On April 22, 1904, after a difficult labor, a blue-eyed child was born to Julius and Ella Oppenheimer. They named him Robert, but gave him a preceding initial taken from his father, which Robert later said "stood for nothing." Julius Oppenheimer was a Jewish immigrant who had come to the United States from Hanau, Germany, in 1888 to work in a family business importing textiles at the age of seventeen. An ambitious and self-improving man, by his thirtieth birthday he was wealthy with excellent command of the English language and in possession of developed tastes in art and literature; Robert later described him as "one of the most tolerant and human of men." Ella Friedman Oppenheimer was an artist who had studied painting in Paris and whose family had immigrated from Germany in the 1840s. At the time she met Julius, she was teaching art in her own New York studio.
The Oppenheimers lived on the eleventh floor of an apartment building in a well-to-do neighborhood on Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson River. In this sheltered atmosphere, Robert grew up surrounded by Van Goghs and fine European furniture — in those days more a sign of good taste than wealth.
As a boy, Robert attended the Ethical Culture School, where, in addition to mathematics and science, he was exposed to a variety of subjects ranging from Greek to French literature. Then, as later in his life, Robert pursued science and the humanities with equal ease and pleasure. When Robert was eight, his brother Frank Friedman Oppenheimer was born.
In school he pursued interests in Greek, chemistry, architecture, classics, art, and literature. As a child, he was given a "perfectly conventional tiny collection of minerals" by his grandfather on a visit to Germany. "From then on I became," he recalled, "in a completely childish way, an ardent mineral collector and I had, by the time I was through, quite a fine collection." At age twelve he had been elected an honorary member of the New York Mineralogical Club and delivered a paper at one of its meetings.
Taking a year off before starting college at Harvard due to an attack of colitis, Robert traveled with a former English teacher to New Mexico, where he fell in love with horseback riding and the mountains and plateaus of the American Southwest. He returned reinvigorated.
At Harvard, Robert flourished, pursuing philosophy and French literature along with his science. He was introduced to experimental physics in a course on thermodynamics taught by future Nobel Laureate Percy Bridgman. While only in his first year as an undergraduate, he had applied, on the basis of independent study, for graduate standing in physics, which would allow him to take higher level courses (which he was granted). After three years of college, Robert graduated in 1925 with an A.B. in chemistry, summa cum laude. He was then admitted to carry out advanced work with J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. However, Robert was somewhat poor at experimental work, though he was becoming increasingly interested in the theoretical aspects of physics, represented in Cambridge by R.H. Fowler and still in the throes of the revolution started by Planck, Einstein, and Bohr.
Surviving a brief bout of depression, Robert accepted an offer from Max Born to continue his studies at the University of Göttingen in Germany, one of the centers of theoretical physics in Europe. Work at Göttingen was centered around a newly forming field of physics, quantum mechanics, and Robert was in on the ground floor.
During his time at Göttingen, Robert found acceptance and success, despite his relative lack of experience with theoretical physics and his young age – he was only twenty-two at the time, and looked much younger. While there he worked with Born, Paul Dirac, Ed Condon, and many others, and he started to gain a very favorable reputation as he began to produce good work and hold his own with any of the other young mathematical physicists. As at Cambridge, there was a steady flow of visiting physicists in Göttingen, and Robert interacted with Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, among many distinguished (and soon-to-be distinguished) others.
In the spring of 1927, Robert was awarded his doctorate with distinction from Göttingen, writing his dissertation on problems concerning the continuous spectrum. He continued to work on the application of quantum mechanics to the problem of scattering, and with Max Born he wrote a joint paper on the quantum theory of molecules, creating the "Born-Oppenheimer approximation," which continues to be used to this day. Robert had arrived in Europe as a somewhat inept and ineffectual laboratory physicist and left as a young maven of mathematical physics. He chose to spend the fall term at Harvard before going to Pasadena to work at the California Institute of Technology, as a National Research Council fellow.
While at Caltech he received numerous invitations for teaching positions – ten in the United States and two in Europe – and eventually opted for an assistant professorship in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley appealed, in his words, because "it was a desert," and yet it was also a fertile place of opportunity. He maintained a joint appointment with Caltech, where he sporadically taught in the spring term, in order to avoid potential isolation. Before his Berkeley professorship began, however, he was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis, and with his now sixteen-year-old brother Frank, spent some weeks at a ranch in New Mexico. They dubbed the location "Perro Caliente," from Robert's exclamation of "Hot dog!" when he found out it could be leased. Eventually he purchased it outright.
