by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer, Peter, 7/79 (MS); 9/23–24/04 (KB)
Peierls, Sir Rudolph, 6/5–6/79 (MS)
Phillips, Melba, 6/15/79 (MS)
Pines, David, 6/26/04 (KB)
Plesset, Milton, 3/28/83 (MS)
Pollak, Inez, 4/20/76 (AS)
Purcell, Edward, 3/5/79 (MS)
Rabi, I. I., 3/12/82 (MS)
Rosen, Louis, 1/9/85 (MS)
Rotblat, Joseph, 10/16/89 (MS)
St. Clair, Fiona and William, 2/17/82 (MS)
Serber, Robert, 3/11/82 (MS); 12/15/79 (JE)
Sherr, Patricia, 2/20/79 (MS)
Silverman, Albert, 8/9/79 (MS)
Silverman, Judge Samuel, 7/16/91 (MS)
Smith, Alice Kimball, 4/26/82 (MS)
Smith, Herbert, 8/1/74 (CW); 7/9/75 (AS)
Stern, Hans, 3/4/04 (KB phone interview)
Stratchel, John, 3/19/80 (MS)
Strunsky, Robert, 4/26/79 (MS)
Smyth, Henry DeWolf, 3/5/79 (MS)
Tatlock, Hugh, 2/01 (MS)
Teller, Edward, 1/18/76 (MS)
Uehling, Edwin and Ruth, 1/11/79 (MS)
Uhlenbeck, Else, 4/20/76 (AS)
Ulam, Stanislaw L., 7/19/79 (MS)
Ulam, Stanislaw and Françoise, 1/15/80 (JE)
Voge, Hervey, 3/23/83 (MS)
Wallerstein, Dr. Robert S., 3/19/01 (KB phone interview)
Weinberg, Joseph, 8/11/79; 8/23/79 (MS)
Weisskopf, Victor, 3/23/79; 4/21/82 (MS)
Whidden, Georgia, 4/25/03 (KB)
Wilson, Robert, 4/23/82 (interview by Owen Gingrich)
Wyman, Jeffries, 5/28/75 (CW)
Yedidia, Avram, 2/14/80 (MS)
Zorn, Jans, 4/8/83 (MS)
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint illustrations appearing on the pages indicated:
American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (AIP)
AP/Wide World Photos (AP)
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Bancroft)
Bird-Sherwin Collection (BS)
Joe Bukowski (Bukowski)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, courtesy AIP, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (AIP-BAS) Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Alfred Eisenstadt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (Eisenstadt)
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection (AIP-PTC)
Nancy Rodger © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives (Harvard)
Herblock © 1950 The Washington Post Co., from Herblock’s Here and Now (Simon & Schuster, 1955) (Herblock)
Inga Hiilivirta (Hiilivirta)
J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee Photographs (JROMC)
Yousuf Karsh/Retna Ltd. (Karsh)
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley)
Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives (LANL)
Anne Wilson Marks (Marks)
National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
National Archives (NA)
Niels Bohr Archive, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (Bohr)
Courtesy Northwestern University Archives (Northwestern)
Alan W. Richards, Princeton, N.J., courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (Richards) Barbara Sonnenberg (Sonnenberg)
Ulli Steltzer (Steltzer)
Dr. Hugh Tatlock (Tatlock)
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (Getty)
United Press International, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection (UPI)
Courtesy of University of North Carolina Archives (UNC)
Herve Voge (Voge)
R.V.C. Whitehead/J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee (Whitehead)
Yosuke Yamahata, Nagasaki, August 10, 1945, National Archives. © Shogo Yamahata/ courtesy: IDG Films. Photo restoration by TX Unlimited (Yamahata)
