by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Soon, other such humanists were joining the Institute, including the archaeologist Homer Thompson, the poet T. S. Eliot, the historian Arnold Toynbee, the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin and, later, the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. Oppenheimer had always admired Eliot’s The Waste Land, and was delighted when he agreed to come to the Institute for one semester in 1948. But it didn’t work out. Having a poet in residence didn’t sit well with the Institute’s mathematicians, some of whom snubbed Eliot, even after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature that year. Eliot, for his part, kept to himself and spent more time at the university than he did at the Institute. Oppenheimer was disappointed. “I invited Eliot here,” he told Freeman Dyson, “in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.”
Nevertheless, Oppenheimer strongly believed it was essential that the Institute remain a home to both science and the humanities. In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences. Only a few of the senior resident mathematicians agreed with him, but their support was critical. Johnny von Neumann was almost as interested in ancient Roman history as he was in his own field. Others shared Oppenheimer’s interest in poetry. He hoped that he could make the Institute a haven for scientists, social scientists and humanists interested in a multidisciplinary understanding of the whole human condition. It was an irresistible opportunity, a chance to bring together the two worlds, science and the humanities, that had engaged him equally as a young man. In this sense, Princeton would be the antithesis of Los Alamos, and perhaps a psychological antidote to it.
The Institute was as idyllic and comfortable as Los Alamos was spartan. Particularly for its lifelong members, it was a Platonic heaven. “The point of this place,” Oppenheimer once said, “is to make no excuses for not doing something, for not doing good work.” To outsiders, the Institute sometimes had the appearance of a pastoral asylum for the certifiably eccentric. Kurt Gödel, the renowned logician, was a painfully shy recluse. His only real friend was Einstein, and the two men were often seen walking together from town. In between bouts of severe paranoid depression—convinced that his food was being poisoned, he suffered from chronic malnutrition— Gödel spent years trying to solve the continuum problem, a mathematical conundrum involving a question of infinities. He never found an answer. Spurred on by Einstein, he also worked on general relativity, and in 1949 published a paper that described a “rotating universe” in which it was theoretically possible to “travel into any region of the past, present, and future, and back again.” For most of his decades at the Institute, he was a solitary, ghostly figure, dressed in a shabby black winter coat, scribbling German shorthand into reams of notebooks.
Dirac was almost equally strange. When he was a young boy, his father had announced that he should speak to him only in French. This way, he thought, his son would quickly learn another language. “Since I found that I couldn’t express myself in French,” Dirac explained, “it was better for me to stay silent than to talk in English. So I became silent at that time.” Wearing long rubber boots, he was often seen hacking trails through the neighboring woods with an ax. This was his form of recreational exercise, and over the years it became something of an Institute pastime. Dirac was maddeningly literal-minded. One day a reporter called to ask him about a lecture he was scheduled to give in New York. Oppenheimer had long since decided that scholars should not be distracted by having phones in their offices, so Dirac had to take the call from a hallway phone. When the reporter said he wanted a copy of the speech, Dirac put the phone down and went into Jeremy Bernstein’s office to ask for advice: He feared, he said, being misquoted. So Abraham Pais, who happened to be standing there, suggested that he write “Do Not Publish in Any Form” atop a copy of the speech. Dirac absorbed this simple advice for several minutes in complete silence. Finally, he said, “Isn’t ‘in any form’ redundant in that sentence?”
Von Neumann was unusual too. Like Oppenheimer, he was multilingual and catholic in his interests. He also loved to throw a good party, staying up well into the morning hours. And, like Edward Teller, he was rabidly anti-Soviet. One night at a party, when the conversation turned to discussion of the early Cold War, von Neumann said quite matter-of-factly that it was obvious: The United States should launch a preventive war and annihilate the Soviet Union with its atomic arsenal. “I think that the USA-USSR conflict,” he wrote to Lewis Strauss in 1951, “will very probably lead to an armed ‘total’ collision, and that a maximum rate of armament is therefore imperative.” Oppie was appalled by such sentiments, but did not allow political considerations to influence his decisions with respect to the permanent faculty.
Scholars from a wide range of disciplines were constantly amazed at the range of Oppenheimer’s interests. One day a foundation executive from the Commonwealth Fund, Lansing V. Hammond, sought Oppenheimer’s advice on some sixty young British applicants for scholarships to study in various American universities. The topics ranged from the liberal arts to the hard sciences. Hammond, a scholar in English literature, hoped to get Oppenheimer’s advice on a few of the candidates working in math or physics. As soon as Hammond was ushered into his office, Oppenheimer surprised him by saying, “You got your doctorate at Yale in eighteenth-century English literature—Age of Johnson; was Tinker or Pottle your supervisor?” Within ten minutes, Hammond had all the information he needed to match his English physicist-applicants with suitable American universities. As he rose to leave, thinking he had taken enough of the busy director’s time, Oppenheimer said, “If you have a few minutes you can spare, I’d be interested in looking at some of your applications in other fields. . . .” Over the next hour, Oppenheimer spoke at length about the strengths and weaknesses of various graduate schools around the country. “Umm . . . indigenous American music, Roy Harris is just the person for him. . . . Social psychology . . . I’d suggest looking into Vanderbilt; smaller numbers, he’d have a better opportunity of getting what he wants . . . Your field, eighteenth-century English literature; Yale is an obvious choice, but don’t rule out Bate at Harvard.” Hammond had never even heard of Bate. He left feeling overwhelmed. “Never before,” he later wrote, “never since have I talked with such a man.”
