Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  For the first year of Kennedy’s term of office, the change in administration had very little effect on Oppenheimer. As before, he gave public talks, attended to institute business and spent vacations on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands. The Oppenheimer family had been going to the Virgin Islands in the spring, summer and winter breaks since 1954, and by 1960 they had their own beach house there. Their immediate neighbours on the island were Bob Gibney and his wife, Nancy. Bob Gibney had been editor of The New Republic and Nancy had worked on Vogue, and both were initially impressed by their new neighbours. The more they got to know the Oppenheimers, however, the less they liked them, and from about 1960 onwards the two families lived in a constant state of feuding with each other.

  The other islanders were friendlier; some of them found Kitty alarming, especially when she was drunk, but most of them remembered Oppenheimer himself with warmth and admiration, and all of them, except the Gibneys, were happy to accept the annual invitation to the Oppenheimer’s New Year’s Eve party, which would arrive without fail in September. When the children were small, they both accompanied their parents to St John two or three times a year, but, on reaching adulthood, Peter stayed away, preferring to spend his holidays in New Mexico. Toni, on the other hand, loved everything about the island: its music, its people, its beaches and its relaxed way of life. All three – Oppenheimer, Kitty and Toni – acquired reputations as expert sailors and they would go off sailing for days at a time.

  In January 1962, after spending Christmas on St John as usual, and hosting their customary New Year’s Eve beach party, the Oppenheimers left for Canada, where Robert had been invited to give the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University. The purpose of these lectures, in the words of the then-principal of University College, McMaster, ‘is to help students cross the barriers separating the academic departments of a modern university’. The three lectures – ‘Space and Time’, ‘Atom and Field’ and ‘War and the Nations’ – cover ground that was pretty well trodden by Oppenheimer by this time, but, presumably because they were aimed at students rather than at the general public, the ground was covered in greater depth and Oppenheimer was less inhibited in using mathematical expressions. In 1964, they were published as a small book with the puzzling and inaccurate title The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists.

  Soon after he arrived back in Princeton, Oppenheimer received a letter dated 1 February from The Christian Century, a non-denominational magazine, asking him to ‘jot down – almost on impulse’ a list of up to ten books ‘that most shaped your attitudes in your vocation and philosophy of life’. The list he sent them was as follows:

  1. Les Fleurs du mal

  2. Bhagavad Gita

  3. Riemann’s Gesammelte mathematische Werke

  4. Theaetetus

  5. L’Éducation sentimentale

  6. Divina Commedia

  7. Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems

  8. ‘The Waste Land’

  9. Faraday’s notebooks

  10. Hamlet

  As an exercise in polymathic showing off, the list is peerless. In just ten titles Oppenheimer has managed to include works of drama, fiction, poetry, mathematics, physics and Hinduism, written in a total of no fewer than six languages: Sanskrit, Greek, Italian, French, German and English. Moreover, in leaving out, in most cases, the author’s name, Oppenheimer is making rather large assumptions about the readers of The Christian Century: that they would know that Les Fleurs du mal is a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire, that the Theaetetus is a dialogue by Plato, that L’Éducation sentimentale and Divina Commedia were works by, respectively, Flaubert and Dante, and, most obscure of all, that by ‘Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems’ he meant the Śatakatraya, which are usually translated as ‘The Three Centuries’, but which Oppenheimer’s old friend Arthur Ryder translated as ‘Women’s Eyes’. The letter inviting Oppenheimer to take part in this feature had said that the lists ‘should inform, intrigue, and possibly inspire our readers’. Well, they were probably intrigued at least.

  On 29 April 1962, President Kennedy hosted a formal reception and dinner at the White House for forty-nine American Nobel Prize-winners plus additional guests, among whom was Oppenheimer. The company included scientists such as Linus Pauling and Glenn Seaborg (but not, significantly, Edward Teller), and writers like Robert Frost and Pearl Buck. It was, said Kennedy, ‘the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone’. After dinner, Seaborg took Oppenheimer aside and told him that there was a good chance of reinstating his security clearance. All Oppenheimer had to do was submit himself once more to a security-board hearing. Would he do that? The answer was swift and final: ‘Not on your life.’

  In September 1962, Oppenheimer was one of three speakers at the dedication of the Niels Bohr Library of the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in New York. The other two speakers were Richard Courant, professor at New York University, and George Uhlenbeck from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Less than two months later, on 18 November, Bohr died at the age of seventy-seven. For the next Year Book of the American Philosophical Society Oppenheimer wrote a long and detailed, but emotionally restrained, biographical memoir of Bohr. Reading it, one would never imagine that he was here writing about the man he revered above all others.

