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  Just when everything seemed to be falling into place for Dorothy, illness again threatened to destroy her world. In the summer of 1937, Kevin was diagnosed with rheumatic endocarditis, a potentially fatal cardiac disease. The doctor’s best recommendation for the ailing six-year-old was a year of bed rest. Too much exertion could kill him. There would be no going to school for him that fall. All they could do was wait and see. Dorothy shut her mind against the terrible possibilities. She put everything aside to tend to her little boy, rushing home for lunch every day and returning straight after work each afternoon. Kevin was bored and lonely, and she hated seeing him lying there looking so miserable. She spent hours a day sitting on his bed reading to him, playing games, and devising ways to keep him amused. It was a long, trying winter, made more so by the death of her father from pneumonia. The following summer, Dorothy took Kevin to Los Angeles Children’s Hospital to see if there had been any improvement. “We drove out to Los Angeles, accompanied by my grandmother and aunt, who followed in a LaSalle limousine with a liveried driver,” recalled Kevin. “It was quite a convoy.” Dorothy rented a tiny house near the shore in Long Beach, hoping the sun and sea air would do Kevin some good. The doctors’ verdict was that Kevin had been misdiagnosed. He was suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of tonsillitis. They removed the swollen glands and sent him home.

  Over the next few years, many of Dorothy’s Santa Fe friends tried to play matchmaker. She kept company with several gentlemen, including the painter Cady Wells, whom she almost married. But after burying her husband and nearly losing her son, Dorothy may have been inclined to take her happiness where she found it, without asking for more. “She had suitors,” said her friend Betty Lilienthal. “But I don’t think there was anyone in town who really interested her that way, who was really appropriate. She had a great many friends, and kept herself busy, and took care of Kevin. I think she was content.”

  If Dorothy had once yearned for a more adventurous life, she had put those thoughts aside and reconciled herself to slow, sun-drenched days in the mesas and mountains of the high desert. Though she counted her blessings that both she and Kevin were doing well, she could not help feeling uneasy at times about the events taking place in Europe. She looked sadly back on those youthful sojourns abroad with her father and wondered if his generation’s sacrifices in the Great War had all been a waste. She read the increasingly alarmist newspaper reports about the rise of fascism and Hitler’s treaty-breaking demands; and when German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, she realized that the ideological tensions had finally erupted into a military conflict. As much as she, like most Americans, was determined that Europe would fight it out alone, and that this country would remain neutral and uninvolved, she understood that even in Santa Fe there would be no respite from worry and strife.

  In her memoir, she recorded the morning in May 1940 when the harsh reality of war suddenly intruded on her peaceful world and wrenched her heart and filled her with foreboding. She and Cady Wells had accompanied their friends Eliot Porter, a well-known landscape photographer, and his wife, Aline, on a trip to the small Hopi village of Supai, located thirteen miles down, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and reachable only by foot or horseback. In this unhurried, isolated corner of the world, they sat lazily listening to the radio in a trader’s house, when a report crackled over the airwaves that the Nazis had marched into Holland:

  There had been a moment of stunned disbelief. The sky was just as bright and deeply blue. The wild celery was just as green on the bank of the small stream which wandered over the rocks on its way to Havasupi Falls. The green backs of the frogs leaping in and out of the stream glistened as always with crystals of brook water. Everything was the same. But nothing would be the same again. There would never again be a piñon tree under which was eternal peace and everlasting happiness.

