“Then you’re collecting Harvard’s books to show how far we’ve come?”
“Either that or”—he glanced toward the photo of the nuclear blast—“how little we’ve learned.”
1945-1969
G
EORGE
W
EDGE
Drake peered across the desert toward a spot on the horizon some ten miles away. A hundred-foot tower had been built there, and atop the tower had been placed a device called simply the Gadget.
George could not see the tower. But in his mind’s eye, he could see the Gadget, sitting there, waiting, silent and sullen. Would it go off? Would it pop and fizzle? Or would it start a chain reaction that could not be controlled? No one knew for certain.
Thunderstorms had blown through earlier, postponing the test from 4:00
A.M.
It was now 5:29:15 on the morning of July 16, 1945, and there was a remote possibility that in fifteen seconds, the world might come to an end.
Professor Kenneth Bainbridge looked at J. Robert Oppenheimer, ’26, the civilian director of the project. Oppenheimer nodded, and Bainbridge pushed a button.
George Drake pulled heavy welder’s goggles over his eyes, turned away from the view slit in the bunker, and put his back against the concrete wall, all as instructed. So did Oppenheimer, Bainbridge, and the others around them.
Then a voice called out, “Zero minus ten . . .”
At similar stations around the Jornada del Muerto Valley, men prepared themselves. Some may have been thinking, as George was, of all that had brought them to this moment. For many, the journey had begun at Harvard. President James Bryant Conant was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. Chemistry professor George Kistiakowsky had worked on the detonating device. Bainbridge had helped build the Harvard cyclotron, the first atom smasher. And five brilliant Harvard undergraduates, the youngest men on the project, had been brought to Los Alamos to act as human calculators.
“. . . nine, eight, seven . . .”
George had arrived at Harvard with his class in the fall of 1941.
He had tried to ignore the worries piling up around them all that autumn and had focused instead on his studies, taking the most challenging courses available in mathematics and physics. And he got all A’s.
But on the night of December 8, 1941, he attended a mass meeting in Sanders Theater and heard President Conant say, “In every preceding ordeal of battle Harvard has stood in the forefront of those who toiled and sacrificed that liberty might survive. There can be no question that in the days ahead this university and its sons will bring new honors to justify the expectations of ten generations of Harvard men.”
Filled with patriotic fervor and a sense of pride in his own ancestry, George walked to his parents’ home on Brattle Street after the meeting.
He could not remember that they had ever looked quite so worried. Dickey Drake and Doris were not people who worried. They went to parties in the middle of the week. They went to Florida in the middle of the winter. They worshiped at Christ Church on Sundays and dined at the Harvard Club on Fridays. They enjoyed their lives. They were well-off. But what did all that matter now?
George sat with his father in the library and said that he was thinking of enlisting.
Dickey Drake was silent just long enough for George to think he was giving serious consideration to an answer that he had probably prepared beforehand, then he said, “The best thing you can do is study. Science will be one of the weapons of this war. And you’re in a place where you might make a difference.”
“How do you know?”
“I know Conant. He’s a scientist. He’s working with the government. And your skills have been noticed.”
It was what George had hoped to hear. He said he didn’t want to leave school anyway.
Then his father seemed to relax, as if he, too, had heard what he hoped for. He said, “So . . . have you been to any club parties yet?”
“Parties? Dad, this isn’t exactly a time to be thinking about parties.”
“It’s never too early to be thinking about the Porcellian Club.”
“Dad—”
“I was a Porcellian.”
“Dad—”
“Your grandfather, too. And—”
“Dad, I don’t care about final clubs.”
“Don’t care? You’re not some kind of socialist, are you?”
George loved his father and hoped to please him, but he was not much like him. George did not play golf, though his parents were members of the Country Club. George had not had a date in his life, while his parents loved to joke about the Lothario that Dickey Drake had been. And George had worn the same tweed sport coat and black knit tie every day of the semester, though his father kept telling him to go to the Coop and buy himself a Harvard tie and a blue blazer and “some of those stylish saddle shoes, and then the girls will flock like starlings.”
Saddle shoes.
No. The study of physics was enough to occupy George. That and dreams of a young woman sitting on his lap and pressing her lips to his.
So he said, “Clubs are not what they were in your day, Dad.”
“Yes. Lowell took care of that. Go and study and stop thinking about enlisting.”
“. . . six, five, four . . .”
George Wedge Drake followed his father’s advice so well that by the fall of 1943, he wasn’t just studying physics. He was teaching it. Most of the physics faculty at Harvard had gone off to work in government projects, so the teaching of it had fallen to retirees, volunteers from other departments, and, as the
Alumni Bulletin
added, “even three undergraduates and a woman.” And there was much debate over which was more shocking, that an undergraduate could teach a course in physics . . . or a woman.
Though there were rumblings of change and Radcliffe students would soon be admitted to upper level courses at Harvard, the sexes did not yet mingle officially in Harvard classrooms. So George, like other instructors and professors, followed the time-honored practice of delivering his classes twice, to the men in the Yard and to the women on the west side of Cambridge Common.
George Wedge Drake liked teaching, and he thought he was good at it. So did a Radcliffe junior named Olga Bassett.
On the first day of class, George noticed her. He noticed all the girls, but Miss Bassett was wearing slacks when the others were wearing skirts, and she was five-ten, taller than her young instructor. Over the next few weeks, he noticed something new about her at each class. Her smile one day; her dark hair, worn to the shoulder, the next; her brown eyes; the flash of thigh when she wore a pleated skirt and kneesocks. And he sensed her intellectual curiosity, too, because after every class, she stopped to ask him questions about the theorems and equations he discussed.
Six weeks into the semester, he summoned his courage and asked her to dinner at Cronin’s, the tavern with the grouchy waitresses and the good clam chowder.
The following month was the happiest time George had ever known, because on Tuesday nights, he could call Olga and invite her to a weekend movie, and she would accept. And sometimes, after the movie, they would sit in a booth in Cronin’s, sit so close that their legs pressed together, and they would order a pitcher of beer and hamburgers, and sometimes, on the way back to Radcliffe, she would hold his hand.
When she told him that she was not going home to New York City for Thanksgiving, because her father was traveling and her mother did not celebrate holidays, he invited her to the Drake home.
George’s parents acted more casual about the invitation than they may have felt, perhaps because Olga arrived with a group of George’s friends, kids from California and St. Louis and other points west. And they all sat at the dining-room table with Victor Wedge and his sons and other aunts and uncles, too. So there was neither the time nor the opportunity for a father to quiz his son about a young lady from New York whose parents did not celebrate such an American holiday.
But a few days later, George received a note under his door at Eliot House:
Come home for a little chat.
This time there was no talk of clubs. The father had absorbed the disappointment of a son so socially inept as to be uninterested in the Porcellian. This time, Dickey Drake did not even wait until his son was settled before he said, “Are you familiar with the American Communist Party?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Has this Olga girl talked with you about it?”
“In passing . . . we all wonder what the world will look like once the war ends.”
“Well, it won’t look the way her father wants it to. He’s a member of the party. Not only that, he writes articles for the
Daily Worker.
”
George Drake felt a wave of heat rise from his collar to the crown of his head.
“Someone should straighten out those people over at Radcliffe admissions.” His father put a glass of port into George’s hand and said, “Conant called the other day. He wants you to leave after Christmas.”
“Leave? Leave Harvard?”
“He’s putting you onto something top secret. You might have to defer the degree for a year or so, but it will all be taken care of.”
“What is it?”
“If I knew, it wouldn’t be a secret, would it? Of course, if they see you dallying with the daughter of a Communist, they’ll give the job to someone else.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The FBI.”
“FBI?”
“You’re brilliant, George. Conant tells me you understand more about physics than half the senior faculty. And here’s your chance, just as I promised two years ago. But you have to be analytical about your life, as if it were an equation.”
So George went back to Eliot House and tried to be analytical. His future would be in particle physics, and particle physics would change the world. And how many men could change the world? But he was also in love. So . . . would it be physics or infatuation? The promise of future success or present happiness?
All the next week, when he saw Olga, he tried to see her as a student rather than “his girlfriend.” He decided that he would tell her on Friday night, after they went to the movies. At the Harvard Square, they saw
Casablanca.
It had been out for a year and they had seen it before, but they still loved it. Noble people making noble decisions.
They left the theater arm in arm and headed back to Radcliffe, but in front of the burying ground, they stopped. He began to speak, but she kissed him instead. Then she whispered, “I think our beautiful friendship has already begun.”
And he knew that he couldn’t tell her that night. And he couldn’t resist her. And her kiss told him that she couldn’t resist him. But there were parietal rules, which meant that getting into his room in Eliot House or hers at Radcliffe could be tricky.
So he turned her toward Brattle Street, because on Friday nights, his parents were at the Harvard Club. At their front door, he stopped and looked up and down the street. He did not tell her he was looking to see if any FBI agents were watching. Then he let her into his parents’ house.
In the library, he lit a fire and poured two glasses of his father’s port. He wanted to tell her. Instead, he kissed her. And then his hand was on the cool smoothness of her thigh, between the kneesocks and the skirt she had so conveniently worn. Soon, clothes were askew, clasps unclasped, zippers unzipped, though nothing came off, because Dickey and Doris always came home before ten-thirty. At ten o’clock precisely—George remembered because the mantelpiece clock was chiming—he and Olga experienced the most exciting moment of their lives. At two past ten, it was over.
After that, he did not have the heart to tell her that he could no longer see her. But on the following weekend and the one after that, he manufactured excuses for staying home—too much work, a family party, a gathering of Physics Department instructors. And then she left for Christmas vacation.
On the day after New Year’s, George and three other juniors boarded a train for New Mexico. On the train, he wrote her a letter, but he decided not to send it. If the train was taking him to the place he expected, there would be someone reading his mail, making sure he was not revealing anything. So he tore up the letter.
Someday she would understand. Still, he cried that night, alone in the sleeping car, as the train sped over the Appalachians and into the heartland.
“. . . three, two, one . . .”
George held his breath. Thoughts of Olga faded. So did thoughts of Harvard.
He had given up much to be here now, but he told himself it was worth it. For eighteen months, he had operated in an environment of mental stimulation he could never have hoped for in Cambridge. Here, in what he later described as an intellectual utopia, he had exchanged ideas with the greatest physicists of the age. But in those final seconds, ideas faded, too, before the enormity of what they had done. And then there was only a single thought, a single word:
Light.
The bunker was open at the back, and even through the welder’s glasses, the flash illuminated every fold and every gully on the hills to the south. It was as though the working of the universe had suddenly been accelerated, causing the sun to leap from below the eastern horizon to its noonday apex in an instant.
They had been told to expect the flash. But the light did not fade. Instead, it rose in height, in intensity, and changed from white to boiling red. George and the others could wait no longer. They had to look at it. They had to see what they had made. So they stood and turned, and in their black welder’s goggles was reflected something that no one had ever seen before, the most beautiful, horrible sight in history.
Then they heard a train coming toward them—the waves of shock and sound, racing hand in hand.
George glanced at Oppenheimer, who was holding a support post in the bunker, his mouth agape, his long skinny face contorted in shock, as though he had been painted by Edvard Munch. Later, Oppenheimer said that at that moment, he was thinking of a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Perhaps . . . but George agreed with Professor Bainbridge, who turned to Oppenheimer a moment later and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”