by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In truth, Oppenheimer very much wanted to change the world—but he knew he was barred from pulling on the levers of power in Washington, and he no longer had the spirit for public activism that had motivated him in the 1930s. His excommunication had not freed him to enter the great debates of the day; it had inclined him, rather, to censor himself. Frank Oppenheimer thought his brother felt enormously frustrated that he could not find a way back into official circles. “He wanted to get back into that, I think,” Frank said. “I don’t know why, but I think it’s one of these things where there’s a—when you get the taste of it, it’s hard to not want it.”
On occasion, however, he spoke publicly about Hiroshima and did so with a vague sense of regret. In June 1956, he told the graduating class of the George School—attended by his son, Peter—that the Hiroshima bombing may have been “a tragic mistake.” America’s leaders, he said, “lost a certain sense of restraint” when they used the atomic bomb on the Japanese city. A few years later, he gave a hint of his feelings to Max Born, his former professor in Göttingen, who had made it clear that he rather disapproved of Oppenheimer’s decision to work on the atomic bomb. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote in his memoirs, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote Born, “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.”
IF OPPENHEIMER was unwilling to enter publicly the roiling debates of the mid-1950s over the Eisenhower Administration’s nuclear policies, he had no hesitation about speaking on cultural and scientific issues. Only a year after the security hearings, he published a collection of essays under the title The Open Mind. It included eight lectures he had given since 1946, all speaking to the issue of the relationship between atomic weapons, science and postwar culture. Published by Simon & Schuster, and widely reviewed, the book served to present him as a modern seer, a thoughtful, enigmatic philosopher of the role of science in the modern world. In these essays, he pleaded for an “open mind” as a necessary component for an open society. He made the case for “the minimization of secrecy,” and he observed, “We seem to know, and seem to come back again and again to this knowledge, that the purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion.” In an implicit rebuke to those who thought that a powerful, nuclear-armed America could act unilaterally, Oppenheimer intoned, “The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is of course not unique in politics. It is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.”
In the spring of 1957, Oppenheimer was invited by the philosophy and psychology departments of Harvard University to give the prestigious William James Lectures. His friend McGeorge Bundy, then dean of Harvard, extended the invitation which, predictably, sparked considerable controversy. A group of Harvard alumni led by Archibald B. Roosevelt threatened to withhold donations if Oppenheimer was allowed to speak. “We don’t believe people who tell lies,” said Roosevelt, “should lecture at a place whose motto is ‘Veritas.’ ” Dean Bundy listened to the protests and then made a point of attending the April 8 lecture.
Oppenheimer titled his series of six public lectures “The Hope of Order.” At the inaugural talk, 1,200 people packed Harvard’s largest lecture hall, Sanders Theater. Another 800 people listened to the lecture piped into a nearby hall. Anticipating protests, armed police stood at the doors. A large American flag hung on the wall behind the lectern, giving the scene an oddly cinematic aura. By coincidence, Senator Joe McCarthy had died four days earlier and his remains were lying in state that very afternoon in the Capitol. As Oppenheimer rose to speak, he hesitated, and then walked over to a blackboard and wrote, “R.I.P.” As some in the audience murmured with comprehension at the audacity of this silent rebuke to the dead senator, Oppenheimer walked back to the lectern stony-faced and began his talk. Edmund Wilson attended one of the lectures and afterwards described his impressions in his diary. As Harvard’s president, Nathan Pusey, was introducing him, Oppenheimer sat alone on the platform, “nervously shifting his arms and feet in an ungainly Jewish way; but when he began to speak, he had the whole audience riveted; there was scarcely a sound throughout. He spoke very quietly but with piercing point. Extraordinary how terse and precise he was, speaking merely from notes—as in his description of William James, in which he touched on his relation to Henry. The opening was quite thrilling—he did nothing to make it dramatic, but he was raising terrific questions that were painfully in everyone’s mind and one felt, as Elena said, his feeling of intense responsibility. We were both of us moved and stimulated.”
But afterwards, Wilson began to wonder whether Oppenheimer was “a brilliant man who had been beaten by the age, who knew no more what to do about it than anybody, who was as incapable of leading it as anybody; his humility now seemed to me hangdog.” Like many who heard Oppenheimer speak, Wilson came away from the experience with a troubled sense of the man’s fragile ambiguities.
From his perch at the Institute, and in numerous other speeches around the country, Oppenheimer was carving out a new role for himself. Once he had been the scientific insider; now he was becoming a distant but charismatic intellectual outsider. David Lilienthal, who saw him frequently, thought he had mellowed. Certainly, he had aged; by 1958, Robert’s lanky, fifty-four-year-old frame had the forward stoop of an old man. But Lilienthal thought the lines of care in his face had “given way to a kind of ‘success’ calm. He has weathered one of the most violent, bitter storms that any human being ever went through.”
