382: Oppenheimer

The Movie

The movie fades up to the sounds of rain pattering as Cillian Murphy’s version of a young J. Robert Oppenheimer watches. Then, with a cut to a massive explosion, we get some text on the screen that reads:

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”

Then, just as quickly as it cuts to the quote, it cuts back to an older J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The True Story

As you can probably guess, that comes from Greek mythology. It’s not really a direct quote of anything, though, but rather it’s more of a paraphrased synopsis of the Prometheus myth.

The whole story is thousands of lines of text, so I won’t include the whole thing here either, but I’ll add a link to it in the show notes if you want to read it all. The movie’s summary is pretty good, though, considering they’re breaking it all down into just a couple lines.

Prometheus was a Titan who was bound by Zeus’s servants Hephaestus, Power, and Force as punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to the humans. That’s how humans were able to progress to a more civilized society with technology thanks to harnessing fire. When he was bound, Prometheus’s torture was basically being exposed to the scorching sun by the day, freezing at night, and then an eagle would eat his liver. The next day, the liver would regenerate and the cycle repeated itself.

The Movie

Back in the movie, we see Oppenheimer going to Europe to study under Patrick Blackett in Cambridge. He’s played by James D’Arcy in the movie. While Oppenheimer is there, the movie focuses on a rather curious moment when Oppenheimer injects Blackett’s apple with potassium cyanide. Then, the next day, he seems to have a change of heart and when he rushes back to the classroom while Neils Bohr is talking to Blackett, and Oppenheimer knocks the apple down just in time, claiming there was a wormhole in the apple.

The True Story

While the movie doesn’t really focus on Oppenheimer’s time as a student in the United States as it does in Europe, it is correct to mention him going to Europe to study under Patrick Blackett at Cambridge.

To back up for a moment, though, what we don’t see much of in the movie is Oppenheimer’s time at Harvard. He went there in 1922 when he was 18 years old and majored in chemistry. That’s how he got interested in physics, when one of his professors named Percy Bridgman taught a course on thermodynamics that interested Oppenheimer. And so, after graduating summa cum laude in 1925 after only three years, Oppenheimer went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study physics.

More specifically, that was at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physics. Oppenheimer was there for about a year from 1925 to 1926.

And that scene with the poisoned apple? That really happened!

The movie implies that Oppenheimer was rather clumsy in the lab, and that’s a bit of truth that frustrated Oppenheimer. On top of that, Professor Blackett was an incredibly demanding teacher. This grew into a resentment for Blackett and by the time the autumn of 1925 rolled around, the then-22-year-old Oppenheimer was struggling badly and feeling incompetent with his lab work.

So, Oppenheimer used chemicals from the lab and injected them into an apple on Blackett’s desk. There’s some debate around exactly what he used and how much—after all, it’s not like this is the kind of thing that gets documented—but we know it happened because he confessed what he’d done to one of his friends. It was most likely cyanide, and probably wasn’t enough to kill him, just to make him sick.

But, that’s irrelevant, because just like we see in the movie, Blackett never ate the apple. Although the movie shows Oppenheimer having a change of mind and rushing back to toss the apple before Blackett can eat it, and that part of the movie seems to be a bit of dramatic license.

The sources I saw merely mentioned that Professor Blackett simply tossed the apple without ever knowing it had been poisoned. There’s nothing I could find that suggested Oppenheimer had a change of mind and rushed back, or that he was even there when the apple was discarded.

The Movie

Going back to the movie, during the apple scene we also see Oppenheimer talking to the visiting lecturer Neils Bohr. In that conversation and due to Oppenheimer’s lack of skills in the lab, Bohr recommends Oppenheimer go to Germany to study theoretical physics under Max Born because there’s no lab work required for that.

The True Story

Since we already learned the poisoned apple story didn’t happen exactly like that in the movie, it’s probably not a surprise to learn this other side of it didn’t happen the same way either.

What is accurate, though, is that the Oppenheimer did meet the Danish physicist Neils Bohr. While the movie doesn’t really mention much about who he was other than to suggest Oppenheimer was looking forward to hearing him speak. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, so when he visited Cambridge just a few years later, I can only imagine how excited Oppenheimer must’ve been to meet one of the most respected minds in his field.

Unlike what we see in the movie, though, it wasn’t Neils Bohr who recommended Oppenheimer go to Germany to study under Max Born.

