Kai Bird is among the co-authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2005 and later on ended up being the basis for the freshly launched significant Hollywood film “Oppenheimer.”
By all accounts, Oppenheimer was an intricate figure; for many years, analysts have actually utilized words as diverse as “complex, contradictory,” “ambitious,” “charismatic,” “mystical,” and “flawed” to explain him. About the only thing experts appear to settle on is that Oppenheimer was dazzling.
Bird offers his take on the man in this interview with the Bulletin’s Dan Drollette Jr and explains what he and his co-author, Martin Sherwin, found in their journey to make their 721-page bio. Bird explores Oppenheimer’s character, his management as the head of the clinical end of the Manhattan Project, his reach the heights of popularity, and his fall from grace.
Bird likewise explains the recent—and, gladly, effective effort—to bring back Oppenheimer’s tradition to its rightful location in American society.
The executive director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography considering that 2017, Bird likewise discusses why he when explained bio as: “The hardest form of history—and the most expensive.”
(Editor’s note: This interview has actually been condensed and modified for brevity and clearness.)
Dan Drollette Jr: It should have been a bit challenging to be made a co-author of this task rather late in the video game. Hadn’t your co-author, Martin Sherwin, already invested twenty years investigating J. Robert Oppenheimer by the time you got on board?
Kai Bird: Yes, however already I was already extremely knowledgeable about long-lasting biographical tasks. I had actually already done a bio of John J. McCloy[1]—and among McGeorge Bundy and his bro.[2] And I’d already learnt more about Marty Sherwin. Initially it was through The Nation, where I was an associate editor in the ‘80s, and he was composing a cover story.
Drollette: What was the story on?
Bird: Hiroshima, properly enough.[3]
But we actually was familiar with each other later, in the mid-90s, through our shared participation in the Smithsonian museum debate over the Enola Gay. I became part of the advisory committee to it.
Drollette: Can you inform me a bit more?
Bird: Sure. The Smithsonian had actually wished to place on a 10,000-square-foot display at its Air and Space Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of completion of World War II. It was expected to enter into the extremely nuanced and complex concerns surrounding the choice to drop the atomic bomb on Japan—you understand, some generals, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, had actually slammed using the bomb as unneeded, as the war was almost won. And Truman’s chief of staff, Adm. [William] Leahy, had actually called it a “barbaric” weapon.
So the Smithsonian had actually wished to put in all these points and counterpoints in the display, however then the American Legionnaires and the Air Force Association sobbed nasty. They desired patriotically inaccurate history and started requiring that they censor this and that. It ended up being a huge political debate; Congress weighed in. It was a nasty battle.
To counter this, Marty and I formed a little committee of historians to safeguard the museum, and we composed some op-eds together.[4]
We ended up being buddies throughout that debate; I discovered Marty to be a lively, amusing man. That remained in ’95, while I was still dealing with my Bundy bio.
By ’98, I had actually released it, and was looking for another task. That was when Marty created the concept that we must sign up with forces on Oppenheimer.
Drollette: What did you state?
Bird: I informed him no.
Drollette: Really? Why?
Bird: I informed him that after the very first bio I had actually carried out with a co-author, we stopped being good friends.
I informed Marty that I liked him excessive to do that.
But Marty was consistent. He kept boiling down to have supper with me and my better half, and talking it up—you understand, pack like, “It’s just such a great project.” And yes, he had actually done twenty years of research study already, however he kept informing me “Oh, Kai, you know, if you join me, there’s still enormous gaps in the research that you could fill; we don’t know enough about the 1930s.”
And he was uproarious in his pitch. He said: “If you don’t join me on this project, my gravestone is going to say ‘He took the book with him.’ ”
So I was encouraged. (Laughs.)
Drollette: And how did it end up?
Bird: It was a terrific partnership. Marty understood the product inside and out, so when we prepared chapters, he might see what was missing out on. He was a genuine wordsmith.
Just as essential, Marty had actually done lots of research study, and had actually obtained 50,000 pages of archival files—consisting of 8,000 pages of FBI files obtained under FOIA [Freedom of Information Act].
Bottom line: It exercised well. I began to compose chapters, which promoted him to compose—and we went back and forth.
Though it still took another 5 years prior to the book came out.
Drollette: In a method, I think you were lucky to have all these recordings from those wiretaps. If you wished to know verbatim what Oppenheimer needed to state back in 1941 about something, there it was, on these old FBI tapes.
Bird: Oh, there was a few of that for the early years. Although it wasn’t in the form of FBI recordings you might listen to even 8,000 pages of records of conferences, interviews with individuals who understood him, and such.
But by the time the 1954 hearings occurred, then you might check out records of the FBI microphones that were wiretapping Oppenheimer at the time.
