by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
IN THE SPRING of 1963, Oppenheimer learned that President Kennedy had announced his intention to give him the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize, a $50,000 tax-free award and medal for public service. Everyone understood that this was a highly symbolic act of political rehabilitation. “Disgusting!” cried one Republican senator when he heard the news. Republican staffers on the House Un-American Activities Committee circulated a fifteen-page summary of the 1954 security charges against Oppenheimer. On the other hand, the veteran CBS broadcaster Eric Severeid described Oppenheimer as “the scientist who writes like a poet and speaks like a prophet”—and approvingly suggested that the award signaled Oppenheimer’s rehabilitation as a national figure. When reporters pressed Oppenheimer for his reaction, he demurred, saying, “Look, this isn’t a day for me to go shooting my mouth off. I don’t want to hurt the guys who worked on this.” He knew his friends inside the Administration, McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were no doubt responsible.
Edward Teller, who had received the same prize the year before, immediately wrote Oppenheimer his congratulations: “I have been tempted often to say something to you. This is the one time I can do so with full conviction and knowing that I am doing the right thing.” Actually, many physicists had quietly campaigned to have the Kennedy Administration restore Oppenheimer’s security clearance. They wanted a real vindication for their old friend, not merely a symbolic rehabilitation. But Bundy thought the political price too high. Indeed, even after the Administration announced that Oppenheimer would be given the Fermi Award, Bundy waited to gauge the response from Republicans before deciding that the president would personally award the prize in a White House ceremony.
On November 22, 1963, Oppenheimer was sitting in his office, working on a draft acceptance speech for the December 2 White House ceremony, when he heard knocking on his outer office door. It was Peter, who said that he had just heard on his car radio that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Robert looked away. At that moment, Verna Hobson dashed in, exclaiming, “My God, did you hear?” Robert looked at her and said, “Peter just told me.” When others arrived, Robert turned to Peter and asked his twenty-two-year-old son if he’d like a drink. Peter nodded, and Robert walked over to Verna’s large walk-in closet, where he knew some liquor was kept. But then Peter observed that his father just stood there, “his arm hanging down by his side, fourth finger repetitively rubbing his thumb, gazing downward toward the little collection of liquor bottles.” Finally, Peter mumbled, “Well, never mind then.” As they walked out together, past his secretary’s desk, Verna Hobson heard Robert say, “Now things are going to come apart very fast.” Later, he told Peter that “nothing since Roosevelt’s death had felt to him like that afternoon.” For the next week, Oppenheimer, like much of the nation, sat in front of a television and watched the tragedy further unfold.
On December 2, President Lyndon Johnson went ahead with the Fermi Award ceremony, as scheduled. Standing next to Johnson’s hulking figure in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Oppie seemed almost diminutive. He stood like a “figure of stone, gray, rigid, almost lifeless, tragic in his intensity.” By contrast, Kitty was positively exultant, “a study in joy.” David Lilienthal thought the whole affair “a ceremony of expiation for the sins of hatred and ugliness visited upon Oppenheimer. . . .” With Peter and Toni looking on, Johnson said a few words and then handed Robert a medal, a plaque and a check for $50,000.
In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer mentioned that an earlier president, Thomas Jefferson, “often wrote of the ‘brotherly spirit of science.’ . . . We have not, I know, always given evidence of that brotherly spirit of science. This is not because we lack vital common or intersecting scientific interests. It is in part because, with countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history.” And then he turned to Johnson and said, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.”
Johnson then responded with a gracious reference to Kitty as the “lady who shares honors with you today—Mrs. Oppenheimer.” And then, to laughter, he quipped, “You may observe she got hold of the check!”
Teller was in the audience that day, and everyone watched with mounting tension as the two men came face to face. With Kitty standing stone-faced beside him, Oppenheimer grinned and shook Teller’s hand. A Time magazine photographer caught the moment with his camera.
Afterwards, John F. Kennedy’s grieving widow sent word that she wanted to see Robert in her private quarters. Robert and Kitty went upstairs and were greeted by Jackie Kennedy. She said she wanted him to know just how much her late husband had wanted to give him this award. Robert, in describing the moment later, confided that he had been deeply touched.
Oppenheimer, however, was still a polarizing figure in Washington. At least one Republican politician, Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, had publicly announced that he would boycott the White House ceremony, and in response to Republican criticism, the Johnson Administration agreed the following year to reduce the Fermi prize money to $25,000. Lewis Strauss, of course, was mortified by Robert’s semi-rehabilitation, and wrote an angry letter to Life magazine, suggesting that the award to Oppenheimer had “dealt a severe blow to the security system which protects our country. . . .”
Strauss’ enmity toward Oppenheimer had only deepened since the 1954 trial. And then all the old wounds had been reopened in 1959, when President Eisenhower nominated Strauss as his commerce secretary. In the bitter confirmation battle, in which the Oppenheimer hearing was a central factor, Strauss narrowly lost, by a vote of 49–46. Strauss correctly blamed Senator Clinton Anderson, and then Senator John F. Kennedy—who had been lobbied by Oppenheimer defenders like McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. When Kennedy protested, “It would require an extreme case to vote against the president,” Mac Bundy responded, “Well, this is an extreme case.” Bundy laid out for Kennedy Strauss’ reprehensible conduct in the Oppenheimer case. Convinced, Kennedy switched his vote and Strauss lost the confirmation. “It’s a lovely show—never thought I’d live to see my revenge,” cabled Bernice Brode to Oppie. “In unchristianly spirit, enjoy every squirm and anguish of victim. Having wonderful time—wish you were here!” Even seven years later, Strauss thought he saw Oppenheimer’s influence at work, complaining that “Oppenheimer’s partisans are continuing their reprisals against individuals who did their duty.” The case would follow both Strauss and Oppenheimer to their graves.
EVEN AFTER Robert won the Fermi award, Kitty’s resentments against Teller and others remained unshakable. One late afternoon in the spring of 1964, she and Robert had drinks with David Lilienthal. Robert had just recovered from a terrible bout of pneumonia; he had finally given up cigarettes but still smoked a pipe. He and Kitty had aged. Robert still wore his signature flat porkpie hat and he drove around Princeton in a Cadillac convertible that had seen better days. When Lilienthal remarked that the last time he had seen them had been at the White House Fermi award ceremony, Kitty’s dark eyes smoldered. “That was awful,” she snapped, “there were some awful things about it.” Robert sat there with his head bowed and murmured softly, “There were some very sweet things said.” But a moment later Robert lost his “kindly, almost rabbinical posture” when Teller’s name was mentioned, and his eyes flashed with real anger. The wounds, Lilienthal noted, were “still sore.” Lilienthal completed his diary entry with the observation that “She [Kitty] burns with an intensity of feeling one rarely sees, mostly with a deep resentment against all those who had any part in the torture Robert had to undergo.”
For a man who had been so politically engaged in the 1930s and ’40s, Oppenheimer was oddly disconnected from the turmoil of the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, as many Americ
ans dug atomic bomb shelters in their backyards, Oppenheimer never spoke out against such hysteria. When pressed by Lilienthal, he explained, “There is nothing I can do about what is going on; I would be the worst person to speak out about them in any case.” Similarly, as the Vietnam War escalated in 1965–66, he had nothing to say in public—though privately, when he discussed it with Peter, it was evident that he was skeptical of the Administration’s escalating commitment.
IN 1964, Oppenheimer received an advance copy of a book with a startling new interpretation of the decision to use the bomb on Hiroshima. Using such newly opened archival sources as former secretary of war Henry L. Stimson’s diaries and State Department materials related to former secretary of state James F. Byrnes, Gar Alperovitz argued that atomic diplomacy against the Soviet Union was a factor in President Truman’s decision to use the bomb against a Japanese enemy that appeared to be defeated militarily. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power created a storm of controversy. When Alperovitz asked for his comments, Oppenheimer wrote him that much of what he had written had “been largely unknown to me. . . .” He pointedly added, however, “[B]ut I do recognize your Byrnes, and I do recognize your Stimson.” He would not be drawn into the controversy over the book—but clearly, as with P. M. S. Blackett’s 1948 book Fear, War and the Bomb, he still thought the Truman Administration had used atomic weapons on an enemy already essentially defeated.
That same year, a German playwright and psychiatrist, Heinar Kipphardt, wrote a play, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Drawing heavily from the transcripts of the 1954 security board hearing, Kipphardt’s drama was first shown on German television and then produced for live theater audiences in West Berlin, Munich, Paris, Milan, and Basel. These European audiences were mesmerized by Kipphardt’s portrayal of Oppenheimer standing frail and lean before his accusers, like a modern Galileo, a scientist-hero martyred by the authorities in America’s anticommunist witch-hunt. Acclaimed by reviewers, the drama won five major awards.
But when Oppenheimer finally read the script, he so disliked it that he wrote Kipphardt an angry letter threatening legal action. (Strauss and Robb, who followed the reviews of the play closely, also briefly considered suing the Royal Shakespeare Company in London for defamation—but their lawyers persuaded them they didn’t have a case.) Oppenheimer particularly disliked the play’s concluding monologue, where the playwright had him expressing guilt for having built the atomic bomb: “I begin to wonder whether we were not perhaps traitors to the spirit of science. . . . We have been doing the work of the Devil. . . .” Such melodrama somehow cheapened the character of his ordeal. In short, he thought the script poor drama precisely because it lacked ambiguity.
Audiences disagreed. In October 1966, a British production opened in London, with the actor Robert Harris playing the role of Oppenheimer, and became wildly popular. A British reviewer wrote that the drama “causes one furiously to think.” Harris wrote Oppenheimer to report that “audiences have been attentive and enthusiastic—especially the young ones—which both surprised and pleased us.”
Oppenheimer later grudgingly agreed that the playwright was guilty of nothing more than dramatic license. He liked a French production of Kipphardt’s drama better because it drew almost exclusively from the security hearing transcripts—but even then, he complained that both productions “turned the whole damn farce into a tragedy.” Whatever its merits, Kipphardt’s play reintroduced Oppenheimer to a new generation of European and American audiences. The play eventually premiered in New York and inspired a BBC TV docudrama and other film renderings of Oppenheimer’s life.
There were other media projects that attempted to delve into Oppenheimer’s life. In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, NBC television aired a documentary, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, narrated by Chet Huntley, which featured Robert’s recollection of the July 16 Trinity test and his recitation from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” On another occasion, when an interviewer asked him on camera what he thought of Senator Robert Kennedy’s recent proposal that President Johnson initiate talks with the Soviet Union to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer puffed hard on his pipe and said, “It’s twenty years too late. . . . It should have been done the day after Trinity.”
Around this time, Oppenheimer learned that a well-connected and sympathetic journalist, Philip M. Stern, was working on a book about his 1954 security hearing. But even though mutual friends vouched for Stern, Oppenheimer decided not to be interviewed. “The subject of the book,” he explained, “is one on which I do not manage to have a total sense of detachment, and on which I have very large and central areas of ignorance. I cannot think of a more poisonous brew.” Stern would write a better book, he thought, “without my collaboration, suggestions, or implied approval.” Stern’s book, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial, was published in 1969 to critical acclaim.25
IN THE SPRING of 1965, Oppenheimer was gratified to see the completion of a new library for the Institute. It was built adjacent to a large artificial pond and surrounded by acres of green lawn, and Robert regarded it as one of his legacies. Designed by Wallace Harrison—the same architect who had designed his St. John beach cottage—the library had an innovative roof that used glass louvers set at an angle. In daytime, this provided ample sunlight. But at night, the library’s electric lighting shone upward. From a distance the whole sky seemed to be lit up by a great fire. When David Lilienthal praised the beauty of the new library’s setting and the spectacle it created at night, Robert gave him a “little-boy grin,” and said, “The library is beautiful, and the setting. It is also an illustration of how we don’t anticipate the most obvious consequences. This happened to us in a major way with the bomb in Los Alamos. As for the ceiling for the library, we wanted the best light, the light in just the right way. . . . In the daylight it turned out to be wonderful. But no one, not one of us, foresaw that not only would light come in, but it would go out—into the sky.”