Driving west to California, Frank flipped their car over and Robert broke his arm. (There was some debate between them about who was the worse driver, and both had considerable claim to the honor.) To cheer up Frank, Robert chose bright red as the color for his sling, which is what he was wearing when he arrived in Pasadena.
In the fall of 1928, Robert headed back to Cambridge and on to the University of Leiden, Holland, traveling along with Paul Dirac to visit Paul Ehrenfest's institute, where he impressed colleagues by giving lectures in Dutch despite very little experience with the language. They affectionately dubbed him "Opje," which became Americanized as "Oppie." He then spent a month in Utrecht, working with Hendrik Kramers. Robert had planned to head to Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr, but Ehrenfest instead advised him to go to Zurich, in Switzerland, on the suggestion that Oppenheimer would benefit more from close contact with Wolfgang Pauli, another sharp mathematical physicist, rather than Bohr's more qualitative and cloudy approach. Robert stayed through the spring of the next year, working with Pauli on, among other things, fundamental problems of quantum field theory and the continuous spectrum.
In the summer of 1929, twenty-five-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer finally arrived at the University of California in Berkeley to take up his post as an assistant professor of physics. Berkeley's physics program was at the time extremely weak in theory, in contrast to the more established mingling of theorists and experimentalists at Caltech. Only the year before had experimentalist Ernest O. Lawrence been recruited as an assistant professor. Berkeley was a desert, but it was very quickly going to bloom. Under the eye of Raymond Thayer Birge, chairman from 1933 to 1955, the Berkeley physics department would quickly become a magnet for top students from around the world.
For Oppenheimer, Berkeley was the site where he would start a school, while Caltech was a place to maintain a sense of collegial interaction and criticism. Within two years, Lawrence had invented his cyclotron: a machine which used a clever arrangement of electric and magnetic fields to push particles to high energies and use them to bombard atomic nuclei. Over time the experimentalists at both Berkeley and Caltech were creating mountains of data and finding new subatomic phenomena, which gave the theoretical physicists ample challenges. Unlike European physics research at the time, theoretical and experimental aspects of the American physics curriculum were still highly integrated.
"I didn't start to make a school," Oppie (as his students called him) reflected later. "I didn't start to look for students. I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved, about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood and which was very rich. The pattern was not that of someone who takes on a course and teaches students preparing for a variety of careers but of explaining first to faculty, staff, and colleagues and then to anyone who would listen, what this was about, what had been learned, what the unsolved problems were."
When Oppenheimer started at Berkeley he was regarded as a poor lecturer. He stammered, spoke inaudibly, and rushed through his material. He even wrote notes on top of other notes on his blackboard, referring students to things he had long since covered up with more chalk. None of this was helped by the inherent complexity of the subject matter. However, over time he became more adept at lecturing, lost his stammer, and took more pains with his explanations. He became especially renowned for his role as a graduate advisor who was willing to work with students for hours on end, fleshing out their scientific problems without taking over the project or taking credit for it later. By the mid-1930s, his group of eight to ten graduate students and half a dozen postdoctoral students would gather into his office to discuss their research progress and interests as a group, exposing each of them to a broad range of topics. However, even with his improvements, some hallmarks of the Oppenheimer style still lingered; in the words of Robert Serber, a former postdoctoral student of Oppenheimer's, he was still "quick, impatient, and had a sharp tongue."
Robert impressed with his lightning grasp and vast mastery of physics — concepts, formulas, and experimental data alike. His students also adored him for his trademark style. They sought to acquire his tastes and imitated his mannerisms. They also spread the famous Oppenheimer mystique – of his learning Sanskrit, for instance, in order to better read the Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu holy book which, curiously, deals in part with the moral obligation of a skilled warrior to participate in the making of war) and of reading the whole of Marx's Das Kapital (not in translation) during a train trip.
Robert became good friends with Lawrence during this period, despite their having very little in common. Oppenheimer was a gangly, refined theorist from an affluent Jewish East Coast background, whereas Lawrence was a solid experimentalist raised in South Dakota who had paid his way through college selling cookware door to door. Whatever their differences, in the early 1930s they became a complementary pair.
