109 East Palace

Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

Jennet Conant

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780743250085
• eBook ISBN: 9781416585428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II.

In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.

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 was 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.

“Well, what would I do?” she persisted.

“You would be a secretary,” he repeated. “Don’t you know what a secretary does?”

“Not always,” she answered smartly, wondering how long they were going to go round and round like this.

“Well, think it over,” was all Stevenson said before continuing across the street. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”

She spent most of that night on the telephone, calling virtually all the friends she had in Santa Fe to find out what, if anything, they knew about a big company or project coming to town. Nobody had heard a thing about it. She was leaning toward the bank job on the grounds that it was permanent, whereas the project Stevenson had mentioned sounded temporary and would last only as long as the war. Still undecided, and with the twenty-four hours almost up, she headed for her appointed meeting with Stevenson at La Fonda no better informed than she had been when she had last seen him.

La Fonda was the central meeting place for locals and tourists alike in the tiny state capital, and legend had it that there had been an inn of some sort on the corner of the Plaza since the early 1600s. Situated at the end of the Old Santa Fe Trail, where the wagon trains from Missouri used to come rolling to a stop, the building once served as a casino and lively brothel and had been host to generations of trappers, traders, merchants, gamblers, politicians, and thieves, from Kit Carson to Billy the Kid. Since 1925, La Fonda had been run by the Harvey Houses hotel chain, which operated fine establishments throughout the Southwest, and so these days it catered to a somewhat better clientele. There was always a lively crowd milling around the dark, elegant lobby, so she was not surprised to see Stevenson deep in conversation with an out-of-towner. He was a businessman, probably a Californian, she judged, comparing Stevenson’s typical Santa Fe attire of open-neck, blue work shirt and faded Levis with the other’s brown silk gabardine suit, matching coat, white shirt, tie, and shiny dress shoes. Deciding to wait in the side hall where she was until they were finished talking, she sat in one of the big leather chairs favored by the bellboys when they were idle.

As soon as Stevenson saw her, he waved her over and introduced her to Duane Muncy, explaining that he was the business manager of the new government housing project that was interested in hiring her. Dorothy, regarding Muncy skeptically, asked exactly what the job would entail and what her duties would be. All he would say was that she would be “secretary to the assistant of the project manager.” Finally, baffled by the wall of silence, Dorothy inquired somewhat tentatively if the project had “anything to do with the war.” Lowering his voice, Muncy allowed as how it did. He began to tell her a little about the project, his carefully circumscribed answers implying that it was too secret to comfortably discuss, when the man in the porkpie hat sauntered over and stopped to join them. He lingered only long enough to exchange a few pleasantries, and to look her over with apparent curiosity, before abruptly excusing himself, murmuring, “All right, I’ll leave you, then.”

Dorothy watched him walk down the long foyer toward the heavy double doors of the hotel. He had not gone six feet when she turned to the two men and, before they could say another word, announced that they could count her in.

She was surprised that beyond her astonishment at her own behavior she had few misgivings, and none whatsoever about the man who was to be her boss. She could not explain why she was immediately taken with this tall stranger, a New Yorker in a funny hat who observed the social formalities of Park Avenue in the wilds of New Mexico. There were just moments in life when one found oneself open to opportunity, to the unexpected, whatever the risks. Dorothy was from pioneer stock. A decade earlier, after burying her husband, she had come out west to make a fresh start for herself and her baby. She had the strong sense that this man’s offer promised a new adventure. “I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast, and so completely,” she told our interviewer years later. “I just wanted to be allied with, have something to do with, a personality such as his.”

In the days that followed, she learned that the man she had met, who went by the name of Mr. Bradley, was actually J. Robert Oppenheimer, a famous American physicist from the University of California at Berkeley and the leader of a secret wartime project. Bradley was the name he would use in and around town, and the way she was to address him in public. She would learn never to mention his real name and, for that matter, never to mention him at all. Not to anyone. She was told never, under any circumstances, to use the word “physicist.” “I was told never to ask questions, never to have a name repeated,” she wrote, recalling her initiation into the most momentous scientific project of the twentieth century. “I soon knew that I was working for a project of great importance and urgency.”

• • •

Though not a native Santa Fean, Dorothy knew the area as well as anyone, if not better, and she supposed that in her own way she belonged there. The old town, with its bright sunshine and crystalline air, had been lucky for her once years ago, and she had claimed it as her own. That was back in 1925, when thin and weakened by the tuberculosis infecting her lungs, she had come to the Sunmount Sanitarium seeking a cure for a disease that had killed more Americans, young and old, rich and poor, than any other affliction up to that time. Her mother had brought her by train, and they had taken a room at La Fonda, unaware they would be forced to bide their time for a full month because of the long waiting list for entrance to the famed sanitarium. Finally, after money and influence had secured her daughter a place at the popular hospice, Dorothy’s mother prepared to leave. When they said their tearful good-byes on December 9, both of them knew the parting might be final. Dorothy was twenty-nine then and had already lost two beloved sisters: Frances Margaret, who had died of tuberculosis six years earlier, and Virginia, to a respiratory infection when she was still a child. Dorothy had been devastated by their deaths. Now that she, too, had fallen ill, she was determined not to spread the contagion to her family and friends. To avoid any chance of being the cause of that misfortune, Dorothy chose banishment and isolation. Their family doctor had confirmed the wisdom of seeking complete rest in a sanitarium, sealing her fate as an outcast. She had no choice but to try to rid herself of the debilitating disease once and for all, or risk never having a normal life. “The tuberculosis was holding her back,” said Betty Lilienthal, an old friend. “She was going to beat it, no matter how long it took.” In those days before antibiotics, the period of recuperation for “lungers” in a sanitarium was of indeterminate length—from six months to several years, even a lifetime.

