American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

A historian of the Cold War with a special focus on nuclear weapons, Martin Sherwin signed the original contract for the book that became American Prometheus in 1979. Immediately thereafter, Sherwin visited New Mexico to get a sense of the physical environment that had enchanted Oppenheimer and kept him coming back summer after summer. In addition, Sherwin spoke with Oppenheimer’s son, Peter. In the ensuing years, Sherwin conducted most of the interviews for the book. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of Oppenheimer’s contemporaries still lived. Sherwin spoke to Hans Bethe, Haakon Chevalier, George Kennan, David Lilienthal, Isidor Rabi, Robert Serber, Joseph Weinberg, and Frank Oppenheimer, among many others.

Robert Oppenheimer (“Oppie”) was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City to parents of Jewish ancestry, Julius and Ella Friedman Oppenheimer. Julius had made a fortune in textiles, and Ella doted on her son, so young Robert grew up both privileged and sheltered. At the Ethical Culture School, he received a secular, liberal education. As a teen and later as an undergraduate at Harvard, he excelled in his studies but struggled to make friends. While studying abroad in graduate school, he experienced severe depression that drove him to despair and even self-destructive behavior. He recovered, however, and found his intellectual passion in theoretical physics. By his late twenties, he had established himself as a formidable physicist and a popular professor at Caltech and Berkeley.

In the mid-1930s, Oppenheimer experienced a political awakening. His romantic relationship with Jean Tatlock introduced him to her circle of Communist friends, and, before long, nearly everyone in Oppenheimer’s life had some connection to the Communist Party. The Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War deepened Oppenheimer’s commitment to left-wing politics. However, the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938, coupled with Adolf Hitler’s aggression in Europe, turned Oppenheimer’s attention to building an atomic weapon. In 1941-42, Oppenheimer emerged as a leading figure in the US atomic bomb project.

In March 1943, Oppenheimer assumed directorship of the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of scientists and engineers conducted atomic weapon research and development. The intense security at Los Alamos made Oppenheimer hypervigilant, so he reported to Army counterintelligence that a man named George Eltenton had approached him through an intermediary about passing information to the Soviets, the US’s wartime ally. This report came back to haunt him in 1954. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer saw the bomb project to successful completion, which culminated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945.

The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left Oppenheimer shaken. In 1945-46, he tried in vain to persuade President Truman and others that atomic energy required international control. In January 1947, however, Oppenheimer became chair of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, a role that allowed him continued access to decision-makers. From 1947 to 1949, Oppenheimer’s views largely conformed to those of the foreign policy establishment—i.e., that the Soviet Union was untrustworthy and that the US needed atomic weapons. In 1949, however, Oppenheimer’s vigorous opposition to developing a thermonuclear (hydrogen) superbomb brought him into conflict with those in the foreign policy establishment who favored a nuclear arms race.

In the context of postwar anti-Communism, particularly the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, Oppenheimer’s objection to the superbomb, coupled with his past Communist associations, rendered him suspect. While Oppenheimer presided over the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, his political enemies, led by Lewis Strauss, prepared to drive him and his anti-superbomb views from the government. In 1953, Oppenheimer learned that his security clearance had been suspended pending a review hearing. Oppenheimer chose to fight the suspension.

For nearly four weeks in April and May 1954, Oppenheimer endured an inquisition-style hearing that looked into his past associations and behavior, all of which had been part of his security file for many years. Despite more than two dozen witnesses vouching for Oppenheimer’s character, the rigged and extrajudicial proceeding resulted in a 2-1 vote to recommend revoking his security clearance. After 1954, Oppenheimer largely faded from public view. He and Kitty built a beach cottage on the Caribbean island of St. John, where they spent months at a time beginning in the late 1950s. Oppenheimer died of cancer on February 18, 1967, at age 62.

When Katherine “Kitty” Puening Harrison met Oppenheimer in August 1939, she was 29 and was married to her third husband—“an impossible marriage,” a friend later recalled (161). She commenced an affair with Oppenheimer, became pregnant, agreed to an amicable divorce with her third husband, and then married her fourth. She and Robert stayed married until his death in 1967, and they had a son (Peter) and a daughter (Toni).

Of all the key figures in Oppenheimer’s life, no one evoked stronger reactions from others than Kitty did. Jackie Oppenheimer, the wife of Robert’s brother, Frank, described Kitty as “one of the few really evil people I’ve known in my life” (163). Kitty’s friends offered more generous assessments—noting, for instance, that Kitty built her life around her marriage, so she became frustrated when Robert seemed aloof, as he often did. Kitty began drinking to deal with her pain and unquestionably struggled to adjust to life as a mother; friends agreed that she never bonded with Peter and exerted too much control over Toni.

