American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus. —Scientific Monthly, September 1945 Prometheus stole fire and gave it to men. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephaestus to nail his body to Mount Caucasus. On it Prometheus was nailed and kept bound for many years. Every day an eagle swooped on him and devoured the lobes of his liver, which grew by night. —Apollodorus, The Library, book 1:7, second century B.C.

Curiously, ever since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer had been harboring a vague premonition that something dark and ominous lay in wait for him. A few years earlier, in the late 1940s, at a time when he had achieved a veritably iconic status in American society as the most respected and admired scientist and public policy adviser of his generation—even being featured on the covers of Time and Life magazines—he had read Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle.” Oppenheimer was utterly transfixed by this tale of obsession and tormented egotism in which the protagonist is haunted by a premonition that he was “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen.” Whatever it was, he knew that it would “overwhelm” him.

His left-wing activities during the 1930s in Berkeley, combined with his postwar resistance to the Air Force’s plans for massive strategic bombing with nuclear weapons—plans he called genocidal—had angered many powerful Washington insiders, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Lewis Strauss.

“What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”

a plan for the international control of atomic energy, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report

“What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer quipped, “A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].” The only defense against nuclear terrorism was the elimination of nuclear weapons.

And yet, as Dyson observed, Oppenheimer’s decision to participate in the creation of a genocidal weapon was “a Faustian bargain if there ever was one. . . . And of course we are still living with it. . . .” And like Faust, Robert Oppenheimer tried to renegotiate the bargain—and was cut down for doing so. He had led the effort to unleash the power of the atom, but when he sought to warn his countrymen of its dangers, to constrain America’s reliance on nuclear weapons, the government questioned his loyalty and put him on trial. His friends compared this public humiliation to the 1633 trial of another scientist, Galileo Galilei, by a medieval-minded church; others saw the ugly spectre of anti-Semitism in the event and recalled the ordeal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s.

He came from a family of first- and second-generation German immigrants striving to be American. Ethnically and culturally Jewish, the Oppenheimers of New York belonged to no synagogue. Without rejecting their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism—the Ethical Culture Society—that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism.

it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer’s odyssey that a life devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.

To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest.”

Julius had no qualms about encouraging his son in these adult pursuits. He and Ella knew they had a “genius” on their hands. “They adored him, worried about him and protected him,” recalled Robert’s cousin Babette Oppenheimer. “He was given every opportunity to develop along the lines of his own inclinations and at his own rate of speed.” One day, Julius gave Robert a professional-quality microscope which quickly became the boy’s favorite toy. “I think that my father was one of the most tolerant and human of men,” Robert would remark in later years. “His idea of what to do for people was to let them find out what they wanted.”

The school’s motto was “Deed, not Creed.” Founded in 1876, the Ethical Culture Society inculcated in its members a commitment to social action and humanitarianism: “Man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny.” Although an outgrowth of American Reform Judaism, Ethical Culture was itself a “non-religion,”

Adler founded in 1880 a tuition-free school for the sons and daughters of laborers called the Workingman’s School. In addition to the usual subjects of arithmetic, reading and history, Adler insisted that his students should be exposed to art, drama, dance and some kind of training in a technical skill likely to be of use in a society undergoing rapid industrialization. Every child, he believed, had some particular talent. Those who had no talent for mathematics might possess extraordinary “artistic gifts to make things with their hands.” For Adler, this insight was the “ethical seed—and the thing to do is to cultivate these various talents.” The goal was a “better world,” and thus the school’s mission was to “train reformers.” As the school evolved, it became a showcase of the progressive educational reform movement, and Adler himself fell under the influence of the educator and philosopher John Dewey and his school of American pragmatists.

Though they shunned notions of class struggle, members of the Society were pragmatic radicals committed to playing an active role in bringing about social change.

topics vigorously debated included the “Negro problem,” the ethics of war and peace, economic inequality and understanding “sex relations.” In his senior year, Robert was exposed to an extended discussion on the role of “the State.” The curriculum included a “short catechism of political ethics,” including “the ethics of loyalty and treason.” It was an extraordinary education in social relations and world affairs, an education that planted deep roots in Robert’s psyche—and one that would produce a bountiful harvest in the decades to come.

For most of the other boys there, Camp Koenig was a mountain paradise of fun and camaraderie. For Robert, it was an ordeal. Everything about him made him a target for the cruelties young adolescents delight in inflicting on those who are shy, sensitive or different. The other boys soon began calling him “Cutie” and teased him mercilessly. But Robert refused to fight back. Shunning athletics, he walked the trails, collecting rocks. He made one friend, who recalled that Robert was obsessed that summer with the writings of George Eliot. The novelist’s major work, Middlemarch, appealed to him greatly, perhaps because it explored so thoroughly a topic he found so mysterious: the life of the inner mind in relation to the making and breaking of human relationships.

