American Prometheus (2 page)

The agony and humiliation that Oppenheimer endured in 1954 were not unique during the McCarthy era. But as a defendant, he was incomparable. He was America’s Prometheus, “the father of the atomic bomb,” who had led the effort to wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Afterwards, he had spoken wisely about its dangers and hopefully about its potential benefits and then, near despair, critically about the proposals for nuclear warfare being adopted by the military and promoted by academic strategists: “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?”

In the late 1940s, as U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated, Oppenheimer’s persistent desire to raise such tough questions about nuclear weapons greatly troubled Washington’s national security establishment. The return of the Republicans to the White House in 1953 elevated advocates of massive nuclear retaliation, such as Lewis Strauss, to positions of power in Washington. Strauss and his allies were determined to silence the one man who they feared could credibly challenge their policies.

In assaulting his politics and his professional judgments—his life and his values really—Oppenheimer’s critics in 1954 exposed many aspects of his character: his ambitions and insecurities, his brilliance and naïveté, his determination and fearfulness, his stoicism and his bewilderment. Much was revealed in the more than one thousand densely printed pages of the transcript of the AEC’s Personnel Security Hearing Board,
In the Matter of
J. Robert Oppenheimer;
and yet the hearing transcript reveals how little his antagonists had been able to pierce through the emotional armor this complex man had constructed around himself since his early years.
American
Prometheus
explores the enigmatic personality behind that armor as it follows Robert from his childhood on New York’s Upper West Side at the turn of the twentieth century to his death in 1967. It is a deeply personal biography researched and written in the belief that a person’s public behavior and his policy decisions (and in Oppenheimer’s case perhaps even his science) are guided by the private experiences of a lifetime.

A QUARTER CENTURY in the making, American Prometheus is based on many thousands of records gathered from archives and personal collections in this country and abroad. It draws on Oppenheimer’s own massive collection of papers in the Library of Congress, and on thousands of pages of FBI records accumulated over more than a quarter century of surveillance. Few men in public life have been subjected to such scrutiny. Readers will “hear” his words, captured by FBI recording devices and transcribed. And yet, because even the written record tells only part of the truth of a man’s life, we have also interviewed nearly a hundred of Oppenheimer’s closest friends, relatives and colleagues. Many of the individuals interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s are no longer alive. But the stories they told leave behind a nuanced portrait of a remarkable man who led us into the nuclear age and struggled, unsuccessfully—as we have continued to struggle—to find a way to eliminate the danger of nuclear war.

Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.” Oppenheimer tried valiantly to divert us from that bomb culture by containing the nuclear threat he had helped to set loose. His most impressive effort was a plan for the international control of atomic energy, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report (but was in fact conceived and largely written by Oppenheimer). It remains a singular model for rationality in the nuclear age.

Cold War politics at home and abroad, however, doomed the plan, and America, along with a growing list of other nations, embraced the bomb for the next half century. With the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear annihilation seemed to pass, but in another ironic twist, the threat of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism is probably more imminent in the twenty-first century than ever before.

In the post-9/11 era, it is worth recalling that at the dawn of the nuclear age, the father of the atomic bomb warned us that it was a weapon of indiscriminate terror that instantly had made America more vulnerable to wanton attack. When he was asked in a closed Senate hearing in 1946 “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city,” he responded pointedly, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” To the follow-up question of a startled senator, “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.

Oppenheimer’s warnings were ignored—and ultimately, he was silenced. Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him. As Ward Evans, the dissenting member of the Atomic Energy Commission’s hearing board, wrote, denying Oppenheimer his security clearance was “a black mark on the escutcheon of our country.”

PROLOGUE

Damn it, I happen to love this country.

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, February 25, 1967: Despite the menacing weather and bitter cold that chilled the Northeast, six hundred friends and colleagues—Nobel laureates, politicians, generals, scientists, poets, novelists, composers and acquaintances from all walks of life—gathered to recall the life and mourn the death of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Some knew him as their gentle teacher and affectionately called him “Oppie.” Others knew him as a great physicist, a man who in 1945 had become the “father” of the atomic bomb, a national hero and an emblem of the scientist as public servant. And everyone remembered with deep bitterness how, just nine years later, the new Republican administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower had declared him a security risk—making Robert Oppenheimer the most prominent victim of America’s anticommunist crusade. And so they came with heavy hearts to remember a brilliant man whose remarkable life had been touched by triumph as well as tragedy.

