Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  In this enterprise, no one bears a greater responsibility than the President of the United States. I think it just possible, Mr President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.

  At the reception afterwards Oppenheimer was photographed shaking Edward Teller’s hand, with Kitty standing beside him, looking at Teller with icy contempt. ‘I enjoyed what you had to say,’ said Teller. ‘I’m so very glad you came,’ replied Oppenheimer.

  Another chance for America’s scientific establishment to honour Oppenheimer presented itself the following April, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It was duly taken, but in a curiously unenthusiastic way. Oppenheimer’s colleagues at the institute, Dyson, Pais, Strömgren and Yang, undertook to edit a special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics dedicated to him. However, Robert Crease records that they had difficulty persuading people to contribute. Dyson wrote to forty leading physicists, many of whom, it seems, refused to contribute. Max Born did contribute, but only a short and rather half-hearted ‘Message’, rather than a proper article. Those who did contribute included Leonard Schiff, David Hawkins, Phil Morrison, Cyril Smith, Willie Fowler, Robert Christy, Eugene Wigner, Julian Schwinger, Abraham Pais, Robert Serber and Kenneth Case. It was an impressive list, but more impressive was the list of people one would have expected to contribute, but who were not there: Isidor Rabi, Victor Weisskopf, Robert Bacher, Samuel Allison, Ed Condon, F.W. Loomis, Hans Bethe, Charles Lauritsen, and so on.

  One of the most interesting articles in this Festschrift is a long and detailed study by Willie Fowler of ‘Massive Stars, Relativist Polytropes, and Gravitational Radiation’, which is one of the first published papers to recognise the importance of Oppenheimer’s work in this area. It begins by quoting from Oppenheimer’s papers on the subject and remarking: ‘It is a tribute to Robert Oppenheimer’s genius that these are the few statements about massive stars accepted as true today.’

  This special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics was printed on 22 April 1964, the very day of Oppenheimer’s sixtieth birthday. According to the weekly letter that Dyson wrote home to his parents, the first copy ‘was rushed down from New York hot from the press’, just in time for the party they had arranged for Oppenheimer at the Strömgrens’ house. ‘Oppenheimer,’ Dyson wrote, ‘seemed to be genuinely surprised and greatly moved. It was the first time I have ever seen him at a loss for a suitable speech. He just said “Thank you” rather incoherently and sat down.’

  The next day, Oppenheimer flew across the United States to Berkeley, where he delivered a lecture on the life and work of Niels Bohr to an audience of 12,500. ‘I am very pleased to be back home,’ he told the massive crowd that had come to hear him. ‘I lived here a long time and to those of you to whom a choice is offered, don’t go away.’ After Berkeley, Oppenheimer gave talks at Caltech, UCLA and, finally, on 18 May, at Los Alamos. Everywhere he went he lectured on Bohr, emphasising again and again the social, political and personal importance of Bohr’s notion of complementarity.

  In September 1964, at the Rencontres Internationales de Genève, Oppenheimer gave a talk entitled ‘L’Intime et le Commun’ (‘The Intimate and the Open’), in which he touched again upon the themes of his 1963 Mount Kisco talk, urging that the openness espoused by Bohr should be expanded to include the private as well as the public. Referring to his security hearing, which by this time was ten years in the past, he said:

  . . . when the proceedings were published, many said that my life had become an open book. That was not really true. Most of what meant most to me never appeared in those hearings. Perhaps much was not known; certainly much was not relevant. I did have occasion then to think of what it might have been like to be an open book. I have come to the conclusion that if in fact privacy is an accidental blessing, and can be taken from you, if it is worth anyone’s trouble, for a few dollars, and a few hours, it may still not be such a bad way to live.