With a furious tempo, politics and physics battled it out through the 1930s for the distinction of producing the most shocking events. In 1932 Cockroft and Walton blasted subatomic particles together with enough force to drive a human-controlled nuclear reaction for the first time. That same year, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, and within three months had seized total dictatorial powers. In April, Jewish civil servants were fired from their posts in Germany, including university professors. In 1934, the Joliot-Curies discovered artificial radioactivity by bombarding elements with alpha particles; in the same year Enrico Fermi discovered similar effects using neutrons, and reported that using uranium as a target produced several different artificially radioactive elements as products. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out after a failed coup by Franco's Nationalists, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. In 1938, Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman released findings proving that Fermi had actually witnessed the bursting of the uranium nucleus and produced atomic fission. Immediately, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch described the mechanism for fission and indicated that large amounts of energy were given off in the process. Leo Szilard confirmed in his own experiments that neutrons, too, were produced in the reaction, and the Joliot-Curies measured the number. The possibility of using a neutron-fed chain reaction for a continuous source of power was front and center in many physicists' minds – as was the possibility of using it for a weapon. As the Nazi army marched into Czechoslovakia, then into Poland, the spectre of nuclear fission in a weapon loomed
Until the mid-1930s, Robert was well-known for being oblivious to politics. He reportedly did not know about the Great Depression until told by Lawrence some time after the stock market crash. However, in 1936 he met Jean Tatlock, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University, at a benefit for Spanish Loyalists organized by Robert's landlady. Robert and Jean's relationship, which oscillated through many highs and lows, sparked Robert's first dedicated interest and involvement with radical politics. Tatlock had many connections in local progressive causes, and through her Oppenheimer met an assistant professor of French literature at Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier. Both Chevalier and Tatlock were members, at various times, of the Communist Party. Having much more money than most of his colleagues (he inherited over $300,000 after his father's death in 1937, a massive sum at the time), Robert was able to support many left-wing efforts, such as those on behalf of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. But his political activity did not reach much further than donations, occasional discussion groups, and benefits and parties that he hosted for causes. Meanwhile, he watched the mistreatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany with what he later described as "continuous, smoldering fury."
During this time, Robert's work as a physicist developed as well. With one of his first graduate students, Melba Phillips, Oppenheimer worked on deciphering the theory behind the cryptic results obtained by the Caltech experimenters and the cyclotroneers at Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory. They explained the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, involved in artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons, an important step in nuclear physics. He was also looking closely at cosmic ray showers, developing a mathematical theory of their step-by-step production. The formalism of relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory attracted his attention, as did the deep troubles of the theory of light and electrons, called quantum electrodynamics. Robert also worked on applying general relativity and nuclear physics to theoretical astrophysics, resulting in work that came into its own only in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, neutron stars and black holes were discovered to exist in physical reality as well as in theorists' minds.
In the autumn of 1940, Robert fell quickly into marriage with Katherine (Kitty) Puening Harrison, a spirited woman with a radical streak, who had earlier been married to a hero of the Spanish Civil War. She was married to a doctor when she first met Robert. By May 1941 they had produced their first child, Peter.
Looking back later, in 1954, Robert would assess his Berkeley days as such:
"Starting with a single graduate student in my first year in Berkeley, we gradually began to build up what was to become the largest school in the country of graduate and postdoctoral study in theoretical physics, so that as time went on, we came to have between a dozen and twenty people learning and adding to quantum theory, nuclear physics, relativity, and other modern physics. As the number of students increased, so in general did their quality. The men who worked with me during those years hold chairs in many of the great centers of physics in the United States; they have made important contributions to science."
For a while, Oppenheimer's work would remain purely theoretical. But things would start to turn very, very practical, as Berkeley became an epicenter for a project to produce a new weapon from physics.
As World War II started, Oppenheimer eagerly became involved in the effort to develop an atomic bomb, already taking up much of the activity of Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Lawrence had been in on the ground floor of attempts to develop a weapon based on the principle of uranium fission. Roosevelt's initial Uranium Committee to investigate the use of fission in a wartime weapon, pressed forward by a letter written by Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein in 1939, was producing unimpressive results, to the dismay of British physicists, who had done much initial theoretical work on the problem. Under their urging and the insistence of Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, and James Conant, the original project was replaced with new infrastructure and new leaders, with the hopes of vastly accelerating the pace.
