Not included in the blockbuster J. Robert Oppenheimer movie is how a Cape Cod connection played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s early life, including his eventual move to Los Alamos to build a bomb that can destroy the world.
It swings through Brewster, and a man who was Oppenheimer’s teacher, early role model, part mentor, life guide: Herbert Winslow Smith.
Son of wealthy New Yorkers, Oppenheimer attended a private progressive high school in Manhattan. He was six feet tall, never more than 125 pounds, and when he came down with dysentery and colitis as a teenager his frailty scared his parents.
Enter Herb Smith, a popular teacher at the school, Harvard educated, erudite as well as forceful. Smith’s Cape Cod roots are as deep as they go for a European, Mayflower arrivals. Smith was in Brewster almost every summer and naturally retired here, the family still owning several homesteads.
None of that mattered to J. Robert’s father. His son liked Herbert, Herbert liked his son, so came a proposal:
Would Smith be willing to take this teenager on an Outward Bound kind of challenge into a rugged world, toughen him up, ready a brilliant, eccentric lad for the rigors of life?
Smith was agreeable. So Smith and Oppenheimer headed to country Smith had explored but Oppenheimer had never seen; the American Southwest. 1922.
The impact was profound.
“In later Oppenheimer was fond of saying that he had two loves: physics and the New Mexican desert,” wrote Ray Monk in a biography. “Of those, the first was New Mexico.”
Smith put the city kid on horseback, and settled into a dude ranch called Los Pinos, northeast of Santa Fe. They rode, camped, made fires, sat up late talking. Oppenheimer developed a crush on a woman who ran the ranch. He came to feel accepted, less an outcast.
Then, riding through the awesome New Mexico landscape, they came upon a wild canyon, uninhabited by Europeans except for a hermetic boys boarding school, named for cottonwood trees that grew there; Los Alamos.
The summer sojourn accomplished its goal; Oppenheimer emerged stronger, more confident — and forever attracted to the Southwest. Soon after returning, heading to Harvard, he heard Smith was going back and wrote, “Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos … spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”
Twenty years later, 1942, Oppenheimer convinced military brass that Los Alamos was the right place to pursue the project named after his city of birth, Manhattan. The eccentric boarding school was bought by the government and expanded into a town eventually with thousands of people – lugging the first nuclear generators, centrifuge, particle accelerator, across the desert.
Oppenheimer’s growing misgivings about the project translated into his feelings about Los Alamos itself:
“I am responsible,” he confessed later, “for ruining a beautiful place.”
He was responsible for much more than that.
Within days of the second atomic bomb dropping at Nagasaki in August, 1945, Oppenheimer was tortured by remorse. He and his wife retreated to a cabin near Los Pinos, the ranch where Smith first took him in New Mexico, and he wrote his old teacher:
“You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many moments of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.”
