Koenig—which of course had been prompted by his father’s overreaction to his letter home about the sex talk at camp. As an adolescent, he had become increasingly self-conscious about his father’s garment business, which he no doubt saw as a traditional Jewish trade. Smith later recalled that once on that 1922 Western trip, he had turned to Robert as they were packing up and asked him to fold a jacket for his suitcase. “He looked at me sharply,” Smith recalled, “and said, ‘Oh yes. The tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?’ ”
Such outbursts aside, Smith thought Robert grew emotionally in stature and confidence during their time together on the Los Pinos ranch. He knew Katherine Page could take a great deal of credit for this. Her friendship was extremely important to Robert. The fact that Katherine and her aristocratic hidalgo friends could accept this insecure New York Jewish boy in their midst was somehow a watershed event in Robert’s inner life. To be sure, he knew he was accepted inside the forgiving womb of the Ethical Culture community in New York. But here was approbation from people he liked outside his own world. “For the first time in his life,” Smith thought, “. . . [Robert] found himself loved, admired, sought after.” It was a feeling Robert cherished, and in the years ahead he would learn to cultivate the social skills required to call up such admiration on demand.
One day he, Katherine and a few others from Los Pinos took packhorses out and, starting from the village of Frijoles west of the Rio Grande, they rode south and ascended the Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau, which rises to a height of over 10,000 feet. They rode through the Valle Grande, a canyon inside the Jemez Caldera, a bowl-shaped volcanic crater twelve miles wide. Turning northeast, they then rode four miles and came upon another canyon which took its Spanish name from the cottonwood trees that bordered a stream trickling through the valley: Los Alamos. At the time, the only human habitation for many miles consisted of a spartan boys’ school, the Los Alamos Ranch School.
Los Alamos, the physicist Emilio Segré would later write when he saw it, was “beautiful and savage country.” Patches of grazing meadows broke up dense pine and juniper forests. The ranch school stood atop a two-mile-long mesa bounded on the north and south by steep canyons. When Robert first visited the school in 1922, there were only some twenty-five boys enrolled, most of them the sons of newly affluent Detroit automobile manufacturers. They wore shorts throughout the year and slept on unheated sleeping porches. Each boy was responsible for tending a horse, and pack trips into the nearby Jemez mountains were frequent. Robert admired the setting—so obviously a contrast to his Ethical Culture environment—and in years to come would repeatedly find his way back to this desolate mesa.
Robert came away from that summer love-struck with the stark desert/mountain beauty of New Mexico. When, some months later, he heard that Smith was planning another trip to “Hopi country,” Robert wrote him: “Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos . . . spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”
CHAPTER TWO
“His Separate Prison”
The notion that I was traveling down a clear track would be wrong.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
IN SEPTEMBER 1922, Robert Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard. Although the university awarded him a fellowship, he didn’t accept it “because I could get along well without the money.” In lieu of the scholarship, Harvard gave him a volume of Galileo’s early writings. He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River. At nineteen, Robert was an oddly handsome young man. Every feature of his body was of an extreme. His fine pale skin was drawn
Such outbursts aside, Smith thought Robert grew emotionally in stature and confidence during their time together on the Los Pinos ranch. He knew Katherine Page could take a great deal of credit for this. Her friendship was extremely important to Robert. The fact that Katherine and her aristocratic hidalgo friends could accept this insecure New York Jewish boy in their midst was somehow a watershed event in Robert’s inner life. To be sure, he knew he was accepted inside the forgiving womb of the Ethical Culture community in New York. But here was approbation from people he liked outside his own world. “For the first time in his life,” Smith thought, “. . . [Robert] found himself loved, admired, sought after.” It was a feeling Robert cherished, and in the years ahead he would learn to cultivate the social skills required to call up such admiration on demand.
One day he, Katherine and a few others from Los Pinos took packhorses out and, starting from the village of Frijoles west of the Rio Grande, they rode south and ascended the Pajarito (Little Bird) Plateau, which rises to a height of over 10,000 feet. They rode through the Valle Grande, a canyon inside the Jemez Caldera, a bowl-shaped volcanic crater twelve miles wide. Turning northeast, they then rode four miles and came upon another canyon which took its Spanish name from the cottonwood trees that bordered a stream trickling through the valley: Los Alamos. At the time, the only human habitation for many miles consisted of a spartan boys’ school, the Los Alamos Ranch School.
Los Alamos, the physicist Emilio Segré would later write when he saw it, was “beautiful and savage country.” Patches of grazing meadows broke up dense pine and juniper forests. The ranch school stood atop a two-mile-long mesa bounded on the north and south by steep canyons. When Robert first visited the school in 1922, there were only some twenty-five boys enrolled, most of them the sons of newly affluent Detroit automobile manufacturers. They wore shorts throughout the year and slept on unheated sleeping porches. Each boy was responsible for tending a horse, and pack trips into the nearby Jemez mountains were frequent. Robert admired the setting—so obviously a contrast to his Ethical Culture environment—and in years to come would repeatedly find his way back to this desolate mesa.
Robert came away from that summer love-struck with the stark desert/mountain beauty of New Mexico. When, some months later, he heard that Smith was planning another trip to “Hopi country,” Robert wrote him: “Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos . . . spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”
CHAPTER TWO
“His Separate Prison”
The notion that I was traveling down a clear track would be wrong.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
IN SEPTEMBER 1922, Robert Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard. Although the university awarded him a fellowship, he didn’t accept it “because I could get along well without the money.” In lieu of the scholarship, Harvard gave him a volume of Galileo’s early writings. He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River. At nineteen, Robert was an oddly handsome young man. Every feature of his body was of an extreme. His fine pale skin was drawn
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