  He was speaking here, of course, as someone who for many years had lived with the awareness that his phones were being tapped, his rooms bugged and his every movement followed and monitored. One might have expected him to be especially protective of his privacy, and indeed for most of his life he was. During these last years, however, he seemed to be striving for a very personal kind of openness, an important element of which was the recognition and acceptance of the evil in oneself:

  We most of all should try to be experts in the worst about ourselves: we should not be astonished to find some evil there, that we find so very readily abroad and in all others. We should not, as Rousseau tried to, comfort ourselves that it is the responsibility and the fault of others, that we are just naturally good; nor should we let Calvin persuade us that despite our obvious duty we are without any power, however small and limited, to deal with what we find of evil in ourselves. In this knowledge, of ourselves, of our profession, of our country – our often beloved country – of our civilization itself, there is scope for what we most need: self knowledge, courage, humor, and some charity. These are the great gifts that our tradition makes to us, to prepare us for how to live tomorrow.

  He chose a related theme when, on 27 September 1964, he was invited to speak at the inauguration of the University of Peace, an institution founded by the Dominican friar Father Pire, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1958 for his work with refugees. What Oppenheimer emphasised on this occasion was the need to overcome pride, linking that theme to the danger of nuclear weapons in the following way:

  Today we live . . . with the arms race promising death to hundreds of millions, with massive retaliation, as it is called, and with its more sophisticated, better educated young brother, deterrence, and with cold wars. They are less inhuman than war itself, and let us not forget it, but they are not very human either. Yet by casting doubt, by recognizing the nearly ultimate evil of general war in this age, they question all war; they question our national sense of self-righteousness. They limit and often mark our pride, and our pride in our power, and in the legitimacy of violence, and our resort to it, or of hate itself as a welcome element of Man’s destiny.

  Hearing and reading passages like this, it was natural to imagine that Oppenheimer was here confessing and apologising for his ‘sin’ in having been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. But, as he said over and over again, he did not regret his work at Los Alamos, nor did he think he and his colleagues had done something unjustifiable in building the bomb. When he said that physicists had ‘known sin’, the sin he had in mind was not murder, but pride.

  One person who misunderstood Oppenheimer on this crucial point was the German playwright Heinar Kipphardt, who wrote a play based on the 1954 hearings called In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The play, first performed in Germany in January 1964, took much of its dialogue from the transcript, but added to it additional material, such as Oppenheimer’s post-war comment that physicists had known sin and some lines of Kipphardt’s own. It was these last that were the main source of the problem. At the end of the play, Kipphardt’s Oppenheimer delivers a soliloquy in which he expresses regret for what he and his colleagues had done:

  I begin to wonder whether we were not perhaps traitors to the spirit of science when we handed over the results of our research to the military . . . We have spent years of our lives in developing ever sweeter means of destruction, we have been doing the work of the military and I feel in my very bones that this was wrong . . . I will never work on war projects again. We have been doing the work of the Devil.

  Oppenheimer read the play in August 1964 and was horrified by it. Though the portrayal of him was clearly intended to be sympathetic, the sympathy was, from his point of view, misplaced, since it was based on misrepresenting his views. On 12 October 1964, he wrote to Kipphardt, complaining that ‘You make me say things which I did not and do not believe.’

  Even this September in Geneva, during a conference of the Rencont
res de Genève, I was asked by the Canon van Kamp whether now, knowing the results, I would again do what I did during the war: participate in a responsible way in the making of atomic weapons. To this I answered yes. When a voice in the audience angrily asked ‘Even after Hiroshima?’ I repeated my yes.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he added, ‘you may well have forgotten Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden, Tokyo. I have not. I think that if you find it necessary so to misread and misrepresent your principal character, you should perhaps write about someone else.’ He finished by warning Kipphardt of legal action ‘against you and the producers of your play’.

  Meanwhile, the play was proving popular with audiences and gaining favourable reviews, not only in Germany, but also in the US. Oppenheimer did not carry out his threat to sue Kipphardt, but he did express his feelings to the press. ‘The whole damn thing was a farce,’ he told the Washington Post, ‘and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it.’ On 11 November 1964, he issued a press statement on the subject, which identified a problem that perhaps upset him even more than the misrepresentation of his own views. Kipphardt, he pointed out, ‘makes me say that Bohr disapproved of the work at Los Alamos because it would make science subservient to the military’. As he had spent the last eighteen months giving lecture after lecture on Bohr in which he had said that Bohr had given everyone at Los Alamos fresh hope and a revived sense of purpose, he could not let this go uncontested. He had, he insisted, ‘never said such a thing’; Bohr ‘understood and welcomed what we were doing’.

