Illustrated Daily; 136; The Woman Who Kept a Secret: Dorothy Mckibben (Part 1)

Feeling of awe that I had when that light hit us, I was like, oh my God, I'm so happy Feeling of awe that I had when that light hit us was remarkable and I don't think anyone has ever seen explosion even. You see, they're 109 miles or 209. I don't remember the leaves of those green trees, those green native trees were kind of shining with the gold. It was different, everything had changed, the world was changed, everything would never be the same ever again in the world. Let us pray, Heavenly Father, Creator of heaven and earth, Maker of all things. You crowned your creation on earth when you made man and woman.

Lord, you place them here on earth to rule and to subdue it in all creation. Please, Lord, we beg You to give us the grace, the wisdom to use our intellect and will and all our gifts and talents for the advancement of all peoples. Help us to be aware of the delicate balance of our environment and your creation. We pray for peace, we pray for all leaders, religious and civil, national and worldwide that all these leaders and their people will work and pray for peace. A peace based on justice and love, so that someday we can turn our weapons of foreign destruction into implements of peace and construction.

Teach us, Lord, not only to harness the atom, but also nature in order to advance peace by eliminating the causes of war. Lord, you remind us from time to time that all power and all goodness resides in you and that you are our Father and therefore we are your sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. With your grace, teach us to be at peace with ourselves, with others and above all with you. Help all nations, all peoples, to learn to live in your peace. With your grace, Lord, make us an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let us so love, where there is injury, pardon, where there is doubt, faith, where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy, O divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand, to be loved, as to love, for it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen. God bless all of you. We knew the world would not be the same, few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent, I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says,

now I am to come death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. Well all that is history now and these are replicas of its artifacts. There is always more to history of course than gets told. Names like Oppenheimer, Fermi, I.I. Robbie, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, figure routinely and prominently into the story of the atomic age. But have you ever heard of Dorothy McKibben? You need to. Because Dorothy McKibben played a remarkable role in those dramatic events which led to the birth of the nuclear age.

Dorothy McKibben has been called the woman who kept a secret but that obscures in some respects rather than tells her story. Operating out of a little known office in Santa Fe, it was through Dorothy McKibben that those now famous scientists gained access to Los Alamos beginning with the birth of the Manhattan Project in March of 1943. Her duties were varied everything from security arrangements to housing accommodations but that still doesn't tell the whole story. Because in time, Dorothy McKibben became the trusted advisor, the friend, the confidant, the marriage counselor, the den mother, to the whole bunch of them, to the Oppenheimer's, the Fermi's and the rest. Tonight, in the first of a two-part conversation, Dorothy McKibben, who is now 84, shares her recollections of those early Los Alamos years. Recollections which take the form of a spoken memoir about the people who perhaps more than any others through their scientific achievements and their personal relations, change the world forever.

Dorothy, one of the most interesting stories of those early years at Los Alamos involves how you became what some people call the gatekeeper at 109. How you came to accept that job? Could you tell that for us? Well, I was at the time out of work and I was interested in trying the bank and they had nothing for me. I was crossing the Palace Avenue traffic running in and out when a Santa Fe in name Joe Stephenson approached me and we did our conversation in the middle of street and traffic took care of itself. And he said, how would you like a job as secretary? And I said, secretary to what? And he said, secretary. I said, well, what would I do? He said, you would be a secretary. He said, don't you know what a secretary does? And I said, not always. And he said, well, think this over. I'll give you 24 hours.

And so that night I picked up the telephone called several of my friends and said, have you heard of a new store or a thing coming in town that wants a secretary? Nobody had heard of anything at all like that. And 24 hours were about to close and I didn't know where I'd see Joe but I walked in the lobby of La Fonda. And Joe was standing there talking to a man I knew was from California because he had on a round silk suit that caught match the pants he had on a white shirt, a necktie and shoes. And we were speaking pleasantly. I knew he was from California. And as we were talking I was glancing around as a woman always does. And I saw approaching us a slender, very thin man in a pork pie hat with a pipe in his hand. He had on a trench coat and he walked on the balls of his feet which gave me the impression he was kind of hardly touching the ground. He stopped and spoke to Joe and Dwayne Muncie and they introduced me to him. And I said, hello. And then he said, all right, I'll see you all later and left and walk toward the door to leave the hotel.

And I turned to the two men. Joe particularly would offered me this job and said, I will take the job. Who was that man? Jay Robert Oppenheimer. And I felt that a person full of that life and personality and charm and a few other magnetic qualities. That was for me and anything he did, I'd like to be part of it in any capacity. And there was no doubt in your mind that Jay Robert Oppenheimer, whoever he might be, was involved in this project in which you were about to take a position. Yes, but I didn't know he was the director. I didn't know what his position was. I knew that he was being a friend of Muncie from California, one of these people. I didn't know he was the director of this outfit.