Kitty’s interests included botany, and while in New Mexico, she worked in a lab. In her younger days, she had joined the Youth Communist League and married a Communist who became a political commissar in the Spanish Civil War. These connections came up during Oppenheimer’s 1954 hearing, where Kitty testified. Bird and Sherwin praise her testimony, noting that she was “undoubtedly a better witness than the husband she was defending” (536). Kitty remained devoted to Robert for the rest of her life. She died in 1972.

Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1953-54, Lewis Strauss orchestrated the investigation and subsequent hearing that led to the suspension and revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Previously, Strauss sat on the Board of Trustees at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In that capacity, ironically, he had helped recruit Oppenheimer to the Institute in 1946.

The second half of the book describes how Strauss emerged as Oppenheimer’s main antagonist. In Princeton, Strauss grew to personally dislike the physicist. His primary objection to Oppenheimer, however, was ideological. Oppenheimer’s vehement opposition to the superbomb rankled the archconservative Strauss and raised his suspicions that Oppenheimer was untrustworthy. Bird and Sherwin describe Strauss as the architect of the plot to remove Oppenheimer and his ideas from the General Advisory Committee to the AEC; he worked with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to make the case against Oppenheimer as damaging as possible. In addition, Strauss poisoned President Eisenhower’s mind against Oppenheimer.

Strauss eventually paid for his plotting. When Eisenhower nominated him as Secretary of Commerce, the US Senate voted 49-46 against the nomination. Senator John F. Kennedy cast one of the deciding votes, citing Strauss’s behavior toward Oppenheimer.

From September 1942 onward, Gen. Leslie Groves oversaw the Manhattan Project, the nationwide research and development initiative geared toward producing an atomic bomb. The project had multiple facilities, housing hundreds of scientists, but the main operation was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Groves appointed Oppenheimer director.

By far, Groves’s most important contribution to the atomic bomb project was his early identification of Oppenheimer as the right man for the job. Groves and Oppenheimer worked well together. Gruff and authoritarian, Groves nonetheless compromised with Oppenheimer when possible and made a sincere effort to balance scientific freedom and project security.

Groves reviewed Oppenheimer’s security file but found nothing alarming. As the highest-ranking official in the bomb project, Groves ignored FBI requests for closer surveillance of Oppenheimer. Although Groves gave confused testimony at Oppenheimer’s 1954 hearing, the general always vouched for the physicist’s ability and loyalty.

Oppenheimer met Jean Tatlock in 1936 when she was a 22-year-old Stanford medical student, and for three years they had “a very intense relationship” (113). Friends believe that Tatlock was Oppenheimer’s truest love. Although they became engaged, she eventually refused Oppenheimer’s marriage proposal. According to a friend, she later regretted her decision.

Tatlock was shy, and she had manic depression, making her melancholy and prone to dark moods. Although a Communist, she took an interest in causes, not Communist Party ideology. Bird and Sherwin consider Tatlock a key influence in Oppenheimer’s political awakening.

Oppenheimer continued to see Tatlock occasionally even after marrying Kitty. The FBI kept both of them under surveillance. She graduated and became a pediatric psychiatrist, but despair weighed heavily on her, and she died by suicide on January 4, 1944.

A professor of French literature at Berkeley during Oppenheimer’s tenure, Haakon Chevalier befriended the physicist, who shared similar political views. In fact, “they liked each other immediately” (120). Like many others in Oppenheimer’s life, Chevalier was a Communist.

Chevalier played a crucial role in the event that caused Oppenheimer more trouble than perhaps any other in his life. During the winter of 1942-43, after Oppenheimer had assumed directorship of the bomb program at Los Alamos, Chevalier approached Oppenheimer on behalf of George Eltenton, an acquaintance who broached the possibility of sharing US atomic research and development information with the Soviets. Oppenheimer waited six months before reporting the incident to Army counterintelligence—a delay that came back to haunt him during his 1954 hearing.

In a 1982 interview, Chevalier told Sherwin that Oppenheimer had been a secret member of the Communist Party. Bird and Sherwin believe that the preponderance of evidence suggests that Chevalier exaggerated.

Following his older brother, Robert, Frank Oppenheimer became an accomplished physicist. Unlike Robert, however, Frank excelled at experimental rather than theoretical physics. In their younger days, the brothers had a close relationship. Robert dispensed unsolicited advice, and Frank accompanied him on several trips to New Mexico.

After marrying young “political firebrand” Jackie Quann in 1936, Frank joined the Communist Party. He and Jackie made no attempt to conceal their political sympathies. This posed no problem until 1949, when the HUAC investigated Frank for his Communist affiliation. That same year, the University of Minnesota accepted Frank’s resignation; unable to find another academic job, he and Jackie moved to Colorado and purchased a ranch. Thus, postwar anti-Communist sentiment affected Frank five years before it did Robert.

