Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (119 page)

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik 1
, the world’s first earth-orbiting artificial satellite. The response in the United States was a frightened shock that the Soviets were, in this technology if not in others, actually
ahead
. Influenced, no doubt, by his positive experience of the Ed Murrow show, Oppenheimer agreed to be interviewed on the subject by Howard K. Smith for a CBS News programme called
Where
We Stand
. Much to Oppenheimer’s chagrin, his interview was never aired. Oppenheimer seemed to believe that this was because he had been too controversial, though the vice president of CBS News, Sig Mickelson, told him that it was because ‘there was other material which was more useful to the central theme of the program than your interview’. A transcript of the interview preserved in Oppenheimer’s papers would seem to bear Mickelson out. For most of the time Oppenheimer was discussing very general defects in the US educational system. When he was asked about the attempt to catch up with the Russians on satellite development, his response was short, bland and uninformative: ‘We wouldn’t like to have this a Russian monopoly, we would like to be good at it.’

More interesting was a talk that he gave in April 1958 to the International Press Institute in Washington under the title ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, which was published later in the year in
Harper’s Magazine
. Oppenheimer’s central theme in this talk was the huge growth in the volume of scientific knowledge and its increasing specialisation. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and – to go a step further – our mathematicians do not know mathematics.’ Expanding on what he said earlier about the impossibility of popularising science, he told his audience that ‘it is almost impossible to explain what the fundamental principle of relativity is about, and this is even more true of the quantum theory’:

Soon after this Oppenheimer left for Europe, where, as well as giving talks in Paris and Copenhagen, he attended the twelfth Solvay Congress in Brussels, which that year was on the theme of ‘Structure and Evolution of the Universe’. Pais was also there, presenting a review of recent work on weak interactions, as was Richard Feynman, whom Pais remembers ‘trying to explain quantum mechanics to Queen Fabiola’.

This visit to Europe was something of a watershed in the Oppenheimers’ relationships with their son and daughter, who at that time were, respectively, seventeen and thirteen years old. Relations within the Oppenheimer family had been difficult ever since the children were born. For reasons both external and internal, Kitty and Robert
were not ideal parents. Pat Sherr has remarked on how impatient Kitty was with Peter when he was little, adding that, in her view, Kitty had ‘no intuitive understanding of the children’. It is a view shared by Abraham Pais, who recalled: ‘To an outsider like me, Oppenheimer’s family life looked like hell on earth. The worst of it all was that inevitably the two children had to suffer.’

Relations between Peter and his parents went from bad to worse when it became clear that he had not inherited his father’s academic ability. He was sensitive and intelligent, but he did not excel at school. The Oppenheimers’ friends remember Kitty nagging Peter relentlessly, both about his poor academic performance and, when he began to get a little podgy, about his weight. He responded by retreating into himself, becoming, as Serber once put it, ‘a shadow . . . trying not to be noticed’.

Shortly before the Oppenheimers left for Europe in 1958, Peter received the bad news that his application to study at Princeton had been rejected. As a consequence, the Oppenheimers decided that, though Toni would come with them to Europe, Peter would be left behind. If the memories of Oppenheimer’s secretary at the time, Verna Hobson, are correct, the decision seems to have been Kitty’s rather than Robert’s. ‘There came a time,’ Hobson recalled, ‘when Robert had to choose between Peter – of whom he was very fond – and Kitty. She made it so it had to be one or the other, and because of the compact he had made with God or with himself, he chose Kitty’.

In the summer of 1958, in what looks like an effort to overcome the kind of specialisation that he had identified and lamented in ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, Oppenheimer published a long, detailed and thoughtful review of
A Study of Thinking
by Jerome Bruner. His conclusion was that, ‘Even the lay reader will recognize in this book some fresh and solid steps toward an understanding of characteristic traits of man’s rational behaviour.’ But: ‘He will also see that the psychological sciences have a very long way indeed to go.’ He was evidently on a mission to bridge the gaps created by specialisation. On 5 July 1958, he published a piece in the
Saturday Evening Post
under the title ‘The Mystery of Matter’, which, while attempting to explain particle physics to the general public, also tried to explain why – having argued several times that such a thing was impossible – he thought it worth while making the attempt. ‘All of us in our years of learning,’ he wrote:

Whether Oppenheimer was successful in explaining physicists and psychologists to each other, and both to the general public, the cumulative effect of his appearances on television, his popular articles and his public speeches was, bit by bit, to repair the damage done to his reputation by the security hearing. The tide of opinion was swinging in his favour. Joseph McCarthy died in May 1957, but the movement associated with his name had been dying for some time before that. Oppenheimer’s tormentor, Lewis Strauss, too, had become an unpopular figure. In the summer of 1958, Strauss was replaced as chairman of the AEC by John McCone, who, prompted by congressional calls to re-evaluate the Oppenheimer case, asked the AEC lawyer, Loren K. Olson, to take a fresh look at the files. What Olson found was ‘a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system’. The path was now clear for Oppenheimer to re-enter public service. However, he showed no signs of wanting to go back down that path.

