Jean Frances Tatlock (February 21, 1914 – January 4, 1944) was an American psychiatrist. She was a member of the Communist Party USA and was a reporter and writer for the party's publication Western Worker. She is also known for her romantic relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
The daughter of John Strong Perry Tatlock, a prominent Old English philologist and an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, Tatlock was a graduate of Vassar College and the Stanford Medical School, where she studied to become a psychiatrist. As a result of her relationship with Oppenheimer and her membership of the Communist Party, she was placed under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped. Tatlock experienced clinical depression, and died by suicide on January 4, 1944.
Early life Jean Frances Tatlock was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 21, 1914, the second child of John Strong Perry Tatlock and Marjorie Fenton. She had an older brother, Hugh, who became a physician.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 7. Her father, who had a PhD from Harvard University, was a noted and acclaimed professor of English at the University of Michigan; an Old English philologist; an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer and English plays, poems, and Elizabethan literature; and author of approximately 60 books on those subjects, including The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1912) and The Mind and Art of Chaucer (1950).Kashner and MacNair, The Bad & the Beautiful, p. 65. He was a professor of English at Stanford from 1915 to 1925, and Harvard from 1925 to 1929, before returning to the Bay Area as a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley."Between the wars: 1914–45". Sandstone & Tile. Winter/Spring 2002. Stanford Historical Society. Volume 26, No. 1.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, pp. 23, 40–41, 51.
Jean Tatlock attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts,Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 39. and Williams College in Berkeley.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 60. In 1930, she entered Vassar College.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 85. After graduating in 1935, Tatlock returned to Berkeley and took courses to complete the prerequisites for Stanford Medical School, and was a reporter and writer for the Western Worker, the Communist Party of America's organ on the West Coast of the United States.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 94.
She was accepted into Stanford Medical School, then located in San Francisco, where she studied to become a psychiatrist.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 96. Tatlock graduated from Stanford with the class of 1941.Stanford University Yearbook — 1941, School of Medicine, Stanford University, p. 176. She completed her internship at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.,Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 140. and residency at the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, now a campus of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, in San Francisco.
Private life
Sexuality Tatlock struggled with her sexuality,Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, pp. 76, 104. at one point writing to her friend, May Sarton, that "there was a period when I thought I was homosexual. I still am, in a way, forced to believe it, but really, logically, I am sure that I can't be because of my un-masculinity."Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 68.
Edith Arnstein Jenkins recalled a conversation with Mason Robertson, a good friend of Tatlock's, in which he claimed Tatlock had told him she was a lesbian. It is plausible that Tatlock had a relationship with Mary Ellen Washburn. As a psychiatrist in training, she was required to undergo psychoanalysis, and therefore consulted Siegfried Bernfeld as part of her training. In the 1940s, homosexuality was seen as a pathological condition to be overcome, which may have led to her eventual suicide.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, pp. 251-252.Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister, p. 28.
Relationship with Oppenheimer Tatlock began seeing Robert Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student at Stanford and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at Berkeley.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 105 They met through his landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn, who was a member of the Communist Party, when Washburn held a fundraiser for communist-backed Spanish Republicans.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 118.Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, p. 29. The couple started dating and reportedly had a passionate relationship. He proposed to her twice, but she refused. Tatlock is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics during the late 1930s,Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 114. and to people involved with, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party or related groups, such as Rudy Lambert and Thomas Addis. The couple continued seeing each other after Oppenheimer became involved with Kitty Harrison, whom he married on November 1, 1940. Oppenheimer and Tatlock spent the New Year together in 1941, and once met at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, pp. 131, 138.
While some historians believe that Oppenheimer had an extramarital affair with Tatlock while he was working on the Manhattan Project,Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, pp. 143–144. others assert that after he was picked to head the Los Alamos Laboratory, he met with Tatlock only once, in mid-June 1943.Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, pp. 101–102. On June 14, 1943, Oppenheimer was in Berkeley to recruit David Hawkins as an administrative assistant. Oppenheimer and Tatlock went to a Mexican restaurant and spent the night together at her San Francisco apartment. All the while, U.S. Army agents, waiting in the street outside, had them under surveillance. At that meeting she told him that she still loved him and wanted to be with him.Smith, and Weiner, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, p. 262.Chafe, The Achievement of American Liberalism, p. 141. He never saw her again.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 232Conant, 109 East Palace, pp. 193–194.
