Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (12 page)

Somewhat later I wrote, “I also find myself police reporter, which is one helluva job. I know the inside of every police station for miles around, the life history, tastes and ‘line’ of every cop, and drew a rather caustic comment from the Judge yesterday when I fell asleep in the jury box [where reporters were allowed to sit during nonjury trials] in Justice Court yesterday.”
⁴

Beneath the mock insouciance of a would-be sophisticate, the enthusiasm of a young woman thoroughly enjoying her varied perspectives on the everyday world comes through. And I actually admitted to being impressed, not to say frightened, when I found myself peering down the barrel of a shotgun wielded by an angry landowner, who was not at all pleased by my effort to write an investigative story on his employment, and mistreatment, of the itinerant farmworkers who tended his cucumbers.

Bob visited as frequently as he could during those Old Field summers and fitted in easily with my family—Mother, Desmond, and George. That meant a lot to me, since the three of them had made subtle but merciless fun of earlier boyfriends who, in their view, did not measure up. Bob's visit to my father's home in Princeton was a different matter. Once we had settled into what promised to be a long-term relationship, we both felt that Bob should get acquainted with the other side of my family as well. It was a visit that he looked forward to with real apprehension, partly because of my father's renown and even more because he knew how much I yearned for paternal approval.

In preparation for the visit, Bob went to the Widener Library to look up some of my father's writings. Among the many impenetrable mathematical titles, one offered a ray of hope:
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
Encouraged by the fact that he was pretty good at both
bridge and poker, Bob started to read. With some effort, he told me later, he got all the way to page fifteen before a thicket of equations stopped him.

When we got to Princeton, my father must have sensed how tense Bob was and did his best to put him at ease. He offered to show Bob the computer he had built at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Bob, curious to see this revolutionary machine, agreed enthusiastically. Once they got to the building, however, my father pulled out a large ring of keys, muttering as he went through it, “Here's the key to my office at Los Alamos, and here's the one to our house in Budapest.” He was unable to locate the proper key on that ring, however, and Bob never did get to see the construction of vacuum tubes that marked the dawn of the computer age. But my father was a gracious and amusing host throughout the weekend; Bob relaxed, and I sensed that the two had gotten along much better than I had feared.

While I was absorbed in my busy but sheltered college life, my father was caught up in a whirlwind at the center of which was Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, who, as head of the Manhattan Project, had successfully led his team to victory in the race against Germany to produce an atomic bomb, was enjoying the adulation of a grateful nation. In 1947, he had become both the director of the IAS and chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), “the group which, more than any other, made the government's decisions about atomic weapons.”
⁵
But, in the process, he had made two mortal enemies: Edward Teller and Admiral Lewis Strauss. Both men were strong proponents of building a hydrogen bomb (also known as the H-bomb), which Oppenheimer was known to oppose. But both had personal reasons for wanting to bring him down as well. Teller felt that Oppenheimer had never given sufficient recognition to his, Teller's, role in Los Alamos's success, and Strauss had never forgotten that he had been made to look foolish by Oppenheimer in the course of a 1949 government hearing.

While the nation was glued to its television sets in 1954, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings that ended Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt, another drama was being played out behind closed doors. That was a hearing on whether Oppenheimer should be
stripped of his security clearance, which was essential to his participation in any matters related to national security. In fact, Lewis Strauss had been working behind the scenes for some time to bring Oppenheimer down. Strauss, a retired navy admiral, wealthy businessman and banker, and confidant of President Eisenhower, who made him his White House adviser on atomic energy shortly after his own election, had quietly arranged Oppenheimer's ouster from the chairmanship of the GAC when his term was up in 1952. But the following year when Strauss, now chairman of the AEC, threatened to have him stripped of his security clearance, Oppenheimer refused to acquiesce without a fight. The result was a hearing before a three-person personnel security board, whose members were selected by Strauss himself.

Oppenheimer's vulnerability to allegations of disloyalty to his country stemmed primarily from his well-known association with members of the Communist Party and his own membership in a number of communist front organizations prior to World War II—indeed, these had very nearly prevented his appointment as head of the Manhattan Project, and the FBI had had him under surveillance ever since. His opposition to the H-bomb project was also raised against him, and he was forced by a bullying prosecutor to confess to a lie he had told in 1943 to protect a communist friend.

One after another, members of the scientific elite who had worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project attested to his unquestionable loyalty to his country, as evidenced by his untiring labors in its defense. Among them was my father, who pointed out how innocent of any knowledge of espionage and counterespionage they had all been at the beginning of the project. “We were little children,” he said, “we had to make up…our code of conduct as we went along.” He wasn't surprised at “how long it took Dr. Oppenheimer to get adjusted to this Buck Rogers universe, [but]…he learned how to handle it and handled it very well.”
⁶

Edward Teller, on the other hand, drove the final nail into Oppenheimer's professional coffin with his reply to a question from a member of the three-person board that served as the jury as to whether he thought the nation's security would be endangered if Oppenheimer were allowed to keep his clearance: “[I]f it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as
demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say it would be wiser not to grant clearance.”
⁷
In destroying Oppenheimer, Teller also damaged himself. He became a pariah to most members of the close-knit physics community, many of whom shunned him ever after, even to the point of refusing to shake his hand.

Drawing on his skills in interpersonal relationships, my father remained friends with both Teller and Oppenheimer and maintained a good relationship with Admiral Strauss. He had been unable to prevent Oppenheimer's expulsion from the world of decision making on national security matters in which he had played such a central role. He did succeed, though, in persuading Strauss, who was also chairman of the institute's Board of Trustees, not to oust Oppenheimer from the directorship there as well, thus salvaging a role for his devastated colleague, albeit a truncated one, in the world of physics that had been his universe since childhood. Oppenheimer proved himself worthy of my father's intervention on his behalf by building the IAS into one of the world's great centers of physics, as he had done twice before at other institutions—at the University of California, Berkeley, before the war and then at Los Alamos.

In the fall of 1954, hard on the heels of both the Army-McCarthy and the Oppenheimer hearings, my father was himself nominated for a seat on the AEC—later superseded by the Department of Energy—which had regulatory control over all activities involving the development and use of nuclear energy. It was a prestigious post, and one that required a spotless record of loyalty to the United States. My father's scientific prominence, his central role in the Los Alamos project, and his hard-line stance against Soviet communism won him Senate confirmation with flying colors. The congratulatory letter I wrote him was enthusiastic, but it also had a less straightforward subtext. Heavily influenced by my mother's desire to conceal our family's Jewish origins, over the years I had internalized her fear that the truth might somehow detract from my social acceptability. In my letter, I expressed concern that his sudden prominence in the public eye might “out” our ancestry.

His reply addressed both his attitude toward the nomination and my awkward, as well as naive, request that he keep up the pretense of what he called, with his flair for a good pun even when discussing serious matters, “pseudo gentility.”

The job isn't mine yet, I have to be confirmed by the US Senate and in view of my doings in re: Oppenheimer this might yet lead to a bust, but I think that is less probable than 50%, although not at all impossible. The job is of course horribly tempting for an ambitious SOB like I am…It is interesting to come to close quarters with some of the most Buck Rogerian technical jobs, and with some of the weirdest things of the so-called “contemporary scene.” I would be lying if I did not admit that it is—to put it mildly—very stimulating.

Now to the Aryan business…Dear, I love you even if you decide to pass as a Chinaman. I don't despise you for trying to appear mildly Episcopalian, for a man who tries to get along at the same time with R. Oppenheimer and L.L. Strauss, the foundations of quantum mechanics and the hydrogen bomb, I couldn't take exception to such a matter even if I wanted to. I do think that you are taking unnecessary chances for an inadequate return. You are a talented girl, and you could probably get along in this silly world without indulging in such marginal operations. However this is no mortal sin.
⁸

I accepted his mild rebuke in the loving spirit in which it was offered, but it would be a good many years before I saw the wisdom of my father's words and abandoned any effort to conceal my ethnic origins, although I remain to this day a communicant of the Episcopal Church I grew up in. This is not because I share the Christian belief in the promise of life after death, although, as the end of my eighth decade draws inexorably closer, I sometimes regret not having this psychological bulwark against mortality. But the older I get, the more I am convinced that when I die my body will return to the elements and a shrinking number of my genes will be passed down from one generation of my offspring to the next, but that my individual consciousness, my “self,” will be forever extinguished. Why, then, do I remain a participant in the traditional Episcopalian service? It is because I find the familiar liturgy of the
Book of Common Prayer
a helpful framework within which to “keep myself constantly mindful of
la condition humaine”
as I once wrote to my mother.

My father took a much more serious view, however, of my declared intention to marry Bob as soon as I graduated from college. In writing to me about his concerns, he bemoaned the fact that he hadn't told me his feelings when we were together.

I was quite melancholy afterwards, isn't it symbolic of how I always managed my affairs with you—lots of hemming and hawing, and an occasional emotional burst, always very, very late. Perhaps it is not too late each time, I am afraid it is too little.

Dear, I am very worried about your plans. I may be seeing ghosts, but I think I don't.

Don't misunderstand me. I like Bob, I could, if I saw more of him, like him a great deal more. Also, he is clearly able, for many good reasons, e.g., otherwise you would probably not pass the time of day with him, nor could he have landed the Princeton job [where he had just been appointed an instructor in English, beginning in the fall of 1955].

But…

Dear, do not misread your own character. You are very, very talented and then some. You absorb information like a sponge, you have sense and charm, you can handle the most highly desired task in the world: dealing with people, influencing people. You are God's own chosen executive, and I am not joking. You would also make a damn good journalist, and a few other things.

Besides, you like money. Whether you show it or not…you have expensive tastes. You are “genetically loaded” from both sides, both Mariette and I adore money…[so] it would be a pity, a misery to see you in petty, straightened circumstances, and worst of all, cut off from using your talents and acting your proper role in life.
⁹

Then, fearing that he hadn't expressed his feelings sufficiently clearly, he wrote me less than a month later, repeating his previous concerns and spelling them out at greater length.

[T]his marriage will set you very straight and narrow financial limits for good and ever. Also, the accidents of academic promotion are not unlikely to land you in remote and otherwise unrewarding places, where you have no means to do anything, to be anything, but a “Hausfrau.” And—all of this has such a desperate finality and ineluctability, right from the word go, right from the age of 21 on. Do you really believe that the mood in which you do this, at 21 or 22, will last at 30 at 40 at 50? It seems to me a desperate chance.

“Don't—for heaven's sake—imagine that we are so very different.
In spite of my curses about the human race, I have been as happy as I can constitutionally be, most of the time, with Mariette and with Klari. But I could have never existed—not with a female angel—without external success and some strong intellectual interest…I doubt that things with you are fundamentally different.
¹⁰