So yes, there was an unbelievable wealth of product. Marty had actually done 100-plus interviews and had them all nicely transcribed by his college students—by the way, you can hear much of them online at the Atomic Heritage Site.[5]
So it was a fantastic partnership.
Drollette: Did you have any concept the book would do so well, seriously and commercially? I don’t believe lots of bios are gotten by Hollywood.
Bird: Well, when the book came out in 2005, I believed it was great, and I was extremely pleased with it. So was Marty. And I keep in mind informing him about 8 months after the book came out that I believed it was a prospect for the Pulitzer. And he said, “Oh, no, don’t say that, you’ll jinx it.”
And I can comprehend that, it’s such a subjective procedure.
But certainly, we won the Pulitzer.
However, even prior to that occurred, there was a movie interest. It didn’t take place, in fact, up until Christopher Nolan occurred years later on. He was handed the book in the spring of ‘21, read it—and without even calling us, he took a seat and invested the summer season composing a movie script.
It was just in September of that year that Nolan called us to state that he had actually gotten the movie alternative and was now handling Universal Studios
The disaster was that we discovered all of this in late September, and after that 2 weeks later on, Marty passed away of nonsmoker’s lung cancer.
Drollette: Well, a minimum of he got to see this award…
Bird: Yes, he was around enough time to understand that it was going to take place. But it’s still extremely sad. I want he was here; Marty would have had a great deal of enjoyable, taking a look at the hoopla around Hollywood and the movie release.
Drollette: One of the important things that I liked about the book was how it caught a few of the information of huge science: the little chain of command in between the theoretical physicists and the speculative physicists and the engineers, the competitions that go on. I imply, it’s a human venture, based on the very same examples as any other group effort.
Bird: Oh yes, quite so.
Drollette: And I likewise detected some little things that you and Marty discussed in passing in the book, such as how the physicists at the Manhattan Project “loved the verbal wrestling that’s inherent in the process of explanation.” That utilized to drive me up the wall when I was modifying a publication at CERN, where I was surrounded by physicists—due to the fact that they’d wish to choose things apart permanently while I’m on due date. But now I see it’s not simply me, it’s part and parcel of the physicist mind.
Bird: Yes, I believe so.
Drollette: There was another thing the book discussed: the connection in between music and physics. I’ve observed that almost every physicist I’ve encountered wants music; I don’t actually understand why that is. So it was something to learn that somebody else had actually detected that too—it wasn’t simply a delusion of my creativity.
Bird: I believe that if you wish to be a good physicist—especially a quantum physicist in the 1920s and 30s—it assisted if you were a polymath. It assisted if you wondered and interested about music or poetry or literature, and Oppenheimer was all those things.
And Oppenheimer was especially skilled at being articulate; he might talk in plain English, and explain to a non-physicist what was going on.
That’s specifically why he was employed to be the director of Los Alamos by Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. Groves might see that Oppenheimer was not just a clever physicist however somebody who might explain—in plain English—what was going on.
Drollette: Which is necessary if you’re requesting for financing on the scale of billions of dollars.
Bird: Absolutely.
Drollette: And I expect that’s a good capability to have if you’re attempting to confine all these dazzling individuals and get them entering the very same instructions—while handling delicate egos.
Bird: Yes, that’s the other thing that occurred when Groves was choosing whether to employ him: Oppenheimer created the concept that if you wished to develop this “gadget,” then rather of separating the researchers in various university laboratories all over the nation, what you required to do was put them all in one location and have them team up together.
And due to the fact that you’re worried about security and leakages, and it’s wartime, then it makes good sense to put them on a high plateau, surrounded with a barbed-wire fence, where they can team up and talk easily amongst themselves inside—however kept separated from the remainder of the world.
That concept interested the basic in Groves, quite.
And from checking out the book, you understand that Oppie understood precisely the location he wished to do this. Because as he informed his bro, his aspiration in life was to integrate his 2 enthusiasms: physics and life in New Mexico. And he did it, by developing Los Alamos, the secret city.
Drollette: I handled to speak with among the last enduring researchers from the Manhattan Project—a physicist called Roy Glauber—prior to he passed away, and he offered me a few of his impressions. Glauber said that when you initially fulfilled Oppie, you wouldn’t have actually believed he might motivate such commitment. The method he put it was that Oppenheimer constantly liked to pepper daily discussions with referrals to things like Indic poetry. But these were not affectations, Oppenheimer really had an interest because example; that’s simply who he was. There were no pretensions or put-ons.
And the physicists type of appreciated that, Glauber said, due to the fact that Oppie was so real to himself. The mindset towards Oppie appeared to be something like: “Okay, he’s different. He’s odd. But he’s genuinely odd.”
