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April 25, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: ‘American Prometheus’ Recounts Life and Strange Times of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of A-Bomb
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| ‘American Prometheus’ by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Knopf Publishing, Inc. (2005) ISBN: 0375412026 (B&N) |
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton (HNN) — Mention the name "Oppenheimer" these days and most people think of the investment firm with the classy black and white TV commercials featuring a logo of hands clasping in a gesture of strength.
Right after World War II, there would be no doubt that the reference was to J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the Atomic Bomb, wrangler of ego-driven Nobel-prize-winning physicists (he himself surprisingly never won a Nobel), cover subject of Time magazine in 1948. He was also in the news in the spring of 1954 as a Charleston, W.Va. native named Lewis Strauss did everything in his power to strip the famous scientist of his government security clearance.
Strauss (1896-1974), a conservative Republican, was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer was a member of the AEC and opposed the Hydrogen bomb and the rapid escalation of nuclear weapons. The clash of titans was inevitable in a year that also saw the more famous Army-McCarthy Hearings that summer.
In a monumental book, 25 years in the researching and writing, "AmericanPrometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Knopf, 736 pages, 32 pages of black and white photographs, $35) Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin bring to life this exciting and dangerous time of our history, when being first with the Atomic Bomb was Job One in the U.S.
Although many – perhaps most -- of the talented nuclear physicists were refugees in Britain and the U.S. from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, there was the fear from about 1939 on that the remaining German scientists under Werner Heisenberg would develop the bomb before us and use it to defeat the allies. This led to the 1942 creation of the Manhattan Engineer District—usually called the Manhattan Project – under the direction of Army Engineers Gen. Leslie Groves and brilliantly led by Oppenheimer.
Bird and Sherwin have left the scientific aspects of the bomb to others, including Richard Rhodes, and have concentrated on the social history and biographical aspects of Oppie’s life – especially the controversy over his association with communists and fellow travelers in the heavily leftist milieu of Berkeley, Calif.
Yes, his friends called him "Oppie" or "Robert." The "J." stood for Julius, a name he never used. He was born in 1904 to a well-to-do German-Jewish couple, Julius Oppenheimer and Ella Friedman, and was educated in the Ethical Culture School on Central Park West, now called Fieldston School and located in Riverdale, the Bronx. Oppie’s younger brother Frank (1912-1985) also attended the school at 33 Central Park West.
Ethical Culture, founded in 1876 by Reform Jew Felix Adler – who ironically was a member of the same reform Jewish temple that Strauss later headed, Emanu-El – played a major role in shaping Oppenheimer’s philosophy of life. It was a liberal, progressive form of education which soon attracted liberal parents of faiths other than Reform Judaism, including Unitarians and Quakers.
Although the Alameda County, Calif. – where Berkeley is located – Communist Party cell claimed Oppie as a member, the authors say the evidence is not convincing. For sure, the brilliant scientist—he earned his Ph.D. in physics from the Institute of Theoretic Physics at Germany’s University of Gottingen in 1927 when he was only 23 – traveled in leftist circles. One of his lovers, Jean Tatlock, was a communist. His wife Kitty was married to a communist, Joe Dallet, who died in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Kitty and Oppie married in 1940. Oppie’s brother Frank was much more active in Bay Area communist circles and suffered for this in the post-war era. He and his wife Jackie eventually founded San Francisco’s world-renowned Exploratorium hands-on museum of science.
Kitty, who came from aristocratic German-Gentile roots, had two children with Oppie, Peter and Katherine, usually called Toni. Peter is a building contractor in New Mexico, a state that Oppie discovered as a teen-ager and grew to love. Toni committed suicide in the Virgin Islands in 1977. The Oppenheimer family must have been a difficult place for children with two erratic, brilliant and driven parents who often delegated responsibility for their children to others, with disastrous results, Bird and Sherwin amply demonstrate.
Gen. Groves was a big – all senses: he weighed 250 pounds to Oppie’s135 – supporter of Oppenheimer, although the politically conservative military man didn’t approve of Oppie’s association with communists and fellow travelers in his role as professor of physics at the University of California in Berkeley. Groves understood Oppie and testified in his favor at the April 1954 security clearance hearings, headed by three hand-picked (by Strauss) men. It wasn’t officially a trial, but it was conducted like a Star Chamber proceeding, with lists of witnesses withheld from Oppie’s relatively ineffectual lawyer. The vote was 2-1 in favor of stripping the world-famous scientist of his top level security clearance.
At the time of the clearance hearings in Washington, D.C., Oppie was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a position he had held since 1947. He retained the post, to the intense displeasure of Lewis Strauss, until his retirement in 1966 – a year before he died of throat cancer in 1967. Founded in 1930, the Institute – not associated in any way with Princeton University but enjoying a collegial relationship with the university – was home to many world famous scientists, mathematicians and scholars, including Albert Einstein.
In contrast to the antagonistic Strauss, Oppie had a much more pleasant experience with another West Virginian, Bluefield’s John Nash, while he was director in Princeton. Nash’s life was recounted in Sylvia Nasar’s "A Beautiful Mind," and the mathematician was played on screen by Russell Crowe.
While at the Institute in 1957, Nash "began questioning veteran physicists about some of the unresolved contradictions of quantum theory," the authors relate. "In the summer of 1957, when he raised such heresies with Oppenheimer, the director impatiently dismissed the questions. But Nash persisted and Oppenheimer soon found himself drawn into a serious argument."
Nash left that summer, but he and Oppie – both of whom had experienced mental problems of varying degrees, with Nash’s much worse – maintained a friendship when many people found the West Virginian too difficult to live with.
"American Prometheus" is a book to savor. It brings back an era I experienced as a young teen-ager in the early 1950s and adds the dimension of serious scholarship to a much studied era in American history. It’s a big, serious, extensively researched and documented book that’s well worth the effort.
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