  When the play was performed in Paris at the end of 1964, the French director, Jean Vilar, heeded Oppenheimer’s protests, removed the lines that had offended him and created a version that was faithful to the transcript and the historical facts. The result was that critics scorned it for being too literal, Kipphardt himself complained that his play had been thus rendered toothless, and audiences stayed away.

  In February 1965, Oppenheimer went one step further with regard to a proposed performance of the play at the Aldwych Theatre in London and successfully had it cancelled. ‘I have not been for this play,’ Oppenheimer wrote to the London producer, John Roberts. ‘I have not wished to have it produced in Berlin, or in Paris, or anywhere else. I would hope that it would not be produced in England, or in this country.’ The lines added by Kipphardt, Oppenheimer said revealingly, ‘seem to me, in fact, rather “anti-American”’. A few weeks later, Roberts received a letter from Oppenheimer’s lawyers, threatening to ‘restrain the production of the play as an unlawful invasion of privacy’. By the same means, in October 1965, a proposed production in New York was also scrapped.

  Why was Oppenheimer so opposed to the play? Some have suggested that he did not want to have all the unpleasantness of the hearing revived, replayed and regurgitated; others that, having won the Fermi Prize, he wanted to get his security clearance back and therefore did not want to be represented as a man in opposition to the government. But perhaps his twin descriptions of the hearing as a ‘farce’ and the play as ‘anti-American’ provide the real answer: whether it came in the form of an accusation from Lewis Strauss or as admiring flattery from Heinar Kipphardt, Oppenheimer was determined to resist the idea that he was opposed to his own country, because his deep love of America was one of the strongest passions he had. Einstein captured this well when, on being told that, against his advice, Oppenheimer had submitted himself to a security hearing (Einstein had advised Oppenheimer to tell the officials they were fools and then to go home), he said: ‘The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him – the United States government.’

  Another unwelcome threat to his reputation came in the summer of 1964 in the form of a letter from Haakon Chevalier. The letter came out of the blue. Oppenheimer had had nothing to do with Chevalier since the end of 1954, and the publication in 1959 of The Man Who Would Be God did nothing to tempt him to resume contact or to think warmly about his old friend and comrade. Chevalier was writing to tell Oppenheimer that, after publishing his fictionalised account of their relationship, he had been urged by a number of people (including, he claimed, Niels Bohr) to write ‘the true story of my involvement with you’ in a non-fictional way. ‘The reason I am writing to you,’ Chevalier told Oppenheimer, ‘is that an important part of the story concerns your and my membership in the same unit of the CP from 1938 to 1942.’

  I should like to deal with this in its proper perspective, telling the facts as I remember them. As this is one of the things in your life which, in my opinion, you have least to be ashamed of, and as your commitment, attested among other things by your ‘Reports to our Colleagues,’ which today make impressive reading, was a deep and genuine one, I consider that it would be a grave omission not to give it its due prominence.

  Oppenheimer’s reply, dated 7 August 1964, was firm and somewhat icy:

  Dear Haakon,

  Your letter came while I was away from Princeton; hence this small delay in my answering. I am glad that you wrote to me. Your letter asks whether I would have any objections. Indeed I do. What you say of yourself I find surprising. Surely in one respect what you say of me is not true. I have never been a member of the Communist Party, and thus have never been a member of a Communist Party unit. I, of course, have always known this. I thought you did too.

