Women of the Manhattan Project: Jean Tatlock

Jean Tatlock was a romantic partner of Oppenheimer before her suicide at age 29.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Quick Facts

Significance:

In the mid-1930s in Berkeley, Tatlock and Robert Oppenheimer had an intense romance; she introduced him to Communist politics as well as the poetry of John Donne.

Place of Birth:

Ann Arbor, MI

Date of Birth:

February 21, 1914

Place of Death:

San Francisco, CA

Date of Death:

January 4, 1944

Place of Burial:

Menands, Albany County, NY

Cemetery Name:

Albany Rural Cemetery

In 1936, Jean Tatlock was at medical school at Stanford University, working to become a psychiatrist. She met a young professor of physics at Berkeley, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and they commenced a relationship that would become quite intense. According to Oppenheimer, “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.” Up to this time Oppenheimer had paid little attention to politics or world affairs, not reading newspapers or listening to radio news. Tatlock was an active member of the local Communist party and she introduced him to radical politics and related activities such as fundraising. As he said later, “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.” However, “I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me.” Tatlock’s father was an English professor at Berkeley, and he had given her a fondness for English literature. She shared that with Oppenheimer, especially the poetry of John Donne. It is commonly thought that Oppenheimer drew the name “Trinity” for the first atomic test from one of Donne’s poems.

Tatlock broke off their relationship in 1939, but when she contacted Oppenheimer in Los Alamos in June of 1943, he quickly took a train to California. As always during the Manhattan Project, he was under surveillance; the agents reported that he met Tatlock, they dined, and he remained at her apartment that night before catching the train back to New Mexico the next day. This trip, and his Communist connections during his relationship with Tatlock, would come to haunt him during his clearance hearings in the 1950s. Tatlock took her own life in January 1944; her note said, “I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow.”