Meanwhile, Strauss was about to face exactly the kind of public humiliation that he had inflicted on Oppenheimer. Shortly after leaving the AEC, Strauss was chosen by Eisenhower to be his new Secretary of Commerce. First, however, he had to submit himself to questioning by the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. The hearings, which began in April 1959, are described by Strauss’s biographer in a way that carries a very strong echo:

Strauss himself described the ‘nightmarish quality of the proceedings’. ‘It was now clear,’ Strauss wrote, ‘that this was to be not a hearing so much as an inquisition, with the attorney for the prosecution brought in by the chief judge.’ Oppenheimer was too gentlemanly to point out the obvious parallels, but some of his friends were not. Bernice Brode, an old friend from the Los Alamos days, for example, attended the Strauss hearings and wrote to Oppenheimer to say that, in an ‘unchristianly spirit’ she was enjoying Strauss’s ‘every squirm and anguish’. ‘It’s a lovely show . . . Having a
wonderful
time – wish you were here.’ On 19 June 1959, Senate voted against Strauss’s appointment as Secretary of Commerce, the first cabinet nominee to be rejected since 1925. Strauss’s political career was over.

In the autumn of 1959,
The Man Who Would Be God
, Chevalier’s fictionalised account of his relationship with Oppenheimer, finally came out and flopped badly. It attracted almost nothing but hostile reviews in
the press and aroused very little interest among the general public. Chevalier himself was too obscure, and Oppenheimer by this time too popular, for there to be much demand for an attack upon him by an embittered former friend.

How far Oppenheimer had come politically since his days as a ‘fellow traveller’ with Chevalier was demonstrated in the summer of 1959, by his participation in a conference sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The conference took place in Rheinfelden, on the border between Switzerland and Germany, and among the other participants were Stephen Spender, Raymond Aron, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr and Nicolas Nabokov – just the sort of wide-ranging intellectuals who had been Oppenheimer’s ideal since his days as an undergraduate at Harvard. In his talk, Oppenheimer confessed to being ‘profoundly in anguish over the fact that no ethical discourse of any nobility or weight has been addressed to the problem of the atomic weapons’. ‘What are we to make,’ he asked, ‘of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life . . . [but] which has not been able to talk about killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?’

In October 1959, Oppenheimer published an article on ‘The Role of the Big Accelerators’ in IBM’s house magazine,
Think
, in which he provided a wonderfully clear explanation of what accelerators were and why physicists needed them in order to study the properties of fundamental particles. Protons, neutrons and electrons, he conceded, can readily be studied because they are so abundant in ordinary matter:

The occasion for this article was the announcement that the President’s Science Advisory Committee had recommended an increase in annual expenditure for particle accelerators from $59 million to $100 million. It also recommended that, separately to this budget, the federal government
foot the bill for a new electron accelerator at Stanford that would, all by itself, cost $100 million. Oppenheimer defended these recommendations, but was careful to make clear that, in his mind, the justification for the expense did not rest on any anticipated technological or practical developments. He was, he said, certain that ‘the same men who wish to find out more about the atomic world will enrich our technology as well as our knowledge’, but:

The real importance of accelerators was that they might allow progress to be made on ‘the ancient question of the constitution of matter’. And perhaps even ‘beyond this question to a new description of happenings in space and time’. Again, Oppenheimer looked forward to a big, fundamental breakthrough. ‘We have the sense,’ he wrote, ‘of being in the neighborhood of one of those great changes in the description of nature, of which relativity and quantum theory are two recent examples.’

In his contribution to a BBC
Panorama
programme on ‘The 1960s’, which was broadcast on 4 January 1960, Oppenheimer went even further. Asked to predict what the coming decade might bring, he said:

But, above all, he hoped, we would learn ‘something about ourselves’, and that ‘we will begin to re-knit human culture, and by the insight and the wonder of the world of nature, as science has revealed it, into relevance and meaning for the intellectual life, the spiritual life of man’.

His hope of ‘re-knitting human culture’ motivated much of what he did in his last few years, including his involvement in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the tenth anniversary of which was celebrated in Berlin, the original home of the Congress, in the summer of 1960. Oppenheimer was delighted to give the opening speech of the anniversary conference, in which he spoke of the threats to, and hopes of, progress. The greatest threat he identified was that of nuclear annihilation: ‘If this next great war occurs, none of us can count on having enough living to bury our dead.’ Citing, as was his custom, ‘that beautiful poem’, the Bhagavad Gita, he asked whether we could be comforted by Vishnu’s
words to Prince Arjuna, in which Vishnu (in the form of Krishna) attempts to allay Arjuna’s anxieties about killing his fellow human beings by convincing him of the unreality of suffering and urging him to adopt an attitude of ‘freedom from the chains of attachment’. Perhaps to the surprise of those in his audience who knew him, Oppenheimer answered negatively: