Dear Reader,
Sometimes, in this life, you come upon someone you just have to write about. That happened to me when I was in my 20s had just moved to San Francisco, was determined to be a journalist and maybe, just maybe some day, write a book. One day I noticed that Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” was speaking at the University of California in Berkeley. I made my way to the campus, pushed into the crowd that had gathered to see and hear this stunningly brilliant, charismatic, tormented (as I supposed most of those who helped produce that horrific bomb must be) physicist. I left knowing exactly what I wanted to write—a biography of
Robert Oppenheimer. And I would, but only after publishing three works of non-fiction, and four novels. And not until I asked a good friend, historian Patricia Klaus, to join me in what I knew was going to be a monumental research task. Patricia was as fascinated by this enigmatic man as I was, and we agreed that one way to understand him, or maybe any man, was to look at the women he loved deeply. We considered his mother, of course, knowing he had been devoted to her; and we also thought about an early “girl friend,” Charlotte Riefenstahl; then about the first woman he had proposed to, (twice), Jean Tatlock; about his wife Kitty and his "best friend" Ruth Tolman. In the end we decided these last three would become the “The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer’s Life.” By diving deeply into the lives of these women we discovered a man capable of deep love and kindness who had, under his glossy surface, a dependency that might have surprised his colleagues. We found ourselves especially touched by one letter we read after our book was published which revealed the power of his emotions and sensibilities in a new way. Early on, Charlotte Riefenstahl, also a physicist, had come to the United States to teach at Vassar. She met Oppenheimer, a student even then, and he introduced her to his family and his father was especially fond of her. She returned to Germany and married a fellow scientist who was both a communist and a Jew in Hitler's Germany. So in 1933, Charlotte with her husband and their young daughter left for England. Unhappy there, her husband took his family to the Soviet Union, where the KGB promptly arrested him. Charlotte and their children, with the help of another famous physicist of the time, Niels Bohr, was able to go on to the United States. Virtually penniless, Charlotte wrote to Oppenheimer asking if she could contact his father for help. Oppenheimer responded that his father had died but that he would like to help, sent her $5000, and urged her to contact him again if she needed anything. An Atomic Love Story required mountains of research. We spent a summer in Washington D.C. at the Library of Congress, then on to the New York Public Library, Los Alamos, and Perro Caliente in the Sangre de Cristos Mountains. Interviews were essential – Martin Sherwin ,who along with Kai Bird produced the 2006 Pulitzer prize winning “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” had begun interviewing friends and colleagues in 1975. He invited us to his home to go through some of his research. Since we live in the San Francisco area, we discovered many people who had known not only Oppenheimer, but some of the three women we had chosen to reveal his life, and their times. Both Robert Oppenheimer and his brother Frank had lived in the Berkeley area; as a girl, Ruth Tolman had lived there as well, so did Jean and Kitty. The University of California at Berkeley was the center of much of the early action. When our book first came out and we were giving book talks, the audience almost always included someone who had a connection with one or more of the main characters. After all the research and writing, Jean remained especially tantalizing to us. Had we been writing a novel, she would have been the heroine. Kitty was fiercely loyal to Oppenheimer but still brittle with an inner core of meanness. It was the elegant and thoughtful Ruth Tolman who, in the end, captivated us. When we had to write about her death, we felt we had lost a friend.
But here’s the main thing about the writing of this book: We cannot forget how tenuous our hold on this planet is, we need to remember the unthinkable possibility of nuclear holocaust. It’s a lesson that each new generation must learn. Robert Oppenheimer would, I hope, be okay with our using his life and his loves, his work, his name in the effort to hold off the ultimate disaster.
Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus
Shirley Streshinsky is a critically acclaimed author of three works of nonfiction and four historical novels. As a journalist and travel essayist, she has written extensively for a wide range of national magazines such as Glamour, Preservation, American Heritage, The American Scholar, and Conde Nast Traveler. She is the recipient of the Society of Magazine Writers’ Award for Excellence and the National Council for the Advancement of Education Writing award, and was cited by The Educational Press Association of America for “superlative achievement in features.” Her travel essays have been a feature on National Public Radio. She was married to the late photojournalist Ted Streshinsky and lives in Kensington (Berkeley), California.
Patricia Klaus is an independent scholar who attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, and then Stanford University where she earned a Ph.D. in Modern British History. She taught twentieth-century British history at Yale University, was a visiting lecturer at the University of Virginia and Stanford, and has written a number of historical articles. Her particular interests are women in nineteenth and twentieth century England as well as the study of war and literature, which made working on a book about the remarkable women of the Atomic Age especially appealing.
Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison—both were members of the Communist Party—and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities.
Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.
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