“He really flattened me,” Dyson recalled. “I saw him at his most fierce. It was bad. I really felt like a worm; he convinced me that I had really betrayed all the trust that he’d ever had in me. . . . That’s the way he was. He wanted to run things his own way. The Institute was his own little empire.” At Princeton, the abrasive streak in Oppenheimer that was so rarely seen at Los Alamos would sometimes appear with a ferociousness that startled even his closest friends. To be sure, most of the time Robert charmed people with his wit and gracious manners. But sometimes he seemed unable to
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