OPPENHEIMER’S RELATIONSHIP with the Institute’s most famous resident was always tentative: “We were close colleagues,” he later wrote of Einstein, “and something of friends.” But he thought of Einstein as a living patron saint of physics, not a working scientist. (Some in the Institute suspected that Oppenheimer was the source of a statement in Time magazine that “Einstein is a landmark, not a beacon.”) Einstein harbored a similar ambivalence about Oppenheimer. When Oppenheimer was first suggested in 1945 as a candidate for a permanent professorship at the Institute, Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Weyl wrote a memo to the faculty recommending the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli over Oppenheimer. At the time, Einstein knew Pauli well, and Oppenheimer only in passing. Ironically, Weyl had tried hard in 1934 to recruit Oppenheimer to the Institute; but Oppenheimer had adamantly refused, saying, “I could be of absolutely no use at such a place.” Now, however, Oppenheimer’s credentials as a physicist just didn’t measure up to Pauli’s: “Certainly Oppenheimer has made no contributions to physics of such a fundamental nature as Pauli’s exclusion principle and analysis of electronic spin. . . .” Einstein and Weyl conceded that Oppenheimer had “founded the largest school of theoretical physics in this country.” But after noting that his students universally praised him as a teacher, they cautioned, “It may be that he is somewhat too dominant and [that] his students tend to be smaller editions of Oppenheimer.” On the basis of this recommendation, the Institute offered the job in 1945 to Pauli—who turned it down.
Einstein eventually acquired a grudging respect for the new director, whom he described as an “unusually capable
man of many-sided education.” But what he admired about Oppenheimer was the man, not his physics. Still, Einstein would never count Oppenheimer as one of his close friends, “perhaps partly because our scientific opinions are fairly diametrically different.” Back in the 1930s, Oppie had once called Einstein “completely cuckoo” for his stubborn refusal to accept quantum theory. All of the young physicists Oppenheimer brought to Princeton were wholly convinced of Bohr’s quantum views—and uninterested in the questions that Einstein posed to challenge the quantum view of the world. They could not fathom why the great man was working indefatigably to develop a “unified field theory” to replace what he saw as the inconsistencies of quantum theory. It was lonely work, and yet he was still quite satisfied to defend “the good Lord against the suggestion that he continuously rolls the dice”—his thumbnail critique of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one of the foundations of quantum physics. And he didn’t mind that most of his Princeton colleagues “see me as a heretic and a reactionary who has, as it were, outlived himself.”
Oppenheimer deeply admired the “extraordinary originality” of the man who had formulated the general theory of relativity, “this singular union of geometry and gravitation.” But he thought Einstein “brought to the work of originality deep elements of tradition.” And Oppenheimer firmly believed that later in Einstein’s life it was this “tradition” that misled him. To Oppenheimer’s “sorrow,” Einstein devoted his Princeton years to trying to prove that quantum theory was flawed by significant inconsistencies. “No one could have been more ingenious,” Oppenheimer wrote, “in thinking up unexpected and clever examples; but it turned out that the inconsistencies were not there; and often their resolution could be found in earlier work of Einstein himself.” What distressed Einstein about quantum theory was the notion of indeterminacy. And yet it had been his own work on relativity that had inspired some of Bohr’s insights. Oppenheimer saw this as highly ironic: “He fought with Bohr in a noble and furious way, and he fought with the theory which he had fathered but which he hated. It was not the first time that this had happened in science.”
These disputes did not prevent Oppenheimer from enjoying Einstein’s company. One evening early in 1948, he entertained David Lilienthal and Einstein at Olden Manor. Lilienthal sat next to Einstein and “watched him as he listened (gravely and intently, and at times with a chuckle and wrinkles about his eyes) to Robert Oppenheimer describing neutrinos as ‘those creatures,’ and the beauties of physics.” Robert still loved to be the bearer of lavish gifts. Knowing of Einstein’s love of classical music, and knowing that his radio could not receive New York broadcasts of concerts from Carnegie Hall, Oppenheimer arranged to have an antenna installed on the roof of Einstein’s modest home at 112 Mercer Street. This was done without Einstein’s knowledge—and then on his birthday, Robert showed up on his doorstep with a new radio and suggested they listen to a scheduled concert. Einstein was delighted.
In 1949, Bohr was visiting Princeton and agreed to contribute an essay to a book celebrating Einstein’s work on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. He and Einstein enjoyed each other’s company, but, like Oppenheimer, Bohr could not understand why quantum theory was such a demon for Einstein. When shown the manuscript of the Festschrift, Einstein noted that the essays contained as many brickbats as words of praise. “This is not a jubilee book for me,” he said, “but an impeachment.” On the day of his birthday, March 14, an audience of 250 eminent scholars gathered in a Princeton auditorium to hear Oppenheimer, I. I. Rabi, Eugene Wigner and Hermann Weyl sing his praises. However strongly his colleagues may have disagreed with the old man, the air was electric with anticipation when Einstein entered the hall. After a moment of sudden silence, everyone stood to applaud the man they all knew was the greatest physicist of the twentieth century.