Oppenheimer was brought into the fold by Lawrence in late 1941. On October 14 of that year, Lawrence wrote to Compton that Oppenheimer should come along with the heads of the new project to an upcoming meeting in Schenectady, New York, as Robert had "important new ideas." Compton replied by telegram the next day that this would be approved, but nonetheless urged that Lawrence should consider passing along Oppenheimer's thoughts at second hand in order to avoid duplicate travel cost. Lawrence replied that he would get the University of California to fund his colleague's travel if necessary; Oppenheimer's presence was essential.
From here Oppenheimer became a useful theoretical advisor, writing to Compton in the next few months with revisions on estimates of the amount of enriched uranium needed for a viable weapon – the critical mass – and the efficiency of such a weapon. By early 1942, Robert was appointed head of fast neutron research and quickly became essential to the project. He threw himself into the task with full vigor, compiling and dissecting all available experimental information on uranium's behavior. That summer he called together a group of "luminaries" to discuss the theoretical problems of developing an atomic weapon. In the top floor of Le Conte Hall on the Berkeley campus, established physicists and Oppenheimer's own students – Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, John Van Vleck, Felix Bloch, Emil Konopinski, Robert Serber, Stanley Frenkel, and Eldred Nelson – spent a month going over the data. Raised at the summer conference was also a pet project of Teller's: the idea of using a fission bomb as a trigger for an even larger weapon, the hydrogen bomb, christened the "Super."
When General Leslie R. Groves took over the secret atomic bomb effort – code named the Manhattan Engineer District, or Manhattan Project – in September of that year, he focused on the idea of creating a centralized scientific laboratory. Previous research had been taken place across the country at a variety of institutions, which interfered with speedy work and created many security concerns. To the surprise of many and the frustration of Lawrence, Groves appointed Oppenheimer scientific director of the still non-existent site, despite his past political affiliations and lack of administrative experience.
Scouting for a site for the new secret laboratory, Oppenheimer was again drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On a flat mesa near Santa Fe, the Los Alamos Ranch School was commandeered for the purpose of the bomb project. Out of it, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory rose as a rag-tag collection of barracks and an ocean of mud. There Oppenheimer collected a group of the most brilliant and able physicists of his day, including Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Richard Feynman, and many, many more. At the urging of Lawrence, the University of California became the laboratory's contractor, dealing with personnel, accounting, and payroll. This happened even though no one in the university's administration knew much of anything about the lab – even its location. (University treasurer Robert Underhill was eventually allowed to know the state in which the lab was to be situated, as he otherwise could not purchase insurance. Underhill was eventually told by Lawrence of the lab's purpose, in order to increase his haste in responding to requests; at a reception, the University's president Robert Gordon Sproul speculated that the laboratory was creating a "death ray," which, while inaccurate, was close enough to the truth to rile Groves.)
Oppenheimer developed into an effective and inspiring director. His trademark ability to understand concepts as quickly as they were put in front of him, and his prowess in keeping the project's disparate details active in his mind at all times, allowed him to expertly coordinate the many hundreds of scientific specialists who poured in. His wife gave birth to their second child, Katherine (called Toni), in 1944 while at the lab.
Using plutonium produced at the massive nuclear reactors built at Hanford, Washington, and uranium enriched in the gaseous diffusion apparatus and the calutrons developed by Ernest Lawrence for the massive complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Los Alamos scientists were able to carry out experiments, explore theoretical conceptions, and construct the world's first atomic weapons. The lab, envisioned originally to accommodate only a few dozen scientists and personnel, would grow to include thousands of people over square miles of space. Despite initial frustrations, problems, and setbacks, Oppenheimer's guidance proved to be invaluable and irreplaceable.
One of the most troubling problems in the project was the use of plutonium for an atomic bomb. While highly enriched uranium could be caused to undergo a rapid, out-of-control chain reaction by simply combining two sub-critical pieces together quickly to form a critical mass, plutonium could not. Due to its unique properties, plutonium could only be used if a sub-critical sphere were imploded using focused lenses of high explosives, increasing its density and thus decreasing its critical mass. Any slight deviations in the implosion, however, would cause the bomb to fizzle, resulting in a relatively small explosion and a large waste of resources.
