The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

We are all a part of Oppenheimer's tragedy.

J. Robert Oppenheimer , who came from a family of German immigrants, ethnically and culturally Jewish but secular, was equal parts brilliant and neurotic. Often depressed, he drank heavily, and cigarettes became an addiction that led to his smoking four to five packs a day. He once tried to poison his academic advisor. Many of his relationships were troubled. In 1954, he accepted the challenge of appearing at a hearing about his loyalty before the Personnel Security Board of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. He did not need to appear, as Albert Einstein advised him. But Oppenheimer felt the need to fight. He approached the hearing with a fatalism that almost seemed wishful, as though he deserved to be punished.

At the same time, Oppenheimer was an original thinker in the new physics; Bird and Sherwin (2005) argue that had he remained as a researcher in academia he would have won a Nobel Prize. Instead, General Leslie Groves enlisted him to lead the making of the first nuclear bomb. With great panache, Oppenheimer created something of an intellectual utopian community in Los Alamos, New Mexico, pulling together a motley crew of talented scientists whom he inspired and directed, and they produced the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Christopher Nolan based his 2023 biopic, Oppenheimer, on the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It is not a bad film. Cillian Murphy does a creditable job as Oppenheimer, and Matt Damon is an excellent Groves. But Robert Downey, Jr., steals the show as the malevolent Lewis Strauss, who manipulated the 1954 hearing to ensure that Oppenheimer would lose his clearance and be removed from governmental positions. Whenever Downey is on camera, he fills the screen. Too long and inevitably incomplete—how could 3 hours capture the

712-page, small-print biography?—the film does provide a reas