“It’s no fun,” he once told a friend, “to turn the pages of a book and say, ‘Yes, yes, of course, I know that.’ ” Jeanette Mirsky knew Robert well enough in their senior year to think of him as a “special friend.” She never thought of him as shy in the usual sense, only distant. He bore a certain “hubris,” she thought, of the kind that carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Everything about Robert’s personality— from his abrupt, jerky way of walking to such little things as the making of a salad dressing—displayed, she thought, “a great need to declare his preeminence.”

Robert, however, was unabashed; indeed, he never failed to display absolute confidence in his mastery over wind and sea. He knew the full measure of his skill and saw no reason to cheat himself of what was clearly an emotionally liberating experience. Still, if not foolhardy, his behavior in stormy seas struck some friends as an example of Robert’s deeply ingrained arrogance, or perhaps a not very surprising extension of his inner resiliency. He had an irresistible urge to flirt with danger.

trench dysentery.

Smith agreed; he was taken aback, however, when Robert approached him in private shortly before their departure with a strange proposition: Would Smith agree to let him travel under the name “Smith” as his younger brother? Smith rejected the suggestion out of hand, and couldn’t help but think that some part of Robert was uncomfortable with being identifiably Jewish. Robert’s classmate Francis Fergusson later speculated, similarly, that his friend may have felt self-conscious about “his Jewishness and his wealth, and his eastern connections, and [that] his going to New Mexico was partly to escape from that.” Another classmate, Jeanette Mirsky, also thought Robert felt some unease about his Jewishness. “We all did,” said Mirsky. Yet just a few years later, at Harvard, Robert seemed much more relaxed about his Jewish heritage, telling a friend of Scotch-Irish ancestry, “Well, neither one of us came over on the Mayflower.”

“Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos . . . spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”

He seemed incapable of not flaunting his eccentricities. His diet often consisted of little more than chocolate, beer and artichokes. Lunch was often just a “black and tan”—a piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with chocolate syrup. Most of his classmates thought him diffident.

Introverted and intellectual, Robert was already reading such dark-spirited writers as Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. His favorite Shakespearean character was Hamlet. Horgan recalled years later that “Robert had bouts of melancholy, deep, deep depressions as a youngster. He would seem to be incommunicado emotionally for a day or two at a time. That happened while I was staying with him once or twice, and I was very distressed, had no idea what was causing it.”

Bernheim was more amused than annoyed by his friend’s eccentricities: “He wasn’t a comfortable person to be around, in a way, because he always gave the impression that he was thinking very deeply about things. When we roomed together he would spend evenings locked in his room, trying to do something with Planck’s constant or something like that.

“I jot down verses. As you so neatly remarked, they aren’t either meant or fit for anyone’s perusal, and to force their masturbatic excesses on others is a crime. But I shall stuff them in a drawer for a while and, if you want to see them, send them off.” That year, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published, and when Robert read it, he instantly identified with the poet’s sparse existentialism. His own poetry dwelt with themes of sadness and loneliness. Early in his tenure at Harvard, he wrote these lines: The dawn invests our substance with desire And the slow light betrays us, and our wistfulness: When the celestial sa fron Is faded and grown colourless, And the sun Gone sterile, and the growing fire Stirs us to waken, We find ourselves again Each in his separate prison Ready, hopeless For negotiation With other men.

I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk; I go to math lib[rary] and read and to the Phil[osophy] lib and divide my time between Minherr [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza—charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think?; I make stenches in three different labs, listen to [Professor Louis] Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.”

“My feeling about myself,” Oppenheimer later said of this period in his life, “was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.”

Abstractly, I feel that it is a terrible pity that there should be so many good people I shall not know, so many joys missed. But you are right. At least for me the desire is not a need; it is an impertinence.”

Robert’s friends were used to this florid language. “Everything he takes up,” Francis later observed, “he exaggerates.” Paul

But decades later, he would look back on his undergraduate years and confess: “Although I liked to work, I spread myself very thin and got by with murder; I got A’s in all these courses which I don’t think I should have.” He thought he had acquired a “very quick, superficial, eager familiarization with some parts of physics with tremendous lacunae and often with a tremendous lack of practice and discipline.”

Robert persuaded his physics teacher Percy Bridgman to write a letter of recommendation. In his letter, Bridgman wrote candidly that Oppenheimer had a “perfectly prodigious power of assimilation” but that “his weakness is on the experimental side. His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory. . . . It appears to me that it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe he will be a very unusual success.”

The daily routines of structured undergraduate existence had provided him with a protective shield; once again, he had been a superstar in the classroom. Now the shield was gone, and he was about to undergo a series of nearly disastrous existential crises

But then he dropped the bravado and confessed: “I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything . . . the lectures are vile.”

