American Prometheus (68 page)

On occasion, Oppenheimer, worn down by these territorial intrigues, vented his frustrations on those close to him. When he caught Freeman Dyson indiscreetly gossiping about an impending appointment of another physicist, Dyson quickly found himself summoned to Oppie’s office. “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 contain his fierce arrogance. Abraham Pais recalled several occasions when Oppenheimer’s unnecessarily biting comments caused young scholars to come into his office, sobbing.

Rare was the lecturer who could fend off Oppenheimer’s interventions, but Res Jost did it memorably. Jost, a Swiss mathematical physicist, was giving a seminar one day when Oppenheimer interrupted to ask if he could explain a point in further detail. Jost looked up and said, “Yes,” but then proceeded with his talk. Oppenheimer stopped him and said, “I meant, will you explain so and so?” This time, Jost said, “No.” When Oppenheimer asked why, Jost replied, “Because you will not understand my explanation, and you will ask more questions and use up my whole hour.” Robert sat quietly through the rest of Jost’s lecture.

Restless, brilliant and emotionally detached, Oppenheimer always seemed an enigma to those who observed him up close. Pais, who saw him almost daily at the Institute, thought him an extraordinarily private person, “not given to showing his feelings.” Rarely, a window would open up to reveal the intensity of his emotions. One evening, Pais went to Princeton’s Garden Theater to view Jean Renoir’s 1937
La Grande illusion,
a classic antiwar film about comradeship, class and betrayal among World War I soldiers. After the lights went up, Pais spied Robert and Kitty sitting in the back row—and he could see that Robert had been weeping.

On another occasion in 1949, Pais invited Robert and Kitty to a party at his small apartment on Dickinson Street. During the course of the evening, Pais was inspired to pull out his guitar and urged everyone to sit on the floor and sing folk songs. Robert complied, but Pais noticed he did so with an “air of hauteur clearly indicating that he thought this was an absurd situation for him to be in.” And yet, after the group had been singing for a while, Pais glanced over at Robert and was “touched to see that his attitude of superiority was gone; instead, he now looked like a man of feeling, hungry for simple comradeship.”

THE PACE of life at the Institute was serene and civilized; tea was served every afternoon between three and four in the Common Room on the main floor of Fuld Hall. “Tea is where we explain to each other,” Oppenheimer once said, “what we don’t understand.” Two or even three times a week, Oppenheimer hosted a lively seminar, often on physics but sometimes in other fields as well. “The best way to send information,” he explained, “is to wrap it up in a person.” Ideally, the exchange of ideas required some fireworks. “The young physicists,” observed Dr. Walter W. Stewart, an economist at the Institute, “are beyond doubt the noisiest, rowdiest, most active and most intellectually alert group we have here. . . . A few days ago I asked one of them, as they came bursting out of a seminar, ‘How did it go?’ ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Everything we knew about physics last week isn’t true!’ ”

On occasion, however, guest speakers found it unnerving to be subjected to what came to be called the “Oppenheimer treatment.” Dyson described the experience in a letter he wrote his parents back in England: “I have been observing rather carefully his behavior during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms. . . . he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control.” Some were unnerved by another of his tics—he’d bite the tip of his thumb, clicking his front teeth, again and again.

One day in the autumn of 1950, Oppenheimer arranged to have Harold W. Lewis present a summary of a paper he, Lewis and S. A. Wouthuysen had published in
Physical Review
on the multiple production of mesons. The paper was based on one of his last research efforts just before becoming director of the Institute, and Oppenheimer was understandably anxious to have a serious discussion of his work. Instead, the gathered physicists veered off into a discussion of
Kugelblitz
or “ball lightning,” an unexplained phenomenon in which lightning has sometimes been observed in the form of a ball. As they discussed what might explain such events, Oppenheimer began to flush with fury. Finally, he rose and stalked out muttering, “Fireballs, fireballs!”

Dyson recalled that when he gave a lecture praising Dick Feynman’s recent work on quantum electrodynamics, Oppenheimer “came down on me like a ton of bricks.” Afterwards, he nevertheless came up to Dyson and apologized for his behavior. At the time, Oppenheimer thought Feynman’s approach—done with a maximum of intuition and a minimum of mathematical calculations—was fundamentally wrong, and he simply wouldn’t listen to Dyson’s defense. Only after Hans Bethe came down from Cornell and gave a lecture in support of Feynman’s theories did Oppenheimer allow himself to reconsider his views. When Dyson next lectured, Oppenheimer sat in uncharacteristic silence; and afterwards, Dyson found in his mailbox a very brief note: “Nolo contendere. R.O.”

Dyson felt a bundle of emotions in Oppenheimer’s presence. Bethe had told him that he ought to study with Oppie because he was “so much deeper.” But Dyson was disappointed with Oppenheimer as a physicist— Oppie no longer seemed to have the time for doing the hard work, the calculations, that it took to be a theoretical physicist. “He may have been deeper,” Dyson recalled, “but still he didn’t really know what was going on!” And he was often perplexed by Oppenheimer as a man, his odd combination of philosophical detachment and driving ambition. He thought of Oppie as the kind of person whose worst temptation was to “conquer the Demon and then to save mankind.”

Dyson saw Oppie as guilty of “pretentiousness.” Sometimes he simply couldn’t understand Oppenheimer’s delphic pronouncements—and this reminded him that “incomprehensibility can be mistaken for depth.” And yet, despite it all, Dyson found himself attracted to Oppenheimer.

