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.
[9] 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.
[10] She was accepted into Stanford Medical School, then located in San Francisco, where she studied to become a psychiatrist.
[14] Tatlock struggled with her sexuality,[15] at one point writing to a friend that "there was a period when I thought I was homosexual.
[20][19] Tatlock is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics during the late 1930s,[21] and to people involved with, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party or related groups, such as Rudy Lambert and Thomas Addis.
Oppenheimer and Tatlock spent the New Year together in 1941, and once met at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco.
[23][24] 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: In the spring of 1936, I had been introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a noted professor of English at the university; and in the autumn, I began to court her, and we grew close to each other.
I should not give the impression that it was wholly because of Jean Tatlock that I made leftwing friends, or felt sympathy for causes which hitherto would have seemed so remote from me, like the Loyalist cause in Spain, and the organization of migratory workers.
[29] Oppenheimer and Tatlock went to a Mexican restaurant and spent the night together at her San Francisco apartment.
[3][36] He found her dead, lying on a pile of cushions in the bathroom, with her head submerged in the partly-filled bathtub.
[43] 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.
In another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, A formal inquest in February 1944 returned a verdict of "suicide, motive unknown".
[48] In his report, the coroner found that Tatlock had eaten a full meal shortly before her death.
[51] 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"[51] surrounding it have subsequently aroused suspicion.
[51] 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.
"[52] 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.
[55] Natasha Richardson played Tatlock in 1989's Fat Man and Little Boy,[56] while Florence Pugh took on the role for Christopher Nolan's 2023 epic biographical thriller Oppenheimer.