  The following March, Lloyd Garrison phoned Oppenheimer to discuss what to do about Chevalier’s book. Notes of the conversation, presumably written by Oppenheimer, survive and record what he told Garrison: ‘Had letter from Chevalier, obscure, slightly blackmailing. Took it to Joe Volpe. Brief answer. No further correspondence.’ They decided not to try and block the book, for fear of giving it free publicity. In the event, that proved wise. The book, entitled Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, was published in the summer of 1965. It did not state that Oppenheimer had been a member of a Communist Party cell. Nor did it sell any better or get reviewed any more favourably than The Man Who Would Be God.

  Oppenheimer was by this time a weary man, aged beyond his years. On 15 April 1965, a few days before his sixty-first birthday, he wrote to the institute’s Board of Trustees, telling them that he intended to retire, not from the faculty, but from the directorship, at the end of June 1966. Two days after his birthday, on 24 April 1965, the institute announced this decision and also that Oppenheimer’s plans for his forthcoming time as a non-directorial professor of physics would include, in Oppenheimer’s words, ‘physics, of course, which is in a most dramatic and hopeful stage, and to seek an understanding, both historical and philosophical, of what the sciences have brought to human life’. When, in May 1965, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the institute, they reported that few people mourned Oppenheimer’s passing and that there was, on the contrary, ‘a general feeling that his resignation as director is best for him and best for the Institute’.

  The summer of 1965 was marked by two significant anniversaries that kept Oppenheimer in the public eye: the twentieth anniversary of the Trinity test on 16 July and the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August. In interviews with Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, Oppenheimer took the opportunity yet again to say that he did not regret working on the bomb. Asked on CBS whether he had a ‘bad conscience’ about the bomb, he replied:

  Well, I don’t want to speak for others because we’re all different. I think when you play a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over 100,000 people and the injury of a comparable number, you naturally don’t think of that as – with ease. I believe we had a great cause to do this. But I do not think that our consciences should be entirely easy, at stepping out of the part of studying nature, learning the truth about it, to change the course of human history. Long ago I said once that, in a crude sense which no vulgarity and no humour could quite erase, the physicist had known sin, and I didn’t mean by that the deaths that were caused as a result of our work. I meant
that we had known the sin of pride. We had turned to affect, in what proved to be a major way, the course of man’s history. We had the pride of thinking we knew what was good for man, and I do think it had left a mark on many of those who were responsibly engaged. This is not the natural business of the scientist.

  Oppenheimer gave far fewer public speeches in 1965 than in previous years and those he did give were markedly different. In place of the intimate, confessional tone of his Mount Kisco lecture and the emphasis on the personal, on acknowledging the evil in oneself, of his Geneva talk, one finds – in accordance with what he had announced as his new research topics – an interest in the history and philosophy of science. Not that his talks of this year can be regarded as a contribution to the academic disciplines of the history and philosophy of science (they are far too informal for that), but, in ‘Physics and Man’s Understanding’, given at the bicentennial celebrations of the Smithsonian Institution, and in ‘To Live with Ourselves’, given at the 1965 US Army National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, there is certainly a more detailed, more focused concentration on the history of science than in his previous talks.

  The detail is particularly evident, and particularly telling, in ‘To Live with Ourselves’, in which Oppenheimer gives examples, taken from history and from his own life, of what scientific discovery is like, his thesis being that ‘the life of the scientist is, along with the life of the poet, soldier, prophet and artist, deeply relevant to man’s understanding of his situation and his view of his destiny’. His first detailed example is from his own life, from the time when, in 1935, he and Frank took some time off to go riding in New Mexico. There, Oppenheimer told his audience, he received a letter from Milton White (then a graduate student at Berkeley), describing some experiments he had recently performed, which demonstrated, for the first time, the existence of the nuclear forces that act between protons. ‘This was,’ Oppenheimer said, ‘one of the many times when the question, “how hard is matter?” got a new, fresh answer.’ He then discussed Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus, Hahan and Strassman’s discovery of fission, Anderson’s discovery of the positron, Einstein’s discovery of relativity, and others. The moral he draws from these examples is: ‘when the discovery has any of the qualities of the great ones, it has to reach back into a solid framework of experience and understanding and a great tradition; it has to mean something’.