The Overlooked Life of Toni Oppenheimer
Little is known by the general public or even somewhat knowledgeable crowd about the ancestral legacy left behind by J. Robert Oppenheimer, and often brushed over entirely is his daughter, Katherine “Toni” Oppenheimer. Likely attributed to the tragedy that weaved throughout her life and untimely death in her father’s shadow, her story is one that mirrors the pain of loyalty, betrayal, and heartbreak that her own father experienced in his lifetime.
Born December 7th, 1944, Katherine, named after her mother, came into the world at Los Alamos where her father was leading the then-secret Manhattan Project resulting in the world’s first atomic bomb. She was the second and last child born to her parents, Katherine “Kitty” and Robert, while her older brother Peter was born before the Manhattan Project in 1941. Due to the overwhelming boom of births in Los Alamos during the project (there wasn’t much else to do in the tiny makeshift town with nowhere to go), she was just one of many being delivered in the 7-room newly built hospital. Initially coining the nickname “Tyke” and then eventually “Toni”, her upbringing was anything but conventional.
Kitty struggled heavily with alcohol and did her best to raise two young children in an environment that certainly had no “how-to” guides. Robert was known to be an emotionally unavailable and convoluted person, and ultimately father, which strained his relationship with his children even further when his primary focus was on the project he was leading during their crucial early developmental years. The fallout of the atomic bomb’s success and loss of his security clearance only intensified his extensive unavailability, too.
After what we can observe now as a recipe for disaster, a mix of postpartum depression and potent alcoholism, the birth of Toni accelerated Kitty’s spiral. She left in April of 1945 to visit Pittsburgh, leaving the 4-month-old Toni behind in Los Alamos with her friend Pat Sherr. Pat had experienced a miscarriage and was open to the idea of caring for Toni for a short time. Kitty left with Peter for 3 months, not returning until July of that year. Robert visited his daughter no more than twice a week, disinterested in the occasion. Pat recalled that Robert would visit with Pat, but never requested to see his daughter unless prompted by Pat to do so, which she did often. After two months of staying with Pat, Robert asked her bluntly if she would adopt Toni. Reasonably surprised and disheartened, she told him no. She didn’t understand how he wouldn’t want to raise his beautiful baby daughter. Robert told Pat, “[It’s] because I can’t love her”. Toni eventually returned home to her parents, but this still always concerned Pat deeply. It is not known whether or not Toni ever discovered that her father had tried to pawn her off, yet it is clear that she still felt the devastating effects throughout her life of being unwanted by both of her parents.
Further along in Toni’s life, neighbors and friends often recalled feeling poorly about the state of her and her brother’s childhood. Her mother was frequently drunk to the extent of slurring her words and not being able to walk straight. Toni fulfilled a job of fetching drinks and cigarettes for her, whether she was alone in bed or having a lavish gathering at their home. As many addicts are, Kitty could appear well put together when she wanted to. Toni got to see both sides, and it eventually fostered a rising tension between the two. Pat, still friends with Robert and Kitty, would visit Kitty for drinks but rarely caught a glimpse of Toni as she was likely with the maids. After seeing Toni, now age 3, for the first time since being her temporary caregiver for 3 months at Los Alamos, Pat felt the same admiration for her as she had all those years ago. This time though while seeing Toni sitting in Robert’s lap in the garden, her head tucked into his chest, Pat knew that Robert had found a love for her that he hadn’t felt before and was relieved. Still, others didn’t feel as similarly. Robert Strunsky, a neighbor of the Oppenheimers, claimed, “I think to be a child of Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer, is to have one of the greatest handicaps in the world”.
Both Peter and Toni stressed the inability to connect fully with their parents throughout their upbringing. Their childhood was vastly different from Robert’s, whose parents provided a nurturing home that provided every resource necessary to help him and his younger brother flourish. An unpredictable hot and cold attitude provided by their parents, Peter and Toni were walking on eggshells while trying to navigate their own path. Peter with outbursts, Toni with internalized insecurity and unexpressed pain, yet appearing ‘serene and sturdy’. Affection was withheld and then overwhelmingly given, with no rhyme or reason. Kitty eventually developed an overbearing attachment to Toni, perhaps projecting a desire for her life to be different than her own. In 1951 at age 7, Toni was diagnosed with polio. Although a minor case, Kitty still followed doctors’ advice to take her somewhere warm and humid. They eventually ended up in St. John, an island in the Caribbean Sea. Ultimately, this decision made by Toni’s parents would result in a full recovery from Polio and a lasting effect on Toni that would eventually bring her back to this island to live permanently in her adulthood.
