109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (review)

Jennet Conant offers an entertaining account of the lives of those fenced off at Los Alamos, New Mexico in the first half of the 1940s. She is the granddaughter of James B. Conant, a prominent chemist who became president of Harvard University and a science adviser to the government during World War II, Jennet Conant uses the experiences and memoirs of several underutilized sources to explore the culture, social activities, and personalities of Los Alamos's wartime population. She portrays the community as a combination of a quasi-military installation and a summer science camp whose inhabitants lived in a pressure cooker cut off from the rest of the world by fences and rules. A key individual who linked this nuclear Shangri-la to reality and served as a focal point for Conant's book is Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin.

McKibbin served as the literal gatekeeper for Los Alamos. All personnel, supplies, equipment, and communications had to be approved by her office at 109 East Palace, just off the plaza in Santa Fe. If the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer acted as the father figure and driving force for the scientists and technicians who were sequestered on the mesa, then McKibbin behaved as the surrogate mother of the community. She helped the wives of the scientists adjust to their new lives and coordinated activities that allowed personnel to escape the mounting stresses of the laboratories. Her house served as an unofficial wedding chapel for several nuptials among staff members. Later, in the 1950s, McKibbin helped Oppenheimer defend himself during his security clearance scandal. McKibbin remained a stalwart defender of Oppenheimer even after he lost his security case.

Although McKibbin is central to the book, she is not the only woman whose contributions Conant explores. The book discusses the roles of Oppenheimer's two other wartime secretaries, Priscilla Greene Duffield and Anne Wilson, who were able to provide further insight into Oppenheimer's personality and character. Conant also includes Kitty Oppenheimer in her story. A contradiction of frailness and cruelty, Kitty jealously guarded her husband from other women. Despite her flaws and insecurities, Kitty eventually came to rely on McKibbin for solace and strength. Conant weaves the accounts of these principal characters together with the remembrances of the wives of scientists and technicians living behind the fences. The result is a layered portrayal of Los Alamos that incorporates the standard storylines but also presents perspectives underappreciated in the past.

Conant takes on too much with this book. Although she introduces previously ignored individuals who were critical in the successful management of Los Alamos, she allows the overworked tale of Oppenheimer's rise and fall to dominate her study, even as she tries to bring attention to McKibbin and other women who found themselves atop the mesa. The reader is left with the feeling that Conant struggled over whether her analysis should focus on the Oppenheimer saga, the influential women in his life during the project, or the experiences of women at Los Alamos in general.

Several histories provide better examinations of Oppenheimer's security scandal, including recent books by Priscilla Johnson Macmillan and by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Likewise, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg, in Their Day in the Sun (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999), offer a more thoughtful analysis of the roles women played in the Manhattan Project. The stories and insight Conant presents from McKibbin's experiences, while entertaining, are not entirely new. Nancy Cook Steeper recently published a biography of McKibbin, Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin: Gatekeeper to Los Alamos (Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos Historical Society, 2003). Other recent publications have looked in depth at the socioeconomic and cultural development undertaken at America's nuclear city on a hill. Conant's text, though by no means a mere fluff piece, leaves one unsatisfied and wondering about the central focus of the book. In addition, the absence of textual citations might frustrate historians and researchers. Although...