American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

To liberals, he became the most prominent martyr of the McCarthyite witch-hunt, a symbol of the right wing’s unprincipled animus.

Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era.

To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me.

naming a baby after any living relative is contrary to European Jewish tradition.

More than most boys, Robert grew up feeling torn between his mother’s strict standards and his father’s gregarious behavior. At times, he felt ashamed of his father’s spontaneity—and at the same time he would feel guilty that he felt ashamed.

When he was only five or six, Ella insisted that he take piano lessons. Robert dutifully practiced every day, hating it all the while. About a year later, he fell sick and his mother characteristically suspected the worst, perhaps a case of infantile paralysis. Nursing him back to health, she kept asking him how he felt until one day he looked up from his sickbed and grumbled, “Just as I do when I have to take piano lessons.” Ella relented, and the lessons ended.

“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.”

“Man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny.”

Elliott taught ethics in a Socratic-style seminar where students discussed specific social and political issues. Education in Life Problems was a required course for all of the high school students. Often he would pose a personal moral dilemma for his students, such as asking them if they had a choice between a job teaching or a job that paid more working in Wrigley’s chewing gum factory—which would they choose? During Robert’s years at the school, some of the topics vigorously debated included the “Negro problem,” the ethics of war and peace, economic inequality and understanding “sex relations.”

Oppenheimer was not oblivious to these issues. Indeed, early that autumn of 1922 he joined the Student Liberal Club, founded three years earlier as a forum for students to discuss politics and current events. In its early years, the club attracted large audiences with such speakers as the liberal journalist Lincoln Steffens, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and the pacifist A. J. Muste. In March 1923, the club took a formal stand against the university’s discriminatory admissions policies.

To demonstrate that he knew something about physics, he listed fifteen books he claimed to have read. Years later, he heard that when the faculty committee met to consider his petition, one professor, George Washington Pierce, quipped, “Obviously, if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.”

Oppenheimer was so clumsy with the lab’s galvanometer that its delicate suspensions had to be replaced every time he used the apparatus.

We were all going through a series of love affairs [with ideas] . . . but perhaps we lacked some of the more mundane forms of love affairs that make life easier.”

. 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.”

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.”

“How is it going?” Robert replied bluntly, “I’m in difficulties.” Bohr asked, “Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?” When Robert replied, “I don’t know,” Bohr said, “That’s bad.”

Fluent in German, Robert quickly grasped the debilitating political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. He later speculated that the Carios “had the typical bitterness on which the Nazi movement rested.” That autumn, he wrote his brother that everyone seemed concerned with “trying to make Germany a practically successful & sane country. Neuroticism is very severely frowned upon. So are Jews, Prussians & French.”

Ehrenfest insisted on simplicity and clarity, traits that Robert had not yet embraced. “I probably still had a fascination with formalism and complication,” he said, “so that the large part of what had me stuck or engaged was not his dish. And some of the things that were his dish I didn’t appreciate how really valuable it would be to have them in clear, good order.”

“His strength,” Pauli soon wrote Ehrenfest, “is that he has many and good ideas, and has much imagination. His weakness is that he is much too quickly satisfied with poorly based statements, that he does not answer his own often quite interesting questions for lack of perseverance and thoroughness.

Unfortunately, he has a very bad trait: he confronts me with a rather unconditional belief in authority and considers all I say as final and definitive truth. . . . I do not know how to make him give that up.”

“We felt a certain kinship,” Rabi said. It was that rare brand of friendship, forged in youth, that survives long separations. “You start off,” Rabi recalled, “just where you left off.”

“There was no mistaking the intensity of Oppenheimer’s affection for his country,” remarked Bloch. “His attachment was most apparent.”

“[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is— absurd.”

“My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

“We were always expecting him,” recalled one early graduate student, James Brady, “to write on the board with it [the cigarette] and smoke the chalk, but I don’t think he ever did.”

“Robert’s blackboard manners were inexcusable,”

Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

“He read almost everything [novels and poetry] that came out.” Cherniss saw him reading the classical Greek poets, but also such contemporary novelists as Ernest Hemingway. He particularly liked Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

On one occasion, Pauli kept interrupting Oppie’s presentation until finally another eminent physicist, H. A. Kramers, shouted, “Shut up, Pauli, and let us hear what Oppenheimer has to say. You can explain how wrong it is afterward.”

I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.”

Too great a dose of ethical culture can often sour the budding intellectual who would prefer a more profound approach to human relations and man’s place in the universe.”

We were animated by a candid faith in the efficiency of reason and persuasion, in the operation of democratic processes and in the ultimate triumph of justice.”

During a visit to Germany, however, he quickly acquired an appreciation of the fascist menace: “The whole society seemed corrupt.” His father’s relatives had told him “some of the terrible things” that were happening in Hitler’s Germany, and he was inclined to support any group determined to “do something about it.”

“It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out.”

Wow

The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.

Soon afterward, Robert surprised his friends by turning up at a party in San Francisco unannounced with Kitty Harrison on his arm. That evening Kitty was wearing a corsage of flaming orchids. Everyone was rather uncomfortable, since the hostess of the party was Estelle Caen, Oppie’s most recent lover. Chevalier called it “a not altogether happy occasion.”

That autumn Lawrence was trying, unsuccessfully, to bring Oppenheimer aboard the bomb project. “If he would just stop these nonsensical things,” he complained to Kamen, “we could get him on the project, but it’s impossible to get the Army to accept him.”

‘My God, what kind of a situation it’s going to be to bring a weapon like that [into the world]; it might end up by blowing up the world.’ Some of us brought this up to Oppenheimer; and basically his answer was, ‘Look, what if the Nazis get it first?’

It is not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that in order to succeed, at age thirty-nine, Robert Oppenheimer would have to remake a significant part of his personality if not his intellect, and he was going to have to do all this in short order.

When Los Alamos opened in March 1943, a hundred scientists, engineers and support staff converged on the new community; within six months there were a thousand and a year later there were 3,500 people living on the mesa. By the summer of 1945, Oppenheimer’s wilderness outpost had grown into a small town of at least 4,000 civilians and 2,000 men in uniform.

You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from it. The prudent man can’t escape, [nor] the honest man.

sadly beautiful

Rabi also gave a less practical but more profound reason for not joining: He did not, he told Oppenheimer, wish to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a weapon of mass destruction.

Wartime compelled some mild-mannered men to contemplate what was once unthinkable.

Lansdale began with an obvious attempt to flatter Oppenheimer. “I want to say this without any intent of flattery . . . you’re probably the most intelligent man I ever met.”

Victor Weisskopf recalled Bohr telling him that “this bomb may be a terrible thing, but it might also be the ‘Great Hope.’

“Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.”

“Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization,” he wrote, “[but] any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes an increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.”

Everyone thought of Teller as a “prima donna”; Bob Serber called him “a disaster to any organization.” But instead of firing him, Oppenheimer gave Teller what he wanted, freedom to explore the feasibility of a thermonuclear bomb. Oppenheimer even agreed to give him a precious hour of his time once a week just to talk about whatever was on Teller’s mind.

“We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in the backs of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.

Based on their reading of intercepted Japanese cable traffic (code-named “Magic”), McCloy and many other ranking officials could see that key members of the Tokyo government were trying to find a way to terminate the war, largely on Washington’s terms.