Bird: Absolutely, I believe that’s a good characterization. Oppenheimer was extremely eccentric. And yeah, he might price estimate the [Bhagavad] Gita—he’d taken the problem to attempt to learn a little Sanskrit so he might read it in its initial text.
He was an extremely strange and sort of delphic character.
But at Los Alamos, whenever they were facing some issue to produce the “gadget”—as the atomic bomb was understood—frequently Oppenheimer’s design was to stand at the back of the room and simply listen and let everybody argue: the chemists versus the engineers versus the physicists versus the surge professionals. And then after a very long time, he would arrange of step in and sum up in an extremely peaceful, soft voice what everybody was stating in a manner that pointed the instructions forward.
And the agreement then ended up being: If we’re going to make any development, then this is the next advance; everybody needed to confess that he was right. So he was quietly charismatic in this spooky way.
Drollette: Let’s talk about what happened after the book came out. I saw where you and your co-author helped contribute to the effort to rehabilitate Oppenheimer. Did you ever expect that there would be this nullification of the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped him of his security clearance? Were you optimistic from the get-go?
Bird: Well, no.
After American Prometheus won the Pulitzer, Marty happened to be living in Washington, D.C.—the same city I was living in—and we would socialize together. And one day we were talking about it when we said, you know, we ought to use this extraordinary platform we have now. We ought to write a letter to someone to try and persuade the powers-that-be to look at this 1954 hearing and see if there is anything that could be done to rectify the terrible thing that had been done to Oppenheimer.
Our first notion, oddly enough, was to go to a lawyer and see if there was a way that we could file a court case. We persuaded a prominent law firm in D.C. to assign a young associate to investigate this for a few months, pro bono. And funnily enough, after a couple of months, we got an apologetic phone call from this young associate who said, very sheepishly, that one of the senior partners in the law firm was C. Boyden Gray, the son of Gordon Gray, who had chaired the security panel that convicted Oppenheimer—and C. Boyden Gray didn’t want anything to be done that would damage the reputation of his father. Gray didn’t want anything that suggested that his father had made a mistake; he thought that would be a scurrilous charge.
So the law firm in question had to back out. Consequently, it was referred to another firm in D.C., and they eventually came back to us and said: “There is nothing to be done, from a legal point of view. The only recourse may be to appeal to the president or maybe the Secretary of Energy to issue an executive order.”
So we began to pursue that. And this took years.
We worked on it often, if fitfully, and wrote some long memos documenting all the egregious violations that the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission had done, violating their own rules on how to conduct a security hearing. Just outrageous things—like the fact that they used all those FBI documents in the hearing against Oppenheimer, but denied Oppenheimer’s lawyer any access to them, saying that they were still classified. When Oppenheimer’s lawyer tried to get the right kind of clearances so that he could read the evidence, they denied him a security classification.
Drollette: So it really was a kangaroo court.
Bird: Yes, that was pretty clear; everyone we talked to pretty much agreed.
But oddly enough, when we we appealed to the Secretary of Energy during the Obama Administration—Ernest Moniz, who was a physicist himself—and made these arguments, we didn’t get the response we expected. He was sympathetic, but he caved to the advice of his veteran lawyers in the Energy Department, who told him: “No, you can’t do this.”
Their thinking was that to exonerate Oppenheimer—or to nullify the decision from 1954—would send the wrong message and set up a double standard in the security system. They thought it would open up the department to lawsuits by people who have subsequently been dismissed for security violations, opening up a whole can of worms.
And in addition, in their view, Oppenheimer had lied. They and Ernest Moniz believed that Oppenheimer had lied in the security clearance hearings.
And of course, Oppenheimer had not told absolutely the whole truth in 1943 when confronted by a security officer about the so-called Chevalier incident.[6] He had, in fact, been telling the whole truth when questioned about it in 1954. But in ‘43, he had merely left out part of the story because he was trying to defend his friend Chevalier—who had naively passed on this feeler from a friend, George Eltenton, about whether information could be passed on to the Soviet consulate. And Oppenheimer’s immediate response had been: “No, that would be treason.”
Drollette: I would have thought that would be the end of it. I mean, you know, it was a feeler, and Oppenheimer said: “No.” End of story.
Bird: But the security people were concerned about the fact that Oppenheimer didn’t volunteer this information for three months. And then when he did volunteer it on his own—without any prompting—this worried the security officers, and they began questioning him. As in: “Well, how do you know this? Who told you this?”
And he then made up what he later called a cock-and-bull story, to try to say: “Well, you should investigate this guy, George Eltenton. But I can’t tell you the name of the person who approached me directly.”
Drollette: Not to mention that by that point, it was 1954, and they were asking him about events that had occurred nearly 20 years earlier—such as “How did you meet Jean Tatlock, who may have been a fellow traveler?”
