A Rare Gift for Complication

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Knopf, 2005. xiii + 721 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

On October 1, 2005, Dr. Atomic, an opera by John Adams about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, opened at the San Francisco opera. The scientist himself, ironically, disliked operas and as a young man usually walked out after the first act. His interests were much more literary, and characteristically, he had a volume of Baudelaire's poetry in his pocket at the testing of the A-bomb, which he called Trinity in reference to a John Donne poem. The editors of Oppenheimer's letters (Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner) pointed out in 1980 that when he was a Harvard student, his letters "suggest a literary man in the making rather than a scientist."¹ Adams's opera alludes to Faust, and other commentators on Oppenheimer's career have alluded to Hamlet in Oppenheimer's favorite Shakespearean play. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin have pertinently invoked Prometheus. He gave mankind fire, as well as many contributions to their reason and understanding, yet was punished by Zeus, who chained him to a rock, where his liver was torn daily by an eagle.

The myth resonates for them with the contribution of his brilliant leadership in the making of the A-bomb and the punishment of his being branded a "security risk" on the invidious ground of his "character" and "associations," as interpreted by the believers in the H-bomb as the key to American security. The last photograph, among a wealth of them in the book, is an eloquent frontal portrait of Oppenheimer with sad eyes and a monastic mien. Certainly Oppenheimer was in his private life often oddly detached, but he was always committed, for better or worse, in his public life; his knowledge and values were thoroughly secular in a modern way.

The physicist Dr. Isadore I. Rabi pointed the way for a biographer in his testimony on behalf of Oppenheimer at the Personnel Security Board hearings: "That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did and what sort of person he was."² The novelist George Eliot argued for the value of "the veracious imagination" in dealing with political and social change, using documents and "analogical creation" for filling in the gaps in the record. Joseph Kanon's fictional portrait of Oppenheimer, as director of the bomb project in Los Alamos (1997), is consistent with the historical figure, but he is not the central character of a novel that is primarily a detective story, set in a historically credible Los Alamos.³

Rabi's reference to "the history of the man" and Eliot's call for the "veracious imagination" have their best example not in fiction, but in Bird's and Sherwin's biography. American Prometheus has a history. In 1979 Martin Sherwin began extensively researching Oppenheimer's story. After twenty years, the end was not in sight, but five years ago he invited Kai Bird to join him, and the book was completed. Sherwin a historian and Bird a biographer complemented each other to create a fusion and not a fission reaction; the narrating voice is singular. With its sensitivity to the emotional side of relationships and taking account of the women and children in his life, it reads like a moving, realistic novel about a scientist as flawed hero, a man whose struggle to balance competing interests in a history-making role of leadership puts him under strain and suspicion.

Oppenheimer's inspiring direction of the Los Alamos project for the A-bomb was a great achievement, especially for someone with no prior administrative experience and who had to deal daily not only with independently minded intellectuals but also with security-minded military men. His hopes...