Kitty

There’s a strange town on a hill near here, bare of any charm, with rows of white dormitories left from war housing for laborers at the Manhattan Project and neutral-looking houses for more highly placed engineers and physicists. The town holds more PhD’s than any other town in the country and is also among the wealthiest. Its reason for being and for continuing to be is the nuclear lab known as Los Alamos.

I’m always interested in the lives of women who jump into these ambitious, deadly federal projects—jump in, fall in, are pulled or sucked in. Kitty (Katherine) Oppenheimer appears to be one of the women who fell in. Her life prior to 1943 would not seem likely to lead to marriage to J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the father of the Atomic bomb that destroyed two Japanese cities and, some believe, led to the end of World War II. Like too many complex and talented women, Kitty lived in her husband’s shadow which continues to obscure her life till this day.

To me, her biography sounds familiar: a pretty, spirited, highly intelligent girl, born in Germany, well educated with a college degree in Botany and like so many in this broad category, attractive to men and married and divorced twice before she met Oppenheimer. She was a member of the Communist Party after marrying a fellow American Communist who went to Spain to fight Franco and was killed there in 1937.

And then spent the war years totally isolated in the barbed-wire encampment where her husband was in charge of creating the world-destroying bomb.

How could this have happened? In a U.S. tormented with fear of German and Japanese spies, in the most highly controlled and most important outpost of the war, a wife of the leading physicist was a Communist? We’ve long since forgotten, if we ever knew, that there was a period in the 1920’s and 30’s when Communism was respected here and abroad as another and possibly better way of organizing a society, before Stalin and the hysterias of the 1950’s Cold War.

I doubt if Kitty Oppenheimer’s politics had any effect on the Manhattan Project, although she did work in one of the labs, testing the results of nuclear fallout on human blood.

She was probably dangerous for a different reason: she was unhappy.

One of the plaques on the dismal museum at Los Alamos goes into detail about that: her drinking, in which her husband joined along with most of the other men and women imprisoned on the hill. But Kitty, unlike many of them, had other reasons to be unhappy: she could not pursue a career in Botany for which she was trained, she was burdened with two young children, no money of her own, and a husband so preoccupied he had little time to be human.

She did escape the hill now and then to visit friends, but since she could never describe the top-secret project in which she was willy-nilly involved, couldn’t even give the address of the place where she lived, these friends could hardly have understood what was happening to her. And it’s easy to imagine her sinking heart as she rode a military shuttle from Santa Fe to the dismal hilltop she had to call home.

The devastations of war are many, varied and subtle, and they fall especially hard on women, caught in bombed cities like the ones in Ukraine, scraping hard to maintain their children, their dreams, whatever they may have been, sacrificed.

Did she argue with Robert? Did she refuse to encourage him as he progressed along his well-regarded and well-rewarded path? Did she fail to provide the good meals, the flattery and obsequiousness he perhaps expected?

It seem likely.

But of course it didn’t matter. The romance that led to their marriage in what she called “the old way”—she was pregnant—could not have stood against his ambition, his sense of mission, his importance in their world.

In the end, she was just unhappy.

In New Mexico Los Alamos Robert Oppenheimer