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

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Everybody knows J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and many of the military minds that directed the effort to develop the atomic bomb. Nobody outside of Los Alamos knew Dorothy McKibben. McKibben who ran 109 East Palace was like the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this war time "Hamlet"-like drama; she viewed the action not from the heart of the research but from the outside at the gateway where she issued security passes, helped new personnel settle in, dealt with complaints about water pressure, food supplies, etc. She knew everything and nothing about the community she helped as she wasn't privy to the secret goal of the Los Alamos community.

While author Jennet Conant doesn't ignore the work they were trying to accomplish, she focuses on the human element that made it possible for the work to occur. Conant provides a detailed and intimate look into the insular community that labored to build the ultimate bomb to finish the "ultimate war". One of the most fascinating sections of the book called "Summer Lighning" deals with Klaus Fuchs who arrived at Los Alamos after doing research for the Manhattan Project on gaseous diffusion. He came to help figure out the implosion problem at the request of Peierls a German physcist working in the US. McKibben never had a suspicion that Fuchs might be betraying the secret work at Los Alamos to the Soviets until it was too late.

Conant who it is noted is the granddaughter of James B. Conant (the chief administrator on the Manhattan Project)has a unique insider's perspective. Conant doesn't shy away from the issue about Oppenheimer's loyalty; she reports that Captain Peer de Silva took an immediate dislike to Oppenheimer and believed, based on his file, that Oppenheimer would betray the United States in a hot second. De Silva went so far as to write a memo to Washington stating that very point creating havoc for General Groves the military head of the operation who knew how much they needed Oppenheimer to make the project work. Illustrated with 16 pages of photos showing what life was like inside the camp, Conant's book looks at a pivotal time in history from a very different perspective--the human perspective and she wisely allows this perspective to dominate her book differienating it from others that examine much of the same time and material.

Ten years ago, I taught part-time at the University of New Mexico's small Los Alamos campus. One day a huge thunderstorm marooned me in the lobby of the building along with a cheerful elderly woman who, I soon learned, had come to Los Alamos as a WAC to work on the Manhattan Project. For the next half-hour, I heard her fascinating stories about the laboratory and the community during the early years. When the rain finally stopped and we parted, I reflected that, although the scientific aspects of the project had been amply documented, there was another human story still waiting to be written.

I'm glad that Jennet Conant has written that story. Besides having an "inside track" through her grandfather's involvement in the Manhattan Project, she was able to access Dorothy McKibbin's memoirs, and she also makes good use of other unpublished materials as well as interviewing the people involved. This isn't a scientific account of the project, it's the story of the people behind it: from the unlikely team of Oppenheimer and Gen. Groves, to the locals who worked as maids and construction workers in the secret community on the hill -- and Dorothy, who held it all together, and whose story is used to structure the book.

Bringing together a motley collection of physicists, engineers, and military experts to construct "the Gadget" was impressive enough -- but the project didn't exist in a vacuum. The technical staff were people who had to be housed, fed, and clothed, and many of them brought families and children whose needs had to be accommodated too. As director, Oppenheimer had to deal with both the scientific and the personal aspects of the project, and this book well describes the human dynamics that he contended with on both fronts. It's gossipy, just like my ex-WAC acquaintance, but it's an enthralling story. And when Dorothy, like the other locals, finally comes to realize what the project was all about, the author well conveys their ambivalence: upon viewing the blast from Sandia Peak, Dorothy reflects, "Everything had changed."

The book is an easy read, but it's by no means lightweight, and I recommend it highly as a necessary supplement to the many good "scientific" books on the Manhattan Project.

109 East Palace presents a surprisingly engaging story about the members of the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos. The author, Jennet Conant, states early on that she is focusing on the human side of project's history: the technical aspects have been well covered elsewhere. The brilliant and colorful denizens of Los Alamos threw wild parties, worked long hours, and chafed under mandates of government secrecy.

In the midst of World War II, an undertaking this monumental had to remain strictly secret. The community was built atop a small school in the middle of the desert. The only link to civilization was across a long, unreliable road and an inadequate bridge. Naturally, logistics were strained. An entire town was built from scratch, and it was in constant construction for years. Scientists, engineers, their families, and soldiers streamed into Los Alamos. They crammed into small apartments with thin walls, and all housing for miles around was filled. Electricity was usually unavailable, and cooking took hours using ancient stoves. Rules limited their ability to leave town or communicate with the outside world.

Although these conditions caused some conflict, the citizens responded amazingly well. The insular community became very intimate. They worked at an exhausting pace, anxious to develop the bomb that could end the war and save American lives, and then released their tension by engaging in wild parties. Entranced with their beautiful environment, they went on long hikes and skied in the winter. Los Alamos became a wonderful and sociable place to live.

Although Conant describes many people, she focuses mainly on Robert Oppenheimer and Dorothy McKibbin. Oppenheimer was the intensely charismatic director of Los Alamos. McKibbin held an office in Santa Fe and served as the link between the top-secret community and the outside world. She handled many administrative issues and addressed everyone's complaints with superhuman patience. Oppenheimer and McKibbin contributed greatly to the Project's unity and success, and they rise up as heroes during the story.