As you might expect, Max Born was a German physicist and he was also highly respected in the 1920s, and after World War II went on to become one of the people who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

So, probably the biggest change is the movie simplified the events.

In the true story, Oppenheimer actually met both Neils Bohr and Max Born while he was at Cambridge. Not necessarily at the same time, though, so it makes sense why the movie simplified it all. But amidst Oppenheimer’s depression from his poor lab work, and I’m sure the whole apple debacle didn’t help, but Oppenheimer decided to leave Cambridge to go to the University of GURT-in-en (Göttingen) in Germany so he could study theoretical physics under Max Born.

GURT-ing-en

Unlike his time in Cambridge, Oppenheimer flourished in his theoretical studies. Just six months after moving to Germany, Oppenheimer graduated with his PhD and co-authored the Born-Oppenheimer approximation with Max Born. He was making a name for himself.

The Movie

After studying in Germany, the movie talks about Oppenheimer returning to the United States where he sets up the theoretical physics department at the University of California, Berkley. Then after all of this setup of Oppenheimer’s education and early career are taking place while we see black and white sequences with Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Lewis Strauss hiring Oppenheimer to work at what the movie only calls “the Institute.”

The True Story

This is where we really start to see the movie bouncing around in the timeline, because Oppenheimer wasn’t appointed as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study until 1947. That’s clearly after World War II and the Manhattan Project. Since we’re following the movie’s timeline of events, we’ll be bouncing around a bit as well, but here is a quick overview of Oppenheimer’s timeline in the true story.

After graduating with his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in Germany in March of 1927, Oppenheimer stayed in Europe for post-doc studies where he spent time in Leiden and Zurich studying under the great minds of the day.

In the fall of 1929, he returned to the U.S. and accepted a position as an associate professor at UC Berkley. He stayed there, but in the spring of 1930, he also started teaching at Caltech. For the next twelve years he went back and forth, splitting time teaching as a full professor at UC Berkley while also being a full professor at Caltech, although he had a special agreement with UC Berkley to release him for six weeks out of the year to teach at Caltech for a term.

This is the time that he built UC Berkley’s theoretical physics program into something of renown that we hear Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Lewis Strauss mention in the movie. But that was in 1947 when Oppenheimer joined the Institute, as we talked about before.

So, from 1930 until 1942, he was splitting time at UC Berkley and Caltech. In 1942, he was given leave to work on the Manhattan Project, and then he returned to Caltech in 1946. He resigned both Caltech and UC Berkley in 1947 to take the job of director at the Institute for Advanced Study.

The Movie

Speaking of the Institute for Advanced Study, in the movie that’s where we see another famous scientist: Albert Einstein. If we’re to believe the movie’s version of history, Oppenheimer seems to think Einstein is a has-been. For example, there’s a line of dialogue early in the movie when Strauss tells Oppenheimer that Einstein is the “greatest scientific mind of our time.” Oppenheimer replies by saying, “Of his time.”

The True Story

While I couldn’t find anything in my research to indicate this exact line of dialogue about Einstein being the greatest scientific mind of “his” time, but the movie is correctly capturing the essence of the relationship between Einstein and Oppenheimer. Before he worked at the Institute, Oppenheimer visited Princeton in 1935. After that, he wrote a letter to his brother where he said, “Princeton is a madhouse: its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate & helpless desolation. Einstein is completely cuckoo.”

About ten years later, Einstein said of the theory Oppenheimer was primarily focusing on, “The quantum theory is without a doubt a useful theory, but it does not reach to the bottom of things. I never believed that it constitutes the true conception of nature.”

Despite these differences, they still had a mutual respect and were cordial with each other. After Einstein passed away in 1955, Oppenheimer wrote publicly that, “…physicists lost their greatest colleague…”

The Movie

Heading back to the movie’s timeline, there’s a line of dialogue from Lewis Strauss as he’s showing Oppenheimer around the Institute when he says the position comes with a house for his family: His wife and two children.

And that introduces us to the next major plot point, because the movie doesn’t focus on Robert Oppenheimer’s personal life a lot, but we do see two relationships that he has…and according to the movie they overlap. First, he has a girlfriend named Jean Tatlock, but then he gets a married woman named Kitty Harrison pregnant. Since Kitty is pregnant, Robert leaves Jean while Kitty leaves her husband to marry Robert. But then, later in the movie, we see Robert having an affair with Jean again.

The True Story

This back-and-forth sort of relationship that we see in the movie does a pretty good job capturing what J. Robert Oppenheimer’s personal life was really like. The key thing the movie does, though, is to mess with the timeline because once again it’s jumping around.

Remember, Oppenheimer’s job at the Institute was in 1947. So, his wife at that time was the woman we see in the movie: Kitty Harrison. She’s played by Emily Blunt.

Kitty’s surname in the movie is actually from one of her husbands before Oppenheimer. Her maiden name was Vissering. She married Frank Ramseyer in 1932, then had that annulled in 1933. The next year, she married Joe Dallet. That lasted until he died in 1937, and then in 1938 she married Richard Harrison. They were divorced in 1940 when she married J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The two children Robert and Kitty had together, Peter and Toni, were the only kids either of them had.

The Movie

In the movie, we see Robert having an girlfriend in Jean Tatlock. But he sleeps with Kitty Harrison, who was a married woman as we just learned, and gets her pregnant. So, Kitty divorces her husband, Robert breaks things off with Jean, and then Robert and Kitty get married.

The True Story

Once again, the movie gets the essence of the story correct, but the timeline was sped up and changed from history.

So, here’s a quick rundown to unravel the historical timeline.

Robert Oppenheimer met Jean Tatlock in the Spring of 1936 when he was teaching at UC Berkley. She was a student there, and it didn’t take long for a romance to blossom. And if you’re wondering, since he was a teacher and she was a student, he was 32 and she was 22. Their relationship developed quickly and Jean had a big influence on shaping Robert’s left-leaning political views. Robert proposed to Jean twice, both of which she rejected, and then in the Spring of 1939, she broke it off with him.

A few months later, in August of 1939, Robert met Kitty Harrison at a party hosted by another physicist. At that time, she was 29 and he was 35. Almost immediately, an affair started. They didn’t hide it, either, as there were reports of Robert and Kitty driving around together in the open.

In the summer of 1940, there was a notable event when Robert Oppenheimer invited Richard and Kitty Harrison to his ranch in New Mexico. Richard Harrison declined the invitation saying he was too busy with work, but Kitty accepted. So, another physicist named Robert Serber along with his wife Charlotte, picked up Kitty in Pasadena and drove her to Oppenheimer’s ranch in New Mexico where they found Robert’s brother, Frank, and Frank’s wife Jackie there.

So, again, the affair wasn’t really a secret. Oh, and at that time, Kitty was pregnant with Robert’s child…who would be Peter, their firstborn.

Well, you can probably see where this is going.

On November 1^st, 1940, Kitty divorced her husband. The very next day, on November 2^nd, 1940, she married Robert Oppenheimer.

But…things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows, because only a couple months after marrying Kitty, who should show back up in Robert’s life? Jean. She reconnected with him and the historical record shows that Robert’s first New Years celebration as a married man, he spent it not with his wife Kitty, but Jean Tatlock.

For the next few years, Robert and Jean maintained contact a couple times a year. While we don’t know the specifics of what happened each time, it’s probably safe to say they were romantic connections.

Despite this, from what we can tell, Kitty knew about Robert’s affair with Jean, and she seemed to tolerate it. Although, to be fair, some have debated just how much she knew. Maybe she only knew them to be friends at first. We don’t really know for sure where that line was crossed, but we know from the FBI tapping their lines in 1943 that Oppenheimer himself said he told Kitty about the affair with Jean, so we can assume she at least knew by then.

The Movie

Speaking of Jean, I’ll throw out a quick content warning here, because something else we see in the movie is a suicide. It happens when Oppenheimer tells Jean that he can’t do the affair anymore, she gets depressed and takes her own life. Robert is shaken by this, but Kitty tells him that he doesn’t get to commit the sin and then make other people feel sorry for him.

The True Story

Unfortunately, that’s true. That was in January of 1944 when Jean was discovered in her bathtub in San Francisco. There was an unsigned note that suggested suicide, and officially it was ruled to be the result of ingesting sedatives and alcohol.

The movie makes it seem like she did it because Robert broke off their affair, but there’s been a lot of controversies surrounding her death.

For example, the note was unsigned. An autopsy suggested she’d eaten a full meal before she died, which the doctor at the time found curious since it’d slow down the effect of the drugs she’d ingested. Her body was discovered by her father, John Tatlock, who moved it from the bathtub to the sofa and then burned a bunch of her letters in the fireplace before calling the funeral parlor—it was the parlor that contacted the police some four hours after she’d died.

Curious things, perhaps, and to be fair as with many debated events in history, not all of those are documented as well as others. But, if there was a conspiracy around her death, that begs the question: Why?

Well, to go down that road, we’d have to remember the timeline. January of 1944. At this point, Robert Oppenheimer was working at the top-secret Manhattan Project. Jean Tatlock was a known member of the Communist Party. If you recall, a moment ago I mentioned the FBI tapped Oppenheimer’s line in 1943 and those revealed that he talked to Kitty about the affair with Jean. The whole reason the FBI was tapping his lines to begin with was because of his association with the Communist Party. They started that in March of 1941, even before he was recruited into the Manhattan Project. Of course, it didn’t stop once he was heading up the top-secret project, so that’s why some think perhaps there was a government coverup to kill Jean Tatlock to keep atomic secrets from getting into the hands of the Soviets.

Then again, Oppenheimer himself believed Jean committed suicide. She was clinically depressed, and she worked as a psychiatrist, so she had access to sedatives pretty easily.

What do you think? If you have any other details or research you’ve done, let me know!

The Movie

For now, if we head back into the movie for the next major plot point, it’s Oppenheimer being recruited into the Manhattan Project by Matt Damon’s version of General Leslie Groves.

But the way we see this happening in the movie, Groves tells Oppenheimer that his name didn’t even come up in the search for a project director even though it was Oppenheimer who brought quantum physics to America. So, the impression I got from the movie was basically if it wasn’t for Groves then Oppenheimer wouldn’t be involved in the Manhattan Project at all.

The True Story

In the true story, that’s not really how it happened. To know what really happened, let’s go back to around the time of Oppenheimer marrying Kitty in late 1940, and then Peter being born in May of 1941. While that was going on in his personal life, in his professional life, Oppenheimer was collaborating on a radiation lab with Ernest Lawrence, who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics. That lab was where Lawrence had invented the cyclotron, a particle accelerator he’d patented back in 1932.

After the United States entered World War II, Lawrence recruited Oppenheimer to work on fission and fast neutron experiments at the UC Berkley lab. As you recall, he’d built the theoretical physics program there, so from July to September of 1942, Oppenheimer assembled a group of theoretical physicists to come up with the principles of a bomb design. Seeing as Oppenheimer was the one who built the theoretical physics program at UC Berkley anyway, over those few short months he became a leader of that group.

So, all of that is to say:

That is why U.S. Army General Leslie R. Groves recruited Oppenheimer on October 15^th, 1942 to head up something called Project Y. About a month later, the two men visited Los Alamos, New Mexico for what they called Site Y.

The Movie

And that leads us into something else about the movie, because for a movie called Oppenheimer, it makes sense to focus on him as the main character. We do see a few others, like Isidor Rabi and at one point Robert brings his brother Frank in on the project, but the movie also mentions having to build a town with churches and schools and such, so it’s obviously not showing us the full scale.

The True Story

Now would be a good time to clarify the term “Manhattan Project” and why I’m referring to something in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This project was a lot bigger scale than what we see in the movie.

So, General Groves was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and in August of 1942, they created something they called the Manhattan Engineer District, or MED. On the surface, it was routine construction in New York City. The true purpose was to cover up the work required for the atomic bomb project.

Over time, that name morphed from the Manhattan Engineer District to the Manhattan Project even though the project itself had sites around the country. As we just learned, Los Alamos, New Mexico was considered “Site Y,” while Oak Ridge, Tennessee was “Site X” and Hanover, Washington was “Site W.”

The Los Alamos location was where the primary work for the bomb design. That’s where Oppenheimer was at, along with about 6,000 workers. The other sites, Oak Ridge and Hanover, were more for providing the materials needed and they were much larger in scale than Los Alamos. There were about 50,000 people working in Hanover that focused primarily on producing plutonium, while Oak Ridge had another 75,000 people focusing on enriching uranium.

So, all in all, the Manhattan Project was a lot larger than what we see in the movie. But again, it’s called “Oppenheimer” and not “Manhattan Project.”