In early 1948,
Time
magazine ran a short news item on an essay Oppenheimer had recently published in
Technology Review.
“Science’s sense of guilt,”
Time
reported, “was frankly admitted last week” by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. The story quoted the wartime head of Los Alamos Laboratory as saying, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

Oppenheimer must have understood that such words, especially coming from him, would attract controversy. Even Isidor Rabi, a close friend, thought the words ill chosen: “That sort of crap, we never talked about it that way. He felt sin, well, he didn’t know who he was.” The incident inspired Rabi to say of his friend that “he was full of too many humanities.” Rabi knew Oppie too well to be angry with him, and he knew that one of his friend’s weaknesses was “a tendency to make things sound mystical.” Oppenheimer’s former teacher at Harvard, Professor Percy Bridgman, told a reporter, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”

Oppenheimer was not, of course, the only scientist to harbor such thoughts. That year his former Cambridge tutor, Patrick M. S. Blackett (of the “poisoned apple” affair), published
Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy,
the first full-blown critique of the decision to use the bomb on Japan. By August 1945, Blackett argued, the Japanese were virtually defeated; the atomic bombs had actually been used to forestall a Soviet share in the occupation of postwar Japan. “One can only imagine,” Blackett wrote, “the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.” The atomic bombings were “not so much the last military act of the Second World War,” he concluded, “as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”

Blackett suggested that many Americans were aware that atomic diplomacy had been a factor—and that this had produced an “intense inner psychological conflict in the minds of many English and American people who knew, or suspected, some of the real facts. This conflict was particularly intense in the minds of the atomic scientists themselves, who rightly felt a deep responsibility at seeing their brilliant scientific work used in this way.” Blackett was describing, of course, the internal torment felt by his former pupil. He even cited the June 1, 1946, speech Oppenheimer had given at MIT in which he had bluntly said that the United States had “used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

Blackett’s book created a stir when it was published the following year in America. Rabi attacked it in the pages of the
Atlantic Monthly:
“The wailing over Hiroshima finds no echo in Japan.” He insisted that the city was a “legitimate target.” But, significantly, Oppenheimer himself never criticized Blackett’s thesis—and later that year he warmly congratulated his old tutor when Blackett won the Nobel Prize in physics. Moreover, when, a few years later, Blackett published another book critical of the American decision to use the bomb,
Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations,
Oppenheimer wrote to say that while he thought some points were not “quite straight,” he nevertheless agreed with the “major thesis.”

THAT SPRING, a new monthly magazine, Physics Today, featured on its inaugural cover a black-and-white photograph of Oppie’s porkpie hat slung over a metal pipe—no caption was needed to identify the owner of the famous
chapeau.
After Einstein, Oppenheimer was undoubtedly the most renowned scientist in the country—and this at a time when scientists were suddenly regarded as paragons of wisdom. His advice was eagerly sought in and out of government and his influence sometimes seemed pervasive. “He wanted to be on good terms with the Washington generals,” Dyson observed, “and to be a savior of humanity at the same time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“He Couldn’t Understand
Why He Did It”

He told me that his nerve just gave way at that moment. . . .
He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things.

DAVID BOHM

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948, Robert returned to Europe, which he had last visited nineteen years earlier. He was then a promising young physicist from whom great work was expected. He returned as surely the best-known physicist of his generation, the founder of the most prominent school of theoretical physics in America—and the “father of the atomic bomb.” His itinerary took him to Paris, Copenhagen, London and Brussels, in all of which he gave talks or participated in physics conferences. As a young man, he had come of age intellectually studying in Göttingen, Zurich and Leiden, and he had eagerly anticipated the trip. But by the end of September, he was writing his brother that he was somehow disappointed at what he had found. “The
Europa reise
is,” he told Frank, “as it was in the old days, a certain time for inventory. . . . In physics the conferences have been good, yet everywhere—Copenhagen, England, Paris, even here [Brussels], there is the phrase ‘you see, we are somewhat out of things. . . .’ ” This led Robert to conclude, almost wistfully, “Above all I have the knowledge that it is in America largely that it will be decided what manner of world we are to live in.”

Robert then turned to the primary purpose of his letter: to urge Frank to seek “the comfort, the strength, the advice of a good lawyer.” The House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had been holding hearings that summer, and Robert was worried for his brother—and perhaps himself. “It has been hard,” he wrote Frank, “since we left to follow in detail what all is up with the [J. Parnell] Thomas Committee. . . . Even the Hiss story seemed to me a menacing portent.”

That August, a
Time
magazine editor and former communist named Whittaker Chambers had testified before HUAC that Alger Hiss, a New Deal lawyer and former high-ranking State Department official, had been a member of a secret communist cell in Washington. Chambers’ accusations against Hiss quickly became the centerpiece of the Republican case that Roosevelt’s New Dealers had allowed communists to worm their way into the heart of the American foreign policy establishment. Hiss sued Chambers for libel in September 1948—but by the end of the year Hiss was indicted for perjury.

Oppenheimer was right to think the Hiss case a “menacing portent.” If someone of Hiss’ stature could be brought down by HUAC, he feared what the Committee could do to his brother, whose Communist Party affiliation was well known. Robert knew that back in March 1947, the
Washington
Times-Herald
had run a story charging that Frank had been a Party member. Frank had foolishly denied the truth of the story. Without being explicit, Robert observed that Frank had “thought about it a lot these last years. . . .” It was in this context that he gently suggested that Frank get a lawyer, and not just a good lawyer. He needed someone who knew “his way around Washington, the Congress . . . and above all the press. Why don’t you consider Herb Marks, who may have all these qualifications?” Robert hoped that his brother would not be caught up in one of HUAC’s witch-hunts; but clearly, Frank had to be prepared.