Americans who care about history and truth owe a debt of gratitude to Christopher Nolan. His remarkable movie, Oppenheimer, a visual knockout, draws faithfully on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's masterful, haunting, and impeccably researched book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
No doubt the movie prompted viewers to want to learn more about Oppenheimer and the `50s, a period that featured the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings that Arthur Miller once called, along with The Depression, one of the two most catastrophic, destructive events of the 20th century.
Both are long – the film, a fast-moving three hours, and the book 721 pages, including notes and sources. American Prometheus immediately engages, integrating characters into a chronological tale about Oppenheimer's personal and professional life --family, mentors, admirers, and enemies, one of whom was Edward Teller who promoted the Hydrogen bomb. Scenes are dramatically revisited, settings poetically evoked (New Mexico, of course, but later St. John's where Kitty and Robert Oppenheimer spent their last years). Oppie, as he was affectionately called, emerges as a dazzling, charming genius who was highly respected even by those who held other views about the future of nuclear power.
Read the book slowly. It's too complex a portrait of a complicated human being, its analyses of physics clear but detailed, its appreciation of contradiction and ambiguity too subtle to be taken in quickly. Sherwin, who died in 2021, knew it. After working for years on the book alone, in 1999 he asked his friend Kai Bird to join him as co-author. It's saying a lot about the fairness and fullness of the 25-year inquiry into the life and eventually Star Chamber "case" of J. Robert Oppenheimer to note that at the end, they acknowledge that their subject remains an "enigma," a polymath. He loved science and his country, but he had nightmares about the future of nuclear energy. The charismatic administrator at Los Alamos would soon become an ardent proponent of international control, but the Cold War witch hunt times were not with him. Nor was a hostile President Truman.
An arrogant but forthcoming man, Oppenheimer acknowledged that in his earlier days, he had been a "fellow traveler," especially during the time he was the lover of Jean Tatlock, and then the husband of Kitty Peuning, both of whom, like his brother Frank, had been card-carrying members of the Communist Party.
While the striking countdown explosion of the atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, would seem to be the climax of Nolan's movie, the book sustains a narrative drive after the wild success of Trinity, as it moves to the later sections where Oppie's loyalty is on trial. The villain of the book, and the movie, was Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, himself a complex character, who obsessively pursued Oppenheimer with the goal of totally destroying him.
Einstein called the AEC the Atomic Extermination Conspiracy. The book climaxes not with a bang, but a whimper, ironically calling to mind T.S. Eliot, one of Oppenheimer's favorite poets. But the theme is Shakespearean – a five-section rise and fall of a brilliant scientist and administrator whose legacy would almost immediately spawn books, plays, an opera, and documentaries.
More stoic than passive, with magnetic ice blue eyes, Oppie could also be memorably warm to his students, overly generous to friends. Women adored him. The book is most memorable, though, for what the authors uncovered from thousands of reports, public and classified, personal recollections, and FBI transcripts based on illegal phone taps, which Oppie once caustically observed "cost the government more than his salary at Los Alamos."
American Prometheus is a powerful, moving accounting of a "watershed time" in the relations of scientists and government and a cautionary look, as the authors say, "at the democratic principles we profess, and how carefully they must be guarded."