It was a far cry from the wealth of opportunities that had awaited her on her graduation from Smith College in 1919, where Dorothy Ann Scarritt had been voted president of her freshman class and was one of the most popular in her year. “Not bad,” she liked to boast, “for a little girl from Kansas City.” Far from being intimidated by the East Coast sophisticates, she once confided to a friend that she had arrived at the elite women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts, with every intention of becoming a campus leader. She was outgoing and engaging, and from early on had demonstrated the great appetite for life that was her father’s greatest gift to her. As the fourth of five children in the large, noisy, and devoted Scarritt family, Dorothy had grown up with a firm sense of her place in the world.

The Scarritts were an exceptionally upright, educated, and substantial midwestern clan. Her father, William Chick Scarritt, had earned a law degree from Boston University and was a prominent corporate lawyer and leading citizen in their town. He was active in civic affairs and politics, and he was a power at the Melrose Methodist Episcopal Church, which had been founded by the family patriarch, the Reverend Nathan Scarritt, a well-known local minister. The Reverend Scarritt had come to Missouri from Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1848 to “teach the classics” in the barren prairie outpost and had earned a reputation as a fine preacher, and an even better businessman. By the time he died in 1890, he had accumulated 260 acres of farmland in the Northeast District, which made him one of the largest landowners in the area and one of the first millionaires. He left each of his six children a substantial sum and enough acreage to build on, so that when Dorothy was growing up, the Scarritts were a powerful Kansas City family and among them owned nearly a dozen mansions on the banks of the Missouri River. Dorothy’s mother, Frances Davis, was from a southern family that had migrated to Missouri, and the lovely redhead retained the genteel manners and impassioned Confederate politics of her old Virginia roots. She was a leading light in Kansas City’s social committees and garden clubs and a strong supporter of the arts.

Dorothy’s father was the chief influence in her early life, and it was from him she got her buoyant personality and undeniable presence. He raised his children to be strong, self-reliant, and athletic, and Dorothy and her siblings pursued tennis, swimming, hiking, and mountain climbing. William Scarritt spared no expense to see that his children benefited from the finest academic training, taking the unusual step at the time of sending both his sons and his daughters to the only private preparatory school in the area, and then east to college. He loved to travel and had a taste for dramatic scenery, taking his children on expeditions to Alaska, across Canada to the Rockies, and to Yosemite National Park and the western United States. After college, he escorted Dorothy on a grand tour of Europe. He encouraged her to pursue a life of pleasure, interest, and adventure. But as forward-thinking as he was in many ways in regard to women, he was also conventional enough to expect his only surviving daughter would eventually come home and settle down. On her return from Europe, however, Dorothy had difficulty resigning herself to the slow, predictable rhythms of her parents’ country club life and to the succession of tea dances and balls, all intended to lead her into a union with a boy from another good family.

In the fall of 1923, four years after graduating from Smith, she received an invitation to visit a college classmate, Alida Bigelow, who was vacationing at White Bear Lake in Minnesota. Dorothy seized the opportunity to escape Kansas City and renew her old acquaintance. While she was there, she met and immediately fell in love with her friend’s cousin, Joseph Chambers McKibbin.^I He had sailed his own boat on White Bear Lake since boyhood, and as he took her out on the water, he regaled her with tales of his racing exploits. He was thirty, a Princeton graduate, and a World War I vet, though, as he was quick to acknowledge, he had spent all his time as an army major training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. He was tall and an excellent athlete: he made varsity crew in college, was the squash champion of the Twin Cities’ team, and rode to the hounds. He told amusing tales of his years in New York City, where he and a group of fellow Princetonians had embarked on careers in investment banking. Dorothy thought he was infinitely more interesting than any of the boys back home and would later say she knew at once that “he was the only man” for her.

At the time he and Dorothy met, he had returned home to St. Paul to fulfill family obligations and was learning to manage his father’s prosperous fur business with the expectation that he would one day succeed him. Both Joseph and Dorothy were chafing at the bounds of family ties, the constraints of small-town life, and the sudden narrowing of their horizons after college. Together, they saw a chance to realize their ambitions. They became engaged and talked of starting an exciting life together in New York. But they had to put their plans on hold when Dorothy, on her return from a trip to Latin America with her father in the winter of 1925, learned that she had contracted tuberculosis. After much soul searching, she decided that despite his repeated objections, it was not fair for her to hold her fiancé to his promise. She broke off her engagement, left everyone who was dear to her miles behind, and set off on the bleak and uncertain journey to New Mexico.