  When war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dorothy’s first reaction was that at least she and Kevin “would be safe,” tucked away in a sleepy backwater such as Santa Fe. She had lost family in the Great War and felt no good had come from that or any other war. She had seen enough misery and death to last her a lifetime and had come out west in part to escape all that. Despite a strong sense of duty that tugged at her conscience, she turned her back on the drumbeat of patriotism and the colorful propaganda banners that filled the Plaza. But the war soon came home to Santa Fe in ways she could not ignore. The small city fell into an economic slump as all the able-bodied men enlisted and one business after another was liquidated. Not far from town, in Casa Solana, a large internment camp was built, and surrounded by barbed wire. Rumor had it that the prison held Japanese Americans and Japanese from Latin America who were deemed “dangerous persons,” and the U.S. government was holding them as bargaining chips for potential prisoner exchanges with Japan. By the beginning of 1943, Dorothy, whose travels had given her a lasting interest in foreign affairs, found it impossible not to feel “quite worked up about the world situation.” She followed the reports of fierce fighting in the Pacific, where America had mobilized almost half a million troops to prepare for General Douglas MacArthur’s offensive. In North Africa, Rommel’s panzer army had routed Allied forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, leaving nearly 1,000 dead. The war was not going well, and Dorothy kept her small kitchen radio tuned to the news.

  By the time she met Robert Oppenheimer, Dorothy had been a widow for twelve years. At his request, she plunged herself into the clandestine wartime project. She did not have the slightest idea what he was doing in the high country, or what would be asked of her. She did not care, she wrote, “if he was digging trenches to put in a new road.” He was the most compelling man she had ever met, and she would have done anything to be associated with him and his work. Perhaps the desert had worked its cure on her a second time, and she was strong again. Her heart, like her scarred lungs, had healed. Maybe after so many years the town had become a bit too small, and she felt the stirrings of an old restlessness. It may also have been that her father’s spirit of adventure ran deeper in her than she knew, and she was ready to see what else life held in store for her. Oppenheimer asked her to start right away, and she agreed.

  To people in town, she remained the same sweet widow, working at a nondescript office around the corner from her old job and spending all her free time with her boy. She was told to attract as little attention to herself and her new position as possible, and she did as she was asked, sticking carefully to the daily rhythms of her previous life. No one, not even her son, was aware of what she was really doing. To people inside the project, however, she became known as Oppenheimer’s loyal recruit, his most inspired hire, and the indispensable head of the Santa Fe office. For the next twenty-seven months, she would lead a double life, serving as their confidante, conduit, and only reliable link to the outside. She would come to know everyone involved in the project and virtually everything about it, except exactly what they were making, and even that she would guess in time. One of the few civilians with security clearance, she was on call night and day. As she soon discovered, she would learn to live with that one word—“security”—uppermost in her thoughts at all times. Everything was ruled by “secrecy, the conditions of secrecy,” she wrote. “One’s life changed. One could not speak of what one was doing, not even in the smallest detail, to one’s family or friends. Every scrap of paper used in the office was burned every evening before closing.” This was a well-known wartime practice, but part of a whole new world to her.

  TWO

  A Most Improbable Choice

  STANDING A FEW FEET AWAY in the lobby of La Fonda, Oppenheimer’s twenty-three-year-old secretary, Priscilla Greene, watched him work his magic on Dorothy McKibbin. The meeting could not have lasted more than a few minutes, but she had no doubt of the outcome. Dorothy appeared to be bright, lively, and intelligent, with rosy cheeks and fine-boned features topped by a mass of curls. She had an engaging manner, a gent
le, assured way about her that was very attractive. Oppenheimer would like her, and there was no question of her liking him. In the short time she had worked for him, Greene had observed that it was the rare individual who was not beguiled by his Byronic looks, quick mind, and grave, courteous manner. “I don’t think he really interviewed her. He just offered her the job,” she recalled, “and she didn’t hesitate for a minute to accept.”

  Priscilla Greene understood this all too well. She had fallen for Oppenheimer almost as quickly as Dorothy McKibbin had. Scarcely a year earlier, in February 1942, Greene had landed a job working for Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel Prize—winning physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. Not long after she had started, Lawrence had doubled her workload by loaning her out on a part-time basis to his good friend “Oppie,” yet another tall, handsome, flirtatious physicist. Oppenheimer (who had picked up the nickname “OpJe” during a postdoctoral stint in Europe and would sign personal letters that way for the rest of his life, though the nickname eventually became Americanized as “Oppie”) was head of Berkeley’s theoretical physics department and had an office in Le Conte Hall, the same administrative building where Lawrence worked. Oppenheimer had been asked to hold a special wartime science conference that summer and needed a hand getting it organized. As it turned out, he had needed a lot of help, and Greene was delighted to find herself in the employ of such a dynamic figure.