  Oppenheimer gave so many public talks during this time, many of them subsequently published as magazine articles, that, inevitably, their quality varied and he increasingly began to repeat himself. In the October 1962 edition of Encounter, the in-house magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he published an article called ‘Science and Culture’, which seems to be little more than a rehashing of thoughts that he had published many times before. Slightly more inspired, if only for its title, was a talk he gave at the National Book Awards in New York on 12 March 1963. The title, of which he was very proud, was ‘The Added Cubit’, an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount as given in St Matthew, in which Jesus, in the context of exhorting his followers to ‘Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink’ – that is, to trust God to provide these things – says: ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’

  Before giving the lecture, Oppenheimer stopped off at Columbia and, while there, asked everyone what his title meant, and where it came from. No one knew. Jeremy Bernstein had recently joined the faculty at Columbia, and a colleague called him to tell him about Oppenheimer’s triumphant exposure of the physicists’ ignorance of the Bible, whereupon Bernstein, being curious, phoned his friend Robert Merton, who immediately identified the relevant passage from St Matthew. Then, Bernstein recalls:

  I went to midtown Manhattan to the Hotel Algonquin to meet some New Yorker colleagues.fn72 As I was passing the elevator, out walked the Oppenheimers. When he saw me he said: ‘Your father is a rabbi – you should know this.’ He had the wrong testament for my father, but I gave Merton’s answer with no explanation. He looked at me very strangely.

  It is hard to see quite why Oppenheimer was so proud of this title, but proud he was. He even ended the talk with an example of the amusement he derived from the failure of people to identify its source:

  Let me end with an anecdote. Three weeks ago a high officer of the National Book Committee asked me for a title for this talk. I did not have one then but I promised to call back shortly and give the title you have heard. He protested that my title was quite puzzling and uninformative. I said it had a history. He seemed puzzled and I quoted St Matthew. Then he said, ‘From what book is that?’ The National Book Committee still has a lot to do.fn73

  Oppenheimer’s theme in this talk is that, contrary to what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, we should ‘take thought’ and not place our trust in fate, or God, or our leaders. ‘By taking thought of our often grim responsibility,’ Oppenheimer told his audience, ‘by knowing something
of our profound and omnipresent imperfection, we may help our children’s children to a world less cruel, perhaps less unjust, less likely to end in a catastrophe beyond words. We may even find our way to put an end to the orgy, the killing and the brutality that is war.’

  The ‘imperfection’ of mankind had by this time become one of Oppenheimer’s favourite themes, though it is here given a new intensity. In our secularised age, he says, we have lost something that can be found in the great religions and is ‘a truth whose recognition seems to me essential to the very possibility of a permanently peaceful world, and to be indispensable also in our dealings with people with radically different history and culture and tradition’:

  It is the knowledge of the inwardness of evil, and an awareness that in our dealings with this we are very close to the center of life. It is true of us as a people that we tend to see all devils as foreigners; it is true of us ourselves, most of us, who are not artists, that in our public life, and to a distressing extent our private life as well, we reflect and project and externalize what we cannot bear to see within us. When we are blind to the evil in ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny, but of any possibility of dealing with the evil in others.

  This, fundamentally, is why the arts are important, since ‘it is almost wholly through the arts that we have a living reminder of the terror, of the nobility of what we can be, and what we are’.

  At the institute Oppenheimer had to deal not so much with evil as with pettiness and squabbling. Several senior members of the institute – including, most vehemently, the mathematicians Deane Montgomery and André Weil – did not like the way it was going under Oppenheimer’s leadership. They thought he brought too many physicists, psychologists, poets and sociologists to the institute, and not enough mathematicians. ‘He was out to humiliate mathematicians,’ said Weil:

  Oppenheimer was a wholly frustrated personality, and his amusement was to make people quarrel with each other. I’ve seen him do it. He loved to have people at the Institute quarrel with each other. He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.

  Robert Crease tells a story that illustrates something about both the bitchiness of academic life and the kind of sniping at Oppenheimer that went on during this time:

  Once in the 1950s, during the oral part of the physics qualifying exam at the University of Wisconsin, a student was asked what J. Robert Oppenheimer had contributed to physics. ‘I don’t know,’ the student answered – and was informed that was the correct answer.

  Sniping at a more personal level went on too, with Deane Montgomery referring to the Oppenheimers’ home, Olden Manor, as ‘Bourbon Manor’.

  George Kennan in his Memoirs writes that it was a ‘source of profound bewilderment and disappointment’ to Oppenheimer that he was unable to bring the disciplines of mathematics and history together at the institute, that he ‘remained so largely alone in his ability to bridge in a single inner world those wholly disparate workings of the human intellect’. Mathematicians and historians would not even sit together in the cafeteria. In place of interdisciplinary harmony there was a constant and fierce rivalry between the mathematicians and the exponents of other disciplines.

