Consorting with the Government Over National Security

J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos project that built the American A-bomb during World War Two. An extraordinary scientist and intellect, he had pottered around in politics on the left edge of the New Deal before the war, involving himself with members of the Communist Party USA. Similar to many reflective people on the left in the 1930s, he may even for a time have been more than a fellow traveler. Although Oppenheimer trimmed his sails when he got the job at Los Alamos, his affiliations would even be questioned from 1942 to 1945. During the early part of the Cold War, although he moved on to commanding positions as a scientific advisor to the government about nuclear weapons, his political past came to haunt him. His doubts about the building of a thermonuclear weapon, the H-bomb, connected up with his supposed tilt toward the communist world. When political culture in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s developed rituals of public degradation for those whose former ideological commitments were disputed, Oppenheimer was destroyed. In 1954, in a celebrated case, his security clearance was revoked.

While perhaps not as compelling a subject for study as Alger Hiss, Oppenheimer has attracted much attention from skilled historians. We have one of them in Charles Thorpe. Reviewers have widely praised his book, now in paperback, since it was first published in 2006. While Oppenheimer shows ability and competence, I would not judge it as earth shattering. My modest estimate stems from a simple fact. So much of a biographical nature has been published on Oppenheimer since 2000 that the possibilities are restricted for finding a conceptual or empirical path distinct from that taken by other scholars.

In American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin have written the most readable and even gripping biography of Oppenheimer. ¹ But, in my view, Bird and Sherwin lack a critical view of Oppenheimer's politics. Thorpe has more detachment and less commitment to the left and to Oppenheimer's way of seeing things, and he provides more analysis about the policies of the period. At the same time, however, the engaged reader might want to use the richly detailed work of Bird and Sherwin as a background for understanding the points Thorpe wants to make. I sometimes felt that, while astute, Thorpe basically supplied an interpretative commentary on American Prometheus, although he has surely done his own extended and original research.

Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect exemplifies a new genre of intellectual biography that perhaps was given birth by work in the history and sociology of science. Academics with training in both sociology and history hope to advance our grasp of developments in thought by avoiding the sometimes flat-footed techniques of conventional biographers of people of mind, and by using insights from more theoretically sophisticated vantage points. We now have a "sociology of ideas" that is employed in biography. An example that has gotten recent attention is Neil Gross's Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (2008), but Thorpe, while not perfect, makes a better effort than Gross.

Here's the issue. Intellectual historians employ a series of explanatory devices that many theorists say derive from "folk psychology." We talk about the motives of thinkers, and try to grasp their intentions in much the same way we would were we talking in an everyday way about the reasoning and understanding of our scholarly colleagues. The new sociologists of ideas believe we can do better than this. They have ways of studying intellectuals that can leverage us a little bit above the sphere of folk psychology. Thorpe's book has an outstanding feature. The sociological generalizations he uses to achieve this leverage actually help; he rarely obfuscates with jargon. While the sociology may not bear as much fruit as Thorpe sometimes intimates, he does generate a view of Oppenheimer not clearly seen in the literature previously. This perspective gives us a more complex...