If Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the story of the making of the first atomic bomb from the scientist’s viewpoint (mostly), Jennet Conant’s 109 East Palace is that story told from the viewpoint of the support staff and families of those scientists (mostly).

It is principally the story of Dorothy McKibben, a Santa Fe widow with a young son who was looking for the best-paying job she could get in the middle of a two-front world war. Or she was until she met J. Robert Oppenheimer and fell in love at first sight and became the guardian of the door at the back of the wardrobe leading to the Narnia of Los Alamos.

In this case that door entered into a nondescript building in downtown Santa Fe, 109 East Palace, which acted as the entry point for nuclear physicists and their families and all the thousands of technicians necessary to the task. Security concerns enforced by G-2 agents caused the small, wooden sign on the door to read “U.S. ENG-RS” and proved so effective that incoming staff spent hours wandering the streets of the little town trying to find it. After a while Santa Fe business owners knew to call Dorothy and say, “Is this one of yours?” It always was. So much for secrecy.

Security, in fact, was the main reason for the creation of Los Alamos on top of a mesa northwest of Santa Fe, summarily dispossessing a boy’s prep school. Oppenheimer convinced General Leslie Groves that security would be best served by gathering all the necessary scientists in one place and surrounding them with military polices and government agents. Security for Los Alamos proved so effective that it wasn’t until 1950 that the British Secret Service arrested Klaus Fuchs for passing pretty much all of Los Alamos’ research to the Soviets from August 1944 on, and he wasn’t the only Soviet spy in residence, either.

Every recognizable name in physics at that time (Oppenheimer, Luis Alvarez, Isidor Rabi, Hans Bethe, Emilio Segrè, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr, Felix Bloch, James Franck, and John von Neumann, Edward Teller (who comes off even worse here than he did in Rhodes’ book, what an asshole), Richard Feynman (the only one I’d like to have met), Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard (who wrote Einstein’s letter to FDR urging the US to start work on nuclear weapons and then was one of the leaders of the Ban the Bomb movement after the war), Ernest Lawrence, Robert Serber, the list goes on. Eight of them had either already won a Nobel prize or would go on to do so later in life.

Once assembled in what can only be described as substandard conditions including bad to no water and cheap housing and never enough of it, it took just 27 months to bring the physicists’ theoretical dreams into nightmare reality.

Through it all Dorothy’s hand was at the tiller, providing local contacts for every eventuality, a mail and freight drop, shopping for everything from groceries to Christmas, a wedding venue, weekend housing, vacation rentals, overnight accomodation for lost or strayed physicists, and again the list goes on. It’s fair to say that Dorothy was as important as Oppenheimer to the eventual success of the Manhattan Project.

She also did an extraordinary amount of legwork to help Oppenheimer defend himself against McCarthyism, although in the end he was stripped of his security clearance anyway, it appears largely because he wouldn’t defend himself. There’s a scene at Los Alamos following Japan’s surrender that I find informative.

Oppenheimer attended the round of victory dinners, but recalled that as he left one gathering, he found one of his best group leaders vomiting in the bushes and told himself, “The reaction has begun.”

When he went to the White House to meet President Truman Oppenheimer’s first words were, “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” only to find an entirely unsympathetic audience. Oppie either forget or never knew that Truman had been a soldier who served under fire in the first World War. I am reminded of William Manchester writing of his experiences as a Marine fighting in the Pacific, who when he heard of the Japanese surrender thought, “Thank God for the atom bomb.” It meant he got to go home.

Oppenheimer died in 1967, Dorothy in 1985. I’m glad this book was written so that she takes her proper place in the history of Los Alamos.

Dana sez–I visited Santa Fe recently and went looking for the door into Dorothy’s sanctum sanctorum. The door is easy to find, but finding the plaque takes some time. Past the Day of the Dead Statues and behind the ristras. There you go.

Book Review Monday Chatter 109 East Palace Jennet Conant