  The squabbling became particularly intense whenever the question of new appointments came up, the hardest-fought and most unpleasant battle occurring in the academic year 1962–3. ‘The faculty meetings became so acrimonious,’ recalls Yang, ‘I was afraid to go unless I had to.’ Abraham Pais remembers that early in 1963 he decided he would leave the institute: ‘It started to dawn on me that I had better move on.’ One reason was that he was worried about becoming complacent and wanted some fresh challenges, but a contributing factor in his decision to leave was, he wrote, that ‘just about then, Oppenheimer was in trouble again with the faculty because of his vacillations in regard to two new faculty appointments in mathematics, which had taken days of mediation on my part, whereafter I said to myself: No more’.

  The dispute began when the mathematicians started pushing for the appointment of John Milnor, a mathematician at Princeton University, as a permanent member of the institute. Oppenheimer turned the request down, whereupon the mathematicians presented two further nominations. Oppenheimer proposed postponing these appointments, but was overruled by the trustees at the mathematicians’ request, whereupon Pais wrote to Oppenheimer, announcing his resignation.

  In April 1963, in the middle of this dispute, it was publicly announced that Oppenheimer would be the next recipient of the AEC’s Enrico Fermi Award. This was an award for outstanding achievement in the nuclear field that had been established soon after Fermi’s death at the end of 1954. It was awarded posthumously to Fermi, and then in successive years to von Neumann, Lawrence, Wigner, Seaborg, Bethe and Teller. Oppenheimer had known that he had been nominated for the award since the White House dinner in April 1962, when Seaborg, who had been appointed by Kennedy as the new chairman of the AEC, took him aside and told him. Seaborg had been mainly responsible for ensuring that the award went to Oppenheimer, intending it to be a public recognition by the AEC that it had done him an injustice by its decision to strip him of his clearance and that it regarded him as someone to honour rather than to hold in suspicion. Seaborg says that, having made the decision to award the prize to Oppenheimer, he called Strauss to invite him to lunch, where he told him the news: ‘He looked as if I’d leaned over the table and punched him.’

  The decision was reported in the June edition of Physics Today, which reproduced the AEC’s announcement and the biographical sketch of Oppenheimer that they released alongside it. The biographical sketch ended with an appendix giving details of nine of Oppenheimer’s most important articles. Rather oddly, what is now regarded as his greatest scientific achievement – the paper on gravitational collapse that he wrote with Snyder – is not mentioned. The presentation ceremony, Physics Today reported, would take place in December 1963.

  In the meantime, in the summer of 1963, Oppenheimer helped to organise an odd little conference that became the first in an annual series at Seven Springs Farm, Mount Kisco, New York. The conferences were held on the estate of Agnes Meyer, the widow of Eugene Meyer, who, before his death in 1959, had been the owner of the Washington Post. Participation was by invitation only and the number of invitees was restricted to fifteen, in order to ‘maintain intimacy of discussion’. Those invited comprised a diverse collection, united only by their broad sympathy with the ideals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In 1963, the attendees included the Princeton scholar Julian Boyd, the Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire, the poet Robert Lowell, the architect Wallace K. Harrison, the psychiatrist Morris Carstairs, the physicist George Kistiakowsky, as well as Oppenheimer’s friends George Kennanfn74 and Nicolas Nabokov.

  The event provided Oppenheimer with the opportunity to give a different kind of talk from the public lectures he had been delivering to hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people during the previous decade. For one thing, he could, while speaking, mention the members of his audience by name, often using familiar versions of their names. Harrison was ‘Wally’, Nabokov was ‘Nico’, and Kistiakowsky ‘Kisty’. His talk expounded Bohr’s notion of ‘complementarity’, in a way that he had expounded in public many, many times before, except that, in extending it beyond physics, he applied it not only to the understanding of politics and society, but also to an understanding of oneself. This led him into an intimate, almost confessional passage, of a kind very rarely to be found in any of his other recorded utterances, whether private or public:

  Up to now, and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. It turned out to be impossible, I will not say to live
with myself, because I think there is no problem there, but for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth. And in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realise that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.

  Never before had Oppenheimer tried so hard to reveal his inner self, as if he were determined to, so to speak, stand naked before these like-minded souls. In his mind, he told his audience, a recurring theme of the conference had been ‘a recognition of and a protest against, the elements of smugness, falsity, self-satisfaction and unction in our times, our societies and our lives, against the hypocritical’. In that sense, he said, the conference participants had something important in common with the Beat movement in poetry, which ‘is surely not without artistic portent, but which is essentially, if I know the people and what they do, a kind of brutal protest against what they feel to be false in the description of the world which their elders have given them and in which they live’.

  On 21 November 1963 the White House issued an announcement that the Fermi Prize would be presented by the President himself to Oppenheimer on 2 December. The following day, the announcement was reported in the newspapers. That afternoon, in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was assassinated.

  So it was that the presentation was made by President Johnson. ‘I know every person in the room grieves with me that the late President could not give this award as he anticipated,’ Johnson said. ‘I take great pleasure and pride that I substitute for him.’ He then handed Oppenheimer the citation, the gold medal and a cheque for $50,000. Oppenheimer’s short acceptance speech concentrated on ‘this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history’: