Have mercy on our uniform,
Man of peace or man of war,
The peacock spreads his fan…
— ‘Song of Issac’ by Leonard Cohen
I haven’t yet seen the movie, Oppenheimer, but apparently a lot of other people have. The film has grossed (according to the website Box Office Mojo) $329 million in the U.S. and about $361 million in Europe and the Middle East.
And $61 million in China. (Maybe their tickets were discounted?)
I plan to watch it. I’ve been fascinated with big explosions since I was a kid, and from what I gather, Oppenheimer features one of the biggest and most important explosions in history. And remarkably, no one was killed. (Until later.)
Although explosions fascinate me, I like them better on a small screen, with the sound level turned down. Call me a whimp if you want. Fortunately, the movie is now streaming on “Peacock”… the streaming service owned by NBC and Universal Studios.
“Peacock”… a pleasant reminder of the good old days when certain TV shows on NBC began with the uplifting message, “The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC.”
Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, wrote:
Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.
Of course, not everyone would agree with that statement, about “the most important person who ever lived.” I suspect Donald J. Trump is among them. And I might be, as well. Like, what about Bill Gates? And Walt Disney?
Be that as it may, J. Robert Oppenheimer certainly belongs on a list of important people. Though it’s not clear of that’s the “naughty” list or the “nice” list.
We know that he was hired to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, so that’s certainly one tally in the naughty column. We also know that he dated Stanford Medical School student and Communist Party member Jean Tatlock when she was 22 and he was 32. (Another tally?) He began taking an interest in left-wing political causes, and while he never officially joined the Communist Party, many of his closest friends and family members did, including his brother Frank Oppenheimer, his friend Haakon Chevalier, and his future wife Katharine “Kitty” Puening.
The naughty list is starting to look like the best choice.
But in spite of all these Communist friends, the U.S. government picked him to build the most powerful bomb ever devised.
Why does that sound exactly like what the U.S. government would do?
Over the years, Oppenheimer developed a reputation as a womanizer, which I guess is expected when you work for the government.
After creating the nuclear bomb, Oppenheimer got crossways with Lewis Strauss, an investment banker and politician, over the advisability of developing the hydrogen bomb, and Strauss managed to get Oppenheimer’s security clearance revoked. A friend of Strauss’ — William Borden, former executive director of Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy — sent a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover suggesting that “more probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.”
Another tally in the naughty column? Or just conniving politicians, screwing honest scientists who make horrific bombs?
The result of the security hearing came to define Oppenheimer for the rest of his life. But that’s better than being defined as a womanizer, I would think.
The 2006 Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus, was temporarily the Number One Bestseller on Amazon last August, shortly after the Nolan film was released. Five months later. it’s dropped to #373. We lose interest so easily.
One final comment. Oppenheimer was interviewed in 1965 by NBC News, a couple of years before he passed, and he infamously summed up his life’s work with a line from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
He probably couldn’t have imagined that thousands of nuclear bombs would eventually be sitting around, unused, like leftover COVID masks.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.