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In less than a decade and a half, Oppenheimer had transformed himself through his work and his social life from an awkward scientific prodigy into a sophisticated and charismatic intellectual leader.
He doesn’t know anything about
Twentieth Century Limited, a luxury passenger train bound for New York. They continued their discussions aboard the train. By then, Groves already had Oppenheimer in mind as a candidate
Rashomon,
As the director of a weapons laboratory that would integrate the diverse efforts of the far-flung sites of the Manhattan Project and mold them quickly into a usable atomic weapon, he would have to conjure up skills he did not yet have, deal with problems he had never imagined, develop work habits entirely at odds with his previous lifestyle, and adjust to attitudes and modes of behavior (such as security considerations) that were emotionally awkward and alien to his experience.
remake a significant part of his personality if not his intellect, and he was going to have to do all this in short order.
erudition,”
pictures of the Japanese bombing that suburb of Shanghai. You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from
“He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,” McKibbin said, “very clear blue.” They reminded her of the pale, icy blue color of gentians, a wildflower that grew on the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
erudition
basketball. This would bring the weight of either device to about a ton—still something deliverable by airplane.11
reprove
incompressibility
“You have pointed out,” Oppenheimer wrote him, “that you are afraid your position in the laboratory might make it necessary for you to engage in prolonged argument and discussion in order to obtain agreement upon which the progress of the work would depend. Nothing that I can put in writing can eliminate this necessity.” The scientists had to be free to argue—and Oppenheimer would arbitrate disputes only for the purpose of reaching some kind of collegial consensus. “I am not arguing that the laboratory should be so constituted,” he told Parsons. “It is in fact so constituted.”
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.
Oppenheimer apparently argued that as scientists they had no right to a louder voice in determining the gadget’s fate than any other citizen.
few weeks, he worked feverishly to establish a public record that would
perfidy.
Washington’s Cosmos Club with James Conant and Lee DuBridge.
July 8 press conference, Eisenhower indicated that he agreed with Oppenheimer’s notion of the need for more “candor” about nuclear weapons.
Oppenheimer had talked to the President and gone to see the two 1952 presidential candidates, General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson;
19, Rue du Mont-Cenis, near the foot of the Sacré Coeur Cathedral,
December 4, President Eisenhower left for a five-day trip to Bermuda, and Strauss went with him. When they returned five days later, Strauss began to choreograph the next steps in the government’s case against Oppenheimer.
Strauss had arranged in advance for Volpe’s office to be bugged.20
William Lloyd Garrison,
beforehand of the moves he was contemplating.” Such tactics so offended Harold Green
“Einstein thinks that the attack on me is so outrageous that I should just resign.” Perhaps recalling his own experience in Nazi Germany,
Einstein argued that Oppenheimer “had no obligation to subject himself to the witch-hunt, that he had served his country well, and that if this was the reward she [America] offered he should turn his back on her.”
“He loved America,” Hobson later insisted. “And this love was as deep as his love of science.”
“Oppenheimer is not a gypsy like me,”
Building T-3, a dilapidated two-story temporary structure built during the war on the Mall near the Washington Monument at 16th Street and Constitution. It housed the office of the AEC’s director of research, but for this occasion, Room 2022 had been turned into a bare-bones courtroom.
Tuesday, April 13, 1954, the New York Times broke the story in a front-page exclusive written by James Reston. The headline read: DR. OPPENHEIMER SUSPENDED BY A.E.C. IN SECURITY REVIEW; SCIENTIST DEFENDS RECORD; HEARINGS STARTED; ACCESS TO SECRET DATA DENIED NUCLEAR EXPERT—RED TIES ALLEGED
“The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government. . . . [T]he problem was simple: All Oppenheimer needed to do was go to Washington, tell the officials that they were fools, and then go home.”
traveled much less fellow
invidious
Robert quietly explained the physics behind what Sis had seen: As viewed from St. John, layers in the earth’s atmosphere functioned like a prism, creating for just a second a flash of green. Sis was thrilled by the sight, and charmed by Robert’s patient explanation.
“Do you think you’d like to go to the moon?” Robert replied, “Well, I sure know some people I’d like to send there.”
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.”
Oppenheimer named ten. At the top of the list was Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, and then came the Bhagavad-Gita . . . and last was Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Arthur Schlesinger,
Thomas Jefferson, “often wrote of the ‘brotherly spirit of science.’ . . . We have not, I know, always given evidence of that brotherly spirit of science. This is not because we lack vital common or intersecting scientific interests. It is in part because, with countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history.” And then he turned to Johnson and said, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken
...more
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Stern’s book, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial,
“The library is beautiful, and the setting. It is also an illustration of how we don’t anticipate the most obvious consequences. This happened to us in a major way with the bomb in Los Alamos. As for the ceiling for the library, we wanted the best light, the light in just the right way. . . . In the daylight it turned out to be wonderful. But no one, not one of us, foresaw that not only would light come in, but it would go out—into the sky.”
He then reminded Oppenheimer of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre “in which the hero is finally freed of guilt by recognizing responsibility. As I understand it, one feels guilty for past actions, because they grew out of what one was and still is.” Bohm believed that mere guilt feelings are meaningless. “I can understand that your dilemma was a peculiarly difficult one. Only you can assess the way in which you were responsible for what happened.
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) and The Life and Death of Stalin (1953). Robert particularly liked his 1964 biography of Lenin.
David Lilienthal told the New York Times: “The world has lost a noble spirit—a genius who brought together poetry and science.”
fulsome
“a man of exceptional physical elegance and grace, an aristocrat with an enduring touch of the intellectual bohemian about him.”
