MBR's Reviewers' Choice

Midwest Book Review’s “Reviewers’ Choice” for January, 2006.
Website Address: http://www.midwestbookreview.com



American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Alfred A. Knopf
www.aaknopf.com
ISBN: 0375412026, $35.00 US $47.00 CAN, 721 pp.

Bonnie Trotter (aka Marian W. Trotter)
Reviewer

In 1951, our elementary school, located in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., conducted air raid drills to prepare us for the possibility of an atomic bomb attack. While our teacher led us single file across the entire campus, I worried that an atomic bomb would certainly not wait for us to reach a safe place. Once the student body assembled in the cafeteria, each of us crawled under a desk, pulled our legs up under us, and covered our eyes by burying them in the crook of an arm.

That bomb never did drop. I kept waiting for it. When I was in high school, my heart still thundered at the sound of any kind of whistling or whining from the skies above. As of now, 2005, it still hasn't dropped. Who and what protected us? Surely not the designers and manufacturers of the first atomic bombs, the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, ending WWII when Japan surrendered a few days later.

I was wrong. Reading American Prometheus (the name of the Greek god who took fire from Zeus and gave it to humans), I learned that the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967), spearheaded the movement to contain this dangerous weapon after it was successfully used on Japan.

When a riveting and highly-acclaimed biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer reached the shelves, I bought it, read it, and chose to review it because I want to know happened behind the closed doors of government during the era of the gestation and birth of nuclear war technology.

American Prometheus greatly intrigued me by its tale of how Oppenheimer, during the aftermath of its use against Japan, advocated before Presidents and generals its control and containment through coordinated effort by all nations, in the end martyring his career as a prominent member of the government's scientific community.

Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer, this brilliant man of such stark contradictions? The authors paint a vivid portrait: rail thin, penetrating blue eyes, dark hair. He wore a porkpie hat. After he bummed a cigarette from a friend while a youth, he chained smoked for the rest of his life. To direct the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer earned the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, even though he failed the phyical because he was 27 pounds underweight.

His strength and stamina, however, showed that he was no weakling. He thrived on long, arduous workdays at Los Alamos, extended horseback rides on a horse named "Crisis" that only Oppenheimer could ride, and reckless sailboat excursions through tempestuous waters.

Surviving a painful, prolonged adolescence, the shy and awkward young man matured to become a captivating lecturer and conversationalist, his verbal generosity warm and sprinkled with dry wit, particularly at social gatherings where friends and colleagues considered him a marvelous entertainer.

At 36 years of age, he married Katherine Peuning Harrison, "Kitty", and they stayed married until the end of his life. Kitty, although plagued by emotional illness and alcoholism, stepped forward to help her husband very effectively through excruciating ordeals, particularly the Atomic Energy Commission's hearing in 1954 to determine whether or not the physicist's top security clearance should be extended. It was not. Her testimony during this hearing was truthful and articulate, while still shedding the best possible light on her husband.

Robert Oppenheimer enjoyed a close relationship with his younger brother Frank, an experimental physicist. The authors describe how Robert detested and avoided experimental physics, an area in which Frank excelled. Unlike Robert, Frank joined the Communist Party and admitted this later on to the government interrogators, getting himself blackballed from teaching and research positions. Frank became a cattle rancher.

For many years he and Frank leased the "Perro Caliente", a ranch in New Mexico, to use as a getaway for themselves and their friends and colleagues. It was here that Robert "adopted" the cantankerous horse, "Crisis", that he rode for days through treacherous mountainous terrain.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, brilliant and creative theoretical physicist, embraced two diametrically opposed sides to his personality, an inner conflict that could have splintered the average person. On the one hand, he was the scientist assigned by the government to direct the development of a combat weapon that would dwarf all others.

The other side of his personality revealed his strong sense of ethics ingrained in him as a youngster at the Ethical Culture School. When the Nazi government persecuted and slaughtered Jews, Robert arranged and paid for his parents' escape to the United States, as well as that for Jewish physicist friends and colleagues. These experiences made him despise fascist governments like Hitler's, compelling him to support left causes, all of which were being hijacked by the American Communist Party. These kinds of involvements would get him into trouble with government interrogators years later.

The physicist's love for and dedication to humankind extended to the literary arts. As a linguist he was fluent in several languages. He was an accomplished writer who immersed himself in such giants as Marcel Proust, Henry James, and Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, eventually quoting it after the birth of his atomic bomb, "Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The authors describe Oppenheimer as naive, as if they are surprised in the light of his scientific genius. To me he seems naive in his dealings with government interrogators, but only from the standpoint of someone whose main interest is protecting his job. Knowing the dangers of the new nuclear war technology, Oppenheimer was most interested in protecting humankind, so he clung like a barnacle to high-level government positions as long as he could. From that standpoint, he was not in the least naive. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. He believed that, inside the system, he could most effectively wage his campaign to contain and control the technology, even at the expense of his career.

I feel that his work during this tenure halted the government's headlong thrust toward what he considered catastrophic destruction, ultimately helping to protect us from that bomb that I kept waiting for. Over time, even after Oppenheimer was banned from government employment, military officials, and Presidents, began to pay attention.

The authors give each of the many secondary characters a dimension you don't normally see in the minor figures of a story. President Harry Truman "wrote to (Dean) Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a 'cry-baby scientist' who had come to his office 'some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy.'"

During the Atomic Energy Commission's hearings on whether or not to renew Oppenheimer's security clearance, its chairmen Lewis Strauss sent President Eisenhower progress reports. "Ike cabled him in a reply from his Augusta, Georgia retreat, thanking him for his 'interim report'. He also informed Strauss that he burned his interim report, apparently not wanting to leave any evidence that he or Strauss was inappropriately monitoring the security hearing."

The authors show a remarkable ability to incorporate facts and dates without interrupting the flow of the narrative, enriching for the general reader as well as the scholar. Reading about Oppenheimer, you learn what it is like to choose between obeying the dictates of those in power, with possibly disastrous consequences for the many, and protesting their decisions, risking your loss of position and reputation. You never know when you will be forced to make such a choice. Oppenheimer's experience can give you the courage to make the right one.

The author Martin J. Sherwin, who lives in Washington, D.C., began his research of Oppenheimer twenty-five years ago. Sherwin, the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University, also wrote A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize and the American History Book Prize.

Co-author Kae Bird, also a resident of Washington, D.C., wrote The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms, and he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. Bird is a contributing editor of The Nation.