The Nobelists included such world-renowned physicists as Isidor I. Rabi, Eugene Wigner, Julian Schwinger, Tsung Dao Lee and Edwin McMillan. Albert Einstein’s daughter, Margot, was there to honor the man who had been her father’s boss at the Institute for Advanced Study. Robert Serber—a student of Oppenheimer’s at Berkeley in the 1930s and a close friend and veteran of Los Alamos—was there, as was the great Cornell physicist Hans Bethe, the Nobelist who had revealed the inner workings of the sun. Irva Denham Green, a neighbor from the tranquil Caribbean island of St. John, where the Oppenheimers had built a beach cottage as a refuge after his public humiliation in 1954, sat elbow to elbow with powerful luminaries of America’s foreign policy establishment: lawyer and perennial presidential adviser John J. McCloy; the Manhattan Project’s military chief, General Leslie R. Groves; Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze; Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey. To represent the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent his scientific adviser, Donald F. Hornig, a Los Alamos veteran who had been with Oppenheimer at “Trinity,” the test on July 16, 1945, of the first atomic bomb. Sprinkled among the scientists and Washington’s power elite were men of literature and culture: the poet Stephen Spender, the novelist John O’Hara, the composer Nicholas Nabokov and George Balanchine, the director of the New York City Ballet.

Oppenheimer’s widow, Katherine “Kitty” Puening Oppenheimer, sat in the front row at Princeton University’s Alexander Hall for what many would remember as a subdued, bittersweet memorial service. Sitting with her were their daughter, Toni, age twenty-two, and their son, Peter, age twenty-five. Robert’s younger brother, Frank Oppenheimer, whose own career as a physicist had been destroyed during the McCarthyite maelstrom, sat next to Peter.

Strains of Igor Stravinsky’s
Requiem Canticles,
a work Robert Oppenheimer had heard for the first time, and admired, in this very hall the previous autumn, filled the auditorium. And then Hans Bethe—who had known Oppenheimer for three decades—gave the first of three eulogies. “He did more than any other man,” Bethe said, “to make American theoretical physics great. . . . He was a leader. . . . But he was not domineering, he never dictated what should be done. He brought out the best in us, like a good host with his guests. . . .” At Los Alamos, where he directed thousands in a putative race against the Germans to build the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer had transformed a pristine mesa into a laboratory and forged a diverse group of scientists into an efficient team. Bethe and other veterans of Los Alamos knew that without Oppenheimer the primordial “gadget” they had built in New Mexico would never have been finished in time for its use in the war.

Henry DeWolf Smyth, a physicist and Princeton neighbor, gave the second eulogy. In 1954, Smyth had been the only one of five commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) who had voted to restore Oppenheimer’s security clearance. As a witness to the star-chamber “security hearing” Oppenheimer had endured, Smyth fully comprehended the travesty that had been committed: “Such a wrong can never be righted; such a blot on our history never erased. . . . We regret that his great work for his country was repaid so shabbily. . . .”

Finally, it was the turn of George Kennan, veteran diplomat and ambassador, the father of America’s postwar containment policy against the Soviet Union, and a longtime friend and colleague of Oppenheimer’s at the Institute for Advanced Studies. No man had stimulated Kennan’s thinking about the myriad dangers of the nuclear age more than Oppenheimer. No man had been a better friend, defending his work and providing him a refuge at the Institute when Kennan’s dissenting views on America’s militarized Cold War policies made him a pariah in Washington.

“On no one,” Kennan said, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. No one ever saw more clearly the dangers arising for humanity from this mounting disparity. This anxiety never shook his faith in the value of the search for truth in all its forms, scientific and humane. But there was no one who more passionately desired to be useful in averting the catastrophes to which the development of the weapons of mass destruction threatened to lead. It was the interests of mankind that he had in mind here; but it was as an American, and through the medium of this national community to which he belonged, that he saw his greatest possibilities for pursuing these aspirations.

“In the dark days of the early fifties, when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’ ”
¹

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER WAS AN ENIGMA, a theoretical physicist who displayed the charismatic qualities of a great leader, an aesthete who cultivated ambiguities. In the decades after his death, his life became shrouded in controversy, myth and mystery. For scientists, like Dr. Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobelist, Oppenheimer was “a symbol of the tragedy of the modern nuclear scientist.” To liberals, he became the most prominent martyr of the McCarthyite witch-hunt, a symbol of the right wing’s unprincipled animus. To his political enemies, he was a closet communist and a proven liar.

He was, in fact, an immensely human figure, as talented as he was complex, at once brilliant and naïve, a passionate advocate for social justice and a tireless government adviser whose commitment to harnessing a runaway nuclear arms race earned him powerful bureaucratic enemies. As his friend Rabi said, in addition to being “very wise, he was very foolish.”

The physicist Freeman Dyson saw deep and poignant contradictions in Robert Oppenheimer. He had dedicated his life to science and rational thought. 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.

But neither comparison helps us to understand Robert Oppenheimer the man, his accomplishments as a scientist and the unique role he played as an architect of the nuclear era. This is the story of his life.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

“He Received Every New Idea
as Perfectly Beautiful ”