His pleasure with the new library only partly compensated for his ongoing clashes with various members of the mathematics faculty. The Institute’s petty politics sometimes provoked him to angry outbursts. “The trouble is that Robert loves controversy,” reported one trustee to Lewis Strauss, “and essentially hates people. He ought to be asked to leave.” Strauss relished such reports, but he still lacked the votes to oust Oppenheimer.
But then, in the spring of 1965, Oppenheimer told the Institute’s trustees that he had resolved that the time had come for him to resign, and he suggested that he should leave in June 1966, at the end of that academic year. Strauss was present to hear the news. Oppenheimer gave three reasons for his decision. First, he was just two years away from the statutory retirement age of sixty-five, and there was no point in “simply waiting for the bell to toll.” Second, he explained that Kitty had been “suffering from an illness which the doctors have pronounced incurable. . . .” (In his memo for his files, Strauss wickedly labeled Kitty’s disease “dipsomania”—the uncontrollable craving for alcohol.) Robert said that this was now making it impossible for him to entertain visitors or members of the faculty. Third, he said his relations with some members of the faculty, particularly in the mathematics faculty, were “intolerable and worsening.”
Robert had wanted to make this decision public later that year, perhaps in the autumn, but that very night he had some faculty members over for dinner and Kitty spilled the beans. Since the news was now bound to leak, the trustees quickly drafted a press release and the story appeared in newspapers around the country on Sunday morning, April 25, 1965.
Oppenheimer had few regrets about leaving. But one was the fact that he would have to move out of Olden Manor, his and Kitty’s home for nearly two decades. Robert consoled himself that the trustees had voted to build a new house for him on the grounds of the Institute—or otherwis
e provide them housing. The Oppenheimers had hired an architect, Henry A. Jandel, and created a model of the new home, a modern glass-and-steel one-story structure to be built on a lot two hundred yards down the road from Olden Manor. But in what can only be described as a characteristic act of personal vengeance, Strauss used his still considerable influence as a trustee to block the project. On December 8, 1965, Strauss told his fellow trustees that he took a “dim view” of these plans. It was a “mistake,” he argued, to have Oppenheimer living on campus, let alone next door to Olden Manor. Another trustee, Harold K. Hochschild, interrupted to say that “even Princeton was too close.” In short order, Strauss persuaded the trustees to rescind their promise. When Oppenheimer was informed the next day, he was “enraged.” If that was the board’s firm decision, he said, he would leave Princeton altogether. If Robert was understandably angered, a furious Kitty vented her outrage on another trustee and his wife, who reported to Strauss that “a very unpleasant conversation had ensued.” Strauss kept his hand invisible in all this, leaving the Oppenheimers only with their suspicions. That was how things stood in December. But by February 1966, Oppenheimer somehow persuaded the trustees to reverse themselves yet again. To Strauss’ disgust, Oppenheimer was allowed to build the house on the site he wanted. Construction began in September 1966 and the house was completed the following spring. But he would never live in it.
IN THE autumn of 1965, Oppie visited his doctor for a physical checkup. It was not something he did very often, but he came home that day and announced that he had been given a clean bill of health. “I am going to outlive every one of you,” he said jocularly. But two months later, his smoker’s cough became noticeably worse. In St. John that Christmas, he complained to Sis Frank of a “terrible sore throat,” and mused, “Maybe I’m smoking too much.” Kitty thought he just had a bad cold. Finally, in February 1966, she took him to a doctor in New York. The diagnosis was clear and devastating. Kitty phoned Verna Hobson with the news: “Robert has cancer,” she whispered.