Insert Page 1: Julius with baby JRO, JROMC; portrait of Ella, Sonnenberg; portrait of Julius, Sonnenberg. Page 2: JRO playing, JROMC; Ella and JRO, LANL; JRO with chin in hand, JROMC. Page 3: JRO on horseback, JROMC; JRO as young man, AIP; young JRO and Frank, AIP. Page 4: Paul Dirac, NA; Max Born, NA; JRO with Kramers, AIP; JRO and others on a boat, AIP. Page 5: Fowler, JRO, and Alvarez, AIP; JRO in Caltech courtyard, Caltech; Serber at blackboard, Berkeley. Page 6: Lawrence with JRO leaning on car, AIP; JRO with horse, LANL; The authors at Perro Caliente, BS. Page 7: JRO with Fermi and Lawrence, Berkeley; Joe Weinberg, Lomanitz, Bohm, and Freidman, NA; Niels Bohr, AP. Page 8: Jean Tatlock facing camera, Tatlock; Dr. Thomas Addis, NAS; FBI document, FBI. Page 9: Hoke Chevalier, Johan Hagemeyer Portrait Collection, Bancroft; George Eltenton, Voge; Col. Boris Pash, NA; Martin Sherwin with Chevalier, BS. Page 10: Kitty in jodhpurs, BS; Kitty passport photo, BS; Kitty in lab, BS. Page 11: JRO’s lab pass, BS; Kitty smoking on couch, JROMC; Kitty smiling, JROMC. Page 12: Kitty and Peter, JROMC; JRO feeding baby Peter, JROMC. Page 13: JRO at Los Alamos party, LANL; Dorothy McGibbin, JRO, and Victor Weisskopf, LANL. Page 14: JRO et al. at a lecture, LANL; Hans Bethe portrait, NA; Frank Oppenheimer inspecting instrument, Berkeley; Groves with Stimson, NA. Page 15: JRO pouring coffee, AIP; JRO silhouetted, LANL; Trinity test explosion, LANL. Page 16: Panorama of Hiroshima, NA; Mother and child survivors in Nagasaki, Yamahata. Page 17: JRO et al. at machine, AIP-PTC; Physics Today cover, UPI; JRO, Conant, and Vannevar Bush in tuxedos, Harvard. Page 18: Frank Oppenheimer in lab, NA; Frank and cow, AP; Anne Wilson Marks in boat, Marks; Richard and Ruth Tolman, BS. Page 19: Cover of TIME, Getty; JRO et al. with airplane, LANL; JRO et al. at Harvard, Harvard. Page 20: Olden Manor, BS; Kitty, Toni, and Peter outside Olden Manor, Whitehead. Page 21: JRO, Toni, and Peter in grass, Sonnenberg; Kitty in greenhouse, Eisenstadt. Page 22: JRO and Neumann in Princeton, Richards; JRO teaching class, Eisenstadt. Page 23: JRO with Eleanor Roosevelt and others, Getty; JRO portrait, NA; JRO with Greg Breit, NA. Page 24: Herblock cartoon, Herblock; Lewis Strauss portrait, NA; JRO walking with cigarette, Getty. Page 25: Ward Evans, Northwestern; Gordon Gray, UNC; Henry DeWolf Smyth, NA; Eugene Zuchert, NA; Roger Robb, Getty. Page 26: Toni on horse, BS; Kitty and JRO, BS; Peter in coat and tie, JROMC. Page 27: Kitty sailing, BS; JRO sailing, BS; Oppenheimer family on beach, JROMC. Page 28: Neils Bohr and JRO on couch, Bohr; Kitty and JRO in Japan, JROMC. Page 29: Oppie smoking pipe, Steltzer; JRO and Jackie Kennedy, Getty; Frank Oppenheimer at Exploratorium, Exploratorium. Page 30: JRO with Kitty receiving Fermi prize, JROMC; JRO with LBJ, Berkeley; JRO shaking hands with Teller, Getty. Page 31: JRO at beach house, Bukowski; Toni on floor, BS; Toni, Inga, Kitty, and Doris on swing, Hiilivirta. Page 32: Portrait of JRO, Steltzer. Part Title I: JRO as young man, AIP-BAS. Part Title II: JRO at blackboard, JROMC. Part Title III: JRO and Groves at Trinity site, AP. Part Title IV: Einstein and JRO, Eisenstadt. Part Title V: JRO in profile, Karsh.
The Oppenheimers. Julius Oppenheimer (above, left) arrived in New York City from Germany in 1888. In 1903 he married Ella Friedman (above, right), a German-American painter born in Baltimore. Robert, born in 1904, sits (right) in his father’s lap.
As a young child, Robert (seated on the right with a friend) had a passion for blocks and collecting rock specimens.
Ella and Robert.
“I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy,” Oppenheimer later said. “My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”
Oppenheimer (right) riding in Central Park.