OPPENHEIMER CONTINUED to preside over the Institute with deftness and sensitivity. He could take pride in his creation. Like Berkeley in the 1930s, the Institute had become one of the world’s foremost centers for theoretical physics—and much more. It was a haven for brilliant scholars, young and old, in numerous disciplines. John Nash was one such young scholar, a brilliant mathematician who held a fellowship at the Institute in 1957.24 Having read Werner Heisenberg’s 1925 paper on the “uncertainty principle,” Nash began questioning veteran physicists about some of the unresolved contradictions of quantum theory. Like Einstein, Nash was troubled by the neatness of the theory. In the summer of 1957, when he raised such heresies with Oppenheimer, the director impatiently dismissed his questions. But Nash persisted and Oppenheimer soon found himself drawn into a serious argument. Afterwards, Nash wrote him an apology but insisted that most physicists were “quite too dogmatic in their attitudes.”
Nash left that summer, and for many years afterwards he struggled with a debilitating mental illness that for a time required him to be institutionalized. Oppenheimer was sympathetic with Nash’s psychiatric ordeals, and invited him back to the Institute when he had recovered from one of his severest bouts with schizoid symptoms. Robert had a forgiving instinct for the frailty of the human psyche, an awareness of the thin line between insanity and brilliance. So when Nash’s doctor called Oppenheimer in the summer of 1961 to ask whether Nash was still sane, he replied, “That’s something no one on earth can tell you, doctor.”
Oppenheimer could be embarrassingly opaque about his own complicated personal life. When twenty-seven-year-old Jeremy Bernstein arrived at the Institute in 1957, he was informed that Dr. Oppenh
eimer wanted to see him right away. As Bernstein walked into the director’s office, Oppenheimer greeted him jauntily, “What is new and firm in physics?” Before Bernstein could muster a reply, the phone rang and Oppenheimer motioned for him to stay as he took the call. When he hung up, he turned to Bernstein, someone he had barely met, and said casually, “It’s Kitty. She has been drinking again.” With that, he invited the young physicist to come by Olden Manor to see some of his “pictures.”
Bernstein spent two years at the Institute and found Oppenheimer “endlessly fascinating.” The man could be by turns sharply intimidating and charmingly disarming. When called to Oppenheimer’s office one day for one of his periodic “confessionals” with the director, Bernstein happened to remark that he was reading Proust. “He looked at me kindly,” Bernstein later wrote, “and said that when he was about my age he had taken a walking trip on Corsica and had read Proust at night by flashlight. He was not bragging. He was sharing something.”
IN 1959, Oppenheimer attended a conference in Rheinfelden, West Germany, sponsored by the Congress on Cultural Freedom. He and twenty other world-renowned intellectuals gathered in the luxurious Saliner Hotel on the banks of the Rhine near Basel to discuss the fate of the Western industrialized world. Safe in this cloistered environment, Oppenheimer broke his silence on nuclear weapons and spoke with uncharacteristic clarity about how they were seen and valued in American society. “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life,” he asked, but “which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”
Oppenheimer deeply empathized with the Congress’ liberal anticommunist message. As someone who had once surrounded himself with communists, Oppenheimer was now in the company of intellectuals dedicated to dispelling the illusions of “frivolous fellow-travelers.” He enjoyed the company of the men he met at its annual sessions. These included such writers as Stephen Spender, Raymond Aron and the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He and the Congress’ executive director, Nicolas Nabokov, became good friends. Nabokov, a cousin of the novelist, was a well-regarded composer who divided his time between Paris and Princeton. He certainly knew that the Congress was receiving funding from the Central Intelligence Agency. And so, too, did Oppenheimer. “Who didn’t know, I’d like to know? It was a pretty open secret,” recalled Lawrence de Neufville, a CIA officer stationed in Germany. When the New York Times broke this news in the spring of 1966, Oppenheimer joined Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a joint letter to the editor defending the Congress’ independence and the “integrity of its officials.” They didn’t bother to deny the CIA link. Later that year, Oppenheimer wrote Nabokov, assuring him that he regarded the Congress as one of the “great and benign influences” of the postwar era.
As time went by, Oppenheimer became more visible as an international celebrity. He began to travel abroad more often. In 1958, he visited Paris, Brussels, Athens and Tel Aviv. In Brussels, he and Kitty were greeted by the Belgian royal family—Kitty’s distant relations. In Israel, his host was Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. In 1960, he visited Tokyo, where reporters greeted him at the airport with a barrage of questions. “I do not regret,” he said softly, “that I had something to do with the technical success of the atomic bomb. It isn’t that I don’t feel bad; it is that I don’t feel worse tonight than I did last night.” The translation of that ambiguously loaded sentiment into Japanese could not have been easy. The following year, he toured Latin America, sponsored by the Organization of American States, garnering headlines in local newspapers as “El Padre de la Bomba Atomica.”
LILIENTHAL, who so admired Oppenheimer’s intellect, was saddened by what he observed of Robert’s family life. There was, he later said, a “contradiction between Oppenheimer’s brilliant mind and his awkward personality. . . . He did not know how to deal with people, his children especially.” Lilienthal later harshly concluded that Oppenheimer “ruined” his children’s lives. “He kept them on a tight leash.” Peter grew up to become a shy but highly sensitive and intelligent young man. But he lived estranged from his mother. Francis Fergusson knew that Robert loved his son, but he saw that Robert seemed incapable of protecting Peter from his mother’s volatile moods. In 1955, Robert and Kitty sent Peter, fourteen, to the George School, an elite Quaker boarding school in Newtown, Pennsylvania, hoping that a little distance would ease tensions between his son and his wife.
