Friday, July 21, marks the opening of two highly anticipated movies that have nothing to do with each other but have already been paired in the public consciousness, perhaps because they both ask us to consider what it means to be human in a world where people constantly grapple for power.
The two films — “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” — have already been conflated as “Barbenheimer” (is that like “Frankenstein”?), with movie buffs planning a five-hour double feature of “Oppenheimer’s” main course and “Barbie’s” dessert. (Well, why not? After all, Barbie and J. Robert Oppenheimer were both physicists.)
I’ll have more on Barbie,“Barbie” and the male gaze in a subsequent post. But for now I’d like to consider Oppenheimer (1904-67), the scientist who spearheaded the creation of the atom bomb and whose life, lived at the nexus of ambition and conscience, would be eclipsed by his failure to understand the power dynamic.
Many continue to ask why the United States chose to pursue the bomb and why Oppenheimer — the brilliant, coddled son of a wealthy, adoring German-Jewish family in New York City who became a charismatic theoretical-physics professor at Berkeley and Caltech — came to direct the scientific team, a role for which he had no experience.
The Nazis were already in pursuit of such a weapon — an alarming scenario that Albert Einstein made clear in a 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — when Gen. Leslie Groves selected Oppenheimer to lead the scientific aspect of the Manhattan Project, so-called for the engineering district in New York City where the quest to build the bomb originated. Although Oppenheimer had no Nobel Prize to go along with his lack of experience, unlike other scientists, and was deemed a security risk because of his associations with the American Communist Party, Groves saw in him the kind of leadership skills and wide-ranging brilliance that would be needed to head a team of scientists in the makeshift town of Los Alamos in New Mexico, where Oppenheimer had a ranch. And one thing more: Grove sensed Oppenheimer was a man of “overweening pride.” His ego was not about to let him fail.
As it was, Nazi Germany was defeated before the bomb was completed, but the scientists toiled on and ultimately the U.S. decided to drop not one but two bombs on an unbending Japan, sparing a long, bloody invasion and countless more lives.
That is at least the official story as history records it. But I don’t think it’s the entire story or even the most important story. I think the members of the Manhattan Project continued to build the bomb for the same reason that anyone sees a creation to completion. You want to see if it works and, having seen that, you want it out in the world. This isn’t just human nature. It’s nature itself’s response to creativity, even if that creative act results in a weapon of mass destruction.
Having seen his baby born and succeed, Oppenheimer was the most famous scientist in the world. But fame isn’t the same thing as power. The reason power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is because it is about maintaining and attaining more power. It’s like money. If $1 million is good, $2 million is better and $10 is fantastic. One bomb is awe-inspiring. Two is terrifying and a whole arsenal is shock and awe. Only after the war, Oppenheimer didn’t think there should be an arsenal.
Time really is another country. The men who helped win the war — the Oppenheimers, the Churchills, the Alan Turings — found themselves losing the peace in the decade that followed as the world tried to forget and moved on to new villains real (the Communists) and imagined (gays, Blacks, anyone who was Other). The leaks at Los Alamos that led to erstwhile ally Russia getting the bomb and Oppenheimer’s familial ties to the American Communist Party via wife Kitty and brother Frank would prevent his security clearance from being renewed — a clearance that has been reinstated posthumously by the Biden Administration.
But even without Communist overtones — there is no reason to think Oppenheimer ever collaborated with the Soviets — his fate was sealed. Like a lot of smart, arrogant people, he had a blindspot. He never understood that you can’t have your ambitious cake and eat your principled one, too. You can’t be both a player and an outlier.
And his protestations against nuclear proliferation and the hydrogen bomb, however noble, seemed to others, not unreasonably, to be naive, disingenuous, duplicitous even. Having shepherded the bomb to fruition — having achieved creative fulfillment, as it were — he had the luxury of disdaining his accomplishment. Perhaps Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin should not have called their masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning biography — on which Christopher Nolan based his film “Oppenheimer” — “American Prometheus” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). In Greek mythology, Prometheus gives mankind fire, for which he is eternally punished by the gods. But he doesn’t create fire and he doesn’t disavow it. Instead, Oppenheimer’s biographers should’ve called their book “American Frankenstein,” after Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus,” who disowns his monstrosity.
“My two great loves are physics and New Mexico,” the biography quotes Oppenheimer as saying. “It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” Be careful what you wish for. The desert, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes in “Thoughts in Solitude” (Shambala, 1993), was the place of contemplation and humility where the Chosen People sealed their covenant with God. It became, he continues, a place of madness, filled with cities of vice and weapons of mass destruction.
“When man and his money and his machines move out into the desert…the desert moves everywhere,” Merton writes. “Everywhere is desert.”
Oppenheimer’s blind ambition, arrogance and lack of self-awareness made him vulnerable to enemies like Edward Teller, whose pet hydrogen bomb he opposed, and Lewis Strauss, the jealous chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who unnecessarily savaged Oppenheimer in a series of hearings in the spring of 1954.
Strauss would get his karmic comeuppance when the Senate failed to confirm him as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of commerce, ending Strauss’ government career. Among those who struck the blow was Sen. John F. Kennedy, who as Eisenhower’s successor would award Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Medal. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented it to him. But Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, insisted on meeting him to let him know her late husband really wanted him to have the medal. Four years later, a broken Oppenheimer would be dead of throat cancer.
Thinking of Oppenheimer, you can’t help but remember another flawed, egotistical, charismatic figure, one who galvanized the First World War. (T.E.) Lawrence of Arabia had a moment leading the Arab revolt against the Turks only to see that moment snuffed out by the victorious politicians who had no interest in Arab independence.
In David Lean’s stunning 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia,” screenwriter Robert Bolt has the shrewd Saudi Arabian King Faisal say prophetically to Lawrence, “For you there is only the desert.”
Oppenheimer’s tragedy was perhaps failing to understand that Los Alamos was such a moment.
For him, too, there was only the dessert.