Robert attended the Ethical Culture School where he was taught to develop his “ethical imagination,” to see “things not as they are, but as they might be.”
Robert and his younger brother Frank.
Oppenheimer studied at Göttingen University, where he received his doctorate in quantum physics under Max Born (right). There he was befriended by physicists Paul Dirac (center, right) and the German phys
icist Hendrik Kramers (below, left). Later he studied briefly in Zurich with I. I. Rabi, H. M. Mott-Smith and Wolfgang Pauli (bottom, right, sailing with Robert on Lake Zurich).
Professor Oppenheimer (above, left) in 1929 at Caltech, where he had accepted a dual appointment with the University of California, Berkeley, and where he quickly became an apostle for the new quantum physics. “I need physics more than friends,” Robert confessed. Oppenheimer (above, right) between physicists William A. Fowler and Luis Alvarez. “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 but which was very rich.” Robert Serber (below, right) was one of his students and then a lifelong friend.
“My two great loves are physics and New Mexico,” Oppenheimer wrote. “It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” Oppenheimer spent his summers at Perro Caliente, his 154 acre ranch (above) with a view of the Sangre de Christo mountains. Robert and his horse, Crisis (right), went for long rides with his brother Frank and other friends, including Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence (below).
Oppenheimer with the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Ernest Lawrence.
Joe Weinberg, Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm and Max Friedman were some of Oppie’s acolytes at Berkeley. “They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations,” recalled Bob Serber.
In the world of quantum physics, Weinberg said, “Niels Bohr (left) was God, and Oppie was his prophet.”
Jean Tatlock was Oppie’s fiancée for four years— and a Communist Party member, although with reservations. “I find it impossible to be an ardent Communist,” she wrote. Tatlock’s mentor at Stanford’s School of Medicine was Dr. Thomas Addis (above, right). Dr. Addis persuaded Oppenheimer to donate money for the Spanish cause through the Communist Party.
By 1941, Oppenheimer was on a FBI list of suspected radicals to be detained in the event of a national emergency.
In 1943 Haakon Chevalier (above, left), a Berkeley professor of French literature, told Oppie of a scheme George Eltenton (above, right) had to provide scientific information for the Soviet war effort. Oppie eventually reported the event to an Army counterintelligence officer, Col. Boris Pash (left).
Below, Martin Sherwin with Chevalier after interviewing him in Paris in 1982.
Kitty Puening grew up in Pittsburgh. Here she is (above) in jodhpurs at 21; in a 1936 passport photograph (top, right); and in the mycology lab at Berkeley (right). In 1939 she met and fell in love with Oppenheimer, who is pictured on his Radiation Laboratory security badge (opposite, top).
Kitty, here seated in their Los Alamos cottage, was a mercurial personality. “She was a very intense, very intelligent, very vital kind of person...very difficult to handle.”
Kitty felt stymied professionally at Los Alamos. She worked in the medical clinic, conducting blood counts, but after a year she quit. At social gatherings she could make small talk, but as one friend put it, “She wanted to make big talk.”
Peter Oppenheimer was born in May 1941. Above, being fed by Robert, and below laughing with Kitty.
“He (Robert) was great at a party and women simply loved him,” said Dorothy McKibbin.
Oppenheimer entertains McKibbin (on his right) and Victor Weisskopf (kneeling) in his Los Alamos cottage.
Above, a scientific colloquium at Los Alamos with (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J.M.B. Kellogg seated in the front row. Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman and Phillip Porter sit behind them.
Below, Hans Bethe, chief of the theoretical division.
Robert brought his brother Frank (center, inspecting an alpha calutron) to Los Alamos in 1945 to work on the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb.
General Leslie Groves (right, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson) selected Oppenheimer to direct the bomb project at Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer pours coffee while touring southern New Mexico, in late 1944, scouting out a site for the Trinity explosion.
Wearing his porkpie hat, Oppenheimer leans over the “Gadget” atop the Trinity site tower, just hours before the test. Below, the Trinity explosion.
Hiroshima after the bomb. More than 95 percent of the roughly 225,000 people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians, mostly women and children. At least half the victims died of radiation poisoning in the months following the initial blast. This photograph by Yosuke Yamahata of a mother and child (right) was taken less then twenty-four hours after the bombing of Nagasaki.
