American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Julius Oppenheimer died suddenly in September 1937. Robert and Frank inherited their father’s diminished but still substantial fortune. Frank had built a promising career of his own. Unlike Robert, Frank excelled as an experimental physicist. In 1936, Frank married Jackie Quann, an economics student at Berkeley and a member of the Young Communist League as an undergraduate. A year later, Frank and Jackie formally joined the Communist Party. Robert was now surrounded by friends and family members who had committed to Communism, in some cases as formal Communist Party members. Bird and Sherwin conclude that Robert “may well have thought of himself as an unaffiliated comrade” (135). In later years, Haakon Chevalier identified Robert as a secret Party member. Others described Robert’s relationship to the Communists as ambiguous. Despite decades of investigation using illegal methods, the FBI never established Robert’s connection to the Party.

The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 enabled Adolf Hitler to invade Poland, triggering World War II and leaving many leftist intellectuals disillusioned over Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s agreement with the Nazi tyrant. Chevalier defended Stalin’s decision as an act of strategic necessity and insisted that Oppenheimer thought similarly, though other friends and other bits of evidence suggest that Oppenheimer had begun to sour toward the Soviets at least as early as 1938. Either way, Oppenheimer remained committed to both President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism and the hope of Hitler’s ultimate defeat. On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union. Years later, Chevalier recalled that he and Oppenheimer heard the news while driving back from a picnic. Chevalier claimed that Oppenheimer always regarded the Nazi and Soviet regimes as fundamentally different. In the 1950s, Chevalier even published a novel featuring an Oppenheimer-like character who doubled as a secret Communist.

Oppenheimer’s intense romance with the intellectually talented but mentally troubled Jean Tatlock disintegrated by the end of 1939. In August 1939, Oppenheimer met Katherine “Kitty” Puening Harrison—a thrice-married 29-year-old from Pittsburgh, a blood relative of European royals, and another ardent political leftist. Kitty’s second husband, a Communist Party member, died fighting fascists in Spain. Kitty was still unhappily married to her third husband when she met Oppenheimer and began an affair. When Kitty became pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child in the summer of 1940, her third husband agreed to an amicable divorce. Some of Oppenheimer’s friends and family were surprised by his whirlwind affair with Kitty and stunned by their subsequent marriage. Peter Oppenheimer, Robert and Kitty’s first child, was born on May 12, 1941.

In January 1939, two German chemists proved that bombarding uranium with neutrons could produce fission. Joe Weinberg, a young graduate student, arrived at Berkeley to begin studying with Oppenheimer. Weinberg later recalled that, during the same week, a group of graduate students used the fission data to sketch a design for a bomb on a napkin. A few days later, Phil Morrison, another of Oppenheimer’s students, noticed a rudimentary drawing of a bomb on his professor’s office blackboard.

As a graduate mentor, Oppenheimer tried to tailor his approach to each student’s needs. With those who know him best, he could be demanding, but he also gave special attention to students outside his inner circle. On one occasion, for instance, he delivered an entire lecture on a subject that he suspected would appeal primarily to one of his more reticent students, hoping that the student would find the confidence to make the subject a research topic. Morrison joined the Communist Party. Weinberg may have joined; he certainly sympathized with Communism. Some students even tried to organize a union in Berkeley’s Radiation Lab, which incensed Oppenheimer’s colleague Ernest Lawrence. Oppenheimer always supported unions and did not seem to have discouraged his students in their left-wing pursuits, but in the early 1940s he began to focus almost entirely on the progress of World War II. By early 1941, Oppenheimer was collaborating with Lawrence on uranium isotope research and hoping that German scientists had not made much progress on an atomic bomb project. When Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Oppenheimer decided that unionization, the Spanish cause, and other left-wing preoccupations were comparatively insignificant.

In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt responded to prodding from scientists in the US and Britain by establishing the S-1 Committee to direct all government research that could lead to the production of an atomic bomb. In May 1942, the S-1 Committee appointed Oppenheimer “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture” and tasked him with leading a secret summer seminar for talented physicists who could help advance the bomb program. Oppenheimer recruited Robert Serber, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and others. Bethe recalled marveling at Oppenheimer’s intellectual prowess during these secret meetings. Ominously, Teller began talking about a hydrogen bomb (or superbomb) that could cause a catastrophic fusion explosion. Oppenheimer remained focused on a fission bomb, which he believed might be the only hope of defeating Hitler. James Conant and Vannevar Bush, both academic scientists and members of the S-1 Committee, persuaded the War Department to overlook Oppenheimer’s prewar political activities, approve his security clearance, and bring him fully into the project.

Oppenheimer attended an S-1 meeting in September 1942. That same month, US Army Col. Leslie R. Groves took command of the bomb program, now known as the Manhattan Project. Groves met Oppenheimer at Berkeley on October 8. Oppenheimer impressed the gruff and conservative Groves as the right man to direct a central laboratory. Meanwhile, illegal FBI wiretaps captured a conversation—between Steve Nelson, a Berkeley Communist, and someone named “Joe”—in which Oppenheimer’s name came up in conjunction with the bomb program. Lt. Col. Boris T. Pash, a high-ranking Army counterintelligence officer and anti-Communist veteran of the Russian civil war, received a transcript of the Nelson-“Joe” conversation. Pash suggested extreme interrogation or even lethal action against suspected Communists in Berkeley. Oppenheimer distanced himself from his old Communist connections.

In the winter of 1942-43, Haakon Chevalier and his wife, Barbara, arrived at the Oppenheimers’ home for what would prove a fateful dinner. Before dinner, while standing in the kitchen with his friend, Chevalier told Oppenheimer that a man named George C. Eltenton, a British-born chemical engineer who worked for the Shell Oil Company, had asked Chevalier to approach Oppenheimer about possibly sharing scientific information with the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Oppenheimer dismissed Eltenton’s treasonous suggestion, and the two friends rejoined their wives. Years later, Kitty Oppenheimer, Chevalier, and Chevalier’s then ex-wife Barbara penned slightly different accounts of the evening, none of which disputed the substance of Robert’s negative reaction. In separate 1946 interviews with the FBI, both Chevalier and Eltenton later confirmed that Oppenheimer rejected the idea of passing scientific secrets to the Soviets. Eltenton’s behavior gave rise to suspicions that he might be a Soviet spy himself, but a Shell coworker who carpooled with the opinionated engineer recalled Eltenton as a simpleminded Soviet enthusiast and “dupe of the Russian consulate” (200).