Jean Tatlock

Jean Frances Tatlock, M.D. (February 21, 1914 – January 5, 1944), was an American psychiatrist, physician, and a member of the Communist Party of America. She is most noted for her romantic relationship with Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

Early life

Jean Frances Tatlock was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 21, 1914,^[1] the second child of Dr. John Strong Perry Tatlock and his wife Marjorie née Fenton. She had an older brother named Hugh, who became a physician.^[2] Her father, who had a Ph.D. from Harvard University, was a noted and acclaimed professor of English at the University of Michigan; an Old English philologist; an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer and English plays, poems, and Elizabethan era literature; and author of approximately 60 books on those subjects, including The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1912) and The Mind and Art of Chaucer (1950).^[2][3] John Tatlock was a professor at Stanford from 1914 to 1924, and later Harvard from 1924 to 1928, before returning to the Bay Area as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1929.^[4][5][6]

Tatlock attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts,^[7] and Williams College in Berkeley.^[8] In 1930, she entered Vassar College.^[9] She graduated in 1935, and returned to Berkeley, where she took courses to complete the prerequisites for Stanford Medical School, and was a reporter and writer for the Western Worker, the Communist Party of America's organ on the West Coast of the United States.^[10] She was accepted into Stanford Medical School (then located in San Francisco), where she studied to become a psychiatrist.^[11] She graduated from the Stanford with the class of 1941,^[12] and completed her internship at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.,^[13] and residency the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital (now the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center) in San Francisco.^[14]

Romance with Oppenheimer

Tatlock began seeing Robert Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student there and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at Berkeley.^[15] They met through his landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn, when Washburn held a fund raiser for communist backed Spanish Republicans. The couple started dating and had a passionate relationship; he proposed to her twice, but she refused.^[16][17] She is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics during the late 1930s,^[18] and to people involved with, or sympathetic to the Communist Party or related groups, such as Rudy Lambert and Thomas Addis.^[17] They continued seeing each other after he became involved with Kitty Harrison, spending the New Year together in 1941, and meeting at Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco.^[19]

Oppenheimer's association with her friends was used as evidence against him during his 1954 security hearing.^[20][21] In a letter to Major General Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager, United States Atomic Energy Commission, dated March 4, 1954, Oppenheimer described their association as follows:

In the spring of 1936, I had been introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a noted professor of English at the university; and in the autumn, I began to court her, and we grew close to each other. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged. Between 1939 and her death in 1944 I saw her very rarely. She told me about her Communist Party memberships; they were on again, off again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking. I do not believe that her interests were really political. She loved this country and its people and its life. She was, as it turned out, a friend of many fellow travelers and Communists, with a number of whom I was later to become acquainted.

I should not give the impression that it was wholly because of Jean Tatlock that I made leftwing friends, or felt sympathy for causes which hitherto would have seemed so remote from me, like the Loyalist cause in Spain, and the organization of migratory workers. I have mentioned some of the other contributing causes. I liked the new sense of companionship, and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country.^[22]

While some historians believe that Oppenheimer had an extramarital affair with Tatlock while he was working on the Manhattan Project,^[23] others assert he met with Tatlock only one time after he was picked to head the Los Alamos Laboratory in mid-June 1943.^[24] At that meeting she told him that she still loved him and wanted to be with him.^[25][26] After spending that night together (while U.S. Army agents, waiting in the street outside, had them under surveillance),^[24] he never saw her again. She committed suicide a little more than six and half months after their meeting.^[27][28]

Death

Tatlock suffered from severe depression, and was being treated at Mount Zion.^[24] On January 5, 1944, her father found her dead,^{[29][30][31][32]} in her San Francisco apartment, at 1405 Montgomery Street,^[3] with an unsigned suicide note. He burned letters and photographs in the fireplace, and called the Halstead Funeral Home. At the time of her death she was under surveillance by the FBI, and her phone had been tapped, so one of the first people to hear of her death was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, via a teletype link.^[33]

At Los Alamos, Charlotte Serber heard the news from friends in Berkeley. As the librarian, she had access to the Technical Area, and informed her husband, Robert Serber, who then went to inform Oppenheimer. When he reached his office, he found that Oppenheimer already knew.^[34] The security chief at Los Alamos, Captain Peer de Silva, had received the news through the wiretap and Army Intelligence, and had broken the news to Oppenheimer.^[35] Tatlock had introduced Oppenheimer to the poetry of John Donne, and he named the first test of a nuclear weapon "Trinity" in reference to one of Donne's poems, as a tribute to her.^[36][37]

There has been, at times, speculation as to whether her death was truly a suicide or not, as it has some suspicious circumstances surrounding it,^[38] but in their review of all of the arguments for and against such a scenario, historians Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin concluded that there is simply not any conclusive evidence of foul play:^[39]

According to the coroner, Tatlock had eaten a full meal shortly before her death. If it was her intention to drug and then drown herself, as a doctor she had to have known that undigested food slows the metabolizing of drugs into the system. The autopsy report contains no evidence that the barbiturates had reached her liver or other vital organs. Neither does the report indicate whether she had taken a sufficiently large dose of barbiturates to cause death. To the contrary, as previously noted, the autopsy determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation by drowning. These curious circumstances are suspicious enough—but the disturbing information contained in the autopsy report is the assertion that the coroner found "a faint trace of chloral hydrate" in her system. If administered with alcohol, chloral hydrate is the active ingredient of what was then commonly called a "Mickey Finn"—knockout drops. In short, several investigators have speculated, Jean may have been "slipped a Mickey," and then forcibly drowned in her bathtub.

The coroner's report indicated that no alcohol was found in her blood. (The coroner, however, did find some pancreatic damage, indicating that Tatlock had been a heavy drinker.) Medical doctors who have studied suicides—and read the Tatlock autopsy report—say that it is possible she drowned herself. In this scenario, Tatlock could have eaten a last meal with some barbiturates to make herself sleepy and then self-administered chloral hydrate to knock herself out while kneeling over the bathtub. If the dose of chloral hydrate was large enough, Tatlock could have plunged her head into the bathtub water and never revived. She then would have died from asphyxiation. Tatlock's "psychological autopsy" fits the profile of a high-functioning individual suffering from "retarded depression." As a psychiatrist working in a hospital, Jean had easy access to potent sedatives, including chloral hydrate. On the other hand, said one doctor shown the Tatlock records, "If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it"^[40]

Her father had her remains cremated.^[41]

Notes

References

• Bird, Kai; Sherwin, Martin J. (2005). American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41202-6. OCLC 56753298. 
• Chafe, William Henry (2002). The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11212-2. 
• Conant, Jennet (2005). 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-5007-9. 
• Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-6588-1. 
• Kashner, Sam; MacNair, Jennifer (2002). The Bad & the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-32436-5. 
• Monk, Ray (2012). Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center. New York; Toronto: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-50407-2. 
• Pais, Abraham (2006). J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516673-6. OCLC 65637244. 
• Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-44133-7. OCLC 13793436. 
• Serber, Robert; Crease, Robert P. (1998). Peace & War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-10546-0. 
• Smith, Alice Kimball; Weiner, Charles (1980). Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and recollections. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-8047-2620-5. OCLC 5946652. 
• Streshinsky, Shirley; Klaus, Patricia (2013). An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life. New York: Turner Publishing. ISBN 978-1-61858-019-1. 
• Thorpe, Charles (2006). Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-79845-3.