Jean Tatlock is well-known for her close friendship with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Tatlock was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and wrote for their magazine, Western Worker.
During WWII, as part of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer served as the lab’s director.
Tatlock struggled with her sexuality, telling a friend at one point 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”
They began dating in 1936, while she was a graduate student at Berkeley and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics.
Tatlock is also credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics and people involved with or sympathetic to the Communist Party or related groups during the late 1930s, such as Rudy Lambert and Thomas Addis.
Tatlock and Oppenheimer remained romantically involved even after he married Kitty Harrison on November 1, 1940.
Oppenheimer and Tatlock met at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve 1941.
Tatlock was being treated at Mount Zion for severe clinical depression.
Her father arrived at 1405 Montgomery Street around 1 p.m. on January 5, 1944.
He climbed in through a window after ringing the doorbell and receiving no response.
He discovered her body in the bathroom, on a pile of cushions, with her head submerged in the partially filled bathtub. An unsigned suicide note was found.
Historians and her brother Hugh have speculated on whether her death was truly a suicide because of some suspicious circumstances.
