Life in a Force Field
The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern
Arms Race. Priscilla J. McMillan. x + 373 pp. Viking, 2005. $25.95.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. xiv + 721 pp.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. $35.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. David C.
Cassidy. xviii + 462 pp. Pi Press, 2004. $27.95.
J. Robert Oppenheimer lived through one of the most severe and
widely witnessed whipsaws of all time. While enjoying the prestige
and political influence that followed from having supervised the
building of the atomic bomb, he was suddenly turned into a walking
ruin by enemies whose malevolence and mendacity he had not fully
measured even in his most prescient and suspicious moments. This
whipsaw is what the late journalist Murray Kempton had in mind when,
in his 1994 book Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events,
he attributed to Oppenheimer the distinction of having experienced
with extraordinary intensity "both the illusion of being
history's conqueror and the fact of being its victim."
Many people have their ups and downs, but few individuals other than
long-serving heads of powerful nation-states are as central to the
great public events of their time as Oppenheimer was to his.
Oppenheimer's significance, however—unlike that of Franklin
Roosevelt or Napoleon or Bismarck—is measured as much by what
happened to him as by what he accomplished. He was a cause of many
things, yes, but he was also a collection of results. His life
instructs us not only about the power of science and the capacity of
highly motivated, well-organized intellectuals to achieve great
things, but also about the power of the American state and about how
its authority can be mobilized by handfuls of determined and willful individuals.
Oppenheimer was an expanse on which was worked out a multitude of
the scientific, governmental, ideological, military and social
dynamics of the middle decades of the 20th century in the United
States. As David Cassidy puts it in the first sentence of his
biography, "The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer is the story of
twentieth-century America." Oppenheimer himself and his
contemporaries had a preliminary sense of this, but now, 38 years
after his death in 1967, Cassidy and other historians are more
confident than ever before of the long-term significance of the
events in which Oppenheimer was involved. These historians are
properly awed by the sheer size of Oppenheimer as a historic
"site." Simply put, there is so much history to
be found there.
This prodigious domain has now attracted a number of highly talented
and energetic scholars who are presenting this history to us in
several splendid books appearing about a century after Oppenheimer's
birth in 1904. I'll discuss three of the most important of these.
Cassidy's J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century is
distinguished by its close attention to the science Oppenheimer did
and to the intellectual relationships he had with other physicists.
Priscilla J. McMillan's The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and
the Birth of the Modern Arms Race is an enthralling and
frightening account of the process by which Oppenheimer's enemies
within the government he served began plotting against him in 1949
and brought him down five years later. Kai Bird and Martin J.
Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.
Robert Oppenheimer is a comprehensive biography, the best
single book ever written about Oppenheimer.
The three books complement one another nicely in content and style.
Although Cassidy's account of Oppenheimer's relationship with Robert
A. Millikan and other Caltech scientists is a fresh and distinctive
contribution, Cassidy devotes only half as many pages to the
post-1954 period of Oppenheimer's life as Bird and Sherwin do. Hence
American Prometheus gives us by far the most complete
and informative narrative of Oppenheimer's efforts to find his way
after 1954. Bird and Sherwin provide a detailed, if painful, account
of Oppenheimer's family life during that period and analyze in depth
the internal politics of the Institute for Advanced Study, which
Oppenheimer continued to direct despite efforts by Lewis Strauss
(who was a trustee there) to replace him. Although Bird and
Sherwin's and Cassidy's biographies both offer carefully documented
accounts of the security hearing and the machinations that led to
it, McMillan's book is entirely devoted to that episode in the
Oppenheimer story. Readers can turn to it for a study of
Oppenheimer's purge that illuminates most chillingly the ease with
which Strauss (as head of the Atomic Energy Commission), the
physicist Edward Teller and leaders of the Air Force were able to
mobilize and manipulate the power of the U.S. government to
eliminate any critical, scientific voice from the councils of
government for several crucial, Cold War years.
Regarding the style of these books, McMillan is the most arresting
prose writer and is the most concerned to leave her reader in a
state of healthy anger and "never again" determination.
Cassidy is straightforward and seems the most concerned that his own
voice be a vehicle for simply conveying to the reader the
information that his research has uncovered. Bird and Sherwin are
more ambitious than Cassidy as writers but are less concerned than
McMillan to get the reader to any particular destination.
All three books leave the reader almost numbed by the extent and
ferocity of the novel pressures with which Oppenheimer had to deal
from the time he entered government service in 1942 through his
adjustment to life as an exile in the mid-1950s. By virtue of the
responsibilities he accepted, he became, in effect, one of his
society's chief "point persons" for dealing with a
cascade of novelties generated by advances in theoretical physics,
by the weapons imperatives of World War II, by the new American
military colossus that emerged from that war and by the domestic
politics of the McCarthy Era. Oppenheimer's life before
1942—as a theoretical physicist, professor at Berkeley and
Caltech, Jewish intellectual, small-time political activist and
lover of Sanskrit poetry—is not without historical interest.
But after 1942 things were really different. For the next dozen
years he lived in a force field.
