@@CHAP@@ AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
@@CHAP@@ PROLOGUE
Damn it, I happen to love this country.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, February 25, 1967: Despite the menacing weather and bitter cold that chilled the Northeast, six hundred friends and colleagues—Nobel laureates, politicians, generals, scientists, poets, novelists, composers and acquaintances from all walks of life—gathered to recall the life and mourn the death of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Some knew him as their gentle teacher and affectionately called him “Oppie.” Others knew him as a great physicist, a man who in 1945 had become the “father” of the atomic bomb, a national hero and an emblem of the scientist as public servant. And everyone remembered with deep bitterness how, just nine years later, the new Republican administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower had declared him a security risk—making Robert Oppenheimer the most prominent victim of America’s anticommunist crusade. And so they came with heavy hearts to remember a brilliant man whose remarkable life had been touched by triumph as well as tragedy.
The Nobelists included such world-renowned physicists as Isidor I. Rabi, Eugene Wigner, Julian Schwinger, Tsung Dao Lee and Edwin McMillan. Albert Einstein’s daughter, Margot, was there to honor the man who had been her father’s boss at the Institute for Advanced Study. Robert Serber—a student of Oppenheimer’s at Berkeley in the 1930s and a close friend and veteran of Los Alamos—was there, as was the great Cornell physicist Hans Bethe, the Nobelist who had revealed the inner workings of the sun. Irva Denham Green, a neighbor from the tranquil Caribbean island of St. John, where the Oppenheimers had built a beach cottage as a refuge after his public humiliation in 1954, sat elbow to elbow with powerful luminaries of America’s foreign policy establishment: lawyer and perennial presidential adviser John J. McCloy; the Manhattan Project’s military chief, General Leslie R. Groves; Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze; Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey. To represent the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent his scientific adviser, Donald F. Hornig, a Los Alamos veteran who had been with Oppenheimer at “Trinity,” the test on July 16, 1945, of the first atomic bomb. Sprinkled among the scientists and Washington’s power elite were men of literature and culture: the poet Stephen Spender, the novelist John O’Hara, the composer Nicholas Nabokov and George Balanchine, the director of the New York City Ballet.
Oppenheimer’s widow, Katherine “Kitty” Puening Oppenheimer, sat in the front row at Princeton University’s Alexander Hall for what many would remember as a subdued, bittersweet memorial service. Sitting with her were their daughter, Toni, age twenty-two, and their son, Peter, age twenty-five. Robert’s younger brother, Frank Oppenheimer, whose own career as a physicist had been destroyed during the McCarthyite maelstrom, sat next to Peter.
Strains of Igor Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, a work Robert Oppenheimer had heard for the first time, and admired, in this very hall the previous autumn, filled the auditorium. And then Hans Bethe—who had known Oppenheimer for three decades—gave the first of three eulogies. “He did more than any other man,” Bethe said, “to make American theoretical physics great. . . . He was a leader. . . . But he was not domineering, he never dictated what should be done. He brought out the best in us, like a good host with his guests. . . .” At Los Alamos, where he directed thousands in a putative race against the Germans to build the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer had transformed a pristine mesa into a laboratory and forged a diverse group of scientists into an efficient team. Bethe and other veterans of Los Alamos knew that without Oppenheimer the primordial “gadget” they had built in New Mexico would never have been finished in time for its use in the war.
Henry DeWolf Smyth, a physicist and Princeton neighbor, gave the second eulogy. In 1954, Smyth had been the only one of five commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) who had voted to restore Oppenheimer’s security clearance. As a witness to the star-chamber “security hearing” Oppenheimer had endured, Smyth fully comprehended the travesty that had been committed: “Such a wrong can never be righted; such a blot on our history never erased. . . . We regret that his great work for his country was repaid so shabbily. . . .”