Actually, if you want to learn more about this, I’ve got another companion episode to this one with historian Alice Lovejoy that focuses more on the movie’s portrayal of the Manhattan Project. You can find that over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/oppenheimer.

The Movie

Back to the movie now, and something that’s very easy to do when we’re watching a historical movie is to look at it from today’s perspective with the knowledge we have today. With that in mind, I thought Oppenheimer did a good job doing was helping us get a sense for what it was like before the nuclear age, because we see Oppenheimer having a major concern that an atomic bomb might start a chain reaction that would just keep going and going until the entire atmosphere has been destroyed and, by extension, everyone and everything on the planet would die.

The True Story

While the movie dramatizes the specifics of it, it’s very true that Oppenheimer and other scientists working on the Manhattan Project considered the possibility that detonating a nuclear device might start an unstoppable chain reaction that’d basically ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and end the world.

Although, as scary as that sounds, it’s often described as more of a “nonzero” risk. So, technically it’s not zero percent chance, but a miniscule chance that from a practical perspective is basically zero.

Except, we’re talking about the end of the world here, so you can understand why even a “nonzero” risk is still worth making sure it doesn’t happen.

The fear was mostly from the physicist Edward Teller, who was worried that a fission bomb would ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere, or perhaps the hydrogen in the ocean, and just keep using that as fuel to burn. That was as early as 1942.

So, they did the math.

It wasn’t until 1946 that two other physicists at Los Alamos named Hans Bethe and Emil Konopinski formally published a paper that proved the reaction couldn’t continue on forever due to dropping air density and temperature thresholds. That was after the Trinity Test in 1945, but they’d obviously been working on it before then and from what we can tell, they had the math figured out by the time of the test, just hadn’t published the formal paper before it.

The Movie

Speaking of the Trinity Test, let’s head back to the movie because we’re at the point of the test itself. According to the movie, there’s an immense pressure to just use the atomic bomb to end World War II. The military has a list of 11 Japanese cities, and they want to drop two bombs on two of those cities. With a tight deadline, they need to detonate an atomic bomb to make sure it works and gather data like what’s a safe operating distance.

That’s how we get the test. In the movie, Groves asks Oppenheimer what they should call the test, and Oppenheimer says, “Batter my heart, three-person’d god.” Groves replies, “What?” to which Oppenheimer replies, “Trinity.”

It’s the first time an atomic bomb has been detonated and according to the movie, the test appears to be a massive success. As he’s watching this is when we see Oppenheimer use the now-famous quote, “I am become death. The destroyer of worlds.”

The True Story

In the true story, there wasn’t really a list of 11 Japanese cities like we see in the movie. There was actually about 16 cities that were considered by what the U.S. called the “Target Committee,” which was made up of 12 people at its height. Oppenheimer was the chair of the committee, along with members of the military and other scientists in the Manhattan Project.

By the spring of 1945, the 16 Japanese cities were narrowed down to five cities: Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura, and Niigata. They were chosen for size, military value, surrounding terrain to help amplify the bomb’s effects, as well as minimal previous bombing so they could see what effect the atomic bomb would have compared to other bombings.

Then came Monday, July 16^th, 1945. The day of the Trinity Test.

The name itself is something the movie alludes to when we see Oppenheimer say, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” That’s a line from the 17^th-century poem from John Donne called Holy Sonnet XIV, which refers to the Christian Trinity. Much later when Groves asked him about the name, Oppenheimer said he wasn’t entirely sure why he picked it other than to think that “Trinity” might fit in with common Western-style names like “Three Rivers,” “Three Peaks,” and so on.

So, he must’ve thought the name “Trinity” wouldn’t attract much attention. Until it exploded, of course.

And the way see the Trinity Test itself happening in the movie is a pretty good re-enactment of what really happened that weekend. There were about 425 people at the Trinity Test site, which was roughly 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. That broke down into about 250 scientists and engineers running the test, another 150 or so military as security, and between 20 to 30 VIPs. That included General Leslie Groves, who joined Oppenheimer at the primary command bunker that they called S-10,000 because it was 10,000 yards south of ground zero. That’s about 5.7 miles.

There were also scientists at N-10,000, and W-10,000, but there were mountains to the east so there wasn’t an E-10,000 post.

As for the goggles we see in the movie, those were real as well. The standard gear was dark lenses that filtered UV, and people were ordered to lie face-down, backs turned and put your arms over your eyes. Of course, not everyone did that. Most famously, Richard Feynman chose not to wear goggles and instead watched through the windshield of a truck.

