Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan, then Betty Goldstein, enters the narrative at Berkeley in autumn 1942, where her social ties brought her into contact with physicists working under the pressure of wartime secrecy. Her brief but revealing place in the account is as a witness to a young circle’s growing awareness that an unexplained project might bring a world-changing weapon into existence.

Arrival at Berkeley

Goldstein arrived on campus in the autumn of 1942, a young graduate student in the psychology department fresh from Smith. She befriended several graduate students of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose research was becoming entangled with military work. Her connection to that circle came through David Bohm, a physics doctoral student writing his dissertation under Oppenheimer’s supervision. Goldstein began dating Bohm; he fell in love with her and introduced her to his friends Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Max Friedman.

A social circle under pressure

The group spent weekends together and sometimes gathered in what Goldstein later characterized as radical study groups. The description situates her among politically engaged students, but the account does not establish her formal political affiliation or make her a participant in the physics research. Rather, her place in the circle was personal and social: through Bohm and his friends, she encountered a community whose conversations were shaped by both radical politics and the knowledge that some of its members were working on something they could not discuss.

The mystery of the wartime project

Goldstein recalled that the students were working on a mysterious project connected to the war and forbidden to speak about it. By the end of 1942, as Oppenheimer began recruiting students, those around them increasingly understood that the work concerned the construction of a very powerful weapon. Her recollection captures the shift from rumor to apprehension: the project was no longer merely a secret among physicists but a prospect with consequences that the surrounding students struggled to imagine.

Rossi Lomanitz later recalled that some students raised with Oppenheimer the possibility that such a weapon might ultimately destroy the world. Oppenheimer’s answer, as Lomanitz remembered it, was the danger that Nazi Germany might acquire the weapon first. The account does not report Goldstein herself joining that exchange; her testimony instead helps convey the atmosphere in which the question arose. Through her brief presence, the narrative records how the secret project registered beyond the laboratory, among young people who could not know its details but already feared its implications.