A crisis occurred in 1958 when Robert was offered a visiting professorship in Paris for a semester. He and Kitty decided to pull Toni, twelve, out of her private school in Princeton and bring her with them. But they decided that Peter, seventeen, should remain behind at the George School. Robert wrote his brother that Peter had expressed the desire to visit Frank on his ranch and maybe try to get a summer job on one of the dude ranches in New Mexico. “He is still in a very volatile mood,” Robert wrote, “and I am afraid I cannot predict what will happen in June with any kind of certitude.”
Robert’s personal secretary, Verna Hobson, disapproved: “What a slap to leave him behind. He [Peter] was enormously sensitive. I felt tremendously on his side.” Hobson told Robert what she thought, but it was clear that Kitty had made up her mind. Hobson saw it as a real turning point in Peter’s relationship with his father. “There came a time,” Hobson said, “when Robert had to choose between Peter—of whom he was very fond— and Kitty. She made it so it had to be one or the other, and because of the compact he had made with God or with himself, he chose Kitty.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“It Was Really Like a Never-Never-Land ”
Robert was a very humble man. I adored him.
INGA HIILIVIRTA
BEGINNING IN 1954, the Oppenheimers spent several months each year living on the tiny island of St. John in the Virgin Islands. Surrounded by the stunning, primordial beauty of the island, Robert relished this self-imposed exile, living as if he were a social outcast. In the words of a poem he had written as a young man at Harvard, he was fashioning in St. John “his separate prison,” and the experience seemed to rejuvenate him now as his summers in New Mexico had reinvigorated him decades earlier. During their first few visits, the Oppenheimers returned to the small guest house at Trunk Bay on the north shore of the island, owned by Irva Boulon. But in 1957, Robert bought two acres of land on Hawksnest Bay, a beautiful cove on the northwest tip of the island. The site lay just below a towering hump-shaped outcropping of rock known ironically, at least for Robert, as “Peace Hill.” Palm trees dotted the cove’s gently sloping white beach and the turquoise waters were filled with parrotfish, blue tang, grouper and the occasional school of barracuda.
In 1958, Robert hired the eminent architect Wallace Harrison—who had helped design such landmarks as Rockefeller Center, the United Nations building and Lincoln Center—to design a spartan beach cottage, something of a Caribbean version of Perro Caliente. However the contractor Robert hired for the project poured the foundation in the wrong spot—perilously close to the water’s edge. (He claimed a donkey had eaten the surveyor’s plans.) When finally built, the cottage consisted of one large rectangular room, some sixty or seventy feet long, sitting atop a slab of concrete. The room was divided only by a four-foot-high wall, setting off the sleeping area from the rest of the cottage. The floor was covered with pretty terracotta tiles. A well-equipped kitchen and a small bathroom occupied the back of the structure. Shuttered windows let sunlight pour into the cottage from three sides. But the front of the cottage, facing the cove, was completely open—to the cove and to the island’s warm trade winds. The house thus had only three walls, with a tin roof designed to roll down to cover the front of the structure during the hurricane season. They called it “Easter Rock,” after the large, egg-shaped rock that sat perched atop Peace Hill.
A hundred yards up the beach lived their only neighbors, Robert and Nancy Gibney, who had re
luctantly sold them the beach property, after much gentle cajoling by Robert. The Gibneys had been living on the island since 1946, when they had bought for a paltry sum seventy acres around Hawksnest Bay. A former editor at The New Republic, Bob Gibney had literary ambitions, but the longer he lived on the island, the less he wrote.
Gibney’s wife, Nancy, came from a wealthy Boston family. An elegant woman, she had once worked as an editor at Vogue. With three young children, and little regular income, the Gibneys were land-rich and cash-poor. Nancy Gibney had first met the Oppenheimers in 1956, during a lunch at Trunk Bay’s guest house. “They were got up in routine tourist garb,” she later wrote, “cotton shirts and shorts and sandals, but they looked like nothing human, too thin and frail and pale for earthly life. . . . Kitty was the more humanoid of the two, although she seemed to have no features except for her dark eyes. Her voice was too deep and hoarse to emanate from her tiny chest. . . .”
Upon being introduced, Kitty said to Nancy, “Aren’t you hot with all that hair?” It was a remark Nancy considered “staggeringly rude.” But initially she liked Robert. He looked “astoundingly like Pinocchio, and he moved as jerkily as a marionette on strings. But there was nothing wooden about his manner: he exuded warmth and sympathy and courtesy along with the fumes of his famous pipe.” When Robert politely asked what her husband did, Nancy explained that on occasion he worked for Laurance Rockefeller at his Caneel Bay hotel.
“He worked for Rockefeller?” Oppenheimer said, puffing on his pipe. And then lowering his voice, he quipped, “I, too, have taken money for doing harm.”