She ran the project's office at 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, through which staff moving to the Los Alamos Laboratory had to pass through to obtain security credentials and directions to their new workplace.

She participated in the Smith College Association for Christian Work, and the Sociology and Current Events Clubs, and helped raise $25,000 for refugees from World War I.

[6] After graduating from Smith in 1919, Scarritt travelled to Europe with her father in 1921, and then to Alaska, western Canada and Yosemite National Park in 1923.

In September 1923, she met Joseph Chambers McKibbin while visiting a Smith College friend in Dellwood, Minnesota.

She toured Quebec, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Thousand Islands in 1924, and in 1925 went with her father to Cuba, Panama, Peru, Chile and Argentina.

[9][10] Scarritt and Joseph renewed their engagement, and were married in the garden of her family's home in Kansas City on October 5, 1927.

After a honeymoon in Rio de Janeiro, they moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Joseph worked in his father's fur business, McKibbin, Driscoll and Dorsey.

[11] Between the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, jobs were hard to find, but McKibbin found employment as a bookkeeper for the Spanish and Indian Trading Company, a small firm that sold handicrafts and artworks.

The owners, Norman McGee and Jim McMillan left the day-to-day running of the business in the hands of McKibbin, whom they paid 50c an hour.

[19] Then in March 1943, she was approached by three men from California seeking to establish a new office in Santa Fe, who offered to hire her as a secretary.

[21] The man was Robert Oppenheimer, a professor from the University of California at Berkeley, establishing a new, secret laboratory for the Manhattan Project, the wartime effort to build an atomic bomb.

[21] McKibbin became the first permanent employee of the Manhattan Project's Santa Fe office, which opened at 109 East Palace Avenue on March 27, 1943.

She became Oppenheimer's deputy in Santa Fe, and ran the housing office, which was nothing more than a front for the top secret laboratory under construction 35 miles (56 km) away.

[23] To protect the secrecy of the Hill (and the entire Manhattan Project), new employees were never provided before their departure for New Mexico with its exact location or the security credentials they would need to gain access to the site.

[26] Instead, they were merely given a memorandum which blandly instructed them to report to the United States Army Corps of Engineers office at 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe.

He offered McKibbin a position at Los Alamos but she declined, and remained in Santa Fe, running the office at 109 East Palace.

She was the one the residents of Los Alamos turned to when they needed a puppy, a goose for Oppenheimer's Christmas dinner, or a doctor who performed abortions.

[27] Laura Fermi recalled that:Dorothy McKibbin stayed calm and unruffled surrounded by large boxes and crates to be hauled by truck to the mesa and by the piles of small parcels that shopping women dumped on the floor to make room for further purchases in their bags.

McKibbin had a local judge conduct the ceremony, but due to the project's security, he was not allowed to know the surnames of the couple.

The Army had taken over the Frijoles Canyon Lodge in the Bandelier National Monument and McKibbin was asked to prepare it to receive them.

She had no experience running a hotel but left the Santa Fe office in the hands of an assistant for six weeks and took up residence at the Lodge in June 1944.

[35] On July 15, 1945, two couples arrived at 109 East Palace and asked McKibbin to join them for an evening picnic on Sandia Peak near Albuquerque.

[36] After the war ended in August 1945, there were doubts as to whether the Los Alamos Laboratory would remain, not to mention the Santa Fe office.

[38] In May 1950, Sylvia Crouch alleged that Oppenheimer had conducted secret communist meetings at his home in Berkeley in July 1941.

McKibbin conducted a meticulous investigation that produced a detailed paper trail demonstrating that Oppenheimer was in Santa Fe at the time.

When Edward Teller, who had testified against Oppenheimer, next appeared at Los Alamos, McKibbin gave him an icy reception.

She intended to do so, but the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had met when he toured Los Alamos on December 7, 1962, cast a pall over the event, and she decided not to attend.