At exactly 5:29 a.m. Mountain Time, the “Gadget” as they called it, detonated on a 100-foot tower. To say the blast exceeded all expectations was an understatement.

Radiation was higher than expected and people at the posts some 5.7 miles away were knocked over by the blast’s shockwave, although there weren’t any major injuries.

That brings us to the line, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

That’s a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture that Oppenheimer paraphrased into that now-famous quote. Chapter 11, Verse 32 says, “I am Time, the destroyer of worlds, grown great, come to consume the worlds.”

Oppenheimer never uttered those words aloud, but in a 1965 documentary for NBC, Oppenheimer recalled that seeing how successful the Trinity Test was, he recounted that he remembered the Bhagavad Gita verse.

The Movie

Heading back to the movie’s version of events, the very next scene after the successful Trinity Test is some military guys saying, “With respect, Dr. Oppenheimer, we’ll take it from here.” And with that, they pack up a bomb and drive away. It happens so quickly in the movie, it’s almost as if that seems to be that they had a successful test, so that’s immediately the end of the Manhattan Project overall.

The True Story

That’s not really what happened. At least not nearly as fast as the movie makes it seem. So, once again, let’s unravel the true story’s timeline.

The Trinity Test was July 16^th, 1945.

About three weeks later, on August 6^th, the uranium gun-type bomb called “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, resulting in between 70,000 and 80,000 deaths instantly. The movie shows Oppenheimer finding out about the bombs through the radio, but he still worked at Los Alamos, where he found out that evening along with everyone else. Cheers erupted among the teams at Los Alamos on hearing the news, and Oppenheimer joined in the champagne toasts. Although, despite the celebrations, he also had moral qualms with the news.

Three days later, more news. The plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped Nagasaki, with between 35,000 to 40,000 deaths instantly. Back in Los Alamos, there weren’t the same kind of celebrations. Oppenheimer was reported to say, “No, this is too much.”

On August 14^th, 1945, Japan announced their intent to surrender. That’s U.S. time, in Japan it was August 15^th. This effectively ended World War II, although the official surrender document wasn’t signed until September 2^nd.

Then, on October 16^th, exactly three months after the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer resigned from his position in Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project continued on without him, though, until it was disbanded on August 15^th, 1947. As for Oppenheimer, he returned to Caltech where he resumed teaching, but quickly realized his heart wasn’t in it anymore.

The Movie

That leads us right up to Oppenheimer’s meeting with President Truman that we see in the movie. You know, the one where Oppenheimer says, “I feel that I have blood on my hands.” Truman replies with, “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit about who built the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did.”

Then, as Oppenheimer is shown out of the Oval Office, we can hear Truman in the background saying, “Don’t let that crybaby back in here.”

The True Story

That was a real meeting that took place on October 25^th, 1945, not long after Oppenheimer resigned from Los Alamos. And the movie is correct to show that Oppenheimer told President Truman that he feels like he has blood on his hands. Truman’s reply was a little different than the movie, albeit with the same effect. Ray Month’s book called Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center quotes Truman as saying, “Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”

Then, he called Oppenheimer a crybaby and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

Except, unlike what we see in the movie, all of that supposedly happened after Oppenheimer had already left so it’s not like it was something he heard as he was leaving like the movie shows.

The Movie

After leaving the Manhattan Project, the movie circles back to something it shows throughout with Lewis Strauss answering to Congress about hiring Oppenheimer for the Institute.

While I was watching that play out in the movie, it gave me the impression that despite Oppenheimer’s contributions to the war effort, his reputation was almost immediately tarnished after the war because of what the movie calls “left-wing associations” and being tied to communism. The movie also seems to imply that Strauss was orchestrating it all, which is quite a turn for the guy who hired Oppenheimer at the Institute.

The True Story

For the most part, the way the movie shows this happening is pretty accurate. It’s dramatized, naturally, but the core elements are there.

What the movie skips are a few years between that meeting with President Truman at the end of 1945 and Oppenheimer’s 1946, when he consulted in Washington on atomic policy and was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. That leads us up to 1947, which actually takes us back to the beginning of the movie when we learned that Lewis Strauss recruited Oppenheimer to be the director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

What started out as a good relationship turned sour mainly due to Oppenheimer’s Communist ties, such as his wife Kitty and his brother, Frank, who was a confirmed member of the Communist Party USA from 1937 until around 1940.

