BOOKENDS: ‘Forgetful Prof Parks Girl, Takes Self Home’

“American Prometheus” has all the makings of a solid spy thriller. The protagonist is a brilliant but troubled physicist who flirts with the Communist Party and then does top-secret government work on the atomic bomb. Along the way, there are love affairs, a suicide, illegal wiretaps, vindictive former friends, and a kangaroo court. John le Carré could not have imagined a better story.

What is unbelievable is that everything detailed in “American Prometheus” is absolutely true.

Far from a cheap supermarket paperback, “American Prometheus” is an exhaustive 600-page biography of the fascinating J. Robert Oppenheimer ’25, remembered by history as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Journalist Kai Bird and Tufts professor Martin J. Sherwin track the scientist from childhood to death, thoroughly charting his rise and fall through interviews, letters, and transcripts. After following Oppenheimer’s path for a quarter-century, the authors will return tonight to their subject’s alma mater, speaking at 6:30 p.m. at the Harvard Book Store.

Bird and Sherwin’s praiseworthy account reveals Oppenheimer as a man tortured from within and hounded from without, a sad victim of both anti-Communism and good old-fashioned revenge.

MISERABLE ON MT. AUBURN

Oppenheimer’s intelligence was present from childhood, but it truly blossomed during his miserable three-year stint as a Harvard undergraduate. He had always been an eccentric and an introvert, and left to his own devices at college, he only made a handful of lasting friendships. His love life was nonexistent.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how Robert would have had time for a romantic relationship. As a freshman in Standish Hall (now part of Winthrop House) and later as an upperclassman living at 60 Mt. Auburn St., Robert took six classes and audited a couple more each semester in order to graduate a year early. Diploma in hand, he set off for Cambridge, England, in 1925, but his social life didn’t get any spicier. However, Oppenheimer’s workaholic tendencies didn’t assuage his head tutor, who chided him on his poor lab skills. In revenge, Robert left the tutor an apple laced with chemicals. Bird and Sherwin speculate that the chemicals were probably non-lethal, but Oppenheimer still faced expulsion from the university. Only the persuasion of his father and a promise to see a psychiatrist saved him.

Oppenheimer next embarked for his father’s native land of Germany, studying the still-developing field of quantum mechanics alongside future physics giants like Paul Dirac, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg. But he never acquired the Europeans’ suave ways with womenfolk. Upon returning stateside to teach at Berkeley, Robert earned a small dose of worldwide notoriety for his romantic foibles. He drove a date to a scenic point up on a hill, and after she fell asleep, he whispered that he would walk back home and she should follow in the car. She did not hear his instructions, and so she waited two hours for him before alerting the police. Cops combed the bushes in search of Oppenheimer’s corpse. They finally found him fast asleep—in his own bed. The next day, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic picked up on the story: “Forgetful Prof Parks Girl, Takes Self Home.”

For less embarrassing reasons, his research at Berkeley was also newsworthy: he produced some of the earliest work on black holes. But Oppenheimer did not have the patience to doggedly pursue one single topic. “As a result, it was frequently he who opened the door through which others then walked to make major discoveries,” the authors write. Unlike several of his friends, Oppenheimer never won the Nobel Prize.

THE WRONG CROWD

During the Great Depression, Oppenheimer began to involve himself in left-wing politics. Many of those closest to him were card-carrying Communists, including his off-and-on lover Jean Tatlock, his younger brother Frank, and his wife Kitty Harrison.

For the rest of his life, Oppenheimer would be trailed by the question of whether he was a member of the party too. Bird and Sherwin conclude, with an air of mystery, “we do not, and we cannot, know the extent of his commitment” to the Communist Party, except that it was short-lived. Stalin’s purges clearly left him disillusioned with the Soviet experiment.

Questions of dual loyalty aside, Oppenheimer willingly agreed to direct the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb in 1942. Edward Teller suggested that such a device might ignite the hydrogen in the atmosphere and wipe out mankind. But Oppenheimer dismissed Teller’s calculations.

A new community was created in the high-altitude desert of Los Alamos, N.M., and hundreds of scientists were shipped in. A physics Dream Team was assembled: Teller, Hans Bethe, and Richard Feynman, among others. The heavy responsibility of overseeing these great minds and building the bomb wore away at Oppenheimer. Two years in, he only carried a gaunt 115 pounds on a 5-foot-10-inch frame, and his four-to-five pack-a-day cigarette habit did not help his health. These chapters in the book center on the physicists’ lives while leaving the scientific aspects on the backburner—a focus that most readers will find to be an asset rather than a liability.

A mushroom cloud of suspicion hangs over this segment of Oppenheimer’s life. In 1943 he made the mistake of spending a night with his former lover, the sometimes lesbian Tatlock. Given her Red leanings, that dalliance constituted a clear breach of security. (Half a year later, Tatlock was dead by her own hand, although some still speculate that she was murdered.) Then came truly devastating revelations of the “Chevalier affair.” In winter 1942, Oppenheimer’s friend Haakon Chevalier had approached him on behalf of another Communist about turning over secret information to the Soviets. Oppenheimer had called the idea “treasonous.” When he was asked about the event in 1943, he suggested that several scientists were approached with the same proposition. Oppenheimer later flip-flopped, telling the FBI that he was the only one approached, but he could never prove which version was the lie.

TERMINATED

As the bomb neared completion, the scientists began to wonder about the morality of unleashing it on humanity. While many had qualms, Oppenheimer actually supported the use of the bomb in order to demonstrate to the world that the U.S. possessed such a capability. He feared that keeping the weapon a secret would guarantee its widespread use in future wars. Oppenheimer, influenced by Niels Bohr, idealistically envisioned openly sharing nuclear information with the Soviets to avert an arms race. He feared atomic war and nuclear terrorism. Oppenheimer used the fame that came out of the Manhattan Project to press these issues, but President Truman described him as a “cry-baby scientist” after Oppenheimer confessed, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”

Oppenheimer became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which was famous for hosting Albert Einstein, but he still faced the wrath of his enemies. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover urged his agents to dig up anything incriminating, and they returned with a far-fetched report that Oppenheimer “had homosexual tendencies.” The FBI wiretapped his phones. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) member Lewis Strauss rabidly pursued Oppenheimer’s downfall too after Oppenheimer humiliated him during a Senate hearing. And finally there was Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” whose pet project Oppenheimer vehemently opposed.

Oppenheimer’s final downfall began when President Eisenhower restricted his access to classified information. Strauss orchestrated a three-member AEC panel to determine whether Oppenheimer should be allowed to retain his security clearance. The “Chevalier affair,” the Tatlock tryst, and Oppenheimer’s old Leftist connections resurfaced and torpedoed his chances at swaying the panel. In the end, Strauss had stacked the decks too high against Oppenheimer, and the panel recommended the termination of his security clearance on a two-to-one vote.

Oppenheimer had his silent revenge, though. Strauss’s unconscionable actions against the famed scientist led senators to reject his appointment as commerce secretary. Oppenheimer lived out the rest of his days at Princeton, dying at age 62 when his smoking habit finally caught up with him in the form of cancer. Oppenheimer had been publicly redeemed though. He received the Fermi Prize for public service from President Johnson, and he was portrayed sympathetically in a 1964 play that attracted international acclaim.

In typical spy novel fashion, this tale ends on an upbeat note. Oppenheimer finishes far ahead of petty men like Strauss and Hoover. The biography is long, but it is infinitely more satisfying than a Tom Clancy thriller, thanks to Bird and Sherwin’s meticulous character construction. And, even better, the reader doesn’t have to worry about the authors churning out another equally long sequel—at least not for another quarter-century.