Political and intellectual objects of varying shapes, textures and
weights were thrown at him with different velocities by a remarkable
cast of characters. These included General Leslie Groves, the
officer in charge of the Manhattan Project; Hans Bethe, the great
theoretical physicist who at Los Alamos repeatedly pressed crucial
and challenging ideas upon Oppenheimer; and Strauss, the
self-important financier who, in his positions at the Atomic Energy
Commission and the Institute for Advanced Study, showed the father
of the atomic bomb what established authority could do to a
challenger, no matter how brilliant and charismatic. Oppenheimer
also dealt with projectiles sent his way by the vain and jealous
Teller, by the benevolent senior administrator James Conant, by his
communist friend Haakon Chevalier, by the great organizer Ernest
Lawrence, by the shallow-minded President Harry Truman, by the
monumentally dishonest J. Edgar Hoover, by countless scientists and
officials dependent on him in one way or another for leadership and
advice, and by a host of other contemporaries whose actions are
carefully detailed in these books.
The point is not that all of these novel stimuli were negative; on
the contrary, some were bracing, exciting and even satisfying
challenges of leadership. Rather, the point is that there were so
many of them and that they were so different from one another and
that they came at him so rapidly and from so many directions all at
once. Hence the numbing effect.
But if we as readers of these books are overwhelmed by the variety
and complexity of the novelties that Oppenheimer faced, what toll
might they have taken on the man who experienced them? Perhaps by
the spring of 1954 Oppenheimer was sufficiently battered, even
though still triumphant rather than humiliated, to be without the
commanding personal confidence that enabled him, in 1940 and 1941,
to hang out with members of the Communist Party no matter what
anyone thought about it. The circumstances were different, to be
sure, but Oppenheimer's passive behavior at his security hearing
might follow less from enduring character traits than from his
having lived in a tornado for a dozen years. Einstein and others
advised him to refuse to cooperate with his tormentors, but all
three of these books remind us how passive Oppenheimer was in
dealing with a government he was sophisticated enough not to trust.
One of the few failings of Bird and Sherwin is their linking of
Oppenheimer's passivity in 1954 with his willingness, as an
adolescent at summer camp, to tolerate hazing. But this tendency to
treat Oppenheimer's personality as an enduring structure runs
counter to Bird and Sherwin's own implicit interpretation of
Oppenheimer's life. What they show us, better than any of his other
interpreters, is that his mature personality during his years as a
great historical figure was articulated in a constant dialectic
between the personal traits he brought to government service in 1942
and the sequence of novel experiences that crashed into him in
Berkeley, Los Alamos, Washington and Princeton during the next dozen
years. To be sure, there are elements of continuity, but when Bird
and Sherwin are tempted by reductionist psychological explanations,
they violate their best instincts as historians, as specialists in
the development of personalities and institutions over time.
Bird and Sherwin are at their best in dealing with the question of
Oppenheimer's relation to the Communist Party in the late 1930s and
early 1940s. They strongly support the general conclusion that Gregg
Herken came to in Brotherhood of the Bomb (an excellent
study of Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Teller, which was published in
2002): that Oppenheimer was much closer to the Communist Party than
he ever admitted. The authors of American Prometheus are
wonderfully liberated from the need, felt by so many of
Oppenheimer's admirers, to defend Oppenheimer's own
self-representations of this part of his life.
But Bird and Sherwin dissent from Herken's specific claim that
Oppenheimer was an actual member of the Party through a secret group
in which he, Chevalier and several other Berkeley friends were
involved. Bird and Sherwin convincingly discredit the testimony of
an informer, Paul Crouch, on whom Herken relied too heavily, and
they join with Cassidy, who is also cautious and persuasive in
dealing with Oppenheimer's communist connections, in presenting us
with an Oppenheimer who stayed well clear of the type of involvement
that mattered: the acceptance of party discipline and the
willingness to use one's position to violate the security interests
of the United States. Herken, too, agrees that Oppenheimer's
involvement stopped far short of treason, so the controversy about
Oppenheimer's communist connections, always played up by the press,
is actually not so much of a controversy after all.
Among the most important consequences of the entire outpouring of
books on Oppenheimer is a shifting of focus from what he did or did
not do (what did he say to Chevalier in that famous kitchen
conversation, and why did he tell different stories about it later?)
to what others did or did not do to him. The documentation we now
have about the illegal wiretapping authorized by Hoover and about
the extraordinary treachery of Strauss and his McCarthy Era allies,
for example, has shifted attention to what the Oppenheimer saga
tells us about the postwar state of national security in the United
States and about the American matrix for the arms race.
Yet it would not do to disaggregate J. Robert Oppenheimer, in strict
poststructuralist fashion, viewing him as a mere concentrate of
results of the operation of powers outside himself. This man was an
agent of history as well as a creature of it. Kempton was right that
Oppenheimer experienced an "illusion" of being history's
conqueror, but it is no illusion for us to believe that without him
the American Century, such as it was, would have been different. And
this applies to his humiliation as well as his triumph. Cassidy,
McMillan, and Bird and Sherwin show us in detail how a sequence of
Oppenheimer's own decisions, foolish and wise, cut off or created
one possible outcome after another. He chose to reject Einstein's
advice to walk out of his hearings in 1954. He chose to appoint
Bethe, and not Teller, to head the theoretical division at Los
Alamos. He chose to keep the most communist-committed of his
students out of Los Alamos. He chose again and again to do one thing
and not another. If we have too long been too narrowly focused on
Oppenheimer's own decisions and not on the decisions of others, the
books before us redress that balance. Oppenheimer studies have never
been in better shape than they are today, thanks largely to these