Political involvement During Oppenheimer's 1954 security hearing, his association with Tatlock's friends was used as evidence against him.Evans, Ward V. "Findings and Recommendations of the Personnel Security Board in the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer", United States Atomic Energy Commission (c/o Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law Library, Yale Law School). May 27, 1954.Smyth, Henry D. "Decision and Opinions of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer" (c/o Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law Library, Yale Law School). June 29, 1954. In a letter to Major General Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager, United States Atomic Energy Commission, dated March 4, 1954, Oppenheimer described their association as follows:
Death Tatlock experienced clinical depression, and was being treated at Mount Zion. At around 1 pm on January 5, 1944, her father arrived at her apartment at 1405 Montgomery Street. When there was no response to his ringing the doorbell, he climbed in through a window.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 250. He found her dead, lying on a pile of cushions in the bathroom, with her head submerged in the partly filled bathtub.Serber and Crease, Peace & War, p. 86.Pais and Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life, p. 36.Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, p. 55. There was an unsigned suicide note, which read:
Her father found her correspondence and sifted through it, burning letters and photographs in the fireplace. At 5:10 pm he called the Halstead Funeral Home, who contacted the police. The police arrived at 5:30 pm, accompanied by the deputy coroner. At the time of her death she was under surveillance by the FBI, and her phone had been tapped, so one of the first people informed about it was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, via a teletype link.Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, pp. 192–194, 198–199 The news of her death was reported in Bay Area newspapers.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 252. Tatlock's father had her remains cremated.
Washburn cabled Charlotte Serber at Los Alamos. As the librarian, Serber had access to the Technical Area and informed her husband, physicist Robert Serber, who then went to inform Oppenheimer. When he reached Oppenheimer's office, he found that Oppenheimer already knew.Conant, 109 East Place, pp. 193–194. The security chief at Los Alamos, Captain Peer de Silva, had received the news through the wiretap and Army Intelligence and had broken it to Oppenheimer.Monk, Inside the Centre, pp. 386–387. Tatlock had introduced Oppenheimer to the poetry of John Donne, and it is widely believed he named the first test of a nuclear weapon "Trinity" in reference to one of Donne's poems, as a tribute to her.Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, p. 129. In 1962, Leslie Groves wrote to Oppenheimer about the origin of the name, and elicited this reply:
Inquest A formal inquest in February 1944 returned a verdict of "suicide, motive unknown".Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 251. In his report, the coroner found that Tatlock had eaten a full meal shortly before her death. She had taken some barbiturates, but not a fatal dose. Traces of chloral hydrate were found, a drug normally associated with a "Mickey Finn" when combined with alcohol, but there was no alcohol in her blood, despite damage to her pancreas that indicated she was a heavy drinker. As a psychiatrist working in a hospital, she had access to sedatives such as chloral hydrate.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, pp. 249–253. The coroner found that she had died at around 4:30 pm on January 4. The cause of death was recorded as "acute edema of the lungs with pulmonary congestion"Streshinsky and Klaus, An Atomic Love Story, p. 192—drowning in the bathtub. It seems likely that she knelt over the bathtub, took chloral hydrate, and plunged her head into the water.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 253.
Assassination theory There has been speculation by journalists and historians, as well as Tatlock's brother Hugh, that her death was not a suicide, and the "curious circumstances" surrounding it have subsequently aroused suspicion. The conspiracy theory that she was murdered by intelligence agents working for the Manhattan Project was bolstered by the 1975 Church Committee, which revealed details of assassinations carried out by American intelligence agencies. One doctor quoted in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, observed that if one "were clever and wanted to kill someone", chloral hydrate would be "the way to do it." However, according to Bird and Sherwin, Tatlock's "unsigned suicide note suggests that she died by her own hand—a 'paralyzed soul'—and this is certainly what Oppenheimer always believed."Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, p. 254.
The assassination theory has been presented in the drama miniseries Manhattan. It was touched on in the 2023 film Oppenheimer, where the Oppenheimer character imagines Tatlock's death in multiple ways: he sees her lowering her head gradually into the bathtub, but then also sees her with a gloved hand shoving her head beneath the water.
Portrayals On television, she was portrayed by Kate Harper in the 1980 TV miniseries Oppenheimer and Fiona Dourif in season 2 of Manhattan. On film, she was portrayed by Natasha Richardson in 1989's Fat Man and Little Boy, while Florence Pugh took on the role in 2023's Oppenheimer.
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