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By Root 1227 0

evidently less gifted, won Nobels or are remembered for insights of special profundity, few in the field recall today any professional paper written by Oppenheimer. (Perhaps his most notable contribution, David Cassidy concludes, was his prediction of collapsing stars that would be identified over three decades later as black holes.) His friend and colleague I. I. Rabi conjectured that Oppenheimer’s physics suffered from his knowledge of subjects outside his field, Hinduism in particular, which ‘surrounded him like a fog’ and so mystified his physics as to rob him of the confidence he needed to follow his scientific instincts and publish. He was better when he stood at a bigger canvas, synthesizing and interpreting the solid experimental work of others, seeing connections and organizing meetings of scientists whose work Oppenheimer, often alone, understood as intersecting. The broadly educated theoretician was also something of a scientific impresario, whose insight and good manners might override his arrogance.

As John Adams and Peter Sellars have recognized, there is an operatic quality to Oppenheimer’s life: its trajectory rose as the pampered boy genius got established in the international community of physicists, and then became the mastermind of the world’s first atomic bomb—after which it plummeted, as Oppenheimer’s own agonized doubts about his achievement, coupled with Cold War-inspired suspicions of his past political involvements, gave his enemies the chance to humiliate him, strip him of his fame, and leave him, like Sophocles’ Oedipus, to ‘live with every bitter thing’ until his death in 1967. This version of Oppenheimer’s life is, of course, too pat. Yet it is hard to miss the tragic quality of Oppenheimer’s story. Oppenheimer looked like a man who had known tragedy, inspiring comparisons to tormented religious figures; with his arrestingly blue eyes, his ‘halo’ of dark hair, and his thin, in times of stress nearly emaciated body, he looked, thought a friend, like one of the apostles in a Renaissance painting. Given at times to philosophical musing and self-doubt, Oppenheimer clearly felt guilty about his role in building the bomb, telling President Harry S. Truman, on 25 October 1945, that he (or, in some accounts, ‘we’) had blood on his (or ‘their’) hands. ‘Never mind,’ Truman later claimed he replied sarcastically. ‘It’ll all come out in the wash’; or the President may have given Oppenheimer a handkerchief to wipe the blood off. He had passed security clearances during the war and again in 1947. Using the same evidence unearthed then, but with the Cold War in full swing, the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954, cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s loyalty and revoked his security clearance. Thereafter he lived in a sort of professional limbo, an uncomfortable symbol, for Americans and perhaps others, of scientific and technological success and moral ambivalence about the bomb.25

Much has been written about Oppenheimer’s politics and their role in the atomic and then the hydrogen bomb projects, and the subject is of limited relevance here. But there is perhaps one point to be made before moving on. Like many Americans, Robert Oppenheimer was associated during the 1930s with the Communist Party, and with individual Communists and causes that would later be stigmatized as Communist or Communist-affiliated. Robert’s brother Frank and Frank’s wife joined the Communist Party in 1937, and Robert’s serious girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, whom he met in 1936 and continued to see during the war, was in and out of the Party. Robert became, as noted, a supporter of the Spanish Loyalist cause, and he contributed money to several organizations that were said to have Communist sympathies, including the Consumers Union. Robert’s wife, Kitty, had been married to Joe Dallet, a Communist who died fighting in Spain, and Kitty herself had once been a Party member. And Robert was friendly with Haakon Chevalier, a member of Berkeley’s English department and a Party member, and acquainted with Steve Nelson, Dallet’s commander in Spain who turned