J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AS A “SITE”

“God knows,” lamented the physicist Isidor Rabi, “I'm not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I'm very, very simple.” J. Robert Oppenheimer played myriad roles in the science and politics of modern America: as a physicist working to establish a synthetic American school uniting theoretical and experimental approaches; as a government functionary and “weaponeer” piloting the development and fine-tuning the deployment of the first atomic bombs; as insider, consultant, and oracle speaking in the name of American science; but also as outsider, voice of conscience, and political pariah.Footnote ¹

This pastiche of professional identities is especially compelling because each is emblematic of a powerful public debate unfolding over the course of the postwar era. We study Oppenheimer's academic career to help understand the transformation of university-based research into corporate and military-driven “big science.” We review how his leadership of the A-bomb project in remote Los Alamos signaled the corresponding separation of the scientist from the larger civil society, both physically and philosophically. We speculate about how his role in drafting the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan for internationalizing the control of nuclear materials at least suggested a path for how an insider might translate dissent into policy. And finally, we cite his fall from grace at his loyalty-security hearing as a signature episode of the anxiety-driven public policy of the McCarthyite moment.

On an even more epic scale, analysts invoke the Oppenheimer saga as crystallizing sweeping twentieth-century social phenomena such as the internalization of assimilationist tensions, the construction of elite identity, or the way Enlightenment ideas about science as a proxy for culture and reason yielded to a modern vision of science as the enabler of violence and disintegration.

Oppenheimer supplemented these public personae with a mesmerizing array of personal roles: as precocious polymath, self-consciously “cultivated” aesthete, energetic outdoorsman, progressive local activist, political victim, and intellectual martyr. To this image-burnishing litany we might annex a less well-known list: duplicitous friend, ambivalent Jew, disloyal mentor, adulterous spouse, and appallingly poor parent.

The historian of ideas David Hollinger incisively suggests that the impulse to piece all of these disparate shards together speaks primarily to the needs of postwar academics and their yearning for an intellectual hero. Hollinger describes Oppenheimer as “a uniquely prominent site” in the history of twentieth-century America, offering this striking locution as a way of capturing how Oppenheimer played a “dual role as the recipient and the agent of multiple and portentous fates.”Footnote ² Insofar as a unified field theory of Oppenheimer is even possible, it might most appropriately highlight this motif of fragmentation.

A consistent refrain for Oppenheimer was his preoccupation with image, and his biographers evocatively trace his eagerness to please authority figures, his pervasive insecurity, and his occasionally craven quest for “insider” status to episodes in his early life. He emerges as a figure who, in the estimation of one of Oppenheimer's own closest colleagues, “never got to be an integrated personality.”Footnote ³ This fundamental lack of integrity—in all senses of that term—means that the “site” of Oppenheimer has been continuously under construction, both by Oppenheimer himself and in the annals of historical memory.

These five important volumes foreground a variety of features of the Oppenheimer landscape, resulting in some intriguing vistas where the perspectives do not necessarily match up. Mining for such multiple perspectives is arguably the best approach to studying someone who was himself so fragmented and multifaceted; accordingly, this essay eschews the hierarchical framing of “if you could read only one,” and explores contrasting and complementary pairings of the readings.

OPPENHEIMER AS SCIENTIST: “ALL THE LOVELY IDEAS HE WORKED OUT WITH HIS STUDENTS”

In the early and mid-1920s quantum mechanics was “the new theoretical physics of the atom,” focusing on the smallest possible indivisible units of energy, or quanta, and how these tiny units behaved. Born in 1904, Oppenheimer was too young to contribute to the first wave of breakthroughs in quantum mechanics, but he had established himself as a virtual prodigy by the time of the second wave, in the late 1920s. Oppenheimer's most-cited reference is still the 1927 Born–Oppenheimer approximation (with his doctoral mentor Max Born), using the techniques of quantum mechanics to rework a question about the motion of electrons in a molecule previously treated by Werner Heisenberg. Also early in his career he published a series of well-respected papers on topics such as the nature of continuum wave functions, the calculation of the absorption coefficient of X-rays, and the elasticity of electron scattering. The physicist Robert Serber, a longtime Oppenheimer friend, has suggested that Oppenheimer's most original contribution was his early work on a theory of field emission, enabling the study of electron emissions from metals.Footnote ⁴

But by the mid-1930s the litany of Oppenheimer's achievements had already picked up a poignant note: the refrain of early promise unfulfilled. In terms of individually attributed, published theoretical breakthroughs, there are really only two other widely cited Oppenheimer contributions in addition to his early work. In the related field of nuclear physics, Oppenheimer and his student Melba Phillips published calculations on proton yields, known as the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, “an important tool” in the study of the energy levels of nuclei, according to the physicist Hans Bethe, who thought this paper was Oppenheimer's most influential contribution.Footnote ⁵ Then in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer published two papers with other students on the collapse of massive stars that are “sometimes recognized as his most impressive piece of research,” in the assessment of biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. These calculations on neutron stars first described what would later come to be known as black holes. While Bird and Sherwin describe this research as “stunning and original,” the science historian Karl Hufbauer notes that this material was nevertheless quite a thin “thread in Oppenheimer's scientific life.” Hufbauer also takes issue with the favorable assessment offered by the physicist Jeremy Bernstein, that had Oppenheimer lived longer this work might well have garnered a Nobel Prize.Footnote ⁶

A friend from Oppenheimer's undergraduate days at Harvard (from which the budding scientist graduated summa cum laude in three years) remembered that “when someone would pose a problem, [Robert] would give two or three wrong answers, followed by the right one, before I could think of a single answer.”Footnote ⁷ This reminiscence captures both the brilliance and the breeziness, bordering on sloppiness, of Oppenheimer's intellectual style. Oppenheimer himself once casually observed, “I should have learned more mathematics. I think I would have enjoyed it, but it was part of my impatience that I was careless about it.”Footnote ⁸ Such breeziness could also shade into boorishness: as a doctoral student of Max Born's, Oppenheimer would routinely interrupt his mentor's seminars, breaking in on the other students and on Born himself, sometimes stepping up to the blackboard unbidden to show how a problem might be solved more elegantly. His classmate Maria Göppert—who would garner a Nobel Prize herself in 1963—eventually presented a formal petition to Born, indicating that the rest of the group would boycott future seminars “unless the ‘child prodigy’ was reined in.” We believe Born when he wrote to a colleague: “I never suffered with anybody as with [Oppenheimer]. He is doubtless very gifted but completely without mental discipline.”Footnote ⁹

As a teacher, too, Oppenheimer fell into the classic self-indulgent trap of failing to adjust or prepare his material in order actually to teach his audience. When he lectured at Caltech on material he had already taught once at Berkeley, thirty-nine of forty students soon shifted their registration status to “auditor.” When the fortieth student then asked to do the same, Oppenheimer begged him to stay in the class on a graded basis. And these were all graduate students; Oppenheimer was apparently never even asked to teach undergraduates.