The lack of confidence in the implosion mechanism encouraged the undertaking of a single test. On July 16, 1945, night turned to day at the "Trinity" test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon. Witnessing the explosion, Oppenheimer reportedly remarked to his brother simply, "It worked." Later he said that his thoughts turned to words from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
Some of the lab's scientists were unsure of their ethical standing in producing such a weapon to be used against civilians. Oppenheimer, however, agreed with those who urged the first use of the bomb against an actual target – and not as a demonstration. In particular, his arguments against staging a demonstration were that the bomb was not certain to work (and a failed weapon might even be used against its builders by the enemy), that POWs might be moved to any target area for which advance warning was given, and that a demonstration would never be as effective as use against what the military had termed "built-up areas" – populated cities.
This was the policy implemented by President Truman on August 6, 1945, when the uranium bomb, "Little Boy," destroyed Hiroshima with the explosive force of 15,000 tons of TNT. Three days later, a plutonium bomb, "Fat Man," was set loose on Nagasaki. Either immediately or through injuries sustained in the blasts, the two bombs killed an estimated 210,000 people, ninety-five percent of them civilians. Six days after the second bomb, Japan surrendered.
Overnight Oppenheimer became a man of tremendous world importance, marked as the "father of the atomic bomb." He became a consultant on the highest of political matters relating to atomic energy. After initial euphoria stemming from the success of a job well done, Oppenheimer slumped into despair as casualty reports streamed in from Japan. While he resumed his professorship at Caltech upon resigning from Los Alamos, a general disaffection made him hesitate to return to Berkeley, and he extended his leave of absence for another year. At a ceremony at Los Alamos at which the Army presented the laboratory with a Certificate of Appreciation, Oppenheimer delivered a grim prediction for the future:
"If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of the a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand."
In the next few years, Oppenheimer would lobby vigorously for international control of atomic energy, in the framework of which the Soviet Union and the United States would submit to a supranational organization designed to allow sharing of peaceful atomic energy information while keeping weapons development to a monitored minimum. These hopes ultimately fell through when policymakers intent on keeping America's atomic monopoly as long as possible presented plans which would obviously keep the Soviets out of the atomic picture. The Russians unceremoniously rejected the proposal in 1946.
In 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission was formed as a civilian agency to oversee U.S. atomic affairs, Oppenheimer was unanimously elected chairman of its General Advisory Committee. In that same year he finally left Berkeley – frustrated by the University of California bureaucracy he had encountered during the war, and unwilling to become a subordinate to Ernest Lawrence – in order to take up an appointment as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The longtime head of the Berkeley physics department, Raymond Birge, declared his inability to keep Oppenheimer "the greatest failure of my life." In Princeton, Oppenheimer would turn the Institute into a magnet for young theoretical physicists at the cutting edge of the discipline, although he pulled back from active research of his own.
On the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer resisted efforts pushing to develop the hydrogen, or fusion, bomb, on grounds both political and technical. (At the time, all proposed models for the weapon were highly speculative.) He quickly became a source of frustration for more optimistic H-bomb boosters like Lawrence and Teller.
During the late 1940s concerns about Communist infiltration were beginning to build as the first lines of the Cold War were drawn. After a Soviet spy ring in Canada was discovered, trouble began for many physicists, especially as officials high in the U.S. government began to speculate as to when exactly the Russians would build their own atomic bomb.
Robert told Pash that several months earlier he had been contacted by "intermediaries" in touch with an unidentified official at the Soviet consulate, and that one of these intermediaries had talked about passing on information about secret work being done at Berkeley. In response to this, he told Pash, Robert said that while he was not opposed to sharing information about the program with the Russians, he would not find it appropriate to do so in an unofficial and clandestine manner. Furthermore, Oppenheimer said that he knew that these intermediaries had subsequently approached others on the project, all of whom were disturbed by the solicitations and sought Oppenheimer's advice. He would not identify the men, who he said had been chosen at chance and posed no security risk and thus ought not be involved, but said two of the three of them were currently at Los Alamos and the third was scheduled to go to the uranium enriching facility at Oak Ridge in the near future. Oppenheimer identified Eltenton as one of the intermediaries but said that he had been approached by yet another go-between, a Berkeley faculty member and friend of Oppenheimer's whom he would not name because he had acted in good faith, had already left town in any event, and posed no future threat. Pash rushed a transcript of the conversation to Groves and a copy to the FBI. Eltenton was put under immediate surveillance.
