I was born in 1941, and it is hard to convey how big a deal the A-bomb was to Americans who came of age in the years following the Second World War. I remember, in the days before television, listening to an atomic bomb test on the radio (!) when all one could hear for 30 minutes straight was the drone of a plane’s engines. Needless to say, J. Robert Oppenheimer, touted as the man who led the Manhattan Project that built the nuclear fission bombs that ended World War II, had enormous fame and public approval.
My hero was (and still is) the Lone Ranger, and the only time I ever sent away for any of his merchandise was when I mailed in a Cheerios box top and some money in order to purchase a “Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring.” I did as instructed and took it into a dark closet to watch it glow on my finger. Whether it contained any radioactive substance I don’t know, but awareness of danger from radiation exposure was pretty low back then. As an example, on most Friday nights, my family ate at a restaurant next to a shoe store that had a fluoroscope machine, and part of my weekly routine was to go into the store and look at the bones in my feet.
In watching the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer and reading a few of the articles spawned by it, I was struck by a story about a conversation that Oppenheimer had with the only other physicist who matched or exceeded him in fame: Albert Einstein. Both worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, of which Oppenheimer became director after the war. When it became known in 1954 that Oppenheimer planned to go to Washington to fight the revocation of his security clearance as an adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission, Einstein told Oppenheimer to let the matter go and not put himself through such an ordeal. Oppenheimer replied, “You don’t understand, Albert; I love my country.” As Oppenheimer walked away, Einstein turned to his secretary and said, “there goes a narr”—a Yiddish word meaning fool.
A fool, as described in my book Anatomy of Foolishness, is someone who lacks awareness of the risky consequences of a particular course of action. That was probably true of Oppenheimer, as he naively assumed that his fame, combined with his verbal skills, would enable him to prevail, as it had on other occasions when he was questioned about his past left-wing activities (support for the Loyalists in Spain) and associations (wife, girlfriend, brother, best friend, and several colleagues had been Communists). But he did not seem to understand that things had changed, particularly that: (a) the rise of Joe McCarthy had increased anti-Communist fervor substantially, (b) his strong public opposition to developing the H-Bomb and in favor of internationalizing control of atomic energy had made him somewhat controversial politically, and (c) Lewis Strauss, the very conservative head of the Atomic Energy Commission had come to hate Oppenheimer (in part for humiliating him publicly once) and had been secretly bad-mouthing him to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Eisenhower for quite some time. Furthermore, the panel that heard his appeal had been stacked against him by Strauss, and so Oppenheimer was unknowingly entering what was basically a kangaroo court.
Oppenheimer, despite being incredibly intelligent, was politically and socially naïve, and he went into the security hearing without fully appreciating what he was up against. In this, he was in the historic company of two other naïve geniuses: the poet Oscar Wilde, whose decision to bring a defamation lawsuit caused him to end up in prison for homosexuality, and the mathematician, computer pioneer, and military code-breaker Alan Turing, whose decision to report a minor theft caused him to also be convicted of homosexuality and to receive the supposedly more humane penalty of estrogen treatments that precipitated his suicide after he started to grow breasts. (Another parallel with Oppenheimer is that Winston Churchill wrote a letter to the judge stating that Turing played a huge role in winning World War II.)
While these “cognitive” factors certainly help to understand Oppenheimer’s foolishness, the main explanation, as is usually the case, lies in the realm of “personality.” Despite possessing considerable charm, Oppenheimer had a powerful need to continue functioning at the highest levels of Washington power and influence, especially concerning matters (atomic energy and nuclear weaponry) that he felt ownership of. Also in the realm of personality was Oppenheimer’s hubris, which made him unable to accept such an assault on his reputation and character.
The outcome (sorry to spoil this for people who haven’t seen the film or lack relevant historical knowledge) is that his appeal was denied and his reputation was sullied, after a monthlong hearing, in which many embarrassing aspects of his personal life (such as his penchant for sexual affairs with the wives of Berkeley colleagues) were divulged. He was denied access to nuclear secrets after that, although he kept his job as director of the Princeton-based Institute (which did no applied work and did not pursue government grants). But he was affected emotionally, and during the few years remaining to him (he died at age 62, undoubtedly as a result of his chain smoking) he retreated to a quieter and more subdued lifestyle, much of it spent in self-imposed exile on the idyllic Caribbean island of Saint John.
Oppenheimer’s ultimate foolishness, in the view of Albert Einstein (and myself, I must confess), was caring so much about what others thought of him in the first place. True wisdom, in the view of the philosophy of Stoicism (a topic I addressed in an earlier blog post about Prince Harry) involves equanimity and acceptance in the face of disapproval or unfairness. A wiser course of action, according to such a viewpoint, would have been for Oppenheimer to have accepted Einstein’s advice and walked away. Oppenheimer’s main biographer, Kai Bird (who co-authored the book American Prometheus on which the movie was based) has expressed an opposite opinion. Even Bird would have to admit, however, that Oppenheimer entered into that contest without fully understanding that it was one he almost certainly was going to lose.
Copyright Stephen Greenspan.