One day Robert caught himself staring at an empty blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand, muttering over and over, “The point is, the point is . . . the point is.” His Harvard friend Jeffries Wyman, who was also at Cambridge that year, detected signs of distress. Walking into his room one day, Wyman found Robert lying on the floor, groaning and rolling from side to side. In another account of this incident, Wyman reported Oppenheimer as telling him “that he felt so miserable in Cambridge, so unhappy, that he used sometimes to get down on the floor and roll from side to side—he told me that.” On another occasion, Rutherford witnessed Oppenheimer collapsing in a heap on the floor of the laboratory.

Robert had a “first class case of depression.” His parents also had some inkling that their son was in crisis. According to Fergusson, Robert’s depression “was further increased and made specific by the struggle he was carrying on with his mother.”

According to Fergusson, Robert went through the motions of courting her. He “did a very good, and chiefly rhetorical, imitation of being in love with her. She responded in kind.” For a short time, the couple were at least informally engaged. And then one evening they went to Inez’s room and crawled into bed together. “There they lay, tremulous with cold, afraid to do anything. And Inez began to sob. Then Robert began to sob.” After a time there was a knock at the door, and they heard Mrs. Oppenheimer’s voice saying, “Let me in, Inez, why won’t you let me in? I know Robert is in there.” Ella finally stomped off in a huff, and Robert emerged, miserable and thoroughly humiliated.

Late that autumn of 1925, Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him. Consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he “poisoned” an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk. Jeffries Wyman later said, “Whether or not this was an imaginary apple, or a real apple, whatever it was, it was an act of jealousy.” Fortunately, Blackett did not eat the apple; but university officials somehow were informed of the incident. As Robert himself confessed to Fergusson two months later, “He had kind of poisoned the head steward. It seemed incredible, but that was what he said. And he had actually used cyanide or something somewhere. And fortunately the tutor discovered it. Of course there was hell to pay with Cambridge.” If the alleged “poison” was potentially lethal, what Robert had done amounted to attempted murder. But this seems improbable, given what happened next. More likely, Robert had laced the apple with something that merely would have made Blackett sick;

Robert traveled to London for regularly scheduled sessions, but it was not a good experience. A Freudian psychoanalyst diagnosed dementia praecox, a now archaic label for symptoms associated with schizophrenia. He concluded that Oppenheimer was a hopeless case and that “further analysis would do more harm than good.”

Oppenheimer said he had a vivid realization: “I was on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic.”

One morning he locked his mother in her hotel room and left. Ella was furious. After this incident, Ella insisted that he see a French psychoanalyst. After several sessions this doctor announced that Robert was suffering a “crise morale” associated with sexual frustration. He prescribed “une femme” and “a course of aphrodisiacs.” Years later, Fergusson observed of that time: “He [Robert] was completely at a loss about his sex life.”

Perhaps in an attempt to divert him from his depression, Fergusson showed him some poetry written by his girlfriend, Frances Keeley, and then announced that he had proposed to Keeley and she had accepted. Robert was stunned at this news, and he snapped. “I leaned over to pick up a book,” Fergusson recalled, “and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for a little while. We must have made some noise. And then I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping.”

But I will keep my remorse and gratitude, and the shame I feel for my inadequacy to you, until I can do something rather less useless for you. I do not understand your forbearance nor your charity, but you must know that I will not forget them.”

“I am not well, and I am afraid to come to see you now for fear something melodramatic might happen.”

Robert remarked: “The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”

But he did read a book that appears to have resulted in an epiphany. The book was Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul. Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression. Proust’s work is a classic novel of introspection, and it left a deep and lasting impression on Oppenheimer.

Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.

Robert no doubt memorized these words precisely because he saw in himself an indifference to the sufferings he caused others. It was a painful insight. One can only speculate about a man’s inner life, but perhaps seeing an expression of his own dark and guilt-laden thoughts in print somehow lightened Robert’s psychological burden. It had to be comforting to know that he was not alone, that this was part of the human condition. He no longer need despise himself; he could love. And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book—and not a psychiatrist—which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression.

One day some years later, when Oppenheimer offered his friend several books, Dirac politely declined the gift, remarking that “reading books interfered with thought.”

Tall and athletic, a warm and gentle soul with a wry sense of humor, Bohr was universally admired. He always spoke in a self-effacing near-whisper. “Not often in life,” Albert Einstein wrote to Bohr in the spring of 1920, “has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.” Einstein was charmed by Bohr’s manner of “uttering his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who [believed himself to be] in the possession of definite truth.” Oppenheimer came to speak of Bohr as “his God.”

some physicists rely almost exclusively on mathematical language to describe the reality of nature; any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility; it’s only pedagogical. I think this is largely true of [Paul] Dirac; I think that his invention is never initially verbal but initially algebraic.” By contrast, he realized that a physicist like Bohr “regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely, as a way to make himself intelligible to other people. . . . So there’s a very wide spectrum. [At Cambridge] I was simply learning and hadn’t learned very much.” By temperament and talent, Robert was very much a verbal physicist in the style of Bohr.