Kai Bird

“I do so want you to be able to enjoy life in its best and fullest sense, and you will help me take care of you? To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest.”

As a critic of the German monarchy, at the war’s end he welcomed the downfall of imperial rule and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But as a fierce anticolonialist, he openly deplored the hypocrisy of a victors’ peace that appeared only to strengthen the British and French empires.

Everything about Robert’s personality— from his abrupt, jerky way of walking to such little things as the making of a salad dressing—displayed, she thought, “a great need to declare his preeminence.”

Robert decorated his room with an oriental rug, oil paintings and etchings he brought from home, and insisted on making tea from a charcoal-fired Russian samovar.

Born was a brilliant theoretical physicist, but because he sometimes made small mistakes in his long calculations, he often asked a graduate student to recheck his math. On one occasion, Born recalled, he gave a set of calculations to Oppenheimer. After a few days, Robert returned and said, “I couldn’t find any mistake—did you really do this alone?”

Contemptuous of authority and armed with a dangerous wit, Houtermans liked to tell his gentile friends, “When your ancestors were still living in the trees, mine were already forging checks!” As a teenager growing up in Vienna, he had been expelled from his gymnasium (high school) for publicly reading the Communist Manifesto on May Day.

When Robert had left for Harvard, he had given Frank his microscope, and Frank had used it one day to look at his own sperm. “Never having heard of sperm,” Frank said, “it was really a marvelous discovery.”

Pauli appreciated Oppenheimer’s ability to discern the heart of a problem, but he found himself frustrated by Robert’s inattentiveness to detail. “His ideas are always very interesting,” Pauli said, “but his calculations are always wrong.” After listening to Robert lecture one day, and hearing him pause, groping for words and murmuring little “nim-nim-nim” sounds, Pauli took to calling him the “nim-nim-nim man.”

Robert arrived with two gallons of bootleg whiskey, a large quantity of peanut butter and a bag of Vienna sausages and chocolate. He arranged to borrow from Katherine Page a saddle horse named Crisis. Aptly named, Crisis was a large, half-castrated stallion that no one but Robert could ride.

She thought he “liked to talk to slightly discontented women and seemed specially sensitive to lesbianism.” He possessed plenty of charisma.