How the true story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's life compares to Christopher Nolan's new movie
the movie jumps back and forth through time as it explores the life and legacy of its subject. “What I wanted to do was take the audience into the mind and the experience of a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history,” Nolan said in the film’s production notes. “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.
“I had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany,” he said at his 1954 hearing before the United States Atomic Energy Commission , which is part of the movie’s central framing device. “I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country.
The movie shows how the U.S. government was aware and skeptical of Oppenheimer’s communist affiliations early on, but chose to overlook them during the Manhattan Project when it became clear he was the right man for the job. However, these associations would ultimately come back to haunt him and lead to the destruction of his career at the height of American anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s.As the movie notes, over the years, Oppenheimer developed a reputation as a womanizer.
Oppenheimer wed the already-pregnant Puening on Nov. 1, 1940, shortly after she divorced her third husband, Richard Stewart Harrison. The Oppenheimers’ first child, Peter, was born in May 1941. Kitty later gave birth to a daughter, Katherine Toni, in December 1944, while living at Los Alamos.
However, Oppenheimer was hailed as a national hero by many and, in 1946, was awarded a Medal for Merit. When the Manhattan Project came under the jurisdiction of the newly-formed AEC, the agency charged with overseeing all atomic research and development in the U.S., Oppenheimer was named chairman of the General Advisory Committee.
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