第40章及后记 There's Only One Robert

CHAPTER FORTY
“It Should Have Been Done the Day After Trinity”

I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and
some courage for you to make this award today.

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER to President Lyndon Johnson, December 2, 1963
BY THE EARLY 1960S, with the return of Democrats to the White House,
Oppenheimer was no longer a political pariah. The Kennedy Administration
was not going to bring him back into government, but liberal Democrats
nevertheless thought of him as an honorable man martyred by Republican
extremists. In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and
now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer
invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At
this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet
Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins.
Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most
extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been
gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when
Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Afterwards, Oppenheimer’s old friend from
his GAC days, Glenn Seaborg—now chairman of the AEC—asked if he
would be willing to endure another hearing to get his security clearance
reinstated. “Not on your life,” Robert snapped.
Oppenheimer continued to give public lectures, most often in university
settings, and usually he dwelled on broad themes related to culture and
science. Since he had been deprived of any status associated with the
government, the power of his persona now was entirely that of the public
intellectual. He presented himself as a diffident humanist, pondering man’s
survival in an age of weapons of mass destruction. When the editors of
Christian Century asked him in 1963 to list some of the books that had
shaped his philosophical outlook, Oppenheimer named ten. At the top of the
list was Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, and then came the Bhagavad-Gita . .
. and last was Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
IN THE SPRING of 1963, Oppenheimer learned that President Kennedy
had announced his intention to give him the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize,
a $50,000 tax-free award and medal for public service. Everyone
understood that this was a highly symbolic act of political rehabilitation.
“Disgusting!” cried one Republican senator when he heard the news.
Republican staffers on the House Un-American Activities Committee
circulated a fifteen-page summary of the 1954 security charges against
Oppenheimer. On the other hand, the veteran CBS broadcaster Eric
Severeid described Oppenheimer as “the scientist who writes like a poet
and speaks like a prophet”—and approvingly suggested that the award
signaled Oppenheimer’s rehabilitation as a national figure. When reporters
pressed Oppenheimer for his reaction, he demurred, saying, “Look, this
isn’t a day for me to go shooting my mouth off. I don’t want to hurt the
guys who worked on this.” He knew his friends inside the Administration,
McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were no doubt responsible.
Edward Teller, who had received the same prize the year before,
immediately wrote Oppenheimer his congratulations: “I have been tempted
often to say something to you. This is the one time I can do so with full
conviction and knowing that I am doing the right thing.” Actually, many
physicists had quietly campaigned to have the Kennedy Administration
restore Oppenheimer’s security clearance. They wanted a real vindication
for their old friend, not merely a symbolic rehabilitation. But Bundy
thought the political price too high. Indeed, even after the Administration
announced that Oppenheimer would be given the Fermi Award, Bundy
waited to gauge the response from Republicans before deciding that the
president would personally award the prize in a White House ceremony.
On November 22, 1963, Oppenheimer was sitting in his office, working
on a draft acceptance speech for the December 2 White House ceremony,
when he heard knocking on his outer office door. It was Peter, who said that
he had just heard on his car radio that President Kennedy had been shot in
Dallas. Robert looked away. At that moment, Verna Hobson dashed in,
exclaiming, “My God, did you hear?” Robert looked at her and said, “Peter
just told me.” When others arrived, Robert turned to Peter and asked his
twenty-two-year-old son if he’d like a drink. Peter nodded, and Robert
walked over to Verna’s large walk-in closet, where he knew some liquor
was kept. But then Peter observed that his father just stood there, “his arm
hanging down by his side, fourth finger repetitively rubbing his thumb,
gazing downward toward the little collection of liquor bottles.” Finally,
Peter mumbled, “Well, never mind then.” As they walked out together, past
his secretary’s desk, Verna Hobson heard Robert say, “Now things are going
to come apart very fast.” Later, he told Peter that “nothing since Roosevelt’s
death had felt to him like that afternoon.” For the next week, Oppenheimer,
like much of the nation, sat in front of a television and watched the tragedy
further unfold.
On December 2, President Lyndon Johnson went ahead with the Fermi
Award ceremony, as scheduled. Standing next to Johnson’s hulking figure
in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Oppie seemed almost diminutive.
He stood like a “figure of stone, gray, rigid, almost lifeless, tragic in his
intensity.” By contrast, Kitty was positively exultant, “a study in joy.”
David Lilienthal thought the whole affair “a ceremony of expiation for the
sins of hatred and ugliness visited upon Oppenheimer. . . .” With Peter and
Toni looking on, Johnson said a few words and then handed Robert a
medal, a plaque and a check for $50,000.
In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer mentioned that an earlier
president, Thomas Jefferson, “often wrote of the ‘brotherly spirit of
science.’ . . . We have not, I know, always given evidence of that brotherly
spirit of science. This is not because we lack vital common or intersecting
scientific interests. It is in part because, with countless other men and
women, we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether
men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
and live without war as the great arbiter of history.” And then he turned to
Johnson and said, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken
some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That
would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.”
Johnson then responded with a gracious reference to Kitty as the “lady
who shares honors with you today—Mrs. Oppenheimer.” And then, to
laughter, he quipped, “You may observe she got hold of the check!”
Teller was in the audience that day, and everyone watched with mounting
tension as the two men came face to face. With Kitty standing stone-faced
beside him, Oppenheimer grinned and shook Teller’s hand. A Time
magazine photographer caught the moment with his camera.
Afterwards, John F. Kennedy’s grieving widow sent word that she
wanted to see Robert in her private quarters. Robert and Kitty went upstairs
and were greeted by Jackie Kennedy. She said she wanted him to know just
how much her late husband had wanted to give him this award. Robert, in
describing the moment later, confided that he had been deeply touched.
Oppenheimer, however, was still a polarizing figure in Washington. At
least one Republican politician, Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, had
publicly announced that he would boycott the White House ceremony, and
in response to Republican criticism, the Johnson Administration agreed the
following year to reduce the Fermi prize money to $25,000. Lewis Strauss,
of course, was mortified by Robert’s semi-rehabilitation, and wrote an
angry letter to Life magazine, suggesting that the award to Oppenheimer
had “dealt a severe blow to the security system which protects our country. .
. .”
Strauss’ enmity toward Oppenheimer had only deepened since the 1954
trial. And then all the old wounds had been reopened in 1959, when
President Eisenhower nominated Strauss as his commerce secretary. In the
bitter confirmation battle, in which the Oppenheimer hearing was a central
factor, Strauss narrowly lost, by a vote of 49–46. Strauss correctly blamed
Senator Clinton Anderson, and then Senator John F. Kennedy—who had
been lobbied by Oppenheimer defenders like McGeorge Bundy and Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. When Kennedy protested, “It would require an extreme case
to vote against the president,” Mac Bundy responded, “Well, this is an
extreme case.” Bundy laid out for Kennedy Strauss’ reprehensible conduct
in the Oppenheimer case. Convinced, Kennedy switched his vote and
Strauss lost the confirmation. “It’s a lovely show—never thought I’d live to
see my revenge,” cabled Bernice Brode to Oppie. “In unchristianly spirit,
enjoy every squirm and anguish of victim. Having wonderful time—wish
you were here!” Even seven years later, Strauss thought he saw
Oppenheimer’s influence at work, complaining that “Oppenheimer’s
partisans are continuing their reprisals against individuals who did their
duty.” The case would follow both Strauss and Oppenheimer to their
graves.

EVEN AFTER Robert won the Fermi award, Kitty’s resentments against
Teller and others remained unshakable. One late afternoon in the spring of
1964, she and Robert had drinks with David Lilienthal. Robert had just
recovered from a terrible bout of pneumonia; he had finally given up
cigarettes but still smoked a pipe. He and Kitty had aged. Robert still wore
his signature flat porkpie hat and he drove around Princeton in a Cadillac
convertible that had seen better days. When Lilienthal remarked that the last
time he had seen them had been at the White House Fermi award ceremony,
Kitty’s dark eyes smoldered. “That was awful,” she snapped, “there were
some awful things about it.” Robert sat there with his head bowed and
murmured softly, “There were some very sweet things said.” But a moment
later Robert lost his “kindly, almost rabbinical posture” when Teller’s name
was mentioned, and his eyes flashed with real anger. The wounds,
Lilienthal noted, were “still sore.” Lilienthal completed his diary entry with
the observation that “She [Kitty] burns with an intensity of feeling one
rarely sees, mostly with a deep resentment against all those who had any
part in the torture Robert had to undergo.”
For a man who had been so politically engaged in the 1930s and ’40s,
Oppenheimer was oddly disconnected from the turmoil of the 1960s. At the
beginning of the decade, as many Americans dug atomic bomb shelters in
their backyards, Oppenheimer never spoke out against such hysteria. When
pressed by Lilienthal, he explained, “There is nothing I can do about what is
going on; I would be the worst person to speak out about them in any case.”
Similarly, as the Vietnam War escalated in 1965–66, he had nothing to say
in public—though privately, when he discussed it with Peter, it was evident
that he was skeptical of the Administration’s escalating commitment.
IN 1964, Oppenheimer received an advance copy of a book with a startling
new interpretation of the decision to use the bomb on Hiroshima. Using
such newly opened archival sources as former secretary of war Henry L.
Stimson’s diaries and State Department materials related to former secretary
of state James F. Byrnes, Gar Alperovitz argued that atomic diplomacy
against the Soviet Union was a factor in President Truman’s decision to use
the bomb against a Japanese enemy that appeared to be defeated militarily.
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb
and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power created a storm of
controversy. When Alperovitz asked for his comments, Oppenheimer wrote
him that much of what he had written had “been largely unknown to me. . .
.” He pointedly added, however, “[B]ut I do recognize your Byrnes, and I
do recognize your Stimson.” He would not be drawn into the controversy
over the book—but clearly, as with P. M. S. Blackett’s 1948 book Fear, War
and the Bomb, he still thought the Truman Administration had used atomic
weapons on an enemy already essentially defeated.
......

Epilogue:
“There’s Only One Robert”

Within a year or two of Oppie’s death, Kitty began living with Bob Serber, Robert’s close friend and former student. When a friend mistakenly called Serber “Robert,” Kitty reprimanded her sharply: “Don’t you call him Robert—there’s only one Robert.” In 1972, Kitty bought a magnificent fifty-twofoot
teak ketch, christened the Moonraker. The name refers to the topmost sail on a large sailing
vessel—or to someone touched with madness. Kitty persuaded Serber to sail with her around the world in May 1972. But they didn’t make it very far. Off the coast of Colombia, Kitty became so ill
that Serber turned the boat around and made for port at Panama. Kitty died of an embolism on
October 27, 1972, in Panama City’s Gorgas Hospital. Her ashes were scattered near Carval Rock, in the same spot off the coast of St. John where Robert’s urn had been sent to the sea’s bottom in 1967. In 1959, ten years after his banishment, Frank Oppenheimer finally made it back into academia when the University of Colorado gave him an appointment in the physics department. In 1965, he won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to do bubble chamber research at University College in London. While in Europe that year, he and Jackie visited a number of science museums; they were particularly impressed by the Palais de la Découverte, which used models to demonstrate basic scientific concepts. Upon their return to America, he and Jackie began to develop plans for a science museum that would give children and adults a “hands-on” experience with physics, chemistry and other scientific fields. The idea took hold, and in August 1969, with grants from various foundations, Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium opened its doors on the grounds of San Francisco’s renovated Palace of Fine Arts, a monumental exhibition hall built in 1915. The Exploratorium quickly became a showcase in the “participatory museum movement,” and Frank became its charismatic director. Jackie and their son Michael worked closely with Frank, and the museum became a family endeavor—and possibly the world’s most interesting pedagogical museum of science.
Robert would have been proud of Frank. Everything the two brothers had learned in two lives
devoted to science, art and politics was brought together in the Exploratorium. “The whole point of the Exploratorium,” Frank said, “is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.” If Frank ran his Exploratorium as a “benevolent despot” until his death in 1985, it was always with the egalitarian notion that “human understanding will cease to be an instrument of power . . . for the benefit of a few, and will instead become a source of empowerment and pleasure to all.”
Peter Oppenheimer moved to New Mexico, living in his father’s Perro Caliente cabin overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Over the years, he raised three children. Twice divorced, he eventually settled in Santa Fe, and made a living as a contractor and carpenter. Peter never advertised his familial connections to the father of the atomic bomb—even when he occasionally went canvassing door-to-door as an environmental activist, lobbying against nuclear waste hazards in the region.
After her father’s death, Toni floundered. “Toni always felt inferior to Kitty,” recalled Serber.
“Kitty managed her life so much that Toni never became independent.” Her strong-willed mother had pressured her into going to graduate school, but after a while she dropped out. She lived alone in a small apartment in New York City for a time, but she had few close friends. Eventually she moved out of her apartment and lived in a back room of Serber’s large Riverside Drive apartment. Using her facility for languages, she got a temporary job in 1969 as a trilingual translator for the United Nations. “She could shift from one language to another without any problem whatsoever,” recalled Sabra Ericson. “But somehow or other, she was always getting slapped in the face.” The position required a security clearance. The FBI opened a full field investigation—and dredged up all the old charges about her father. In what must have been a painful and ironic blow to a tender ego, the security clearance never came through.
Toni eventually returned to St. John, resigned to making the island her home. “She made the
mistake of staying on St. John,” Serber said. “I mean, it’s so limited. There was nobody there she could talk to, really . . . nobody her own age.” Twice married and twice divorced, Toni enjoyed only fleeting happiness. Denied her chosen career by the FBI, she never seemed to recover her footing.
After her second divorce, she became good friends with another recent arrival on the island, June Katherine Barlas, a woman eight years older. With Barlas and others, Toni rarely talked about her parents. “But when she did mention her father,” recalled Barlas, “it was always lovingly.” She often wore a ponytail holder that had been given to her by Robert—and she’d become very upset if she ever misplaced it. She avoided discussing the 1954 hearing, other than to say on occasion “that those men had destroyed her father.”
But clearly, she still had issues with her parents. For a time, she saw a psychiatrist in St. Thomas, and she told her friend Inga Hiilivirta that this experience had helped her to understand “her resentment toward her parents from the way she had been treated as a young child.” She suffered from fits of depression. One day, determined to drown herself, she started swimming out from Hawksnest Bay toward Carval Rock, where Robert’s ashes rested on the sea bottom in an urn. She swam for a long time straight out across the ocean—and then, as she later confided to a friend—she suddenly felt better and turned back to shore.
On a Sunday afternoon in January 1977, she hanged herself in the beach cottage Robert had built on Hawksnest Bay. Her suicide was clearly premeditated. On her bed Toni had left a $10,000 bond and a will deeding the house to “the people of St. John.” She was beloved throughout the island.
“Everybody loved her,” Barlas said, “but she didn’t know that.” Hundreds came to the funeral—so many, in fact, that scores had to stand outside the small church in Cruz Bay.
The cottage on Hawksnest Bay is now gone, swept away by a hurricane, but in its place is a
community house standing on what is now called Oppenheimer Beach.