This is a good, vigorously written biography by an author
who is sympathetic with his subject, but it suffers from faults which exclude
it from true excellence or being regarded as a definitive life.
First, the author is fixated - a strong word, but
appropriate here - by notions around Jewish identity, an odd focus for a
biographer of Oppenheimer, a man who was raised in a secular environment at
home and at school and who seems to have given very little thought to Jewish
culture. Indeed, Oppenheimer, with his piercing blue eyes and tall thin figure,
almost certainly was of mixed ethnic background, but even here the author
assures us, his rather ethereal mother, the dominant parent in contributing to
his looks and temperament, was as Jewish as his hearty German Jewish father.
The author more or less accuses Oppenheimer of ignoring
cultural roots to his peril, regarding the act of having done so almost as a
character flaw and as an explanatory variable in his personality. Monk makes
himself a bit silly in this because countless migrants to the United States
from scores of ethnic backgrounds, including my own paternal grandfather, did
things like change the spelling of family names or adopt English-sounding first
names or nick-names, and many gave up traditional customs. They wanted a fresh
start in a brave new world, and no one would sensibly assert they were flawed
in doing so.
Monk starts the book by quoting the physicist Rabi,
generally a brilliant observer, on the something which seemed to be missing in
Oppenheimer’s personality, and from there weaves the theme of missing
Jewishness. Actually I think Rabi (whose view here, it should be noted, would
have been influenced by his being an old country Orthodox man) got this
observation wrong because it is very likely that Oppenheimer was something of an
autistic, perhaps the milder form called Asperger’s Syndrome, which explains
his extreme awkwardness with other people and difficulty seeking or making
friends. Combined with his rather ethereal character plus other personality
quirks, Oppenheimer undoubtedly communicated a sense of undefined otherness. Missing
ethnic roots is not on the mark for analysis.
A good deal of attention is given over to rising
anti-Semitism in the United States, something which had had no long-term
history but seems to have arisen after the stock market crash of 1873. The rude
turning away of Joseph Seligman from the Grand Hotel at Saratoga in 1877 was a
watershed event which other hotels and institutions soon began to copy, if for
no other reason than not wishing to lose their customers to those who catered
to prejudice. This, of course, is relevant to the life of a man like
Oppenheimer, but coming along, as it does in this book, with all of the
author’s emphasis on the theme of Jewishness and anti-Semitism, it becomes a
bit wearying. Oppenheimer went only to the best schools and received
magnificent appointment after magnificent appointment during his career, so the
relevance of anti-Semitism to his life seems marginal if not obscure, and as we
know from glancing at a list of Nobel-winning physicists, being Jewish was no
bar.
Monk’s worst excess is introducing virtually every
scientific figure to whom a descriptive epithet may apply as “Jewish Dutch” or
“half Jewish” or “German Jew,” etc. This not only contributes nothing to the
story, its repetition many times communicates a sense almost of reverse
prejudice. The ethnic origin of any scientist surely is irrelevant except where
it may have a special bearing, as in someone’s escape from Hitler’s Germany.
Contributing to the sense of a man with a missing center was
Oppenheimer’s true tragic flaw: he is almost a case study of the exceptionally
brilliant man who does not achieve top recognition in his chosen field. Yes,
the world community of theoretical physicists certainly came to have his name
on their tongues, but while Bohr, Dirac, Rutherford, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger,
Born, and others made historic contributions in the revolutionary scientific
period of Oppenheimer’s early life, and received Nobel prizes in recognition,
Oppenheimer did not. Oppenheimer, despite all his cleverness and literally
tireless efforts to keep on top of theoretical and experimental work in his
life as an active physicist, gained his position in history for what was
essentially a management job, heading up the scientific teams of Los Alamos in
building the atomic bomb.
What’s more, having as his great achievement the
construction of a terrible weapon which shortly was used brutally to extinguish
tens of thousands of souls simply had to conflict with Oppenheimer’s acute
aesthetic, poetic sensibilities. The author tells us that Oppenheimer never
regretted his work on the bomb, but if that is so it goes to the same tragic
flaw of needing to achieve and accomplish and impress yet not quite being able
to do so in his field of pure science.
As Monk informs us with many interesting anecdotes,
Oppenheimer in his twenties could be something of a terror with his sharp
tongue and his incessant desire to demonstrate he knew more than others, even
during other scientists’ presentations which he would interrupt many times. I
tend to think that these acts too demonstrate Oppenheimer’s tragic flaw: he
almost knew or feared he might not achieve what many of them had achieved, yet he
felt impelled to make an indelible impression on them with questions,
anecdotes, and witticisms.
So too Oppenheimer’s two half-hearted attempts at killing
male friends in his academic years, both involving friends whom he admired but
likely felt over-shadowed by in grace and attractiveness and success. The
incidents may well also have reflected frustrated sexuality in a man who had a
hard time relating to people and whose actual sexual identity may have not been
strongly fixed: more than a few hostile observers regarded him as homosexual. These
violent acts are anecdotes of which I was not aware – in one case leaving a
poisoned apple on the intended victim’s desk - and they speak strongly to
Oppenheimer’s odd personality. He did also suffer from severe depressions and
was once diagnosed as schizophrenic. On the subject of his personal life, I
think it fair to say the author does a less than adequate job with, for example,
the nature of his strange marriage to Kitty barely touched upon.
During the unpleasant period of hearings over Oppenheimer’s
security clearance, the author depends too much on transcripts, always in my
view a questionable approach. It would be much more interesting to learn more
about how this affected Oppenheimer’s private life. In this sequence of events,
there is Oppenheimer’s own terrible mistake of having previously called into
question the political reliability of others, particularly that of his old
friend Chevalier. The author gives us Chevalier’s exchange of letters with
Oppenheimer, and I believe we see in this yet another aspect of Oppenheimer’s
true tragic flaw. It was almost as though Oppenheimer were once again poisoning
an apple to be left for a friend. He destroyed Chevalier’s career and never
expressed regret for having done so.
Monk seems to regard the possibility of Oppenheimer’s having
served Soviet interests as almost impossible. He cites as proof Oppenheimer’s
deep affection for America, as for the geography of the Southwest or his
determination to show Europeans that America could build its own school of theoretical
physics, but those kinds of feelings are simply not proof against the
possibility of espionage. Kim Philby, one of the legendary British spies for
Russia in the 1950s, in his sad Soviet exile, relished receiving the Times of
London from the KGB and reading such utterly banal English things as cricket
scores. Anyway, Oppenheimer worked in a cesspool of McCarthyite insanity, the
very thing which in part motivated the British Cambridge Five and other spies
for fear America might launch a nuclear attack on a yet unequal Russia. Indeed,
the author neglects communicating the well-developed plans and advocacies in
Washington for a massive, pre-emptive strike on Russia.
The fact remains that Sudoplatov, in his memoir, tells us
that Oppenheimer did serve as a spy. I know full well that spy memoirs are
frequently riddled with disinformation, but Sudoplatov’s claim is a rather large
thing which any biographer pretending to comprehensiveness cannot ignore. I say
this without believing the claim, but, if the claim were true, it would not
outrage me the way I suspect it would Mr. Monk. I have always regarded the acts
of the period’s British spies as a healthy antidote to the nuclear-armed
insanity of early 1950s America. If extreme measures are regarded as needed to
defend freedom, as they so frequently are in America, how much more so to
defend masses of humanity from insane attack?