Once they agreed to send Dorothy away, the Scarritts had a great many facilities to choose from, as it was then the fashion for health seekers to go west. Since the 1840s, men and women with symptoms of consumption had been heading to the mountains and deserts, and by the 1870s, the completion of the transcontinental railroad brought throngs of invalids to the plateau between Mississippi and California. By 1900, they accounted for a quarter of all the newcomers to California and a third of Colorado’s growing population. No place was deemed more restorative than New Mexico, where medical researchers had found tubercular consumption among the native Indian tribes to be almost nonexistent. Every western state to some degree owed its development to the burgeoning new health industry: railroads distributed brochures touting the advantages of the region, and promoters and developers competed to lure patients to their towns and subdivisions with tales of remarkable recoveries. As more and more travelers headed to the arid plains as an antidote to the feverish cities, those hospitals and institutions catering to itinerant health seekers cropped up all across the West, advertising their “pure air,” “wholesome climate,” and exaggerated claims of rejuvenation in line with the myths of El Dorado gold. Inevitably, some travelers, weakened by the ravages of illness, died in the course of the journey, but such discouraging stories rarely found their way into print. Boosterism was the order of the day, so much so that Mark Twain was moved to parody the lavish endorsements in Roughing It, noting that three months in Lake Tahoe would “restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor.” The West’s reputation as a natural paradise was given full expression by Daniel Drake, a leading Cincinnati physician, who published a series of journal articles and books widely publicizing the health benefits of frontier life and the renewing influence of “the voiceless solitudes of the desert.” If Drake’s fervent belief in the curative powers of the western climate and lifestyle went well beyond empirical science to wishful thinking, consumptives and their worried families could not be blamed for keeping the faith.

After investigating reputable sanitariums everywhere from Colorado Springs to the Sierra Madre, the Scarritts eventually settled on Sunmount as the ideal place for Dorothy to wile away those disappointing days. The high-desert plateau and crisp, clear air were regarded as therapeutic from a medical standpoint, and the stunning mountain vistas equally invigorating from a psychological one. Sunmount had first opened its doors to patients in 1903, but the lovely salmon-colored stucco compound on Camino del Monte Sol that greeted Dorothy on her arrival was built in 1914. It was designed so that the exterior took on the luscious contours of adobe and conformed to the Spanish Pueblo Revival style that was then coming into vogue. Under the guidance of its director, Dr. Frank Mera, Sunmount’s patients were prescribed a European-style regimen featuring rest, a nutritious diet, and plenty of fresh air. They enjoyed large, comfortable rooms with big, open windows and slept year-round on sun porches constructed to face southwest so as to capture the winter light. Dorothy quickly became practiced in the art of wrapping herself tightly in blankets to ward off the cold of the desert nights.

Sunmount advertised itself as a modern health resort rather than a hospital and, in contrast with the grim prisonlike isolation enforced by many sanitariums at the time, placed no serious restrictions on its patients’ activities or sociability. Mera was something of a Southwest aficionado, and together with his brother, Harry, a local archaeologist, made sure those in his care took full advantage of Santa Fe’s cultural attractions and saw to it that the hospital became closely integrated into the local community. Sunmount sponsored tours of the old town and Indian pueblos, organized educational events that celebrated the ancient culture of the Indians and the Spanish settlers who came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and staged concerts, poetry readings, and dance recitals to help pass the time fruitfully. Whatever quaintness had originally characterized his efforts gave way to a busy and profitable service industry. There were classes available in everything from painting and pottery making to architecture, and the Pueblo Indians and area craftsmen were invited to sell their artwork to the rich and idle in residence.

To Santa Feans, TB was a respectable affliction, and they maintained a tolerant attitude toward the moneyed easterners who flocked there for the cure in the 1920s. Even then, Santa Fe was not the typical tourist town, and had a lively bohemian culture that qualified it as “the Paris of the Southwest.” The recent boom in archaeology, and growing government interest in preserving the ancient Indian ruins in nearby Frijoles Canyon, had served to greatly raise the town’s profile and importan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Chapter One: Charmed
• Chapter Two: A Most Improbable Choice
• Chapter Three: The Bluest Eyes I’ve Ever Seen
• Chapter Four: Cowboy Boots and All
• Chapter Five: The Gatekeeper
• Chapter Six: The Professor and the General
• Chapter Seven: Summer Camp
• Chapter Eight: Lost Almost
• Chapter Nine: Welcome Distractions
• Chapter Ten: Nothing Dangerous
• Chapter Eleven: The Big Shot
• Chapter Twelve: Baby Boom
• Chapter Thirteen: Summer Lightning
• Chapter Fourteen: A Bad Case of the Jitters
• Chapter Fifteen: Playing with Fire
• Chapter Sixteen: A Dirty Trick
• Chapter Seventeen: Everything Was Different
• Chapter Eighteen: A Rain of Ruin
• Chapter Nineteen: By Our Works We Are Committed
• Chapter Twenty: Elysian Dreamer
• Chapter Twenty-One: Scorpions in a Bottle
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Fallout
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Author’s Note on Sources
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright