109 East Palace Read online

  ALSO BY JENNET CONANT

  Tuxedo Park:

  A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science

  That Changed the Course of World War II

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2005 by Jennet Conant

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conant, Jennet.

  109 East Palace : Robert Oppenheimer and the secret city of Los Alamos / Jennet Conant.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory—History. 2. Manhattan Project (U.S.)—History. 3. Atomic bomb—United States—History. 4. McKibbin, Dorothy Scarritt, 1897-1985. 5. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967. 6. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory—Biography. 7. Manhattan Project (U.S.)—Biography. 8. Physicists—Biography. I. Title.

  QC773.A1C66 2005 623.4′5119′0973—dc22 2005042497

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8542-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-8542-7

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Grandpa

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  ONE: Charmed

  TWO: A Most Improbable Choice

  THREE: The Bluest Eyes I’ve Ever Seen

  FOUR: Cowboy Boots and All

  FIVE: The Gatekeeper

  SIX: The Professor and the General

  SEVEN: Summer Camp

  EIGHT: Lost Almost

  NINE: Welcome Distractions

  TEN: Nothing Dangerous

  ELEVEN: The Big Shot

  TWELVE: Baby Boom

  THIRTEEN: Summer Lightning

  FOURTEEN: A Bad Case of the Jitters

  FIFTEEN: Playing with Fire

  SIXTEEN: A Dirty Trick

  SEVENTEEN: Everything Was Different

  EIGHTEEN: A Rain of Ruin

  NINETEEN: By Our Works We Are Committed

  TWENTY: Elysian Dreamer

  TWENTY-ONE: Scorpions in a Bottle

  TWENTY-TWO: Fallout

  Author’s Note on Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  They won't believe you, when the time comes

  that this can be told.

  It is more fantastic than Jules Verne.

  —JAMES B. CONANT

  TO THE NEW YORK TIMES' WILLIAM L. LAURENCE

  IN SPRING 1945

  PREFACE

  For as long as I can remember, my grandfather James B. Conant kept a memento of Los Alamos on the desk in his study. It was a sample of trinitite, fused sand from the crater in the desert floor formed by the first explosion of an atomic bomb at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. It had been embedded in Lucite for safekeeping, but I was often warned not to play with it as a child because it was still “hot” and emitted enough low-level radiation to set a Geiger counter madly clicking. The rock was a potent talisman from my grandfather’s past—a tumultuous time during which he took on the secret assignment of investigating the feasibility of designing and building a nuclear weapon for use in the war against Germany. He ultimately became the administrator of the Manhattan Project and the classified Los Alamos bomb laboratory, located on a remote mountaintop in New Mexico. After the successive bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a swift and decisive end, he emerged as one of the country’s great scientific leaders in the eyes of some, and as a mass murderer to others, responsible for helping to create the most diabolical weapon in the history of the world and for recommending its use against Japan.

  Los Alamos was the chief morality tale of my childhood, as intrinsic, formative, and fraught as the most morbid of Mother Goose nursery rhymes are to other children. Like most good stories, it featured a cast of heroes and villains; only they changed depending on who was telling the tale. My white-haired, bespectacled grandfather, a lean, austere Yankee mellowed by age and made approachable by the twinkle in his eyes, never expressed regret over his role in World War II. I loved him, and I would listen raptly to the stories of those urgent, exciting days, when the army often dispatched a special military plane to retrieve him from the isolated cabin in Randolph, New Hampshire, at the foot of the Presidential Range, which was for more than three decades our family’s summer home. Blue Cottage, as the house was known, was so far removed from the nearest town, and communication so uncertain, that the army was forced to run a special phone line down the dirt road to ensure they could reach him in an emergency. When the scientists who were his old friends would come to visit, they would reminisce about their pioneer days at Los Alamos, where the most brilliant, sophisticated men in the world attempted to do nuclear physics while cooking on Bunsen burners and camping out. In their company, my grandfather would relax his guard, and hearing their laughter and stories of absurd mix-ups, near misses, and desperate last-minute saves, I found it impossible not to come away with the impression that despite the pressure and grim purpose, theirs had been the adventure of a lifetime.

  At the same time, even as a very young child, I was aware that my grandfather’s war service was a loaded subject, publicly as well as privately. The mere mention of the time period could elicit a withering remark from my grandmother or a sarcastic rebuke from my father. “My own family did not escape the poison of deception,” my grandfather wrote in a rare moment of introspection in his 1970 autobiography, My Several Lives. As one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, he was bound by a very high-degree of secrecy, or “compartmentalization,” and conceded that the amount of “bald-faced lying” that he was forced to engage in permanently impaired his credibility with those closest to him. Security was extraordinarily tight, and he considered it a “fact of wartime” that he could tell his wife and two sons nothing about his work or frequent absences. Even after my grandmother discovered a Santa Fe railroad matchbook in one of his suit pockets after a trip that he had said took him no farther west than Chicago, he remained silent, leaving her to imagine in her barely suppressed rage what other betrayals he might be concealing. The estrangement that developed during those years left deep wounds on all sides and was still palpable years later when we gathered for tense family dinners.

  When I was growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, the heroics of World War II had faded from our national memory, patriotism was out of vogue, and anti-war rallies protesting America’s involvement in Vietnam regularly blockaded Harvard Square. My liberal parents were full of anger and recriminations toward my grandfather, his complicity in the secret military effort to develop chemical weapons and the bomb, and the subsequent—and in their view, cruel and unnecessary—destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I was twelve, they took my brother and me to the scene of the crime. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, we sat and watched the horrifyingly graphic documentary made in the aftermath of the attack, showing the black and burning city and the unspeakable suffering of those who survived the blast, their scorched skin hanging down like torn rags from their bones, radiation eating away at their insides as they slowly and painfully died. My mother walked out of the museum theater in the middle, sick to her stomach. We were living in Japan then, expatriates in a foreign land, and during the long train ride back to our home in Tokyo, I looked at the Japanese faces staring back at me and wondered what they would think if they knew.

  In the years after the war, every decision made by the leaders of the Manhattan Project was subject to review, second-guessing,
censure, and the inevitable assignment of blame. There was an enormous sense of guilt and remorse among some of the scientists actively involved in the bomb project, coupled with a tremendous sense of responsibility that they must do everything in their power to convince the nations of the world to stop developing weapons of mass destruction. Others steadfastly maintained a sense of pride in having accomplished what had to be done in those dark days, when the shadow of totalitarianism had fallen across the map of Europe and England stood alone, on the verge of being engulfed by Nazi domination. Still others were determined to build more powerful bombs to maintain America’s technological superiority.

  In the protracted debate over the development of the hydrogen bomb, my grandfather, along with the director of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, strongly opposed the more militarist faction, represented by Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, in the bitterly divided scientific community. In the cruel betrayals and unimaginable reversals that exemplified the Cold War era and Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting campaign of terror, Oppenheimer, the celebrated “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” was stripped of his clearance and barred from government work on the grounds that he represented a risk to national security. My grandfather, who testified in Oppenheimer’s defense at his hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission’s Personnel Security Board, considered the whole proceeding little more than a “kangaroo court” and left Washington in disgust.

  The detonation of the first atomic bomb triggered a chain of events the scientists could not stop, and Oppenheimer’s tragic downfall was, in a sense, history’s verdict on their collective failure to properly safeguard such a devastating new weapon. In an essay entitled, “How Well We Meant,” published after the fortieth reunion of Los Alamos scientists in 1983, the physicist I.I. Rabi reflected on how people have tended to forget the terrible state of affairs, both in Europe and the Pacific, that brought the United States to enter the atomic bomb race in the first place, and equally have failed to learn from the mistakes that resulted in the proliferation of nuclear weapons and competitive stockpiling of armaments. Rabi wanted to remind people that the story of Los Alamos was one of “human greatness and human folly.” The scientists’ motivating impulse was to protect people, not to destroy them. For all the cynicism and fatalism that exists about the arms race fifty years later, it was important, Rabi argued, not to lose sight of “science as the highest achievement of mankind, and as the process that takes us out of ourselves to view both the universe and our place in it.” The scientists who built the bomb were of all different nationalities and religions. They banded together out of a sense of patriotism, not just for America, but for Western civilization and for the ideals of humanity that they all embraced. “It was the example of the United States that toppled most of the kingdoms and empires of the world,” wrote Rabi. “We did this by asserting the greatness of the human spirit. Somehow, rather than this calculus of destruction, we must get back to our true nature as a nation.”

  My grandfather firmly believed that what he and his colleagues accomplished at Los Alamos saved the country and protected Western civilization. His misgivings were never about his part in facilitating the design and construction of the bomb, or its ultimate use against Japan, a decision that he always maintained was “correct.” Instead, he was plagued by a sense of personal responsibility and failure. From the moment of the Trinity test he realized that something irreversible had happened—that they had given humanity a tremendous new form of power and they would now have to dedicate themselves to trying to control it. As the years passed, he was distressed by the many missed opportunities. If only they had not been quite so naïve in handing the bomb over to a government and military not wise enough, or responsible enough, to understand the full ramifications of what they possessed. If only the scientists had not abdicated their moral obligation to see the atomic bomb placed under a strong international authority. If only they had succeeded in preventing the further development of the hydrogen bomb. My grandfather was haunted by these “if onlys” until the day he died, worrying about them even as his heart gave out and his mind slipped away in that cold New Hampshire winter of 1978.

  My purpose in writing this book was to try to gain insight into the greatness and the folly of Los Alamos, not by retracing the saga of scientific discovery, which was chronicled in Richard Rhodes’ authoritative book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but by reexamining the very personal stories of the projects key personnel. When she was swept up into the Manhattan Project, Dorothy McKibbin was plunged into a secret world of great men and ideas beyond anything she could have imagined. As the gatekeeper to Los Alamos, she presented herself as a peculiarly compelling witness to history, registering the full scope of the momentous change and moral upheaval the scientists’ work unleashed. She was not objective in any real sense, but for that matter, neither am I. She was smitten with Robert Oppenheimer from the moment they met and unreservedly embraced both him and his brilliant crew of scientists, including my grandfather, whom she liked and admired. But as an intelligent, articulate, and knowing observer, she made the human element all the more vivid and understandable, offering a unique view of the atomic pioneers that led the way to the Trinity test and a dangerous new world. Dorothy chronicled the dramatic times, problems, and mounting conflicts in her unpublished memoir and many letters to Oppenheimer. She made no claim to heroism for her own small role in history, but her record of courage, service, and sacrifice, along with that of Oppenheimer and the hundreds of remarkable men and women who followed him to that high mesa in New Mexico, may give us a new understanding of what they achieved in those unparalleled twenty-seven months. And with America at war again over weapons of mass destruction, her story also gives us a new appreciation for the need to promote peace and defuse the nuclear predicament they unwittingly helped to create.

  109 EAST PALACE

  ONE

  Charmed

  THERE WAS SOMETHING about the man, that was all there was to it. He was six feet tall and very slender, and had on a trench coat and a porkpie hat, which he wore at rakish angle, so that people, women in particular, could not help taking notice. His face had a refined quality, with closely cropped black curls framing high cheekbones and startling blue eyes that radiated a strange intensity. He stuck out in Santa Fe like a sore thumb. But it was not his unusual looks, his city clothes, or even the pipe that he waved about in one hand while talking that caught Dorothy McKibbin’s attention. It was something in his bearing, the way he walked on the balls of his feet, which “gave the impression he was hardly touching the ground.”

  Someone might have mentioned his name when they were introduced, not that it would have meant anything to her at the time. She had done little more than shake his hand, but she felt instinctively that their meeting was about to change everything about her quiet life. She had never intended to make a decision so quickly. She had only planned to come in for an interview, but she was so struck by the man’s compelling personality that she blurted out the words “I’ll take the job” before she had any idea what she was saying. In less than a minute, she had agreed to go to work for a complete stranger, for some kind of government project no one in Santa Fe seemed to know a thing about, doing God only knew what. She was forty-five, a widow with a twelve-year-old son, and flustered as a schoolgirl.

  Dorothy McKibbin had come to the hotel La Fonda in the center of the old Santa Fe Plaza that March afternoon in 1943 in search of employment. It was no secret she was looking for work. Everyone in town knew the venerable old Spanish and Indian Trading Company, where she had been bookkeeper for ten years, had closed on account of the war, which had been raging on two fronts for more than a year with no end in sight. The store's owners had gone to Washington to do their part and were working for one of the many government agencies. A lot of people were leaving. Most of the native Spanish American population had already headed to California to work in the big factories and defense plants. Tourism had slowed to a trickle. The whole town wa
s emptying out. She had worried about how she would earn a living until an old friend, George Bloom, who was president of the First National Bank, had found her something in the loan department. To qualify for the position, Bloom told her, she would first have to pass the Civil Service exam. The first time she took the required typing test, she flunked it. She was typing so fast she ran clean off the lines, and the “old machine did nothing to help. No bells rang; no horns blew.” She was so infuriated by her humiliating performance, she went home and practiced for five days. When she took the test the second time, she passed it with flying colors. The job was hers. Her dignity restored, Dorothy informed Bloom she would have to “think it over.” She hated the thought of working in a bank. Still, it paid $120 a month, and with all the men going off to war, she knew it would not be too difficult to work her way up to “a high position.” Dorothy promised to let Bloom know in a day or two.

  She was still mulling over his offer when she ran into Joe Stevenson, a local entrepreneur, who told her about another job that might be available and that would pay as much as $150 a month. Under any other circumstances, Dorothy would have jumped at the chance to get a higher-paying position, but there was something about the way Stevenson talked—he was vague, almost evasive—that left her feeling unsettled. She was crossing Palace Avenue when Stevenson approached her, and they carried on their awkward little exchange in the middle of the street with the traffic steering around them.

  “How would you like a job as a secretary?” he proposed cheerfully.

  “Secretary to what?” she asked.

  “Secretary,” he said, smiling. Dorothy took in the smile. She knew Stevenson had recently returned to town from California, where he had been enrolled in some kind of government training program. Rumor had it that the training was war related, and she could not help wondering if this might be, too.