He was both history's conquerer and history's victim. In December 1983, Esquire reflected on the life, times, and death of the architect of destruction.
Murray KemptonThe ferocious weapon first exploded secretly in the American desert in 1945 did not merely alter history, it loosed the power to end it. The bomb was the work of hundreds of keen minds, the foremost of which was J. Robert Oppenheimer’s. He administered Los Alamos, where the weapon took form, and the glory of the accomplishment—if glory it was—belonged to him. Sadly, so did the later realisation that what had been created was the distinct possibility of self-destruction.
His four months at Harvard and five at the California Institute of Technology made the year 1927 the least purposeful he had ever experienced; and it was a relief for him to accept a Rockefeller Foundation grant and escape for twelve months in the European centres of the new physics that were altogether more congenial to him for being so much more aware.
He was their inspiration, their supervisor, and even their housekeeper, and. collective triumph though theirs was, they all knew that he had done more to build the bomb than anyone else at Los Alamos.
He complained early in his tenure as chief adviser on international atomic policy that whatever he proposed was uncritically accepted. His wait for relief from that distress was a short one; within a few months his advice was being just as uncritically disregarded.He first began to sense the limitations of his writ when President Truman asked him, in 1946, to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. Oppenheimer replied that he did not know; and Mr.
Long afterward, in his troubles he replied to the charge that he had been less than wholehearted in serving his government’s desires, if not its truest interests, by saying: “I did my job, the job I was supposed to do.” There was in those words a cold tone stripped of every ideal except the rules of function.
Now he had taken upon himself the felt duty of speaking for physics to government and for government to physics. He would be guardian angel over an alliance with too much of the imbalance that obtains when one side is the caterer and the other is the customer and disputes about taste are settled by the palate of the payer.
In 1946 Lawrence designed his Materials Testing Accelerator, a piece of hardware too expensively enormous even for his private patrons, his magnificoes. He laid the MTA’s conception before the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, where he sustained the shock of having it dismissed by Oppenheimer as a vision that, “imaginative” as it was, “cannot do what is expected of it.
Ordinary laymen and officials had taken for granted their country’s monopoly of a secret uniquely Robert Oppenheimer’s, and they could see no way it could have been lost if it had not been stolen. They kept faith with that misconception well after it had been blown to vapour by executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose crimes could never have run beyond pilferage too petty to explain the triumph of Soviet research.
All five of his colleagues on the General Advisory Committee joined him in recommending a low priority for Teller’s quest of the absolute. Oppenheimer later professed himself astonished by a unanimity that his enemies could never afterward explain except as the workings of his malicious animal magnetism.
Oppenheimer’s certainties had eroded and his will was ebbing; but the old intuitive faculty was swift as ever; and he seems to have divined Teller’s breakthrough sooner than anyone else there. “Sweet and lovely and beautiful,” he is reported to have observed. There was a sudden reglowing of what embers remained from the fires of his earliest conviction that what could be discovered ought to be discovered, wherever it tended. Once more elegance was for him its own absolution.
Extremes in the worship of anything, even reason, inevitably arrive at superstition. Strauss had made of science a cult; and, all the time he was sure of himself as a child of the Enlightenment, his devotions bore him farther and farther back toward those smoking altars where men adored or shuddered before idols they thought either kind or malign but never indifferent.
Insulating the Atomic Energy Commission from Oppenheimer was no problem at all: he was still on call as a consultant, but Strauss had only to abstain from taking the opportunity to consult him. Oppenheimer did not yet know that he had embarked upon an existence that did not hold many hours of unobserved privacy. His government’s agents had watched them enter the Tatlock home and had remained outside it until the next morning when she drove him to the airport.
With this revelation, Chevalier’s career commenced a steady decline; and now and then, from promptings livelier in his conscience than his affections, we may suppose, Oppenheimer would make a feeble stab at clearing his name. An unhopeful attempt to comfort a woman the world thought a Communist and he once thought he loved, a failed essay at shielding a friend who may or may not have made a pass at espionage, and a halfhearted try at calling the dogs off someone against whom he himself had raised the scent—those three uneasy passages were the only departures from prescribed discretion that could be found against him by prosecutors whose obsessive curiosity was more than up to discovering any others.
Oppenheimer was tried before a three-member Personnel Security Board chosen by Lewis Strauss, a prosecutor uniquely blessed with the right to select his jury. The hearings lasted over three weeks and consumed some 990 pages of transcript. Large portions of them were engaged with inconclusive burrowings into the history of the hydrogen decision. Six of the eight prosecution witnesses gave evidence whose main import fell upon the bad advice they felt the accused had given to his masters.
“The work of Military Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Atomic Energy Commission—all at one time or another have felt the effect of his falsehoods and misrepresentations.” Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi had joined Oppenheimer in the General Advisory Committee’s early remonstrance against the Super; and yet Strauss went on showering them with his blessings and they went on rejoicing in them.
One day, shortly after his disgrace, he sat with a visitor painfully better acquainted with his history than his person.But where, his visitor wondered, did the complicity lie?
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