The job you accepted was originally described as this amorphous, secretarial position. When did it finally dawn on you, the enormity, the magnitude and the significance of the position you had just accepted? Oh, a year or so later, it just came out. It's sort of like falling in love. You carry on and everything and then you're aware of this fact that it's hit you. I don't compare this project, the atomic bomb to love, but I'm just trying to tell you, I worked in there and they needed me very much so they put me in very soon with three other secretaries. We sat at 109 at desks and Oppenheimer sat at the desk in the back room and we sat in the front room and we had to take over four wrenches between Santa Fe and Los Alamos to house. Our personnel were coming in and they were all young people and many of them were pregnant and maybe many had the average age at that time was 25.

This was the middle of March in 43. The first in May they all went up to the hill. The housing was completed, but this getting people up was rather nerve wracking because they had to have shoe stamps and they had to have food stamps and the drivers were not really interested in what they were doing. They sometimes forget to stop at a wrench to pick up a Fermi. Somebody like that made up to send something else. It's hard to imagine overlooking Enrico Fermi, isn't it? Listen, let me ask you, what did the community of Santa Fe? How did the city itself, the town's people react to these comments? Bill Harrison, who's editor of the New Mexican, told his staff not to come in my office, she won't tell you anything. Second, people would call me from some place in town and say there's a crazy man here, he doesn't know where he's going. I said send him over. That's how we got him. We had a fish of cars we call taxis, pick them up. Fermi's wife, Lara, Fermi was coming out from Chicago and we sent a car from Los Alamos to lay me the picker up and the driver was told that he was to meet Mrs. Farmer.

Because Fermi's name was Mr. Farmer, Nicholas Boer's name was Uncle Nick and so forth and so forth. The driver said to this woman or you, Mrs. Farmer, she said I'm not, Mrs. Farmer and so he went back and Lara called from Laney to the hill. And they said, well we sent someone, your name is Farmer, she said I didn't know that, there was a man with a taxi but I didn't know that. So we had to send again to get her. The years you worked with Robert Oppenheimer, left an indelible impression on your mind, I wonder if you'd share with us, give us a word portrait of the Robert Oppenheimer you remember best. Well, he was very natural and very active. He'd come to the house, he would make the best dry martinis you ever had.

And he would cook the steak and fresh asparagus which was a ritual menu we had and Kitty was often with him. Kitty was his wife? Yes, she was charming. And the best portrait of him I think is when I saw him about to make a speech when the Navy gave Los Alamos the E award. Do you remember that E for excellence? There was a grandstand which is no longer at Los Alamos erected and it looked out over the valley and toward the Sangre de Cristo. And I went of course and as I was approaching the grandstand there was Robert pacing along and he was within himself. And I knew that because when he's within himself he's not conscious of anyone else and I just said hello to him. He had as I described it a rather glazed look in his eye eyes and he was composing the speech that he made five minutes later.

And it was one of the best speeches that have ever been done at Los Alamos whether they have a copy of it or not I do not know. But I think of him in that way and I think of him with people so charming and so helpful, especially the young people about physics and about science and so forth. The early days at Los Alamos some of the greatest names in the world of science strode that mesa. I'd like to get your impressions of some of those people as well. I know Oppenheimer Borg, very great respect for Neil's Borg. Why did he hold Borg in such high regard? Because he was the master. He was older than Oppie and the two Germans that discovered this in the 1800s this use of atomic energy talked to him about that. And he's a person who could get everything all together. He was sort of the master of the scientist and he came over here.

And he was charming. I can see him standing up with a big wide straw hat on in my office and they all called him Uncle Nick. And I remember driving with Robert and Jackie, the wife of Frank Oppenheimer, up to Frank's ranch at Pegosa Springs. And we stopped in a meadow and just stood around and looked around and everything. And Robert said in 1938 was the first he had heard of this. There were others, I.I. Robbie, is it a Robbie? Yes, he and Robert were just like this. They spent months together in Geneva talking and talking and talking. And he thought the world of Robbie and I'm sure they exchanged very important ideas on this work together.

All right, Enrico Fermi. Electricity. I saw him first. I don't think he may have come in the office, but that would have been or they may have taken him straight up. Have what they call a dorm party. Those people had no entertainment up there, whatever. And the young men were in a men's dorm, women in the other dorm, another for married people's dorm. They would bring their liquor and refreshments to one dorm, the downstairs room, the first floor, and have a party. And everybody would go, I mean, there was nothing else to do and they didn't come down here. And I saw Fermi leaning against the wall and he was quite relaxed. He's stockily built and has these piercing eyes, absolutely piercing. But I saw Fermi standing there and I'll always think of him that way.

All right, let me ask the woman who could keep a secret about the man who couldn't, Klaus Fuchs. Well, Klaus was part of the British mission. There were 80 people sent over from England and Winston Churchill, telephone, Franklin Roosevelt, and said, gave him the names of the people coming in that they were all right. So we did not clear them. We took his word for his clearance. And he was such an appealing and charming young man that everybody liked him very much. And the young women who had young children, when they went on trips like a long trip to Mexico, they would ask Klaus to come in their house and live there and take care of their young children. They trusted him so much. And he was kind and cheerful and being unmarried, he had time on his hands and he could do these things. And that meant a whole lot. And then when the agents from the Treasury Department or the Army and Navy, I mean the intelligence agents would come in my office.

Each one of them said to me, the ones we fear is in the laboratory. And this was rather startling, but you had no answer to that. And this was said by all three of those intelligent people and nobody knew or had any idea who it was. Do you think they knew? No. Oh, Lord, they'd have gotten him. Heavens to Betsy. That was their job. Well anyhow, he did very important work and he was right in the inner circle. Klaus was very bright and they wouldn't have been over here. Then he went back to England and was employed in the Cavendish Laboratory. And our FBI in the United States of America found by talking to Russia that the information could come from only one place in the world. And that was a little place in the mountains of New Mexico called Los Alamos. This information was unique from that.

And so they began to consider Los Alamos. And when they heard the kind of information that was given, they knew it was Los Alamos and they worked on it very hard. And I think our agents were the ones that went over to England. They walked down the aisle of the Hall of the Cavendish Library and here was Klaus Fuchs and some other people and they tapped him on the shoulder and said, come with us. And they sentenced him to 15 years in prison. And he was put in prison and kept there. Nine years and one of the tractors of the Los Alamos scientific laboratory said, I wish we could give him a problem to work out for us. They still thought that much of his intellect, obviously.

Klaus was a believer in international knowledge and that it shouldn't be a secret. The road from Los Alamos, of course, inevitably led to Trinity. What was the mood as the date for the test approach? I in my back room felt attention and I just felt it in my bones. I could hear from telephone calls that things were getting to a crescendo and so forth. Some friends of mine who were young scientists found me on Sunday and said, we're going on a picnic tonight and got in the car and we drove to the top of the Sunday of Peak out of Alvapurki. That was 109 miles away from Trinity and it was raining and I could see a great plane in the sky dragging these things to take temperature and wind flow from. I thought, put off these down there and it's raining and of course they were taking every precaution to see what the air and everything would be like.

Then at 530 of bang, it didn't hear any noise but the sky lit up to the top of the apex of the sky for about a fourth of the horizon and we just watched it and you had a feeling of awe. Did you know when you saw that explosion what you were seeing? Yes, feeling of awe that I had when that light hit us was remarkable and I don't think anyone has ever seen an explosion. It's either 109 miles or 209. I don't remember the leaves of those green trees, those green native trees were kind of shining with the gold. It was different. Everything had changed. The world was changed. Everything would never be the same ever again in the world. After Hiroshima, tell us the mood of Robert Oppenheimer as you perceive that mood.

Well, he had done his job. They had done what they started out to do and he smoked constantly, constantly and he called me up in the summer 66 from Princeton and said that he had cancer of the throat. He had used cobalt and we talked about this and it was later in February that he died of it. I just don't know. He organized the AEC to go over there and see what they could do with Hiroshima. And as I said before they wouldn't have hit Nagasaki unless the Japanese ruler had been so stubborn about it and they hadn't wanted to but they were doing this and so they did it.

In the aftermath, the next major chapter in the story of nuclearity was the decision to go forward with the production, the research and the production of what they called the super, the hydrogen bomb. And here Edward Teller figures prominently into the story of course but briefly tell us about Edward Teller's early years at Los Alamos. Earlier about the hydrogen bomb, they were all against it, everybody except Teller. We didn't need a hydrogen bomb. We had death right there and everyone of the board who's a president of Harvard, all those people were against it, all 12 of them were against it. They voted against the super bomb. They thought it was shocking and unnecessary and excessive and we could destroy the world easily enough with our little atomic bomb. All those famous names and I'm trying to think of them, they were on this board and every one of them voted not to but Teller just thought for the sake of science.

We ought to do it and we call it his bomb. Nobody's ever called it the father of the hydrogen bomb but Teller wanted this and he used all his pressure and everything to do it and they made it and this was a shocking thing and we all hate the idea of it. I want to talk more about Edward Teller and the next chapter in the story of Los Alamos tomorrow evening so we state right where we are that we might continue this conversation. Please do join us tomorrow as we continue this fascinating conversation with the woman who kept a secret, Dorothy McKibben. Until then, thanks for joining us. I'm Hal Rhodes. Good night. I like that title of the woman who kept a secret. That's very good. It's much better.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.