Despite his urgings, Robert's graduate students did not end their political activities. They would also soon either be fired or moved away from the weapons project. (One had his deferment canceled and was even drafted, despite having just been put in charge of a significant aspect of Lawrence's weapons effort .)
Pash soon told Groves that he needed to know the name of the professor who had contacted Oppenheimer and the others. In early September, Oppenheimer, Groves, and the head of the Manhattan Project internal security, Captain John Lansdale, shared a compartment on a train ride eastward. The grilling continued; Oppenheimer said that he was confident that no secrets were lost and that no further contacts were made, and that he would reveal the name of the professor only if Groves issued him a direct order. Not wanting to press the point, as he felt Oppenheimer's favor vital for the success of the project, Groves declined. In a few weeks, Lansdale would interrogate Oppenheimer again about the identities of the professor and those who were contacted, to no success. In a few months, however, he would report to Groves that Oppenheimer was honest about never having been a Communist and would not permit Communists to interfere with the success of the bomb project. Pash continued his investigation, however, until Groves appointed him the head of Project Alsos, the effort to assess the Nazi atomic bomb project from evidence in liberated western Europe.
In December 1943, Groves made up his mind that he needed to know the identities of the unknown individuals. Flying to Los Alamos, he ordered Robert to give the name of the go-between. Oppenheimer promptly replied that it was Haakon Chevalier, his old friend and colleague from progressive circles. When Groves ordered him to reveal the names of the three individuals contacted by Chevalier, Robert said that he would tell only if Groves promised not to give the information to the FBI, as he did not want to put them under what he saw as unnecessary scrutiny. Thinking that they were among Oppenheimer's graduate students, already under FBI surveillance and effectively neutralized, Groves agreed. But he was surprised when Robert gave only one name: Frank Oppenheimer, his brother.
Robert's younger brother had also pursued physics, though he lacked his older brother's charisma and gifts. He had also dabbled in leftist politics, and he and his wife Jackie had in fact joined the Communist Party soon after they were married, much to Robert's disappointment. However, during the war, Robert secured Frank a job working for Lawrence at the Rad Lab, providing he kept his political activity to a minimum. Later Frank would go to Oak Ridge to assist with problems of corrosion, then to Los Alamos to help plan for the Trinity test.
According to what Robert told Groves that day, Frank had been approached by Chevalier about passing information to the Russians or inquiring whether his brother would do so. Troubled by the solicitation, Frank went to Robert for advice, who admonished him to have nothing to do with the plan and later berated Chevalier for attempting to recruit his brother as a spy. (Frank would later deny ever being contacted by Chevalier, and Chevalier himself would deny contacting anybody but Oppenheimer.)
Groves did not want to break his promise to Oppenheimer, but he also did not want to commit a felony for withholding information. Returning to Washington, Groves called a meeting with his lawyer, Army Major William Consodine, and Lansdale. Asking them to write down the names of who they thought Oppenheimer had told him the contacts were, he set in front of them a pad of paper. Lansdale wrote three names down, all from a list of suspects compiled earlier by Pash. Consodine wrote only Frank. Groves told the men that he did not want to lose Robert's trust and jeopardize the success of the project, but national security was clearly a problem as well. After the meeting – whether on his own volition or as a request of Groves is not known – Lansdale reported the information verbally to the FBI.
After the war, Frank returned to the Rad Lab but soon got a job at the University of Minnesota. Before he left Berkeley, however, he filled out a new AEC personnel security questionnaire and omitted his membership in the Communist Party, unaware that the FBI already knew. In 1947, the FBI leaked a story to the press that Robert's brother had been a Communist and had worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb.
In 1949 Frank was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify about his Communist affiliations. While still on the stand, he was fired from his position at the University of Minnesota. Other left-wing students of Robert's met similar trouble. David Bohm was suspended from teaching at Princeton, Joseph Weinberg and Rossi Lomanitz had already lost their positions during the war for security concerns. Robert himself had testified at a closed executive session of HUAC as a cooperating witness in June 1949 about the activities of Weinberg, Lomanitz, and another student, Bernard Peters. Damning testimony against Peters, in which Robert labeled him "a dangerous man and quite Red," was leaked to the Rochester Times-Union newspaper and threatened Peters's job the University of Rochester. Oppenheimer's testimony angered many of his peers, not to mention Peters, who was surprised by what he saw as gross inaccuracies. Moreover, if the leaked testimony was truly representative of Oppenheimer's feelings towards Peters at the time, what did it say about Oppenheimer's judgment that he had kept Peters on the Manhattan Project until 1946? Robert later said that the testimony was a terrible mistake and that he was not prepared to answer the questions when they were asked. He wrote a letter to the editor of the another Rochester newspaper, suggesting that while Peters did have radical political views during his years as a student, "I have never known Dr. Peters to commit a dishonorable act, nor a disloyal one." Peters's job remained secure, but afterwards his foreign travel was extremely restricted.
Unable to secure a position in physics elsewhere, and denied a passport to travel abroad for work, Robert's brother Frank sold a Van Gogh he had inherited after his father's death and used the money to buy land in Colorado with the intention of becoming a cattle rancher with his wife Jackie.
Further tensions were forming around Robert. In 1949 testimony before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on the (lack of) danger of radioisotopes, Oppenheimer made a laughingstock of AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss. That August, when the first Russian atomic bomb was detonated – years before any American politician believed it possible – the pressure increased to develop the Super. Oppenheimer resisted. However, against the recommendations of the AEC's General Advisory Committee, President Truman announced a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb as the American response to the Russian atomic test. On February 1, 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had worked under Teller at Los Alamos in the British delegation, confessed to espionage in London. Fuchs had been passing detailed secrets to the Soviets for years relating to the atomic bomb and even embryonic work on the hydrogen bomb. Less than a week after Fuchs's confession, Senator Joseph McCarthy let loose with his famous announcement that he had the names of two hundred Communist infiltrators in the State Department.
Robert's failed stand against the hydrogen bomb had angered the politicians in Washington and many of the scientists at Berkeley alike. His enemies, led by Strauss, had two main weapons ready and lined up against him: his past Communist sympathies at Berkeley, and the Chevalier incident. The most damning part of the Chevalier incident – which at the very worst did not have Oppenheimer consenting to espionage – was the fact that he had been extremely coy in talking about it to the security authorities, changing his story several times and being especially evasive. By the late 1940s, Oppenheimer had been under the intense scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI on numerous occasions already; his phone had been wiretapped, his movements had been followed, and his security file had grown to more than a foot in thickness.
Fearing that the Chevalier incident – which threatened to resurface in the perjury trial of another of Oppenheimer's former students, Joseph Weinberg – would lead to difficulties in his reappointment to the GAC, Robert announced that he would resign in 1952, before the question would go before the president. However, it came as a shock to him when his AEC security clearance was suspended in December 1953 in connection with an accusation of Communist sympathies and of being a national security risk. Oppenheimer appealed the decision and asked for a hearing.
In April 1954 the hearing "in the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" was watched closely by scientists, politicians, and other observers. Oppenheimer had gone quickly from science's darling to a potential liability, and all the characters of the past years would be called to testify for or against him. Some of the most critical testimony came from fellow physicist and government advisor Edward Teller: "In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act . . . in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. . . . If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance."
On June 28, 1954, the AEC commissioners voted four to one to uphold the decision to deny Oppenheimer his clearance, citing his unreliable character and veracity as their primary motivation.
Stripped of his clearance, Oppenheimer was exiled from the corridors of power. He would be no longer sought for official advice on atomic energy or the weapons he had helped create, nor allowed free access to the laboratory he had built up.
Because of his testimony against Oppenheimer, Teller himself faced an exile of his own. Many of his fellow scientists were sympathetic to Oppenheimer's fight against the mechanisms of anti-Communism during the McCarthy era. Teller took refuge in the echelons of the military-scientific establishment as a top scientific advisor, albeit one who was shunned by much of the scientific community.
Oppenheimer continued to lecture and write. He toured Europe and America offering reflections on the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe. At the Institute for Advanced Study, he worked to bring together intellectuals at the height of their powers across the variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent questions of the age, but largely felt that he had failed to make any significant progress. Compared to his school-building days of radicalism at Berkeley, his massive responsibility at Los Alamos, and his political influence in the AEC, Oppenheimer's life after the security trial lacked gravity.
