American Prometheus is a first-rate biography, thorough, judicious, full of telling anecdotes, drawing on an astonishing range of sources (including Oppenheimer's 7,000-page FBI file), etc., fully deserving of its Pulitzer Prize. I'm going to split my review into two parts, because I want to deal first with the thing that fascinates me about Oppenheimer. The questions about Oppenheimer's political involvement and eventual expulsion from the government will be covered in a later post.
Around the middle of 1942, the US government began to get serious about the atomic bomb program. That meant thinking about who to put in charge of it. The Army tapped Colonel Leslie Groves, fresh from building the Pentagon, to head their side of things, sweetening the deal by offering him promotion to Brigadier General. But who would lead the scientists?
For many people there was only one answer: J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was widely considered to be America's smartest physicist and knew as much as anybody about the physics involved in making a bomb. The German nuclear program was led by Werner Heisenberg, a towering genius whose name is written into physics at the most fundamental level, and people thought that among Americans only Oppenheimer had a chance against him. Oppenheimer also knew everybody in physics; this was partly because he was a wealthy, well-travelled man who loved intellectual conversation, and partly because he had cooperated with so many other physicists in his work. (Because, people said, he was great at generating ideas but lousy at doing the detailed mathematical work necessary for formal publication, so he always had one or more co-authors to do that.) Nobody disliked him; he is completely free of that aura of stolen ideas, collaborators not acknowledged, obnoxious behavior, and so on that hangs around many successful scientists. He was also a great teacher who offered the first seminar on quantum mechanics outside of Europe, which made him a key shaper of a generation of younger physicists. Many of his students became his lifelong friends. Plus he was already working in the program, running a group making calculations on fast neutron propagation. So wherever Groves went and whoever he asked about leading the bomb program, the answer he got was "Oppenheimer."
But.
Oppenheimer had never led anything bigger than a seminar. He had never shown any interest in administration even at the level of department chair, and was not much involved in regional or national scientific associations. He never taught a class before 11 AM because he liked to stay up late every night drinking and socializing. His desk was always a mess, covered with piles of paper, grocery lists mixed in with important calculations. He also had a long history of involvement with left wing organizations, and although he denied ever having been a member of the Communist Party the FBI did not believe him. According to American Prometheus, when Groves mentioned Oppenheimer's name to the S-1 committee, the high-level group in charge of the atomic program (Secretary of War Stimson, Vannevar Bush, James Conant, etc.), they said, no chance. Groves said, ok, who then? After a month in which people suggested numerous other names that were immediately shot down, the committee ended up back where Groves and most of the physics community had landed: Oppenheimer.
At a date that is not recorded but must have been in November 1942, Groves tapped Oppenheimer. It was a rocky transition. Oppenheimer did make one excellent decision right away, to establish a secret town in a remote part of New Mexico where the scientists would work together in isolation. But he bungled much else. His early interactions with Army counterintelligence were disastrous in a way that later came back to haunt him. He first said that the program would need only six physicists, a number that very rapidly ballooned into the hundreds. First he wanted no organizational structure at all, then when he decided that there would be four divisions he tried to be both the overall director and head of the theoretical section, and he resisted having either an org chart or an assistant director. People began to murmur that he was a bad choice after all.
But Oppenheimer realized that he was screwing up, and then, somehow, he did the thing that fascinates me: he transformed himself into the leader the program needed. He began arriving at his (clean) desk every day at 7:30 AM. He became adept at choosing leaders for the various parts of the program and he arranged a staff for himself that got the project up and running. He was everywhere, talking to every single one of the 400 physicists and engineers about his work, impressing all of them with his grasp of what they were doing. Over the objections of the Army he set up colloquia where there was free-ranging discussion of all parts of the program, which many participants said was vital for success. He set the project schedule and pushed everyone to meet it. He had an excellent sense of which problems raised by others were serious and demanded extra resources and which would sort themselves out. When disputes broke out at Los Alamos he brought everybody together and cajoled them toward agreement; when they could not be made to agree he made the decision himself. He had insisted from the beginning that the scientists must be able to bring their families with them to Los Alamos, and he made sure there were programs for families and a school for the children. He was a father figure to all the young physicists in the program; if you have read Richard Feynman's famous memoirs you may have noticed that Feynman was in awe only of one man in his life, and that was Oppenheimer. When Feynman was sent to check on the progress of Uranium work at Oak Ridge, Oppenheimer took the time to coach him on how to act and what to say. In interview after interview (American Prometheus cites at least twenty) veterans of Los Alamos said that without Oppenheimer there is no way they would have finished a bomb before the end of the war.
As part of this transformation Oppenheimer, hitherto known mainly for mumbling, made himself into a public speaker. His first appearances before Los Alamos crowds were mediocre to awful, but over the course of the war he found his voice, and by 1945 people were describing his speeches as "riveting" and "inspiring."
Wikipedia says that Oppenheimer "at first had difficulty with the organizational division of large groups but rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence at Los Alamos." As if, you know, this were not especially noteworthy, just something that one does. But I disagree; I think that of all the remarkable things that Oppenheimer did, the most remarkable was to turn himself into the man the moment required. In the face of world war, determined to win a race with the Nazis for the ultimate weapon, Oppenheimer made himself into something he had never been before, something most people who knew him doubted he could become or would ever want to become. He saw what was needed and became it.
How?
One thing cited by many people at the time was ambition. Oppenheimer was overtaken by a very powerful desire to make an atomic bomb before the Nazis, and he just as badly wanted to lead that effort. His old friends were startled; Oppenheimer's only real ambitions before 1942 were scientific, and he got along so well with other physicists partly because he never sought power, accolades, or attention for himself. This ambition was noticed by the FBI and Army counterintelligence men who worried about Oppenheimer's politics. In secret memos they said that they could insure his cooperation by threatening to remove him from the program, because he obviously wanted to write his name in the history books as the father of the bomb.
And what was that about? Oppenheimer had long been anti-fascist, supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and working to help Jewish physicists escape from Germany. Did he want to be remembered as a great fighter against Fascism? Did he, like many other Jewish physicists, believe that this was the best way for Jews to fight back against Hitler? Did he want to be famous? Had he simply looked around and decided, like Groves and many others, that he was the best man for the job, so he had damn well better do it? We don't know, because he never said. But we can see that it happened.
As I wrote here back in 2013 about Barack Obama turning himself into a debater when it seemed essential to his re-election, I have a strong sense that the most successful people are the ones who refuse to give in to their natural weaknesses, but overcome them.
I wonder, though, about the price Oppenheimer paid for his transformation. Did he, perhaps, simply exhaust himself? Not only did he put in extraordinary hours for four straight years, much of his effort was spent on things he was not good at and which might have been contrary to his nature. By the end of 1946 he had lost the struggle over control of nuclear technology and the Cold War arms race was on. He was saddled with the burden of being the man who built the bomb but then failed to control it. And, I think, he was very, very tired.
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