American Prometheus by Kai Bird Read Free Book Online Page A

The two friends had both just turned seventeen. “It was a blowy day in spring— very chilly—and the wind made little waves all over the bay,” Fergusson said, “and there was rain in the air. It was a little bit scary to me, because I didn’t know whether he could do it or not. But he did; he was already a pretty skilled sailor. His mother was watching from the upstairs window and probably having palpitations of all kinds. But he had induced her to let him go. She worried, but she put up with it. We got thoroughly soaked, of course, with the wind and the waves. But I was very impressed.”
    ROBERT GRADUATED FROM THE Ethical Culture School in the spring of 1921, and that summer Julius and Ella took their sons for the summer to Germany. Robert struck out on his own for a few weeks on a prospecting field trip among some of the old mines near Joachimsthal, northeast of Berlin. (Ironically, just two decades later, the Germans would be mining uranium from this site for their atomic bomb project.) After camping out in rugged conditions, he returned with a suitcase full of rock specimens and what turned out to be a near-fatal case of trench dysentery. Shipped home on a stretcher, he was ill and bedridden long enough to force the postponement of his enrollment at Harvard that autumn. Instead, his parents compelled him to remain at home, recuperating from the dysentery and a subsequent case of colitis. The latter would plague him for the rest of his days, aggravated by a stubborn appetite for spicy foods. He was not a good patient. It was a long winter, cooped up in the New York apartment, and at times he acted boorishly, locking himself in his room and brushing aside his mother’s ministrations.
    By the spring of 1922, Julius thought the boy well enough to get him out of the house. To this end, he urged Herbert Smith to take Robert with him that summer on a trip to the Southwest. The Ethical Culture School teacher had made a similar trip with another student the previous summer, and Julius thought a Western adventure would help to harden his son. Smith agreed; he was taken aback, however, when Robert approached him in private shortly before their departure with a strange proposition: Would Smith agree to let him travel under the name “Smith” as his younger brother? Smith rejected the suggestion out of hand, and couldn’t help but think that some part of Robert was uncomfortable with being identifiably Jewish. Robert’s classmate Francis Fergusson later speculated, similarly, that his friend may have felt self-conscious about “his Jewishness and his wealth, and his eastern connections, and [that] his going to New Mexico was partly to escape from that.” Another classmate, Jeanette Mirsky, also thought Robert felt some unease about his Jewishness. “We all did,” said Mirsky. Yet just a few years later, at Harvard, Robert seemed much more relaxed about his Jewish heritage, telling a friend of Scotch-Irish ancestry, “Well, neither one of us came over on the Mayflower. ”
    STARTING OUT IN THE SOUTH, Robert and Smith gradually made their way across to the mesas of New Mexico. In Albuquerque, they stayed with Fergusson and his family. Robert enjoyed their company and the visit cemented a lifelong friendship. Fergusson introduced Robert to another Albuquerque boy their age, Paul Horgan, an equally precocious boy who later had a successful career as a writer. Horgan happened also to be bound for Harvard, as was Fergusson. Robert liked Horgan and found himself mesmerized by the dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty of Horgan’s sister Rosemary. Frank Oppenheimer said that his brother later confided in him that he had been strongly attracted to Rosemary.
    When they got to Cambridge and continued to hang out together, Horgan quipped that they were “this great troika” of “polymaths.” But New Mexico had brought out new attitudes and interests in Robert. In Albuquerque, Horgan’s first impressions of Robert were particularly