Just as noteworthy, however, are the repeated references in the biographies to the extraordinary amounts of time Oppenheimer spent with his own doctoral students. They often met daily as a group and would hold weekly sessions in the evenings to discuss the latest journal literature (and much else besides). Oppenheimer occasionally developed special, less-challenging problems for some of his students who were floundering, and sometimes would even finish a struggling student's paper for him, although this informal affirmative-action program seemed to apply exclusively to favored male students. (Women students who were not keeping up were unceremoniously barred from class; one famously went on a hunger strike to be allowed to repeat a course.) As his first doctoral student and sometime girlfriend Melba Phillips summarized, “He was an idea man. He never did any great physics, but look at all the lovely ideas he worked out with his students.”Footnote ¹⁰

Elaborating upon the professional quality Oppenheimer lacked, Princeton physicist Murray Gell-Mann explained that his senior colleague “didn't have sitzfleisch,” a concept much less colorfully translated as stick-to-itiveness or perseverance. As Gell-Mann explained, “He never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn't have the patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic.” As the historian Richard Polenberg points out in his contribution to the Carson–Hollinger essay collection, Oppenheimer was a classic “fox”—a thinker whose work is “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences,” using the evocative temperamental contrast sketched by Isaiah Berlin. Individual breakthroughs of the type honored by the Nobel committee were not where Oppenheimer's particular gifts lay. (Indeed, Bird and Sherwin sometimes seem to suggest that it is only plodding, hedgehog types who garner a Nobel anyway.)Footnote ¹¹

Oppenheimer made his most important intellectual contributions in physics as a kind of scientific equivalent of a dramaturge: as a stimulator, enabler, and synthesizer of the work of others. He predicted the existence of the electron-canceling positron, for example, which in turn pushed Paul Dirac to predict the existence of antimatter. Oppenheimer's ability to guide and stimulate determined the two signal accomplishments of his career: his development of an “American School” of physics at Berkeley, which brought together theoretical and experimental approaches; and his leadership of the wartime Los Alamos laboratory that developed the first atomic weapons. In keeping with his synthetic style, of course neither of these achievements could possibly be due to Oppenheimer alone. But in the early and mid-1940s these two newly constructed spaces were the most conspicuous beneficiaries of his energy and creativity.Footnote ¹²

His leadership in setting up the Los Alamos lab, in particular, showed how Oppenheimer was able to “metamorphose into a charismatic and efficient administrator,” as Bird and Sherwin explain. Late in 1942, when he was first scouting the remote Los Alamos site—then a rustic boys' school—Oppenheimer indicated that he believed he could conduct his weaponeering with six or so scientists. By 1945 the site was in effect a bustling town, with upwards of two thousand professionals (both theoretical and experimental physicists, as well as engineers and technicians) and an additional six thousand support staff and family members.

Rabi and many others initially thought the thirty-eight-year-old Oppenheimer an impractical choice as leader; “he couldn't run a hamburger stand,” was the early assessment of one Berkeley scientist. But the physicist Robert R. Wilson soon observed that “whatever we felt about his deficiencies, in a few months he had corrected those deficiencies,” later concluding that, “when I was with him, I was a larger person . . . I became very much of an Oppenheimer person and just idolized him . . . I changed around completely.” His administrative chief of staff at Los Alamos, Dorothy McKibben, concurred: “He made you do the impossible.”Footnote ¹³

OPPENHEIMER AS HUMANIST: “WE WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO LIKE TCHAIKOVSKY”

Oppenheimer as one of the last great polymaths—learned in literature and languages, dabbling in Eastern philosophy and socialist political thought, appreciator of great art and fine wines—is a favorite refrain of Oppenheimer biographers. Any detailed character sketch treats us to breathless accounts of how Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit so he could study the Bhagavadgita in the original. We learn how Oppenheimer soon took to handing out copies of the Gita to his friends, and how these studies were in his own words “easy and quite marvelous,” giving him “a feeling for the place of ethics.” But perhaps just as telling is a vignette from his undergraduate days, describing a visit to the home of Percy Bridgman, Oppenheimer's physics professor at Harvard. Bridgman “showed his student a photograph of a temple built, he said, about 400 B.C. in Segesta, Sicily. Oppenheimer quickly disagreed: ‘I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about fifty years earlier.’”Footnote ¹⁴

In the aggregate, these stories are more suggestive of a poseur than of a proficient. “Never since the Greek tragedies has there been heard the unrelieved pomposity of a Robert Oppenheimer,” agreed the husband of Oppenheimer's Berkeley landlady, capturing the appropriate historical sweep. The rarefied realm of literature and philosophy is also where we see Oppenheimer regularly intoning advice that he was notoriously unable to put into practice himself, for example the way the Gita teaches how the path of discipline is the only way “to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire.” Upon hearing that Oppenheimer was studying Sanskrit, Rabi reportedly asked archly, “Why not the Talmud?”Footnote ¹⁵

Oppenheimer's graduate students soon started imitating some of his affectations, smoking Chesterfields and making his characteristic “thinking” sounds, leading to their being labeled the “nim nim boys.” (“We weren't supposed to like Tchaikovsky,” observed one acolyte, “because Oppenheimer never liked Tchaikovsky.”) Part of Oppenheimer's cult status was also undoubtedly due to his legendary generosity. He gave expensive gifts to friends and colleagues and often treated large groups of his students to fine restaurant meals in San Francisco, or to steak dinners in his own home. To underemployed graduate students at the height of the Great Depression such displays of wealth and sophistication must have been truly dazzling. Robert Nisbet, a Berkeley doctoral candidate in sociology, observed with some awe how Oppenheimer “lived, without question, the good life—a handsome house in the hills, and, so it was said, the best of wines, foods, and women.”Footnote ¹⁶

OPPENHEIMER AS FRACTURED PERSONA: “HE REQUIRED SOMEONE OR SOMETHING TO ACT AS A MAGNETIC FIELD TO LINE UP THE VARIOUS FRAGMENTS OF HIS SOUL”

Contemporaries often remarked on how Oppenheimer's otherworldly physicality added to his aura. Sociologist Charles Thorpe, in his nuanced analysis of the sources of Oppenheimer's charismatic presence, observes how the physicist's “physical condition was widely ascribed moral meaning.” Oppenheimer's five-foot-ten-inch frame never weighed more than 130 pounds, and often weighed significantly less. “His straight Roman nose, thin lips and large, almost pointed ears accentuated an image of exaggerated delicacy,” observe Bird and Sherwin. A contemporary at Berkeley observed how “his mere physical appearance, his voice, and his manners made people fall in love with him—male, female.” Oppenheimer himself was prone to weirdly intense crushes on women and men, once giving his Caltech colleague Linus Pauling an expensive ring, an extensive and valuable mineral collection, and writing a cycle of poems for him, before ending the friendship by making what was apparently an eminently resistible pass at Pauling's wife. (She later indicated that she felt it was really her husband to whom Oppenheimer was attracted.)Footnote ¹⁷ Another contemporary remarked on the “legend” of Oppenheimer's physicality, the way “he walked his jerky walk, feet turned outwards, a Jewish Pan with his blue eyes and his wild Einstein hair.” A less sympathetic observer noted how he looked “astoundingly like Pinocchio, and he moved as jerkily as a marionette on strings.”Footnote ¹⁸

Indeed, a reader may often gauge how a particular historical actor felt about Oppenheimer by the tenor of the description of his physical appearance. After Oppenheimer's public humiliation at his 1954 loyalty-security hearing, he emerged as “a thin, gray, shrunken ghost,” in one journalistic account, while one of Oppenheimer's former students noted sadly that “he was a broken man. It was really terrible to see how he sort of sagged after the trial and how he was melancholic and he had no longer the verve and all the qualities he had before.”Footnote ¹⁹

Melancholic complaints were of course nothing new for Oppenheimer. As an adolescent off on his first tour of the American West with his high school teacher Herbert Smith, Oppenheimer's various gastrointestinal problems “invariably came on when Robert heard someone making disparaging remarks about Jews.” Robert had initially asked if he, too, could travel under the name “Smith,” as a younger brother, a request that a startled Smith refused. Bird and Sherwin delicately label these and other related vignettes as suggestive of Oppenheimer's “lifelong ambivalence about his Jewish identity.” His much more grounded co-religionist Isidor Rabi offered the characteristically flat-footed observation that “Oppenheimer was Jewish, but he wished he weren't and tried to pretend he wasn't.”Footnote ²⁰

Some of the most intriguing analysis in both the Bird and Sherwin and the Cassidy volumes links Oppenheimer's attitudes about his identity to the assertively assimilationist stance of the Ethical Culture school in Manhattan, where Oppenheimer received his secondary and most of his primary education. The Ethical Culture movement sought to escape the narrow confines of “Jewish particularism” by cultivating a wider sense of social engagement and a universalized interest in bettering all humanity. But the very breadth of these aspirations seemed to produce a kind of cultural and spiritual impoverishment as an unhappy by-product. Individuals apparently need some particularism after all; as Oppenheimer himself explained late in his career:

Something similar to this analysis may perhaps have been what Rabi had in mind when he opined that Oppenheimer would have been better off studying the Talmud.Footnote ²¹

The modernity of which Oppenheimer's very life and career became a contested symbol was epitomized by the pluralistic orientation of his Ethical Culture background, but also by his own personal and professional fragmentation. On the one hand, Oppenheimer the public intellectual was a leading popularizer of the physicist Niels Bohr's ideas about “complementarity”—that ideas about different kinds of incommensurable quanta existing in the same space had analogies in what Oppenheimer called “the common world,” including the relationship between the eternal and the transient, or science and philosophy, as a way of accommodating pluralism and combating disintegration.Footnote ²²

But in 1954, in his first public address in the wake of his humiliating loyalty-security hearing, Oppenheimer advocated a closed-off, academic community of elite scientists, “for it is here [in the academic world] . . . that the narrowness of scientific life can best be moderated, and that the analogies, insights, and harmonies of scientific discovery can find their way into the wider life of man.” But why would the cloistered world of the academy be the best environment for moderating “narrowness”? As Cassidy insightfully puts it, Oppenheimer was in effect advocating “the dissolution of the bond between technical science and the larger, human society in which it evolved and is nourished”; that is to say, exactly the kind of sterile bifurcation that Oppenheimer antagonist Lewis Strauss and the Atomic Energy Commission were advocating, between science and any kind of normative or evaluative function that might be exercised by civil society or even by individual science advisers in the service of some larger vision of the national interest.Footnote ²³

In a lecture series the previous year—that is, just before the AEC loyalty-security hearing, chaired by Strauss—Oppenheimer in his role of revered public intellectual had suggested that one possible bridge between the worlds of science and society was “constituted in his own authority as interpreter of the cultural meaning of science,” as Charles Thorpe explains. Oppenheimer was making a larger argument than simply struggling against the ever-increasing specialization of the academic world. He sought to advance a pluralistic vision, leaving behind the premodern model of each isolated individual seeking maximum cultivation, which he argued was unsuited for the complexity of contemporary life. Instead, “Oppenheimer substituted an ideal of dialogue between diverse communities. The problem of the unity of knowledge and the problem of human solidarity were identical,” and could be mediated by the right sort of cultural broker, namely an elite expert such as himself.

Oppenheimer arguably constituted singularly unsuitable timber for constructing such a bridge, however, fundamentally lacking integrity himself. Oppenheimer always “required someone or something to act as a magnetic field to line up the various fragments of [his] soul,” in the words of Harvard physicist Gerald Holton, and over the course of his life that external thing remained the search for approval from others.Footnote ²⁴

Bird and Sherwin romanticize this fragmentation. They note the Rashomon-like quality of what came to be known as “the Chevalier affair,” for example, suggesting that perhaps there were many, equally valid perspectives on an episode where Oppenheimer offered one fabrication after another to sets of increasingly incredulous security officials about what seems to have been an exploratory approach for information about the bomb from a British communist. (This controversy, in which Oppenheimer briskly betrayed his close friend Haakon Chevalier, remains all the more mysterious given that at least one of the subsequent, disavowed stories was much more damning than the quickly dismissed contact that Oppenheimer was apparently trying to obscure.) Similarly, the authors glamorize the soupçon of skullduggery surrounding the death of Oppenheimer's onetime fiancée Jean Tatlock, whose alleged suicide may have been assisted by the overzealous agent assigned to report on her continuing contacts with Oppenheimer.Footnote ²⁵

While the temptation in the biographies is to adopt an omniscient now-it-can-be-told tone, the details of these two scandals in particular remain murky, and serve mainly to highlight Oppenheimer's role as liar, adulterer, or disloyal friend. Nor were his several trysts with Tatlock after his marriage to Kitty Puening his only infidelities. He had a notorious long-term affair with the psychologist Ruth Tolman, married to his friend Richard Tolman and believed by some in their circle to have contributed to Richard's early death from heart failure—“a broken heart,” as one Oppenheimer colleague and former friend observed. The point here is more precisely that Oppenheimer never seemed to feel that the rules for other people should apply to him.Footnote ²⁶

There are of course other ways to manifest a lack of personal integrity besides lying. Adding friends and former students to his growing litany of betrayals, Oppenheimer “named names” in addition to Chevalier, such as Thomas Addis, a physician who had collected Oppenheimer's various contributions to what were then known as communist “front” organizations; his former students Rossi Lomanitz and Joe Weinberg; and, most egregiously, his former student Bernard Peters, a survivor and refugee whom Oppenheimer had admitted to his graduate program despite Peters's lack of an undergraduate degree. In what was initially secret testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Oppenheimer confirmed some earlier comments he had made about Peters being “a dangerous man and quite Red.” As part of this astonishing testimony, Oppenheimer went on to note that Peters had once escaped from Dachau “by guile”—in context seeming to suggest that Peters was something of a sneaky character after all. Peters later observed graciously that it was “a rather sad experience to see a man whom I regarded very highly in such a state of moral despair.”Footnote ²⁷

Oppenheimer professed to be very affected by the novels of Marcel Proust—another “ambivalent” assimilated Jew with a doting mother, whose creativity like Oppenheimer's came to represent the proud national identity of an entire generation on the world stage. Oppenheimer once reportedly surprised his friend Chevalier by quoting a passage from A la Recherche du temps perdu by heart, to the effect “that indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.” The scope of Oppenheimer's own indifference was of course not limited to the personal and professional travails he helped to inflict on his family, friends, and colleagues. Indifference amounting to cruelty is paradoxically captured in a small moment of empathy: on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands, where the Oppenheimer family retreated to escape the public eye after the loyalty-security hearing, Robert reportedly became upset when shown a squirming turtle that a friend had caught to make a soup. Oppenheimer then “pleaded for the turtle's life,” explaining that seeing the helpless animal “brought back to him the horrible memories of what happened to all the little creatures after the [atomic bomb] test in New Mexico.”Footnote ²⁸

This vision of an architect of Hiroshima becoming agitated over a suffering turtle presents a scenario rife with such fundamental problems of scale and human sympathy that the mind boggles. This is the same former bureaucrat who had ensured a smooth transition when the original rationale for building the bomb—to beat a likely parallel program in Nazi Germany—dropped out completely after Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945. Oppenheimer had coolly shifted his mission over to targeting Japan, which was never believed to be building a weapon of mass destruction. He personally fine-tuned aspects of the bomb's deployment, adjusting aspects of the flight plan for delivery of “the gadget” to effect maximum civilian casualties upon detonation. As with the earlier Allied and Axis firebombing of cities from the air, far from being incidental “collateral damage,” this deliberate engineering of mass civilian suffering was a major purpose of the whole enterprise. It is in the context of knowing anything at all about how Oppenheimer had spent the previous twenty years that his excessive delicacy in sacrificing his soup is so very unsettling.Footnote ²⁹

MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON OPPENHEIMER AND THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

The process of writing a biography is a little bit like being married to one's subject. Perhaps this dynamic explains why the best biographers sometimes seem a little star-struck—there needs to be a certain level of attraction, and even passion, just to get one through the tough times. Historian Martin Sherwin has been through the scholarly equivalent of couples therapy with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Having made a twenty-plus-year commitment to his subject that was in danger of foundering, Sherwin brought in journalist and biographer Kai Bird to knit the estranged partners back together again. The spectacular result suggests the value of standing by your man: a richly textured and nuanced biography that offers a vivid picture of Oppenheimer as a “man in full.”

It may seem odd to argue that a 721-page biography would benefit from being supplemented, but a balanced and engaging analysis of the most controversial episodes in the Oppenheimer narrative is best achieved by reading Bird and Sherwin in conjunction with one or another of the other volumes under review. For Sherwin particularly, sticking with such a difficult and chimerical historical figure seems to have resulted in a corresponding, compensatory need to burnish his subject overmuch.

Indeed, one of the deeply annoying features of a sizeable chunk of the Oppenheimer literature is that its creators consistently frame any possibly unflattering trait as also suggesting a flattering and positive quality, and then that flattering and positive dimension mysteriously migrates to become the highlighted feature of the analysis. The fact that all forty of those graduate students sought to drop Oppenheimer's Caltech lecture course on a graded basis was because he was “impos[ing] his own exceedingly high standards on others.” The fact that a psychoanalyst of the adolescent Oppenheimer declared him “a hopeless case” was because that particular analyst—and the next three—were so much less able than the analysand. The fact that Oppenheimer lacked the sustained commitment and focus to achieve the breakthroughs in his chosen field realized by so many of his less-celebrated contemporaries was because he “instantly saw the flaws in any idea almost as soon as he had conceived it.”Footnote ³⁰

Responsible historians of course cannot simply leave the unfavorable information out, and the result is a sometimes awkward shoehorning of disturbingly disconfirming evidence into flat and unhelpful categories such as beloved-if-quirky-personality or high-achieving-if-mercurial-professional. In addition to the issues of framing and balance discussed above, Bird and Sherwin present a series of contested interpretations of episodes in the Oppenheimer story that consistently place Oppie in a rather more heroic light than the evidence would really support. When they write admiringly in their Introduction of Oppenheimer's involvement in “the struggle to achieve economic and racial justice,” they lament how this brave stance was “so easily used to silence his voice a decade later,” which may now in turn serve as a cautionary tale about “how delicately balanced are the democratic principles we profess, and how carefully they must be guarded.” Even allowing for the inflated rhetoric of introductions, the thesis underlying this series of assertions is extremely slippery. Leaving aside the minor point that there is not much evidence of Oppenheimer caring about race per se, it is not really Oppenheimer's 1930s activism that brought him down, and to frame Oppenheimer as “McCarthyism's most prominent victim” may be to elide too much.Footnote ³¹

“YOU CAN START OUT ACCUSING A FELLOW OF TREASON AND END UP CONVICTING HIM OF FIBBING”

We may now add Prometheus to the list of literary and historic figures to whom Oppenheimer is routinely analogized, along with Socrates, Faust, Hamlet, Galileo, and Dreyfus. Some Oppenheimer stalwarts occasionally produce an actual Christ analogy—although almost everyone puts the brakes on here, interestingly—generally preferring “saint” or “martyr” when invoking religious iconography. The event that definitively transformed Oppenheimer from sycophant to saint was his “loyalty-security” hearing of 1954, where a panel handpicked by Oppenheimer enemy and Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss determined that Oppenheimer was a “security risk” before stripping the scientist of his high-level government clearance.

The ad hominem, vendetta-like quality of this entire proceeding was underlined by the fact that Oppenheimer's term as chair of the AEC's General Advisory Committee had already expired in 1952, and Oppenheimer had asked Truman not to reappoint him (he was succeeded by Rabi). Gordon Dean—in 1952 head of the AEC—had kept Oppenheimer on as a “consultant” under year-to-year contracts. With Lewis Strauss having taken over as AEC chair in July 1953, Oppenheimer's last contract was accordingly due to expire on 30 June 1954. The hearing before a three-person “Personnel Security Board” took place from 12 April to 6 May, with the appeal before all five AEC commissioners released on 29 June 1954. Even apart from this eyebrow-raising timing—one commissioner was not even allowed a full twenty-four hours in which to draft a dissent—Rabi disparaged the need for a hearing, caustically noting that Oppenheimer “is a consultant, and if you don't want to consult the guy, you don't consult him, period.”Footnote ³²

While these proceedings were, without doubt, structured as a kind of “degradation ceremony,” labeling them a McCarthyite witch hunt does not quite capture the contingencies of the situation, either. It does seem as if at least part of the motivation for pressing forward with the hearing was to keep it out of the hands of McCarthy (and Hoover) by preemptively running an in-house process, for one thing. It is hard to separate out general anticommunist hysteria from specific anti-Oppenheimer animus. Even at the time, the hearing was widely held to be a travesty. The more egregious irregularities included the illegal wiretapping of Oppenheimer's communications with his lawyers, the introduction into evidence of the fruits of this poisonous tree in the form of memoranda attributed to a “reliable source,” and the fact that Oppenheimer's counsel were denied the very same security clearances that were rushed through for the AEC's lawyers in a mere four days. (Absence of such clearance meant that Oppenheimer's counsel were often not allowed to see the very documents that his questioners—and his judges—had in front of them.)

Outside the four walls of the hearing room, Strauss also lied to Eisenhower that Oppenheimer's defense team was planning to leak the confidential transcript, then promptly leaked it himself, after promising the forty witnesses that their testimony would never be made public. Perhaps noteworthy, in the context of the hearing's label as a “loyalty-security” procedure, is the uncontested fact that Oppenheimer himself never leaked confidential information, either as head of Los Alamos or as a target of the hearings.

Administrative hearings are of course notoriously capricious and thin on procedural protections. The formal standard Oppenheimer was supposed to be satisfying was the so-called “whole-man” standard from 1946, which “might excuse a man's questionable associations (if there was no evidence of actual transgression) with reference to the context of his entire life and work and of his value to the nation,” as summarized by science historian David Cassidy. Such a flexible standard—which Oppenheimer had already been held to satisfy in the past—had been employed to hire former Nazis for defense research, for instance, and was still in effect at the AEC.Footnote ³³

The personnel board actually used a much more stringent standard than the “whole-man” approach, however. The new standard, recently approved by the Eisenhower administration and applicable to other federal agencies, sought to establish whether the subject was a “security risk.” As one Oppenheimer defender lamented at the time, “The term ‘security risk’ is such a broad one that you can start out accusing a fellow of treason and end up convicting him of fibbing but still impose the same punishment.” Derogatory information regarding character could mark one as a security risk—the subject had to be like “Caesar's wife”—above suspicion.Footnote ³⁴

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a high threshold appropriate for a criminal charge, when the liberty of the accused is at stake; in an administrative hearing, the standard is a lower bar—“preponderance of the evidence,” translated into lay terms as “more likely than not”; that is, a likelihood that could be as low as 50.01 percent. But such a standard nevertheless places much more of a burden on the accusers than a process whereby the accused would have to show that his behavior was blameless beyond a reasonable suspicion—that would in effect push the threshold down to a 30, 20, or even 10 percent likelihood of wrongdoing. This was in effect Oppenheimer's predicament under the “Caesar's wife” standard ultimately deployed against him.Footnote ³⁵

Given these procedural shenanigans, many of which were evident at the time, some Oppenheimer supporters wondered why he did not just walk out. Washing his hands of such a patently illegitimate process would not necessarily have meant yielding to the AEC's accusations. Oppenheimer might plausibly have framed a walkout as preserving his political capital as an expert in order to fight another day, perhaps in the more favorable forum of the court of public opinion, or by seeking to rally the scientific community to him. Why did he stick around and, moreover, perform so very poorly?

Such a framing leads to the lingering, larger question of—was he or wasn't he? Of course, if it were clear that Oppenheimer had been a member of a traditional, dues-paying communist cell, one or more of the various martinets monitoring his every move would doubtlessly have smoked out such a fact long before. However, it seems at least possible—perhaps even “more likely than not”—that Oppenheimer participated in a looser, professional CP cell for Berkeley faculty, with self-identified members such as professor of French literature Haakon Chevalier and party member and “liaison with the faculty group at the University of California” Gordon Griffiths, some of whom were not “subject to discipline” in the traditional manner of party members. Bird and Sherwin, in particular, unconvincingly attempt to explain away mounting circumstantial evidence that Oppenheimer at least understood himself to be a party member, and not just a fellow traveler, on the same basis as other members of this “closed unit,” several of whom later identified Oppenheimer as a fellow participant.Footnote ³⁶

Robert Oppenheimer lying about his CP past to hang onto shreds of power would of course serve as a much less sympathetic protagonist than Oppenheimer as persecuted martyr. Such a scenario might also help to explain Oppenheimer's much-examined performance problems at his loyalty-security hearing. The anxiety and anticipation of being confronted with a surprise transcript would likely have been debilitating, for one thing. Historian Richard Polenberg urges us to consider an intriguing counterfactual alternative: would we feel differently about Oppenheimer—as a “singular figure in the history of science and in the history of American politics”—if the personnel board had in the end declined to declare him a security risk, based on the same evidence, and yet still released the transcript? Oppenheimer the tattler would arguably have lacked the moral authority—and access to the role of “singular” figure—of Oppenheimer the victim.Footnote ³⁷

“NOT AN ATTACHED KIND OF PERSON”

Where Bird and Sherwin really shine is the way they illuminate the personal side of Oppenheimer's story. It is tempting to treat several of the episodes in his eventful life as discrete chunks or to link them by over-reliance on particular, portentous themes. The device of “INSERT NAME HERE and the American Century,” focusing on the big issues, is an obvious temptation for any biographer after years of tracking down interview subjects, combing through handwritten letters, and reading unsigned policy memos that may or may not have been written by one's subject. Yet there is a thinness to the thematic treatments that only becomes clear upon reading Bird and Sherwin's more textured narrative. This observation may be less about Bird and Sherwin and more about the way a full-scale biography may be a better device to communicate both about its subject and about the times in which it is set, as “a prism of history,” in the words of legal historian and biographer Laura Kalman.Footnote ³⁸

An important part of the Bird and Sherwin thesis is that “a person's public behavior and his policy decisions (and in Oppenheimer's case perhaps even his science) are guided by the private experiences of a lifetime.” Bird and Sherwin deliver on this thesis in a substantive and satisfying way: women and children, places and spaces are vividly present in American Prometheus, and not just as background props contributing “color.” Sometimes a man who has “a great need to declare his preeminence,” in the words of Oppenheimer childhood friend Jeanette Mirsky, is able to be more relaxed—more “himself”—around women. These interactions, which are not necessarily sexual but are often off the public stage, can offer important clues to a complex character.Footnote ³⁹

While the more episodic treatments of the Oppenheimer story treat the women in his life as peripheral, one is nevertheless struck by the numbers of women scientists gliding through the Oppenheimer story: Nobelist Maria Göppert, doctoral candidate (and later physics instructor) Melba Phillips, and German physicist Charlotte Riefenstahl, but also Kitty Oppenheimer herself (who trained as a botanist), psychologist Ruth Tolman, and psychiatrist-in-training Jean Tatlock. Prestigious, high-status identities were not available to these talented women, and the thwarted nature of their professional lives manifested itself in various personal ways: in Kitty's rashes, Tatlock's suicide, and the widespread alcoholism of “the wives” at Los Alamos—many of whom were also scientists in their own right—a problem so pervasive that it prompted an official quest for activities that would seem meaningful for these women to do.Footnote ⁴⁰

Similarly with Oppenheimer's two children: Thorpe and Cassidy barely mention them, while Bird and Sherwin tell the story of how newborn Peter was parked with friends for two months so that Robert and Kitty could “escape” the pressures of parenthood, while four-month-old Toni was similarly deposited with a different friend for two and a half months. During one of Oppenheimer's twice-a-week visits to his daughter during this interlude—after being pointedly prompted to inquire about her at all—he reportedly asked this long-suffering friend whether she would like to adopt baby Toni “because I can't love her . . . I'm not an attached kind of person.” These are stories that shed light on the man, and incidentally also shed light on the era. “Not an attached kind of person” is a detached kind of person, not only from personal relationships, but from other kinds of moral compasses as well.Footnote ⁴¹

Bird and Sherwin are clearly the best resource for this “man-in-full” treatment, but analytically their work is troublingly uneven. In addition to the interpretive problems with the CP membership question discussed above—where one garners the sense that the two authors do not agree—their counternarrative of Oppenheimer as a New Dealer and Roosevelt supporter is based on documentation that is alarmingly thin. Even the notorious “poison apple” story gets the Rashomon treatment—did the twenty-one-year-old Oppenheimer really return hastily from a trip to Corsica to “see how things had turned out” because he had left an actual poisoned apple on the desk of his Cambridge supervisor, the future Nobelist P. M. S. Blackett? Cassidy does not even mention this gripping tale; Bernstein thinks the whole story might have been a kind of metaphor, perhaps for a bad paper; Thorpe speculates that it may have been a fantasy; while Bird and Sherwin offer a detailed anecdote about disciplinary hearings and potential attempted-murder charges without citing a single contemporaneous source.Footnote ⁴²

As noted, it is as a supplement for the thinner patches in Bird and Sherwin that the other volumes fill in to offer contrast, depth, and richness. Cassidy is best on the science, and might have exploited this significant comparative advantage yet more by drawing more detailed comparisons than the brief glimpses he already offers of the life and career of Werner Heisenberg (the subject of another Cassidy biography). Cassidy also concentrates on public policy, and offers a clear if overly terse narrative of the loyalty-security hearings. However, he does not really make some key episodes come alive—notably the important interlude at Los Alamos, which readers do not reach until 225 pages into a 352-page text. Reading Bird and Sherwin and Cassidy together highlights the way the absence of the richly limned women and children from the Bird and Sherwin volume leave a very big gap: Kitty Oppenheimer appears on only three pages in Cassidy's story in any detail, for instance. Reading these two books in tandem similarly highlights the rather clipped minimalism of the scientific exposition in Bird and Sherwin, where Cassidy is able to explain the problems with which Oppenheimer was wrestling in a way that Oppenheimer himself, despite several high-profile attempts, was never able to do.

A supplement to Cassidy on the public-policy side is Thorpe, who does not care about the science at all—or about Oppenheimer's personal life either, at least not very much—but gives us a very textured and nuanced vision of the transformation of the role of the public intellectual at mid-century. Thorpe's work is analytically brilliant despite the odd inelegant turn of phrase and a certain repetitiveness—it may indeed be too nuanced, in the sense that it makes the same point repeatedly in slightly different ways, using the word “habitus” three times in two successive paragraphs, for example. Thorpe combs through particular iconic episodes in the Oppenheimer canon—such as Oppenheimer's famous but probably apocryphal quote at the moment of first detonation that “I am become Death”—with clear and sparkling analysis and detailed, persuasive research.Footnote ⁴³

Thorpe beautifully develops a paradox—not captured in Bird and Sherwin or Cassidy—of the way Oppenheimer the public intellectual was consistently more interested in the humanities or questions of moral philosophy when he was farther away from centers of power. As Thorpe puts it,

One garners the clear sense from Thorpe's rendering that Oppenheimer would have happily cropped out this particular “public conscience” shard of his identity for the chance to be at the center of things again.Footnote ⁴⁴

In their Introduction, Bird and Sherwin highlight Oppenheimer's famous lament: “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretic terms?” But this was in 1959. Ethics per se were far from his concerns when Oppenheimer urged other scientists not to trouble themselves about the ethical implications of the targeting and use of nuclear weapons, personally suppressed physicist Leo Szilard's petition urging more deliberative approaches, and chaired committee discussions urging an attack on an urban, civilian population for its “psychological effect.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Priscilla McMillan's The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race strays from Oppenheimer too much—her treatment, in particular, suggests the sterility of an overly thematic approach. The first forty pages are a deluge of names without much to animate them, while Oppenheimer himself is offstage for large swaths of the text. A self-consciously breezy style reflects her extensive background in journalism, but it is not effectively deployed here, resulting in grating sentences such as this assessment of Kitty Oppenheimer's reaction to one of Robert's extramarital affairs: “Knew of it, didn't like it, and accepted it.”Footnote ⁴⁶

McMillan's focus is on the causes and consequences of “the removal from public life of the one individual who might have helped restrain our catastrophic rush to overarmament.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As Thorpe persuasively shows, however, such an assessment of Oppenheimer's attitudes and influence does not really capture the complexities of her subject's role. McMillan's saintly Oppenheimer and villainous Edward Teller are each equally overdrawn. As with Bird and Sherwin, Thorpe, Cassidy, Bernstein, and others, McMillan has amassed an extensive roster of interview subjects (to whom one's heart goes out, after all they must have endured—both at the hands of Oppenheimer himself and from the subsequent battalions of questioners). How someone who is clearly an excellent researcher, writer, and forensic journalist has come to miss the mark like this may have more to do with the architecture of the book, which does not link its episodes together well enough to develop a multidimensional picture of its hero or its villains.

The Carson–Hollinger essay collection has adopted an inspired approach for a figure such as Oppenheimer who did not himself achieve synthesis, namely to organize sets of provocative and contrasting essays around substantive controversies in the Oppenheimer canon. Highlighting fragmentation works for this volume because its many contributors are not seeking a unified view of their subject. In addition to the Bernstein, Hollinger, and Polenberg essays, cited above, the collection offers illuminating contributions on Oppenheimer's science by Karl Hufbauer, on the CP membership issue by Gregg Herken (author of Brotherhood of the Bomb), and on parallel developments in Soviet science by David Holloway and Alexei Kojevnikov—an under-studied and underappreciated transnational perspective.

Work by junior scholars Stephanie Young, David Kaiser, and W. Patrick McCray is complemented by contributions from seasoned analysts of science and society such as J. L. Heilbron and Daniel Kevles, as well as chapter-length excerpts from what was then newly published or forthcoming work from Bird and Sherwin, Cassidy, and Thorpe. Jon Else and Peter Galison explore a fascinating cultural dimension in their dialogue about their respective documentaries on Oppenheimer and the bomb (The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb and The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Debate).

This wide variety of approaches suggests why selecting pairings of the books is a better avenue than simply plumping for one “best” treatment. Bird and Sherwin plus Thorpe yields a richer treatment of the concept of “charisma” than Thorpe's sociological treatment alone; Bird and Sherwin plus Cassidy offers a supplement on the science; Bird and Sherwin plus McMillan provides a focus on public policy—or actually, Philip Stern's classic Oppenheimer Case might be better for the public policy—while Bird and Sherwin plus the Carson–Hollinger essays highlights continuing controversies over interpretation.Footnote ⁴⁸

CONCLUSION: “NOW ON THE PRECIPICE OF A NEW AND DANGEROUS NUCLEAR ERA”

The terms “humanist” and “humanity” weave in and out of these very different volumes: sometimes Oppenheimer is a humanist because he is learned in the humanities—what Thorpe calls “repertoires of humanistic cultivation”—as opposed to confining himself to technology and the sciences. Sometimes humanity is contrasted with barbarism or is used as a way of “humanizing” Oppenheimer by discussing his personal weaknesses and foibles. Oppenheimer prided himself on his classic humanist background and interests, in the traditional sense of being an educated and cultivated appreciator of literature, art, and language—but he was fundamentally lacking in humanity, in the basic sense of empathy and broad moral imagination. As noted above, one of the more disturbing vignettes in this whole vast literature is of a defeated and wasted Oppenheimer agonizing over that struggling turtle on St John. By 1961 Oppenheimer had indeed come a long way from the calculating bureaucrat who had once dismissed poisoning the food supplies of cities—cities full of civilians—“unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men,” in his own chilling words. But far from bespeaking a searing spiritual journey to a place of cross-species sympathy, Oppenheimer's shift in perspective was arguably due more to the fact that by then he was no longer in charge, no longer on top, a capsized shell of a man himself.Footnote ⁴⁹

And in the end, J. Robert Oppenheimer was not a site at all—or a nodal point or a process—he was a human being, embedded in social structures and hierarchies with other human beings. Capturing his humanity—as a terrible father and inadequate husband as well as a gifted synthesizer, manipulator, and what theoretical physicist Abraham Pais has called “an almost genius”—is the ultimate task of the biographer.Footnote ⁵⁰

The idea emerges almost despite these biographers that what distinguished an iconic figure such as Oppenheimer from a widely reviled figure such as Edward Teller was Oppenheimer's carefully cultivated quality of charisma, that the two, Oppenheimer and Teller, were really rather alike, in their overweening ambition, their evaluation of self-worth in terms of their proximity to power and fame, and their willingness to betray friends and colleagues in order to maintain and enhance their own insider status.