After World War II, Oppenheimer was famous, but as the Cold War sparked what we now know as the Red Scare, people started to grow suspicious of him. Rumors spread, and anyone with top secret clearance like Oppenheimer had for the Manhattan Project was called into question.

As for Lewis Strauss, that relationship started to sour a couple years after he recruited Oppenheimer. In fact, now that the Manhattan Project is a National Park, here’s a quote from the National Park Services’ website to explain the exact moment Strauss stopped liking Oppenheimer:

Robert Oppenheimer, testifying before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy including Lewis Strauss in 1949 on the military usefulness of Iron 59 said in part, “You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do.” These and other comments by Oppenheimer, who was known for making biting remarks, caused people to laugh. Strauss looked foolish and was furious. “There was a look of hatred there [on Strauss’ face] you don’t see very often…” said one observer.

It wasn’t just that one comment, though, as you’ll notice that article talks about “other comments.” The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s website has another article that discusses another comment from Oppenheimer in that same hearing:

Strauss believed that radioactive isotopes had military value and argued against exporting them. However, with little patience for those he considered intellectually inferior, Oppenheimer publicly humiliated Strauss by saying, “My own rating of the importance of isotopes . . . is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins.”

In response, Strauss didn’t hide his look of hatred. Oppenheimer had publicly revealed that Strauss knew little about physics, particularly nuclear science.

After that hearing, Lewis Strauss held a grudge against Oppenheimer. So, as Oppenheimer’s public image started to deteriorate into the Cold War era of the early 1950s, Strauss certainly didn’t want to do Oppenheimer any favors. Quite the opposite, actually, because Strauss asked the FBI to track Oppenheimer in 1953. They did, and delivered a report to Strauss on November 20^th, 1953, which Strauss sent directly to President Eisenhower. Upon reviewing the report, Eisenhower decided to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. That happened on December 21^st, 1953, and Oppenheimer was given the choice to resign or appeal. He appealed the decision, which was heard by a three-man panel. They voted two-to-one not to reinstate the security clearance.

And with that, Oppenheimer’s government career was effectively over. But even though the movie doesn’t talk much about the rest of Oppenheimer’s life, let’s fill out the rest of the true story.

Despite his government career effectively coming to an end when his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer was still the director at the Institute for Advanced Study, but in 1954 he started taking vacations with his wife and daughter to the small island of Saint John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They enjoyed sailing together, and they must’ve loved it there because in 1957, Oppenheimer bought some land and built a vacation home there.

He continued working for the Institute for Advanced Study and in March of 1963 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. That’s kind of a lifetime achievement award for scientists with the medal physically given by the President of the United States. Oppenheimer winning that award was a big deal considering how he’d been shunned by the scientific community.

Unfortunately, though, JFK was assassinated before he was able to give the award to Oppenheimer, so President Lyndon B. Johnson formally gave him the award in December of 1963. Jackie Kennedy attended the ceremony and told Oppenheimer how much her husband wanted him to have the medal.

Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965. He tried radiation treatment, but it was unsuccessful, so he resigned from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1966 due to his health. Then, on February 18^th, 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer passed away in his sleep at home in Princeton at the age of 67.

I thought I’d end our story today with more recent news from just before the movie’s release in 2023. Because in 2022, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm issued this press release:

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer occupies a central role in our history for leading the nation’s atomic efforts during World War II and planting the seeds for the Department of Energy’s national laboratories—the crown jewels of the American research and innovation ecosystem.

In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed. The Atomic Energy Commission even selected Dr. Oppenheimer in 1963 for its prestigious Enrico Fermi Award citing his “scientific and administrative leadership not only in the development of the atomic bomb, but also in establishing the groundwork for the many peaceful applications of atomic energy.”

The Department of Energy has previously recognized J. Robert Oppenheimer in other ways including the creation of the Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program in 2017 to support early and mid-career scientists and engineers to “carry on [Dr. Oppenheimer’s] legacy of science serving society.”

As a successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy has been entrusted with the responsibility to correct the historical record and honor Dr. Oppenheimer’s profound contributions to our national defense and the scientific enterprise at large. Today, I am pleased to announce the Department of Energy has vacated the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.