The rest of the story provides great drama. After completing the bomb, the scientists reflect on the responsibility of creating a destructive weapon. Later, the weary Oppenheimer faces anti-communist wrath.

109 East Palace is definitely worth reading. It presents an inspiring tale of citizens coming together during great adversity and proving triumphant.

-Zach Zelmar

The World War II decision to build the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, NM was odd. Why, in heaven's name, would anyone locate a huge scientific laboratory on top of a mesa reached only by a dirt road, tens of miles from a town, a railroad, and an airport? The selection of Los Alamos by the dynamic duo of leaders, General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, probably cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs and may have delayed the completion of the bomb itself.

Well, if Los Alamos was a poor choice on economic and scientific grounds, it was a great dramatic and artistic choice. Author Conant in "109 East Palace" does a wonderful job depicting the clear air and casual culture of New Mexico and the makeshift colony of nuclear physicists living up on the magic mesa. The book is based on the observations of Dorothy McKibbin, a social secretary, gatekeeper, and "Girl Friday" of the Los Alamos Lab, a widow who loved extravagantly -- although perhaps platonically -- the charismatic scientific leader, Robert Oppenheimer. Author Conant, however, although admiring of Oppie, does not hesitate to point out his warts -- of which he seems to have had an epidemic.

This book is not a scientific account of the building of the bomb, but a social history of the wartime community of Los Alamos and the scientists and military officers who made up its population. Oppenheimer is the enigmatic center of the group, but the author also paints portraits of the blunt Groves, the appealing Fermi, the spy Fuchs, and many others of the cast of characters inhabiting Los Alamos.

"109 East Palace" concludes with the dramatic story of the Trinity test of the atomic bomb, the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, and Oppie's post war political problems which led to him being denied a security clearance by the government. This is a serious book about the making of the most destructive weapon ever used, but it's also entertaining and instructive for those of us who never could remember the difference between fusion and fission. The tale of Oppie and the bomb is one of the most intriguing and controversial chapters in all of American history.

Smallchief

About 20 miles or so north west of Santa Fe in the central hills and mountains of New Mexico, USA, is the town of Los Alamos, the home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the birthplace of the nuclear bomb. This book describes that town and the people that developed the bomb during the 30 months leading up to the first test explosion. It is beautifully written book, easy to read, and it brings a human touch to the story, but it merits just 4 stars. The problem is simple: competition. Right now as it was released in 2005 it has an almost direct competitor, the 750 page American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Also, a quick GOOGLE search will show that there are many books and articles on Oppenheimer and Los Alamos going back at least 4 or 5 decades. Plus there have been books and articles on the Oppenheimer-Lawrence relationship. I had already read at least two books including the 1968 book Lawrence and Oppenheimer by Nuel Pharr Davis, and I read it thirty years ago, plus there are many others, and one or two movies, now so long ago that I now forget which book I read and which I did not, but I did read the Davis book and it had a lot of similar information. So this book is not new and it has competition that other new book is better - in my humble opinion. In any case, this is a good book, but because of the competition just 4 stars.

This book is a bit different from the others in that it involves manily the 30 months leading up to the summer of 1945 at Los Alamos. It describes a number of the key people and the not so well known support staff, and it describes how they were hired. The book outlines briefly how Los alamos was developed, life at Los Alamos, the internal debates, the Tuesday night meetings to review progress, lots of information on the nervous chain smoking science boss Oppeneimer, the around the clock work schedules, and the political infighting. It describes the first blast starting a few days before, and then walks us through all the major events and uncertainties hour by hour, including the 10 dollar bet that it would not go off, Hans Bethe's last minute calculations to confirm it would explode, the explosion, the radiation waves including the purple glow, the shock waves, etc. After the tests it describes the targeting of the first two bombs dropped on Japan. In addition to the 300 pages of text there is a nice collection of photographs showing the boom town, some test hardware, and of course the people.

After the summer of 1945 the book jumps to 1953 and in one final chapter describes the AEC hearing in which Oppenheimer loses his security clearance. The bomb was made but now the cooperation, the camaraderie, and the teamwork in Los Alamos has been replaced by ambition and rancour. This part includes some of the testimony of Teller. Clearly, Oppenheimer and his cautious approach is in the minority, and even considered unpatriotic by many including the ambitious Edward Teller and others - it was after all the McCarthy era, and McCarthy had not yet been censured. The generals and war planners could not wait to have bigger hydrogen bombs, and they got rid of all the opposition including Oppie.

This is a well written book that can be read fairly easily in one day. It has a lot of chatty details about the 30 month crash program to build the bomb, and gives many insights about the personalities involved. I thought that American Prometheus - another book that I have recently read as noted above - had more details, especially about the politics of the cold war following the development of the bomb, in addition to many details on the bomb program itself. As noted in the book and elsewhere, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for speaking out against the devlopment of the hydrogen bomb; he thought the hydrogen bomb was too powerful and too expensive and would never be used; the plutonium bomb itself was dangerous enough and there should be some sort of international nonproliferation treaty to limit the numbers, including the numbers built by the US. Also, he was worried about nuclear proliferation accelerating out of control, and he has been proven to be right. The US and USSR made almost 140,000 nuclear weapons by some estimates, almost one bomb for every 2000 Soviet citizens, a mad number really and probably 100 times too many bombs, at a cost exceeding 5 trillion dollars for just the US. In retrospect Oppenheimer was right and many of the bombs were most likely a great waste of money and it took decades before both sides agreed to limit the numbers and then start reducing the numbers.