  At the time, Oppenheimer was thirty-seven, and had a reputation on Berkeley’s campus as an inspiring lecturer. He was also known to be impatient, arrogant, and possessed of a razor-sharp tongue—and as a young teacher had been infamous for terrorizing anyone in his classroom he found plodding, dull-witted, or in anyway crass. He was considered one of the very best interpreters of mathematical theory, and study with him guaranteed the ambitious a fast-track career in theoretical physics. Many people were intimidated by him, though those who knew him better claimed that he had mellowed in the decade since he had come to Berkeley in 1929 after a sojourn in Europe, where he had studied with a small colony of world-class physicists, including James Franck and Einstein’s friend Paul Ehrenfast, and been a recognized participant in the quantum theory revolution. But there was always the sense with Oppenheimer that the mediocre offended him and that he did not regard the denizens of a West Coast university as quite his equals. John Manley, a refreshingly low-key experimental physicist at the University of Illinois whom Compton assigned to assist Oppie on the wartime physics project, recalled that when he met Oppenheimer for the first time, he was “somewhat frightened of his evident erudition” and “air of detachment from the affairs of ordinary mortals.”

  Oppenheimer could also be dismissive to the point of rudeness. He had a habit of interrupting people mid-sentence by nodding and saying quickly, in a slightly affected Germanic accent, “Ja, ja, ja,” as though he understood exactly what they were thinking and where their argument was headed—an argument that he would then proceed to rip apart in brutal fashion. After witnessing one such performance, Enrico Fermi, who was every bit as agile if not more so, observed that Oppie’s cleverness sometimes allowed him to sound far more knowledgeable about a subject than he might be in practice. But with his magnetic presence, astonishing quickness of mind, and wide range of intellectual interests, Oppenheimer was an exciting figure to be around, and students and colleagues were drawn to him as much by his great capacity as a physicist as by his immense charm. “We were all completely under his spell,” said Philip Morrison, one of the brightest of the young physicists who studied with him. “He was enormously impressive. There was no one like him.”

  His allure extended well beyond the lecture hall. Oppenheimer had the powerful charisma of those who know from birth that they are especially gifted. He expected to dazzle—the implacable blue eyes said as much in a glance. It was his mind that burned so brightly, with an intensity that he brought into every room, every relationship, every conversation, so that he somehow managed to invest even an offhand gesture or remark with some extra meaning or significance. Everyone wanted to be initiated into his inner circle. Even his younger brother, an astute observer of the Oppie effect, was not immune. “He wanted everything and everyone to be special and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special,” said Frank, who was eight years his junior and idolized his talented brother, following him into physics even though he knew he would never be in the same league. “He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up those enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special. His sunsets were always the best.”

  What drew people to Oppenheimer was that he was so very serious and he took those he collected around him so seriously, endowing them with rare qualities and facets they did not know they possessed. He would focus on them suddenly and relentlessly, showering them with phone calls, letters, favors, and unexpected, generous gifts. His attention could be unnerving, but at the same time exhilarating and gratifying. He was far from perfect, but his flaws, like his dark moods and savage sarcasm, were part of his fascination. He liked to show off, but the performance disguised a deep well of melancholy and self-loathing he carried with him from his cosseted New York childhood. It was the loneliness of a prodigy. He was named for his father, Julius Oppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, but was always known simply as Robert or Bob until his early twenties, when he felt compelled to embellish his name, perhaps in the belief that “J. Robert Oppenheimer” sounded more distinguished. He suffered from serious bouts of depression as a student first at Harvard, and then later at Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge, England, and even flirted with the idea of suicide. After failing to find satisfaction in psychiatry—one high-priced London doctor diagnosed his condition as “dementia praecox” and a “hopeless case”—he immersed himself in Eastern mysticism and became a fervent admirer of the Bhagavad Gita, the seven-hundred-stanza Hindu devotional poem, which he read in the original, after studying Sanskrit for that purpose. For a scientist, his search for wisdom in religion, philosophy, and politics was so unusual as to be considered “bohemian.” While it got him into trouble at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology), where he also taught, and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan refused him a promotion on the grounds he was too much of a dilettante, at Berkeley it only added to his appeal.

