American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kai Bird, Martin J. SherwinEdition: Perfect Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05
ISBN: 0375726268
Number of pages: 721
Publisher: Vintage Books
Book Reviews of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Book Review: A Man Much Bigger Than His Warts
Summary: 5 Stars
To describe this book as a politically motivated rehabilitation of Oppenheimer makes one think that the reviewer just didn't read the book. Indeed, the power of this book is its utterly warts on presentation of Oppenheimer which permits as objective an assessment of the man as one could ever hope to read.
Examples? The authors describe Oppenheimer's emotional instability as a youth, well into his twenties, culminating in an affair in which Oppeheimer intentionally placed a fellow scholar's life at risk of poisoning, either as a result of murderous intent, or minimally criminal recklessness. Later the authors document unrelentingly Oppenheimer's preening, and when he finally made it big in Washington, his all too frequent willingness to accomodate the political ideas of the influential politicians around him. Lesser warts include his name dropping ("George thinks...." in reference to George C. Marshall) among friends who knew him before he "made it." The litany includes his own infidelity, his wife's border-line (?) alcoholism, the dysfunction in his own family, resulting in estrangement of his wife from his son, and later his daughter's suicide. How could inclusion of all of this have escaped even the most distracted reader?
When the book failed to appear in the five or so years expected, and dragged out another two decades, the New York Review of Books writes: "Not everyone was surprised; historians of the subject, a small gossiping group, suggested that Sherwin was the latest victim of the curse of Oppenheimer, whose genius was tainted by a mean-spirited streak. Aspiring biographers, it was said, came to loathe the company of the man and dropped their projects." Loathe? Not typically associated with uncritical praise.
So if there is so much that's offensive, what possibly could hold a reader's attention for 600+ pages? Brilliance. The authors, yes, but much, much more so their subject. You don't need to know any physics to read this (altho the "each action, equal and opposite reaction" idea is useful for the politics) . Oppenheimer was the classic Renaissance man. A scientist. A lingust. A poet. A horseman. A sailor. A politician. A leader. An outdoorsman. A lover of women and wine, if not song. A citizen. And, yes, a leader of men.
The fact that he accepted the description of himself in the thirties as a "fellow traveler" is an admission of no more than he reacted as would any informed and civilized man to Hitler's persecution of Jews, the fascist takeover in Spain, the vast unemployment of the depression, and other obvious human suffering. Was his wife married at one point to and herself a "commie." Yes, and her first husband died heroically fighting Franco in Spain. Was his brother a "commie" too. Admittedly, and without apology. But there is no evidence whatsoever -- and the prosecution has had half a century to find it -- that Robert Oppenheimer, his wife or his brother ever betrayed his country.
And not for want of an opportunity to investigate. To be sure, the FBI tapped his homes, his offices, chased him all over the globe, and -- most outrageously -- even bugged his lawyer's office and daily fed the results to Oppenheimer's prosecutors as his star chamber trial at the Atomic Energy Commission proceeded. He was bugged so much he commented, perhaps with ironic intent, but probably accurately, that the government spent more money bugging him than they paid him to build the bomb.
Oppenheimer is, in hindsight, blessed to have had such repulsive enemies -- Teller, the self-promoting wannabe father of the H bomb, sells out Oppenheimer behind closed doors and fawns before him in public. AEC Chairman, and Princeton Trustee Lewis Strauss, converts petty personal revenge to public policy in retaliation for Oppenheimer's public arrogance, condescension and gratuitous personal slights towards him. Gordon Gray, judge of the AEC security board presiding over Oppeheimer, acquiesces to a corrupt prosecutor's ongoing ex parte pre-trial contacts with him and the other judges, only one of whom dissented (despite his own personal distaste for Oppenheimer). Hoover's unrelenting, and totally illegal, FBI wiretaps overwhelm.
It is perhaps the reader's revulsion at his enemies that allows us to accept Oppenheimer's complexity, genius and warts, with equanimnity, and makes the reader, at the end, stand in something approaching awe, both of him and at the story just told. For that, the authors deserve our unequivocal thanks.
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