Ernest Lawrence, Glenn Seaborg and Oppenheimer. “Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again,” opined Scientific Monthly, “and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”
Physics Today put Oppie’s porkpie hat on its cover.
Harvard University elected Oppenheimer to its board of overseers (with James B. Conant and Vannevar Bush).
A gifted experimental physicist, Frank Oppenheimer (above) was fired in 1949 by the University of Minnesota when it was revealed that he had been a member of the Communist Party. He became a cattle rancher in Colorado.
Anne Wilson Marks was Oppie’s secretary in 1945—and then she married Herbert Marks (lying on deck of the boat), his friend and lawyer.
Anne Wilson Marks was Oppie’s secretary in 1945—and then she married Herbert Marks (lying on deck of the boat), his friend and lawyer.
Caltech’s Richard Tolman and his wife, Ruth Tolman, a noted clinical psychologist who became one of Robert’s deepest loves.
Time magazine put Oppenheimer on its cover in November 1948.
Center, Oppenheimer was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee. Here he is on a trip with James B. Conant, Gen. James McCormack, Harley Rowe, John Manley, I. I. Rabi and Roger S. Warner.
Bottom, Oppenheimer (far left) in 1947 receiving an honorary degree from Harvard, with Gen. George C. Marshall, Gen. Omar N. Bradley and other honorees.
Olden Manor, in Princeton, New Jersey, where the Oppenheimers lived after Robert was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947.
Kitty, Toni, and Peter in the greenhouse.
Robert and his children in the yard at Olden Manor.
Robert gave Kitty a greenhouse to grow her orchids. They entertained frequently. “He served the most delicious and the coldest martinis,” Pat Sherr said.
Oppenheimer with mathematician John von Neumann, standing before von Neumann’s early computer.
Oppenheimer discussing physics with students at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “The Institute was his own little empire,” said Freeman Dyson.
Oppenheimer with (from left) Hans Bethe, Senator Brien McMahon, Eleanor Roosevelt, and David Lilienthal.
Oppenheimer opposed a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb. He explained to a TV audience that a “superbomb was a matter that touch[ed] the very basis of our morality. It is a grave danger for us that these decisions are taken on the basis of facts held secret.”
Oppenheimer at a conference with physicist Greg Breit. “What we don’t know, we explain to each other.”
In December 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower ordered a “blank wall” between Oppenheimer and the government’s nuclear secrets. Robert’s ensuing security hearing was orchestrated by Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (above, right), who was determined to purge Oppenheimer from government service. Oppenheimer hired lawyer Lloyd Garrison (right) to defend himself.
On April 12, 1954, Oppenheimer’s security hearing opened, chaired by Gordon Gray (top, right). Only one AEC commissioner, Henry DeWolf Smyth (center, right), voted to reject the Gray Board’s decision to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, AEC commissioner Eugene Zuckert (bottom, right) voted with the majority against Oppenheimer. Roger Robb (bottom, left) served as the Gray Board’s prosecutor. Only one member of the Gray Board, Ward Evans (top, left) voted to uphold Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Evans called the decision a “black mark on the escutcheon of our country.”
&
nbsp; Toni Oppenheimer on horseback. “From when she was six or seven years old,” Verna Hobson observed, “the rest of the family relied on her to be sensible and solid and to cheer them on.”
Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, but kept his job as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Here, walking with Kitty in Princeton.
Robert could “just pour in the love” he felt for Peter Oppenheimer.
After the 1954 security hearing Oppenheimer “was like a wounded animal,” Francis Fergusson recalled. “He retreated. And returned to a simpler way of life.” He took his family to St. John in the Virgin Islands. Later he built a spartan beach cottage, and the family (below) spent many months each year on the beautiful island. He and Kitty were expert sailors.
Sitting with his old friend Niels Bohr, 1955.
In 1960 Oppenheimer visited Tokyo (below) where he told reporters, “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.”
Oppenheimer in his office at the Institute.
In April 1962 President John F. Kennedy invited Oppenheimer to the White House. He is seen here shaking hands with Jackie Kennedy.
Frank at the Exploratorium in 1969, a science museum in San Francisco that gives visitors a “hands-on” experience with physics, chemistry, and other fields, which he founded with his wife, Jackie.