A comparison with Teller suggests another kind of road not taken: instead of the more typical question of asking what kept Oppenheimer from the path of integrity pursued by a Blackett or a Bohr or a Rabi or a Szilard, and constructing a Faustian narrative around a fall from grace or a tragic flaw, we could equally well shrug our shoulders and say that he was like a more telegenic Teller.Footnote ⁵¹

Such a matter-of-fact downgrading raises a concluding, and deceptively simple, “so-what” question: shouldn't we just cut the guy a break? Maybe we have studied him enough—not in the sense that we now have all the answers (patently impossible with Oppenheimer), but rather in the sense that there is only so much fine-grained sifting that his character can support. Complicated does not always mean noteworthy. We may gain additional purchase on this so-what question if we broaden our frame of analysis, focusing on the Oppenheimer-era public-policy issue that continues to affect us most into the present: the international control of nuclear materials, including weapon-making materials.

One of Oppenheimer's arguments in the late 1940s was, at root, that he could not do more to advance the more multilateralist Acheson–Lilienthal vision because it would have compromised his own influence with an “inner circle” of policy-makers who were already rather skeptical about him. James Hershberg's excellent essay in the Carson–Hollinger collection offers an important corrective to assumptions that Oppenheimer's internationalism remained constant, and merely lacked an outlet after the 1946 demise of the Acheson–Lilienthal approach (which had been drafted largely by Oppenheimer himself). Hershberg shows how Oppenheimer was moving away from his earlier moral-philosophical advocacy of an open scientific world as he became increasingly suspicious of Soviet diplomacy and intentions after the collapse of the notably more unilateralist Baruch Plan in 1947. Hershberg's analysis also fits with Thorpe's assessment, that over time Oppenheimer had increasingly “internalized the culture and mentality of the national-security state.”Footnote ⁵²

And now we stand “on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era,” in the words of a refreshingly candid policy proposal published by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn in the Wall Street Journal in January 2007. An additional four nuclear states—official and unofficial—have joined the ranks of the original five sanctioned under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of 1968. But up to twelve additional nuclear players are currently in the works, some with clearly realizable aspirations within the next decade. Being able to threaten regional enemies with the possible development of weapons of mass destruction seems to enable one to jump the queue of international prestige, development aid, and resources from international institutions and non-governmental organizations.

Nor is this unwelcome dynamic confined to nation states—as the Wall Street Journal essay points out, “most alarmingly, the likelihood that non-state terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weaponry is increasing,” noting in a significant understatement that such a development will “present difficult new security challenges.” The essay advocates turning “the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise” by means of US-led initiatives “consistent with America's moral heritage.”Footnote ⁵³

From a distance of two generations beyond the demise of the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, we can see how it has become ever more difficult to make any progress on the knotty problem of nuclear proliferation, in part because of the baleful influence of smart, power-hungry types such as Oppenheimer (and Kissinger). What resembled a certain circularity has now become a depressing, downward spiral: powerful elites such as Oppenheimer could not do the right thing because it would have cut them off from their powerful, elite roles, but what is the power for, ultimately? If the purpose of arrogating authority and influence to oneself is to create a memorable name for posterity, well, we remember Einstein (or Darwin) more. Alternatively, if the purpose is to help shape world-historical political events, then surely it is the quality of the politics that we should be debating.

Oppenheimer was an extraordinarily talented person who managed to achieve the worst of all possible worlds by these measures of success: even given all the recent interest in his life story, he will never be ranked with an Einstein or a Darwin, as a virtual synonym for scientific genius. Nor did he offer beneficial intellectual or political leadership, in the sustained, consistent, and risk-taking manner of his former supervisor at Cambridge, the British Nobelist P. M. S. Blackett; or the physicist and peace activist Leo Szilard; or the only physicist to leave Los Alamos due to moral objections, the Nobel Peace laureate Joseph Rotblat.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Oppenheimer story does indeed raise the big questions, but perhaps not in the way his staunchest supporters intend. What are the human qualities that propelled, say, a Nelson Mandela or a Yasser Arafat or a Henry Kissinger to prominence, and does it matter to the outcomes of particular world-historical events that a leader with the qualities of one and not another was demonstrably influential at certain key junctures? The premise of the big, fat, Great Man biography as a genre is clearly based on answering “yes” to this question. The very existence of such scholarship, the physical presence of the “doorstop” tome, embodies some notion of causation, and of the workings of history: we study the trajectories of these historical actors for clues to the continuing influence of these individuals, and not simply to make them “come alive.”

And it seems clear that the chattering classes will not be cutting Oppenheimer a break any time soon, in large part because his own vigorous self-promotion has successfully elevated him into the ranks of historical figures whose legacies we judge and reevaluate and debate without end. Perhaps the Promethean analogy does work here after all, as a new generation swoops in for a feast, with its own menu of issues.

Given Oppenheimer's astonishingly poor choices at junctures both professional and personal, perhaps the outcome to be explained is how he managed to accomplish as much as he did, as opposed to the more usual framing of wondering why he did not accomplish more. For this we must credit Oppenheimer's own peculiar skill set—as synthesizer, enabler, and manipulator—and the interplay of these qualities with a culture that continues to privilege “charisma” and virtuosity over judgment and integrity. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” wrote Oppenheimer's doctoral mentor Max Born in a memoir, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.”Footnote ⁵⁵