During Robert’s security hearings, Toni and Peter were caught in the conflict via teasing and bullying about their father’s alleged communist ties and suspected Soviet connections. Toni, again, always seen as sturdy, was observed to ‘take it all in stride’. Peter, however, continued to outwardly struggle with the weight of it all, as expected of such a young and vulnerable child. In 1955, Peter was sent off to a boarding school at age 14 rather than dealing with his issues at home. 3 years later, Robert and Kitty would leave him behind while taking Toni to Paris for a semester while Robert took up a teaching position there. Sometimes Toni got the brunt of their wavering neglect, and sometimes Peter. This time, it was Peter.
Toni grew into a brilliant and shy young woman. She had been molded into someone who always did what she was told and followed the rules in every circumstance. She hated her picture being taken and hid from the public eye. St. John fostered an environment where she could thrive, away from that. Those around her observed her beautiful yet dark and moody eyes and facial features, the same as her mother’s. Her hair, dark and long, sometimes acted as a cover for her to hide behind. Friends and neighbors of Toni in St. John noticed that when Robert was around, he felt like a distant visitor, not a father. There was a disconnect that had been present in Toni’s entire life. But others found that Robert was proud of her; he had just not been able to express it properly. Robert had been known to not be able to express his emotions properly his entire life, so this was not a new experience for those around him, including his daughter. Reserved and sensitive, Toni eventually began to carve out her life on her beloved island.
Prior to this, Toni, just like her father, had a deep interest in linguistics. She studied other languages with an endless desire for knowledge. She read and wrote in nearly 5 different languages fluently. In her college years, she attended Oberlin College with a Bachelor of Arts. Only a year after receiving her degree in 1966, her father Robert passed away from cancer. Conflicted with her feelings about her childhood and her relationship with him, Toni still always defended him greatly against what the U.S. Government did to him. After her father’s death, she had begun to ‘flounder’. Because of Kitty’s overbearing attachment to Toni in her teenage years, Toni found herself unable to function independently from her parents. With just her mother around, feelings of inferiority began to rise to the surface again as she felt her childhood creeping back up on her.
As she began to find herself again after losing her father, 2 years later Toni got herself a temporary position with the U.N. as a trilingual translator, utilizing her vast skills in linguistics. The position required a security clearance though, and tragically, her country failed her. The FBI refused her security clearance simply due to her relation to her father. Once again, Robert’s shadow had followed her, even after his death. Less than 3 years later, her mother would die of a pulmonary embolism. Toni would never recover from this unrelenting sequence of events. 2 marriages and 2 divorces later, she continued reeling.
Living the last years of her life in St. John, she made a small circle of friends, hoping to heal from the suffering she had endured. She saw a psychiatrist who attempted to provide relief from the trauma of her upbringing and early adulthood. Toni once tried to drown herself in the waters where she and her brother had spread their parents’ ashes. Something during this attempt revealed a peaceful feeling to her, enough for her to swim back to land and change her mind. Still, in January of 1977, Toni finalized her decision by hanging herself in a beach cottage her father had built on Hawknest Bay. Leaving behind $10,000 and the deed to the cottage to the people of St. John, Toni’s love for the island persevered past her untimely death a month after her 32nd birthday. Her funeral was so well attended that people lined up outside the church to pay their respects. The beach the cottage resided on was named after her and her family; “Oppenheimer Beach”. June Katherine Barlas, a close friend of Toni’s, said of her, “Everybody loved her, but she didn’t know that”.
Toni’s lifetime of pain, resentment, and unrelenting heartbreak had also been filled with love, intelligence, and a transcending desire to find beauty in the world around her, regardless of her past. While many don’t know her story, those who were touched by her presence in their lifetime will never forget the lasting effect she had on them. A baby girl, born among a testing ground for a future weapon of mass destruction that would take hundreds of thousands of lives, grew out of the fallout, a blooming flower in a desert of sand turned to glass.
Reference:
Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. J. (2006). American prometheus: The triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
