American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

FOR A FEW YEARS after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues.

For several decades, American scientists had been leaving the academy in droves for corporate jobs in industrial research laboratories. In 1890, America had only four such labs; by 1930 there were over a thousand. And World War II had only accelerated this trend.

“They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project.”

Asked whether humanity now had the capability to destroy itself, Oppenheimer replied, “Not quite. Not quite. You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what’s left will be human.”

A few years later, he gave a hint of his feelings to Max Born, his former professor in Göttingen, who had made it clear that he rather disapproved of Oppenheimer’s decision to work on the atomic bomb. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote in his memoirs, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote Born, “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.”

At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”