A German-born physicist, Hans Bethe worked under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, where, along with others, he marveled at Oppenheimer’s transformation from scientist to administrator. In addition, Bethe accompanied Oppenheimer to observe the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Bethe knew Oppenheimer well enough to deliver one of three eulogies at his 1967 memorial service. Sherwin interviewed Bethe in 1982.

Perhaps the most influential State Department official of the 20th century, George Kennan wrote a 1947 article that outlined a “containment” policy toward the Soviet Union. This served as the basis of US Cold War policy for decades.

However, many US officials misunderstood Kennan’s “containment” argument. Some put a belligerent spin on a doctrine that in reality called for patience. The gist of Kennan’s argument was that the Soviet Union was fundamentally weak and thus would crumble in time. The US needed only to prevent further Soviet aggression. Kennan opposed nuclear proliferation for this reason—he thought it reckless and unnecessary in dealing with a weaker party. Oppenheimer’s views dovetailed perfectly with Kennan’s.

When ostracized by the foreign policy establishment, Kennan joined Oppenheimer in Princeton. At Oppenheimer’s 1967 memorial service, Kennan delivered one of the three eulogies.

A fellow Jewish-born physicist from New York City, Isidor Rabi met Oppenheimer in Gottengen, Germany. Unlike Oppenheimer, Rabi made no attempt to conceal his Jewish heritage. Rabi hailed from the working-class Lower East Side—a far different world from Oppenheimer’s spacious childhood apartment on the Upper West Side. Despite their different backgrounds, Rabi and Robert stayed good friends for the rest of their lives.

Rabi disappointed Oppenheimer by refusing to work at Los Alamos. As he explained years later, Rabi had moral objections to building the bomb and then using it on civilian targets. Additionally, Rabi opposed militarizing physics. Nevertheless, he attended colloquia at Los Alamos and even served as a visiting consultant. At the 1954 security clearance hearing, Rabi gave spirited testimony in his friend’s defense.

A student of Oppenheimer’s at Berkeley, Joseph Weinberg was a committed Communist. In 1943, an illegal FBI wiretap captured a conversation between “Joe”—presumably Weinberg—and another Communist named Steve Nelson. Joe and Nelson discussed the bomb project and a “professor” who, though unnamed, clearly fit Oppenheimer’s description. The two Communists spoke in whispers, and Joe explained that the professor had changed and thus likely no longer thought the way they did.

Thereafter, the FBI and Army counterintelligence kept a close watch on Weinberg. By the late 1940s, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) suspected Weinberg as “Scientist X,” a reputed Soviet spy. Weinberg was indicted by a grand jury, but the evidence was weak, and he was acquitted of perjury charges in early 1953. Like Frank Oppenheimer, Weinberg lost his academic position. Weinberg resented Oppenheimer’s abandonment of his Communist past, which Weinberg felt reason to consider an abandonment of friends and former students. In later years, Weinberg said of Oppenheimer, “He had had enough of me and I had had enough of him too” (460).

A Danish-born physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for his work on the atom, Neils Bohr had already achieved legendary status when he met Oppenheimer, then a graduate student, in England in 1926. Oppenheimer became a devotee of Bohr’s atomic theories. In fact, one observer summarized the relationship so well that Bird and Sherwin used it as the title for Chapter 20: “Bohr Was God, and Oppie Was His Prophet” (268).

Oppenheimer admired Bohr for more than his brilliance as a physicist. In December 1943, Bohr arrived at Los Alamos. Allied forces had smuggled him out of Nazi-occupied Denmark months earlier. Bohr’s visit to Los Alamos had little practical effect on the project—“They didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb,” Bohr later said (270)—but turned Oppenheimer’s mind to the problem of secrecy and the bomb’s postwar consequences. After the war, Bohr joined Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study.

A Hungarian-born physicist, Edward Teller worked under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. As early as 1943, Teller became obsessed with building a superbomb. Oppenheimer overruled Teller and even replaced him with another scientist on an aspect of the project that required more focus than Teller appeared willing to give. Although Oppenheimer “became increasingly annoyed by Teller’s behavior,” however, the director did not dismiss Teller from Los Alamos altogether (283).

After the war, Teller’s resentment toward Oppenheimer intensified as policymakers moved toward development of the superbomb. In 1951, Teller complained to the FBI about Oppenheimer, and at the 1954 hearing he testified against Oppenheimer. On the question of “wisdom and judgment,” Teller said, it “would be wiser not to grant clearance” (534). Years later, when a friend mentioned Teller, Oppenheimer’s “eyes flashed with real anger” (577)