Toll’s interest in world affairs was, at that time, greater than my own. I’m sure, for instance, that he learned about the Korean War on the day it started, June 25, 1950 (while I was en route). It came to my attention only some days later, after I had settled in at Los Alamos.
Chapter 8
A New World
Within days of joining the Los Alamos lab, I was confronted with yet another decision, this one more confounding than the decision whether I should be there at all. All of the lab’s three thousand or so employees were presented with a loyalty oath to sign. We were employees of the University of California, and this oath was the same as the version that all UC staff were being required to sign at their respective campuses in California as of July 1, 1950.{1}, [44] The oath had two parts, brief enough to be duplicated in full here.
First, an oath required of all employees of the State of California:{3}
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.
Then, a supplement specifically for University employees:{4}, [45]
Having taken the constitutional oath of office required by the State of California, I hereby formally acknowledge my acceptance of the position and salary named, and also state that I am not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence, and that I have no commitments in conflict with my responsibilities with respect to impartial scholarship and free pursuit of truth. I understand that the foregoing statement is a condition of my employment and a consideration of payment of my salary.
I didn’t like the oath and didn’t want to sign it, although I could not clearly articulate my reasons for feeling that way. I was, deep down, a libertarian of sorts, and may have carried the “genes” of Quakerism that later became explicit in my life. As it turned out, the oath swept through the Los Alamos lab with barely a ripple. As of the designated deadline for signing, only two lab employees had not signed. One was John Manley, a senior physicist and associate director of the lab. I was the other. Manley had been a key figure in the Manhattan Project, starting with his participation in a meeting in Berkeley in 1942 that got the whole program (including considerations of thermonuclear weapons) started. He left the lab in that summer of 1950 for a department chairmanship at the University of Washington, without having signed the oath. I stood in awe of his principled stand, and had to decide whether to follow his lead (in not signing, not in transitioning to some other good job). John Wheeler did not press me one way or the other. I sat down with Norris Bradbury, the lab director. “Ken,” he said (I paraphrase), “I fully sympathize with your position and I agree that the oath is odious. But there is not a thing I can do. My hands are tied. If you don’t sign, you will have to be terminated.” I wasn’t prepared for an abrupt end to my days at the lab. I signed.[46]
Many years later, in the 1990s, when I was helping John Wheeler prepare his autobiography, I interviewed John Manley’s widow, Kay. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned how much I had always admired her husband for his refusal to sign the oath. “Oh, no,” she said (or words that effect), “It’s true that John was opposed to the oath, but he already had accepted the job offer from the University of Washington and didn’t need to sign. Had he stayed at the lab,” (I continue to paraphrase) “I’m sure he would have signed.” In fact, John Manley did return to Los Alamos to work there after the oath requirement was dropped, so I shall continue to believe that he acted, at least in part, on principle.
Less than two months after President Truman’s statement of January 31, 1950 (or his call for a crash program to build an H bomb, as some interpreted it), the Los Alamos lab went on a six-day week—accompanied by a 20-percent boost in salaries.{5} Teller reports in his Memoirs that this change elicited some “grumbling in the ranks.” Soon after John Wheeler’s arrival in Los Alamos in late February or early March, Teller joined him for breakfast at Fuller Lodge, and, according to Teller, Wheeler “told me that after he had got into bed, he picked up the Gideon Bible on his nightstand; it opened (he assured me with a solemn expression) to the commandment: ‘Six days shalt thou labor.’”{6}, [47] That sounds like Wheeler.
By the time I got to Los Alamos in June of that year, whatever grumbling there may have been had subsided—tempered, no doubt, by the salary boost. Many female employees chose to make a mild statement by coming to work in jeans on Saturdays, while continuing to wear dresses and skirts on the other five days. (I am told that when the lab reverted to a five-day week in early 1953, the reaction was muted, the gain in free time balancing the loss of income.)
When I look back now at that 1950-51 year in Los Alamos, I marvel that I had such a full schedule, mixing work and pleasure with no sense of pressure. Such are the blessings of youth. I worked full time at the lab, did a little nuclear research outside the lab, went on weekend outings, and took part in square dancing. I even joined an exhibition dance group in which the men wore black trousers, black shirts, and bolo ties, and the women wore brightly colored flared skirts. We performed our shuffling two-step at events around the state.
The weekend outings—Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening—were mostly with a small group of other young lab employees in my trusty Carryall. We got as far afield as Gallup and Chaco Canyon (nothing is very close in New Mexico). Among my companions on some of these outings was a lovely and very capable “computer” named Miriam Planck (no known relation to the Max Planck who had initiated quantum physics fifty years earlier). During the summer of 1950 she was helping Enrico Fermi with his calculations on the Super (more on those calculations later). We couldn’t help noticing that Fermi seemed to need her presence in his office a good deal of the time. Stan Ulam, aware of Miriam’s charm as well as her ability, found reasons to drop in on Fermi rather often to check on how the calculations were going. More than forty years later, I had occasion to talk to Miriam on the phone—she was in Los Angeles, I in Philadelphia. She was then Miriam Caldwell, the divorced wife of the physicist David Caldwell, a UC Santa Barbara professor. In our conversation, she told me something about her life since Los Alamos, and added, “Fermi was a very nice man.”
In 1950 the lab buildings were still downtown, next to Ashley Pond (a pond named, appropriately, for Ashley Pond, the founder of the Los Alamos Ranch School).{9} They were wooden buildings with names like gamma and gamma prime, situated within security fences. These fences were so close to the buildings that I often imagined that when Fermi was lecturing in his stentorian voice on a summer day with the windows open a spy could easily loiter just outside the fence and collect secret information. The small lecture room doubled as a coffee and social room and had a name, the Reines Raum. How it happened to be named for the physicist (and later Nobelist) Fred Reines and why the Germanic flavor I have not discovered. For a time, John Wheeler and his “boys”—John Toll and I and two additions from the lab, Burt Freeman and Joe Devaney—occupied a single not-very-large office just off the Reines Raum. Wheeler was no prima donna and accepted this in good grace. It actually had some advantages in being next to the room where people gathered mornings and afternoons.
44
For nearly a year, debate about the oath had been roiling UC campuses. Some faculty resigned in opposition to it, and thirty-one were fired. Among the latter was the UCLA physicist David Saxon, who, after being rehired, became the president of the UC system in 1975.{2} When I was confronted with the oath in Los Alamos, I knew nothing of the controversy it had already generated in California.
45
In numerous places on the Web, the word “the” is inserted so that the text of the oath reads “…oath of the office.”
46
Years later, in 1971, I joined the University of Massachusetts and was confronted, unexpectedly, with another oath of a similar kind. Most such oaths in other states had been expunged by that time, but not in Massachusetts. This time I said no and didn’t bend. When I and two support-staff members at the Boston campus came before a Superior Court judge who was to decide our fate, he decreed that the case should be shelved for consideration at some later time. That later time has yet to come. The case still resides, so far as I know, in the back of some filing cabinet in Boston.