Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, discusses the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, the history of nuclear weapons, and the new film on his life by Christopher Nolan.
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In the following excerpt, Richard Rhodes details what J. Robert Oppenheimer was like inside and outside Los Alamos.
Derek Thompson: I have seen the new film Oppenheimer. You have seen the new film. For those who have not seen the movie, we’re going to spoil some parts of the plot, right? At the end of the day, history is already spoiled on many parts of this plot, but we’re going to try to do our best to not spoil the artistry of the movie until we give our critical appraisals at the very end.
So, Richard, the story is so big I almost don’t know where to start, but I thought maybe we’d start with Oppenheimer the man. I would love to know what he was like in person. In the movie, he’s called sphinxlike. He’s played with this really brilliant chilliness by Cillian Murphy. Based on your understanding and having talked to people who knew him, was he funny, charming, rich but aloof? What kind of a person was J. Robert Oppenheimer?
Richard Rhodes: Well, let’s see. Let’s start with his relationship with women. He was immensely courtly. On a first date, he would bring a flower bouquet. He had those electric blue eyes, something like Paul Newman’s blue eyes, and he was attractive to women.
As a person, however, he was an extremely conflicted human being. Isidor Rabi, who’s so wonderful in this motion picture, quoting him, the actual lines he delivered that I’ll quote later, but Rabi said once [that] Oppenheimer reminded him of a friend from Rabi’s childhood, about whom they often said he couldn’t decide whether to be the head of the Knights of Columbus or B’nai B’rith.
Thompson: What did that mean?
Rhodes: Well, from Rabi’s perspective, it meant that he had an uncertain identity, which he certainly did. He loved to play roles with people, play games with people, really. Rabi said, “He played them with me, and I didn’t mind it. I thought it was good fun.” But it upset a lot of people because they never quite knew who Oppenheimer was. In that sense, I think he had a lot of qualities in common with actors.
At the same time, for whatever reason, he could be really cruel and cutting to people when they said stupid things. Hans Bethe won a Nobel Prize for having figured out why the sun shines, how the sun’s thermonuclear system works. So no slouch, Hans Bethe, and a very steady, solid guy who was a mountain climber all his life. Bethe said, “Oppie could even jump on me and be cruel to me about mistakes I made.” And he said, “I didn’t mind.” Which Bethe would not have minded. He was perfectly confident as a human being. But if Oppenheimer could be snip-ish, if you will, even with Hans Bethe, you can imagine what his students must have sometimes felt.
And, of course, that famous scene, which is in the picture, of Oppenheimer making a joke in public at Lewis Strauss’s expense, which is one of the things that led Strauss to be so grimly despising of Oppenheimer and so determined to punish him for having humiliated Strauss in public.
So all those qualities were there. What’s interesting about it, however, and this is something Bethe and others told me when I interviewed them, [is that] he wasn’t that way in Los Alamos. So Oppenheimer, in a certain interesting way, decided to become, to act the part of the perfect lab director. And he was, because he not only understood the technical side superbly—I mean, he wasn’t a deep scientist. That’s why he never won a Nobel.
But he was a very broad scientist. He was always up on the latest things. And so if they had a problem in any of the many different aspects of inventing the bomb, they could go to Oppie, and he would quickly think it through and give them some ideas. And that in itself is a wonderful thing in a lab director. But in addition, because he was such a humanist—I mean, he wrote poetry. He taught himself Sanskrit so he could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. He was a broadly educated, humanist human being. He was able to bring to their personal problems the kind of emotional support that they needed. So if he was someone who was never quite clear about his identity, it seems at Los Alamos, everything came together. And for those three, four years, he did a wonderful job. I’m not sure anyone else could have made that work.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Richard Rhodes
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