AS PHYSICISTS, Oppenheimer and Einstein disagreed. But as humanists, they were allies. At a moment in history when the scientific profession was being bought wholesale by a Cold War national security network of weapons labs and universities increasingly dependent on military contracts, Oppenheimer had chosen another path. Though “present at the creation” of this militarization of science, Oppenheimer had walked away from Los Alamos, and Einstein respected him for attempting to use his influence to put the brakes on the arms race. At the same time, he saw that Oppenheimer used his influence cautiously. Einstein was mystified when, in the spring of 1947, Oppenheimer refused his invitation to speak at a public dinner of the newly formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. Oppenheimer explained that he felt “unprepared to make [a] public address at this time on Atomic Energy with any confidence that the results will lead in the direction for which we all hope.”
The older man clearly didn’t understand why Oppenheimer seemed to care so much about maintaining his access to the Washington establishment. Einstein didn’t play that game. He would never have dreamed of asking the government to give him a security clearance. Einstein instinctively disliked meeting politicians, generals or figures of authority. As Oppenheimer observed, “he did not have that convenient and natural converse with statesmen and men of power. . . .” And while Oppie seemed to relish his fame and the opportunity to mix with the powerful, Einstein was always uncomfortable with adulation. One evening in March 1950, on the occasion of Einstein’s seventy-first birthday, Oppenheimer walked him back to his house on Mercer Street. “You know,” Einstein remarked, “when it’s once been given to a man to do something sensible, afterward life is a little strange.” More than most men ever could, Oppenheimer understood exactly what he meant.
AS AT LOS ALAMOS, Oppenheimer was still uncommonly persuasive. Pais recalled meeting a senior scholar just emerging from Oppie’s office. “Something odd just happened to me,” said the professor. “I had gone to see Oppenheimer regarding a certain issue on which I held firm opinions. As I left, I found that I had agreed with the opposite point of view.”
Oppenheimer tried to exert the same charismatic powers over the Institute’s Board of Trustees—but with mixed results. In the late 1940s, the board was often stalemated between liberal and conservative factions. It was dominated by its vice chairman, Lewis Strauss. Other trustees tended to defer to his judgment, partially because he was the only board member with substantial wealth. At the same time, some of the more liberal trustees were put off by his archconservatism. One trustee grumbled that the board did not need “a Hoover Republican thinking in the last century.” Although Oppenheimer had met Strauss only briefly before coming to Princeton, he was well aware of Strauss’ political views and quietly made it clear that he would not welcome Strauss’ elevation to the post of chairman of the board.
Oppenheimer’s personal relations with Strauss were initially correct and cordial. Yet it was in these early years that the seeds of a terrible feud were sown. On his visits to Princeton, Strauss was often entertained in Olden Manor; after one such dinner, he sent Robert and Kitty a fine case of wine. But it was clear to all that both men were eager for power and willing to exercise it against each other. One day, Abraham Pais was standing outside Fuld Hall when a helicopter landed on the expansive lawn that separated the Institute from Olden Manor. Out stepped Strauss. “I was struck by his appearance,” Pais later wrote, “suave if not slick, and had the instinctive reaction: Watch out for what is behind this fellow’s deportment.”
Oppenheimer soon realized that Strauss had ambitions to be something of a “coadministrator.” In 1948, he told Oppenheimer that he was contemplating buying a former faculty member’s home on the grounds of the Institute. In a clear signal, Oppenheimer forestalled this by quickly getting the Institute to buy the house in question and renting it to another scholar. Strauss apparently got the message. As the Institute’s unpublished official history notes, “The episode marks the apparent end for the time being of Mr. Strauss’ hope to help govern the Institute at short range.” It also established a permanent tension and mutual distrust that extended beyond the Institute. Desp
ite this setback, Strauss exerted his influence over the Institute through his close alliance with Herbert Maas, the chairman of the Board of Trustees, and Professor of Mathematics Oswald Veblen, the only faculty trustee.
Strauss was often annoyed that Oppenheimer sometimes made politically sensitive decisions without first seeking the trustees’ approval. In late 1950, Strauss temporarily blocked Oppenheimer’s appointment of a mediaevalist scholar, Professor Ernst H. Kantorowicz, because he had refused to sign a California Board of Regents loyalty oath. Strauss relented only when it became clear that his was the sole dissenting vote. When Congress passed legislation requiring an FBI security clearance for scientists funded by fellowships from the AEC, Oppenheimer fired off an angry letter to the AEC. The Institute, he wrote, would no longer accept such fellowships on the grounds that the required security investigations violated its “traditions.” Only a month later did Oppenheimer inform the trustees of his action. According to the minutes of the meeting, some trustees expressed the fear that the director’s action might involve the Institute in a “political controversy,” specifically with the FBI. Oppenheimer was told that in the future, he should consult with the Board prior to making such decisions.