Bird: Yeah, right, it was a lot of ancient history.
But that’s what made the Oppenheimer story so interesting.
You know, when Marty Sherwin persuaded me to join him on this project in the year 2000, at one point he commented that “You know, Kai, you and I wouldn’t be spending so many years on this man’s life if it was just a story about the father of the atomic bomb—if it was just about a physicist who invented weapons of mass destruction. What makes the story really interesting and gives it an arc in storytelling is the fact that in 1945 he was hailed as the most famous scientist in America. And then nine years later, he was publicly humiliated and stripped of his security clearance, with questions raised about his loyalty.”
Oppie ended up being a non-entity after 1954, and his life as a public intellectual was pretty much destroyed.
And that is what makes his story interesting: There is a triumph, but also a tragedy.
Drollette: I read somewhere—maybe in your book—that when Oppenheimer died in 1967, Senator Fulbright took to the Senate floor and said: “Let us remember, not only what his special genius did for us—let us remember what we did to him.”
Bird: Right. I love that quote, it really summarizes, in a dramatic method, the egregious nature of the harm that was done to this very sensitive soul.
Drollette: There was another line that said: “Vulnerability ran through his personality like a geological fault…”
Bird: He was a fragile personality, going back to his childhood and then his prolonged adolescence and his struggles in Cambridge, when he was first learning quantum physics in the 1920s. This is sort of what makes him so human—that he was aware of his own fragility, and he was aware of the fact that he was vulnerable.
And so that made him empathetic to other human beings. He could be very sweet and patient and nurturing to students and to the common citizen that he met in the street—and yet he could be extremely snide and insulting to people above him, in positions of authority.
Which I also find sort of endearing.
Drollette: I’ve got to say that the person who gets short shrift from history was Gen. Leslie Groves. Yes, he was the hard-charging and goal-oriented military man in the development of the bomb, but he had the vision, the awareness, to realize what he had in Oppenheimer. I mean, he elevated Oppenheimer to the supreme position at Los Alamos.
Bird: They were two very different personalities, so it was very improbable that they should get along. But they did. And Grove saw the genius in Oppenheimer, and his humanity.
Groves was very loyal to Oppie; he hired him knowing full well about all his left-wing proclivities in the 1930s. But Groves absolutely trusted him.
Likewise, you would think that Oppenheimer would not get along with this gruff, rather politically conservative army general. But the two men understood that they needed each other. And while it was a very improbable collaboration, it was a successful one.
Drollette: Are the kinds of things that occurred to Oppenheimer still happening today? Are scientific facts still being distorted for political gain?
Bird: I’m afraid the answer is, obviously, yes.
We just have to look back to the recent pandemic where the integrity of scientists and public health officials was being questioned by the public and by politicians—a very dangerous thing.
We live in a very complicated, modern society, drenched with technology and physics, and we need the knowledge of scientists. And more than that, we need their opinions as public intellectuals to help provide guidance to understand the public policy questions that we face. Not that they have any gilded wisdom, but they have certain expertise that we lack as ordinary citizens.
But unfortunately, the role of the scientist or the expert witness in American society is very low. They don’t have much standing. There is a downright suspicion of scientific expertise.
And I think at least part of this lack of trust in science and scientific expertise dates back to what occurred to Oppenheimer in 1954 when America’s most famous scientist was publicly humiliated. That had a chilling effect on scientists everywhere, making them wary of speaking out on public policy issues—no matter how much we need them to. The notion is that scientists have to beware of contradicting the conventional wisdom spouted by politicians, because you could be tarred and feathered.
I can’t think of a scientist today who has the sort of public standing that Oppenheimer had in 1945, when his image was put on the cover of Time magazine, and he was celebrated as a scientist and as someone to be listened to. We just don’t have the sort of large public intellectual like that anymore, who has a scientific background.
And that’s a curious and unfortunate thing.
Endnotes
[1] See
[2] See
[4] See
[5] See
[6] Haakon Chevalier was a friend of Oppenheimer’s, whom he met in the late 1930s while both were on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. (Chevalier taught Romance languages, Oppenheimer taught physics.) In 1942, around the very same time that Oppenheimer was appointed to the Manhattan Project, Chevalier told Oppenheimer of a disturbing conversation he’d had with a third party named George Eltenton, a scientist at the Shell Oil Company who had connections to the Soviets—then our allies in World War II. Chevalier thought that Oppenheimer should understand what happened; Oppenheimer cut him off. But because Oppenheimer let several months go by before reporting the conversation to US intelligence authorities, it became a key issue nearly a decade later, in subsequent hearings about Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness. For more details, see “Decision and Opinions of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,” June 29, 1954.
