American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

On February 25, 1967, mourners gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, for Robert Oppenheimer’s funeral. Nobel Prize-winning physicists, scholars, and other luminaries paid their respects. The ceremony featured three eulogies, including one delivered by George Kennan, Oppenheimer’s friend and the author of the US “containment” policy against the Soviet Union (which US officials adopted in the late 1940s and pursued as a primary Cold War strategy for decades thereafter). Kennan remembered his late friend as a principled patriot. Bird and Sherwin describe Oppenheimer as “an enigma” (5).

Born on April 22, 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer entered the world at a consequential time for theoretical physics, highlighted by the 1905 publication of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Robert’s parents, Julius Oppenheimer and Ella Friedman, were German Jewish immigrants who had settled separately in New York before meeting and eventually marrying. Julius had amassed substantial wealth in the textile business. Ella, a young artist with a strong personality, formed a powerful bond with her son Robert but protected him to excess. As an elementary school student, Robert developed solitary and diverse pursuits such as poetry and studying minerals—and showed signs of precocious genius. As a teen, Robert attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, the instructional arm of the Ethical Culture Society. Founded by Dr. Felix Adler, the son of another German Jewish immigrant, the Ethical Culture Society promoted secular humanism. The school attracted students from affluent families, including Jewish families eager to assimilate into an increasingly antisemitic US society. Robert’s teachers were socially conscious; one had descended directly from a famous 19th-century abolitionist.

Robert excelled as a student, but his sheltered upbringing made it difficult to form friendships, so he often appeared to other students either conceited or withdrawn. He did develop a friendship with Francis Fergusson, a scholarship student from New Mexico. In addition, Robert discovered both an enthusiasm and an aptitude for sailing, along with a curious disregard for physical danger. In the spring of 1922, a year after graduating from the Ethical Culture School, his friend and teacher Herbert Smith took Robert on a summer trip to New Mexico, where they stayed with Fergusson and his family. At the Los Pinos Ranch northeast of Santa Fe, Robert met Katherine Chaves Page, a 28-year-old married woman with whom he became infatuated and formed a lifelong friendship. Robert fell in love with New Mexico’s physical beauty, including a pleasant plateau overlooking the valley of Los Alamos.

After returning from New Mexico, 18-year-old Oppenheimer entered Harvard University. Once again, he struggled to make friends. In addition, he periodically experienced depression. Academically, he chose chemistry as a major but quickly learned that his truest scientific love lied in theoretical physics. During his sophomore year, he attended multiple lectures by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Neils Bohr, celebrated for his work on the atom. Oppenheimer proved a brilliant yet unusual scientist: He adored the theory of physics but abhorred experimental work in laboratories. His gloom deepened, and he often unburdened himself in letters to his friend and former teacher, Herbert Smith.

Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude in 1925 after only three years at Harvard. That summer, he took his parents to New Mexico, where they lodged at Katherine Page’s ranch. Along with Paul Horgan, a friend from his previous New Mexico trip, Robert enjoyed extensive horseback riding in the mountains he now loved. Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s 13-year-old brother, accompanied them. Robert acquired a smoking habit.

In September 1925, Oppenheimer sailed for England to begin graduate studies at Cambridge University. His friend Francis Fergusson, a Rhodes Scholar studying at Oxford, met him at the train station. At Cambridge, Oppenheimer displayed rare brilliance. He bristled at dull lab work, however, and experienced terrible depression (which threatened to derail his life) and erratic behavior.

Ella Oppenheimer tried to improve her son’s mental health by inviting Inez Pollak, a young woman who was one of Robert’s high-school classmates, to accompany the family to England. Their courtship proved disastrous, however, and he experienced even deeper depression. Then, in an act both self-destructive and vindictive, Robert foolishly and dangerously laced an apple with a substance designed to sicken whoever ate it and then left the apple for a teacher he detested. Spared expulsion and criminal charges, Robert received psychiatric care. He felt on the verge of self-harm. When his friend Francis Fergusson revealed that his girlfriend had accepted his proposal of marriage, Robert snapped, wound a belt around his friend’s neck, and then collapsed on the floor, weeping. Fergusson forgave his deeply troubled friend.

In the spring of 1926, Robert accompanied three other friends on a short vacation to Corsica. There, he appeared to have an epiphany, for his outlook had improved when he returned. Back at Cambridge, he met Neils Bohr in person and decided to throw all of his energies into theoretical physics.

Having nearly self-destructed at Cambridge, Oppenheimer decided to continue his studies at Georgia Augusta University in the small German town of Gottingen, which Bird and Sherwin describe as “undoubtedly the center of theoretical physics” (56). Max Born, the Physics Department Chair, had instructed such brilliant physicists as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Enrico Fermi. Oppenheimer noted the deteriorating political and economic conditions in the waning years of Germany’s Weimar Republic. As a precocious intellectual, he still sometimes intimidated and even alienated his fellow students, and his despairing moods occasionally returned. Nonetheless, he excelled in Gottingen, publishing an astonishing seven papers in the emerging field of quantum physics. One paper, on the behavior of molecules, laid the foundation for decades of work in high-energy physics.

Having earned his doctoral degree in Gottingen, Oppenheimer returned to New York in 1927. After one postdoctoral term back at Harvard, he moved to Pasadena, California, and began teaching at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in early 1928. That summer, Robert and his brother, Frank, now 16 and an aspiring physicist too, returned to New Mexico and stayed with Katherine Page. They convinced their father to lease a nearby ranch, which they named Perro Caliente. Robert later purchased the ranch and returned to it often.

Back in Pasadena, Robert found that his growing reputation as a theoretical physicist had expanded his opportunities. He accepted a joint position at Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley. First, however, he secured a fellowship to return to Europe and study for another year. In Copenhagen, he studied under Wolfgang Pauli, whom he grew to admire, and met Isidor I. Rabi, a young fellow physicist of Jewish ancestry who, like Robert, had grown up in New York. Unlike Robert, however, Rabi embraced his Jewish heritage. Robert and Rabi nonetheless developed a strong friendship.

Robert, Frank, and their parents returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1929. Back at Berkeley that fall, Robert struggled to explain physics on a level that undergraduates could understand. By all accounts, however, he developed into a charismatic lecturer. In addition, he attracted dozens of talented graduate students. Those closest to their mentor called him “Oppie.” Robert met his colleague Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a brilliant experimental physicist and future Nobel Prize winner whose work brought in research money and allowed him to develop the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (“Rad Lab”). Robert’s own work remained focused on theoretical physics. He developed a reputation as a brilliant synthesizer who saw at once all crucial elements of a problem, but his varied interests prevented him from focusing on one task for an extended period. As a now-confident and thriving professor in his late twenties, Robert attracted far more attention from young women than he had in his student days.

As an unmarried professor, Oppenheimer often spent social hours with his graduate students. Some of the male students even began mimicking his quirks. Oppenheimer regularly displayed both patience and generosity toward his students. In October 1931, Ella Oppenheimer died. Struggling to cope with the loss of his mother, Robert turned to the Bhagavad Gita and found comfort in Eastern mysticism. At the University of Michigan, where Oppenheimer conducted summer lectures, talented young physicist Robert Serber met him and decided to join him at Berkeley. The friendship grew so close that Oppenheimer invited Serber and his wife, Charlotte, to visit him in New Mexico in the summer of 1935. Robert Serber had connections to the Communist Party through Charlotte and her family. Although Oppenheimer read widely in the humanities, Oppenheimer had never taken much interest in practical politics. The events of the early 1930s, however, particularly the deepening Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, awakened Oppenheimer’s left-wing political consciousness.