In 1960, Robert was invited by the Japanese Committee for Intellectual Exchange to visit Japan, the country that had experienced the direct results of his success at Los Alamos. Though he was advised to decline, for fear of a poor reception, Robert took up the offer. When he arrived he was asked by reporters whether he was sorry that he had made the atomic bomb. He replied: "I do not regret 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."
When Kennedy took office, official policy towards Oppenheimer became more favorable. In 1962 he was invited as a guest to a White House dinner for Nobel Laureates, at which he was approached by Glenn Seaborg, the Berkeley scientist who had co-discovered plutonium, currently Chairman of the AEC. Seaborg asked if he would want another security hearing, to clear his name. Oppenheimer declined; once was enough.
Looking for other ways to help, sympathetic figures in government (including Seaborg and favorable members of Kennedy's cabinet like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk) decided that the AEC's prestigious Enrico Fermi Award might be an apt way to express Oppenheimer's "rehabilitation." As part of the normal award process, the AEC asked the opinions of members of the scientific community, including Edward Teller, who had won the award the year before. Teller thought it would be a good opportunity to end his differences with Oppenheimer, and with them his own alienation from other scientists.
Oppenheimer's nomination was approved unanimously by the GAC, and Kennedy himself was slated to present the award, although he was assassinated before it could happen. In 1963, Oppenheimer received the Fermi Award from President Johnson. After receiving his medal, Oppenheimer 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." He even ceremoniously shook Edward Teller's hand afterwards.
It was intended as a reinstatement of sorts, but it was, however, only symbolic in its effects. Oppenheimer still lacked the security clearance. However, he became committed to attempting to achieve a peaceful world by non-governmental means, fully accepting his official exile. To this extent he assembled a group of academics and intellectuals for a retreat in the summer 1964 at Mount Kisco, New York. To open the meeting, he encouraged all participants to speak frankly first about themselves before attempting to do so about society. For his own personal assessment, Robert offered up the following:
"Up until now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. It turned out to be impossible . . . for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth . . . and in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them."
The meeting came to no workable conclusions, not surprisingly. The next year, Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to give a memorial address for Niels Bohr, who had passed away two years before. The auditorium was packed, and Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer's successor as director, introduced him as "Mr. Los Alamos." Applause began in the front row and quickly spread throughout the room, becoming the deafening roar of a standing ovation. Later that year Robert would also return to Berkeley to deliver a talk, receiving yet another massive, favorable response.
After losing his job at the University of Minnesota, Frank Oppenheimer would live as a cattle rancher in Colorado. In 1957 he would teach again at a local high school, and in two years was offered a position at the University of Colorado. There his interests shifted towards developing new methods of science education, which eventually culminated in a "Library of Experiments" used to teach physics to students. In the mid-1960s, inspired by European science museums, he labored to create a site in the United States to encourage science learning. In 1969, Frank's efforts led to the opening of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, an interactive museum with the mission to make science fun and accessible for people of all ages. Frank served as its director until his death in 1985.
By 1965 Oppenheimer's health was ailing. He gave up his position of Director at the Institute of Advanced Study and instead took Albert Einstein's one-time position as senior professor of theoretical physics. In the winter of 1966, Oppenheimer's former student David Bohm wrote to ask whether the former director of Los Alamos felt any regret over Hiroshima. In his reply, Robert said, "My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me." Within two months, Robert died of throat cancer, on February 18, 1967.
At his funeral at the Institute, physicists and government officials came together once again: among the guests were Robert Serber, his former student and later assistant on the Manhattan project; Isidor Rabi, a physicist Robert had known since their student days in Europe; General Leslie Groves, who had left the Army to go into private business in 1948; and John Lansdale, once head of internal Manhattan Project security, who had defended Oppenheimer at his 1954 hearing. Addresses were given by George Kennan, former diplomat and colleague of Oppenheimer's at the Institute; Hans Bethe, his longtime friend and head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos; and Henry De Wolf Smyth, the only member of the AEC to vote against the stripping of his clearance. The Juillard String Quartet performed two movements from Beethoven's Quartet in C Sharp Minor; afterwards Kitty and Frank received guests in the Institute library. Robert's ashes were then scattered over the Virgin Islands, a favorite summer retreat of his family.
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