This important, exhaustively researched book is extremely partisan — and rightly so. Selling his soul for fearsome knowledge, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), the “father of the atomic bomb,” made a Faustian bargain in which three centuries of physics culminated in a massively destructive weapon. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin convincingly argue that after World War II, Oppenheimer, horrified by his discovery, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. His reputation was deliberately destroyed, with the help of the FBI, by his implacable enemy Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The authors compare the public humiliation of Oppenheimer, the most prominent victim of anti-communist persecution during the Cold War, to two other scientific and political martyrs: Galileo Galilei in 17th-century Italy and Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 19th-century France. Like Oppenheimer, both men suffered greatly but were later exonerated.
Born into a wealthy German-immigrant family in New York, Oppenheimer, a “repulsively good little boy,” lectured to learned geologists when he was only 12 years old. Educated at Harvard, Cambridge University and Göttingen, he was cultured and humane; knew French, German, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit; and was an expert horseman and sailor. Five feet, ten inches tall, but weighing only 115 pounds, the “Jewish Pan with blue eyes and wild Einstein hair” was physically frail but intellectually dazzling. He smoked incessantly and bit his nails, could be arrogant and caustic, and was plagued by deep depressions. But he charmed both men and women, and conveyed charismatic authority. His genius, a friend observed, “lay in his ability to synthesize the entire field of study,” inspire his colleagues to develop their innovative ideas, and enable a group of difficult men, working under intense pressure, to achieve an almost impossible scientific and military goal.
In the 1930s Oppenheimer taught at Berkeley. Though never a member of the Communist Party he was, like most intellectuals, active in many left-wing causes: rights for African Americans, immigrant farmhands and factory workers, and support for the Loyalist (anti-Fascist) side in the Spanish Civil War. In early 1943, George Eltenton, a British-born physicist and Soviet agent, working for Shell Oil in California, instructed Oppenheimer's close friend Haakon Chevalier, who taught French at Berkeley, to ask Oppenheimer if he would give information about his secret work to our Russian allies. Oppenheimer refused this treasonable request. But, to protect Chevalier, he did not report the incident until August 1943. The Russians eventually got the precious information from Los Alamos through the German-born British scientist Klaus Fuchs.
By then Oppenheimer was director of Los Alamos (northwest of Santa Fe), a wartime lab devoted to the development of the atomic bomb. At the lab he transformed himself from a vague, eccentric professor into a highly efficient administrator. Los Alamos enabled Oppenheimer to combine his two great loves, physics and New Mexico, which D.H. Lawrence, who lived in the savagely beautiful Sangre de Cristo mountains in the 1920s, called “the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.”Los Alamos opened in March 1943 with 100 people and shot up to 6,000 by 1945. Wartime conditions were Spartan in that isolated, claustrophobic desert, and staffers often lacked water, milk and even electricity.
The scientists, racing against the Nazis to perfect the weapon that could undoubtedly win the war, feared that the "fission bomb might inadvertently ignite the earth's atmosphere, ninety percent of which was made of hydrogen," and destroy the whole world. The Nazis surrendered before the bomb was tested and, according to the authors, it was dropped on Japan in August 1945 to frighten the Russians. They ignore, however, two potent arguments: that bombing Japan actually saved American (as well as Japanese) lives that would have been lost during an invasion of Japan and that it would deter future nuclear war. During all this time Oppenheimer was spied on by his own government: "his mail was monitored, his phone tapped, his office wired." From 1945 to 1954 the FBI collected an additional 8,000 pages of surveillance and illegal wiretap transcripts, including a lot of lies and proof of his affair with a colleague's wife.
After the war Oppenheimer became the most famous scientist in America. Yet he never won the Nobel Prize and stopped publishing physics papers. In 1947 he was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and, once again, was a brilliant leader. In 1954, at the same time as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the AEC held a star-chamber inquiry about Oppenheimer's security clearance, during which the FBI fed information to the prosecutor that the defense was not allowed to see. His alleged crimes, in essence, were his past association with known communists and CP front organizations (though he was, by then, strongly anti-communist) and especially his failure to report the fatal conversation with Chevalier.
His attorney was embarrassingly submissive; Oppenheimer was disgraced and half-heartedly attempted suicide. By a vote of two to one the board decided that he was "a loyal citizen who was nevertheless a security risk" and revoked his clearance. He remained director of the Institute, but was suddenly transformed from insider to outcast. He took refuge on St. John, in the Virgin Islands, and was awarded the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize by President Kennedy.In 1967 his cigarette and pipe smoking caught up with him and he died of agonizing tongue and throat cancer. His son became a carpenter, his daughter hanged herself.
American Prometheus is excessively detailed, sometimes long-winded and repetitious. Love affairs are always stormy, passionate and intense, but the authors don't mention his Oppenheimer's wife's reaction when his affair was revealed during the inquiry. Some of the scientific explanations are opaque, and the last 13 years of his life are covered in only 30 pages. But this redemptive book, a major contribution to American history, offers a judicious interpretation of the evidence, incisively portrays Oppenheimer's personal life and character, and is very exciting when describing the development, testing and dropping of the bomb, and the postwar inquisition about his loyalty. |
