109 East Palace by Jennet Conant Read Free Book Online

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
    S TANDING 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 gentle, 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