  His style was to be the tormented genius, and his spare frame and angular face reflected his ascetic character, as if his desire to engage every moment fully and completely were consuming his inner resources. He had been a delicate child, and when he pushed himself too hard, he became almost skeletal, resembling a fifteenth-century portrait of a saint with eyes peering out of a hollowed face. There was something terribly vulnerable about him—a certain innocence, an idealized view of life that was only saved from being adolescent by the sheer force of his intellect—that touched both sexes. His students all adored him, and he inspired the kind of devoted following which led some jealous colleagues to sneer that it was more a cult of personality, that Oppenheimer was the high priest of his own posse. He was trailed everywhere by a tight, talented group of graduate students, the stars of their class, and Greene learned to easily identify them by their pompous attempts to imitate Oppenheimer’s elegant speech, gestures, and highbrow allusions. She sometimes had the impression that Oppie was conscious of his ability to enthrall. It was no accident that people wanted to help him and would go to extraordinary lengths to earn his approbation.

  Greene, who had graduated from Berkeley the previous year and still wore her long, blond hair loose on her shoulders like a schoolgirl, found him “unbelievably charming and gracious,” His voice was one of the most mesmerizing things about him. When he singled her out for attention, he was “so warm and enveloping,” he made her feel like the most pleasing guest at the party. “When he came into a room, my most characteristic memory of him is [his] coming across to shake your hand, with a slight tilt and a marvelous smile,” she said. “And what secretary was
n’t going to be absolutely overwhelmed by somebody who, in the middle of a letter—we all smoked in those days—whipped his lighter out of his pocket and lighted your cigarette while you were taking dictation and he was talking.”

  Compared to Ernest Lawrence, Oppenheimer was a person of enormous culture and education. Lawrence was celebrated for his invention of the cyclotron, the powerful atom smasher, but was proletarian in his pursuits outside of physics. Oppie was from a wealthy New York family, wore good suits, and tooled around campus in a Packard roadster he nicknamed “Garuda,” in honor of the Sanskrit messenger to the gods. He spoke six languages, quoted poetry in the course of everyday conversation, and could be snobbish about music and art. “Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were acceptable,” noted his protégé, Robert Serber. “Ditto the Impressionists.” He had fierce opinions when it came to food and wine. “Martinis had to be strong. Coffee had to be black…. Steak had to be rare,” listed the British physicist Rudolf Peierls. Once, Oppenheimer took Peierls and a group of graduate students out to a steak restaurant for dinner. He proceeded to order his entrée rare, and this was echoed by everyone in turn until the last student at the table requested his, “Well done.” Oppie looked at him for a moment and said, “Why don’t you have fish?”

  He spent a great deal of time cultivating people and interests that had nothing to do with science, and even Greene could not help being struck by the wide variety of his correspondence. One of the first things he asked her to do was take down a letter to a San Francisco museum to which he was planning to give a painting by Van Gogh, which he had inherited from his father. He had pronounced the artist’s name in the guttural German style with lots of breath—“Van Gaaaccchhh”—which was beyond her, and in the end he had had to spell it. “The people he thought about, wrote about, and talked to, he had such a wonderful feeling for, that you really wanted to be part of whatever he was doing,” she said. “It was very hard to resist him.”