Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project, is frequently depicted as a tragic figure. He is often described as an American Prometheus who bestowed humanity with the atomic bomb, suffered from guilt over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and eventually lost his security clearance during the political tensions of the 1950s.
In his new biography, Robert Oppenheimer: The Sphinx Without a Secret, journalist David Rieff offers a different perspective. Rieff examines Oppenheimer's formative experiences, particularly his mixed feelings about his Jewish heritage, to explain the physicist's enigmatic personality. The author argues that beneath Oppenheimer's apparent emotional distance lay a consistent drive to remain at the center of cultural, scientific, and governmental life.
Rieff notes that many biographers attribute Oppenheimer's mysterious nature to his suppression of his ethnic identity. During his time at the Ethical Culture School in New York City, his only close friend was a non-Jew from New Mexico. At a summer camp for affluent German Jewish children in upstate New York, the 14-year-old Oppenheimer faced mockery for his small stature and lack of interest in sports.
The camp experience left a lasting impression. When his parents complained to staff about the teasing, other campers beat him, poured green paint on his body, and locked him in an icehouse for the night. Rieff suggests that Oppenheimer's decision to stay for the rest of the summer and his refusal to identify his abusers helped shape a personality that was comfortable within a self-created psychological space. This tendency toward silence was evident decades later during the 1954 hearings where he failed to defend himself vigorously against the removal of his security clearances.
Despite his personal reticence, Oppenheimer was active in supporting Jewish causes. In 1934, while working as a graduate student in Germany, he sent a portion of his salary to the University of California, Berkeley, to help German Jewish scientists escape the rising Nazi threat. Throughout the 1930s, he expressed a deep anger regarding the treatment of Jews in Germany. This sentiment, combined with his sympathy for victims of the Great Depression and his relationships with political radicals, led him to support Communist front organizations.
Oppenheimer did not abandon his political views when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact in 1939. However, when France fell and the Battle of Britain began, his patriotic instincts were strongly awakened. He sought to play a central role in the impending war and distanced himself from the Communist Party, though he maintained contact with his brother Frank and his former partner Jean Tatlock. At Los Alamos, General Leslie Groves overrode objections from the FBI and army intelligence to grant Oppenheimer a security clearance, betting that the physicist's ambition and loyalty would ensure his dedication to the project.
After the bombing of Nagasaki, Rieff points out that Oppenheimer did not experience a sudden moment of regret. Instead, he continued to defend the bomb while acknowledging its grim implications. He told President Harry Truman that he felt he had blood on his hands. In his later years as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Oppenheimer focused on the need for international control over nuclear weapons.
Colleagues often found it difficult to predict whether Oppenheimer would act as a tragic intellectual or a dutiful soldier when discussing controversial issues. He believed that ambiguity was necessary to navigate life. Oppenheimer died in 1967, but his legacy remains powerful, as evidenced by the popularity of the 2023 film directed by Christopher Nolan. Rieff argues that the public's fear of nuclear holocaust continues to fuel interest in the man he describes as a sphinx, whose story is true in some ways and not in others.
