends—John Edsall and Jeffries Wyman—had arrived on Massachusetts shores in the 1630s, however.*

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* All three of Robert's early Harvard friends would go on to illustrious careers: William Clouser Boyd became a noted American immunochemist. Jeffries Wyman, who was also one of Robert's housemates, became renowned for his research into hemoglobin and blood proteins; he also had a lifelong preoccupation with blood relatives and family ties. John T. Edsall, also a housemate, became a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard, and did pioneering work on proteins and plasma.

     These early settlers in the New World were not the huddled masses that would wash westward from Europe two hundred years later, but strong-minded, God-fearing, typically prosperous and well-educated people who had left their native England seeking freedom to worship. These were the Puritans, supremely confident in their own superiority, who helped to establish a distinctive American character: a kind of rock-ribbed perseverance, a determination that would not falter. The hellfire and damnation they preached would also linger long in the Puritan psyche, but would never be quite so deeply embedded as their belief in the spiritual value of good deeds and the ethics of hard work.

     As the seventeenth century converged into the eighteenth, the English, some of them gentry, continued to make the long sea journey to the colonies in America, looking not so much to worship as they pleased as to make their fortunes. A social elite evolved around those who did not have a dusky complexion, who were Protestant, who had married well or made money or, preferably, both. Harvard, established in 1636, was the college of choice for those families who mattered. Their names became a litany—among them Adams and Cabot and Lodge, Saltonstall, Peabody, Forbes, and Lowell, and all of their many permutations. For another century and more, they merged and married each other as often as possible. In 1928, Robert Oppenheimer's Harvard friend Jeffries Wyman married Anne Cabot. (The Cabots had arrived in America in 1770, the Wymans 130 years earlier.) It was a heritage that was old and rich in willpower, Puritan values and a strong sense of purpose, their daughter Anne Cabot Wyman would write. She describes her family as entwined with grandparents, uncles and aunts and rafts of cousins. The generations met every year at big family parties and in old summer enclaves in Maine or on Cape Cod. In the winter, colonies of relatives clustered in the upscale Boston suburbs of Brookline or Dover or Milton. The men worked together in offices on State Street in downtown Boston or in labs at Harvard. Their wives belonged to 'Mothers' Clubs.' They were all considered—and considered themselves—'True Bostonians.'²

IN 1922, ROBERT OPPENHEIMER'S FIRST year at Harvard, 21 percent of the student body was Jewish. The following year, Harvard's president—a Lowell—suggested a quota on Jews in the student body: no more than 15 percent.³ It would have been impossible for anyone as smart and sensitive as Robert to be unaware of the prejudices that existed, or to believe they did not apply to him.⁴

     Robert was at Harvard long enough to learn that bloodlines mattered; that while the gene pool would swirl and widen in the early decades of the twentieth century, New England, with its Great Migration core, would remain implacably white and Protestant. His German-Jewish roots would forever exclude him. And yet two of the women he would come to love in his lifetime had bloodlines that set them solidly inside the circle of those who belonged.

JEAN TATLOCK'S HERITAGE TRACED BACK TO important families of the 1636 Puritan colony in Connecticut. Her grandfather, William Tatlock D. D., arrived from England in 1853, and married Florence Perry, who in the course of time gave birth to a son, whom they named John S. P. Tatlock, the S for Strong and the P for Perry. Jean's grandfather would serve as rector and archdeacon of St. John's Episcopal Church in Stamford, Connecticut for thirty years.⁵ His son John grew up to be a handsome young man, with a broad forehead, blue eyes, and a dignified demeanor and, in time, became a scholar of Chaucer and Dante. His first post was as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, where he was destined to meet a remarkable student named Marjorie Fenton.

     The Fentons too had come early to America; they settled into the Hudson River Valley and played a lively role in the new colony's life. John Fenton served in the Revolutionary War as a drummer and worked his way to the rank of sergeant in the Commander-in-Chief's Guard.⁶ Four score years later, another Fenton and another American war: fifteen-year-old Ernest left his New York home in 1860 to make his way to Washington, D.C., arriving just as Abraham Lincoln was about to become president and the Civil War loomed like a great dark cloud over the capitol.

     In 1865, Virginian Mary Welsh Waters, just seventeen, was one of the hundreds of thousands of grieving wives left behind by the ravages of