The book merits 4 stars and I recommend American Prometheus first over this book; I thought that other book was a lot better, but go crazy and buy both with the advertised two for one deal, both books are good.
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If you received your Ph.D. in Physics along about 1939 or 1941 you stood a good chance of getting a train ticket to Santa Fe, New Mexico with instructions to go to 109 E. Palace upon arrival. Once there you would meet Dorothy McKibbin. She would give you a badge and arrange transportation up a thirty five mile treacherous, twisting mountain road to a place where your working companions were as rarified as the high desert atmostphere.

This was a time when the changes in the world of physics were exploding. And of all the changes, those being made at Los Alamos were the greatest. This book, told through the eyes of Dorothy McKibbin, written by the granddaughter of the head of the project, comes out in Robert Oppenheimer's centennial year.

In today's revisionist history mood, some people lament the dropping of the bomb. They forget the feelings in this country going back to Pearl Harbor. They also ignore the fact that if the Germans had been successful in driving the D-Day invasion back into the sea or at the Battle of the Bulge, the first to receive Atomic Honor would likely have been Berlin.

Splendid Book.

It is now over 60 years since the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and yet the books still keep coming out. Conant is the granddaughter of one of the chief scientists, and offers a partial insider's view.

I read the book from the vantage of someone who was a newly minted PhD in physics, doing a postdoc there in 1988. Some 44 years after the events chronicled in the book. A little weird. But some people and locations in and around Los Alamos that the book describes, I also ran into. Fuller Lodge was still there, and still a major meeting place. Needless to say, the many tribulations of roughing it during the war were long gone. The town had been civilianised for decades.

Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman are prominently mentioned. (Feynman got his PhD from Bethe.) I had met Feynman several times at Caltech prior to his death in early 1988. It was a little jarring to see the accounts of those men when they were both young. In 1988, I heard Bethe give a memorial lecture on Feynman at Los Alamos. And in fact, Bethe died only a few months ago. Others mentioned in the book, like Robert Bacher and Robert Christy, I had also met at Caltech.

Conant's narrative is strongest in the details of the personal lives of the scientists and their families. She describes well the continual near-chaos and upheavals endured by many who arrived there. There is interesting mention of the tensions between spouses, where typically the husband could not intimate what he was working on, until after Trinity or Hiroshima. She also goes into how the daily grinds were partly alleviated by the hiking in the very scenic surroundings, and by the alcohol-fuelled carousings. Sadly, she does not describe whether the widely rumoured negotiable availability of some WACs for sex was true or not. Though the rumours are indeed mentioned. In fact, a TV series made in the early 80s depicted those as true.

The technical obstacles of the bomb and how they were overcome have been more comprehensively covered elsewhere. Ditto for the controversies after the bombs were dropped on Japan, and on Oppenheimer's tribulations during McCarthyism.

This book should be read in conjunction with: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II.
Both are by the same author and she covers the who, what, when, where, why of the major advances in physics and the theorectical and the technological races to win the Second World War. .
By thoroughly researching the viewpoints of many observers and participants in the Manhattan Project and the development of radar , she mined the facts and melds them and presents the reader more insights into the personalities and politics as well as the sciences than most (if not all) of the participants could themselves.
For those of us who experienced the depression and WWII but who never learned how the Atom Bomb and Radar came to be and how the Allies won the war technologically, these books are priceless.
The virtual battalions of unsung heroes are presented in context.
These two books also show how history should be researched and presented in order to be understood and factual too.
If you have children or grandchildren, buy copies for them to keep and read many times to grasp the evolution of the bomb and radar and to begin to understand how wars are really won or lost years before they start.

Five stars for the excellent book, 109 E. Palace, by Jennet Conant. This book recounts the incredible history of The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the masterful management of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Ms. Conant describes in detail the arrival at Los Alamos of many of the world's most famous physicists, description of their intense work which led to the development of the atomic bomb, and their living and working conditions, often adverse. Ms. Conant, using valuable resource documents gathered together by her grandfather, James Conant, at one time President of Harvard, has written a fascinating narrative. Don't miss it!

I like historical books on technical matters, and I found myself quite enjoying this book. Were I asked to describe this book, I'd say this book reads like a (long) conversation you might have, were you to sit on a park bench with someone who worked at Los Alamos during WW II... The book provides a glimpse into what life was like at the labs - you won't learn about the physics of the bomb, but you'll get highly personal views on the politics of that time. Were I to have a complaint about the book, it would be that the book relies heavily on one primary source for a great portion of the book, and while that character did have a very unique and interesting perspective, we are left with "her" opinions of others thoughts and motivations - not a problem, and really unavoidable given the wealth of source material her primary source left her. If you want to know what life was like at the labs, this is the book for you.