Summary of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer E-Book

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• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Summary of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

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The biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, is a captivating account of his life and times during America's transformation. It offers voluminous scholarship and insight, capturing Oppenheimer's essential nature and self-contradictory behavior.

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Summary of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer offers a captivating account of his life and experiences during America's transformation, revealing his essential nature and self-contradictory behavior.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

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Summary of

American Prometheus

A

Summary of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book

The Inspiration for the Major Motion

Picture OPPENHEIMER

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American Prometheus: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture OPPENHEIMER by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

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PREFACE

In 1953, Robert Oppenheimer faced a difficult decision: resign from his government advisory positions or face charges from chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss. Oppenheimer was declared a security risk and faced charges ranging from ridiculous to political. His left-wing activities during the 1930s in Berkeley and postwar resistance to the Air Force's plans for massive strategic bombing with nuclear weapons angered powerful Washington insiders, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Lewis Strauss. After much discussion, Oppenheimer decided to fight the charges and drafted a letter to "Dear Lewis," stating that Strauss had encouraged him to resign. However, Oppenheimer could not let the charges go unchallenged, and he drafted a letter to "Dear Lewis."

The agony and humiliation Oppenheimer endured in 1954 were not unique during the McCarthy era. He was America's Prometheus, "the father of the atomic bomb," who led the effort to wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. In the late 1940s, as U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated, Oppenheimer's persistent desire to raise tough questions about nuclear weapons greatly troubled Washington's national security establishment. Strauss and his allies were determined to silence the one man who they feared could credibly challenge their policies.

American Prometheus is a deeply personal biography that follows J. Robert Oppenheimer from his childhood in New York's Upper West Side to his death in 1967. The book highlights the connection between our identity as a people and the culture of things nuclear. Oppenheimer tried to divert us from the bomb culture by containing the nuclear threat he had helped to set loose, such as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. However, Cold War politics at home and abroad doomed the plan, and America and other nations embraced the bomb for the next half century.

The threat of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism is likely more imminent in the twenty-first century than ever before. Oppenheimer's warnings were ignored, and the powers-that-be rose up in anger to punish him when he tried to control the atomic fire.

PROLOGUE

On February 25, 1967, six hundred friends and colleagues gathered in Princeton to remember and mourn the death of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a renowned physicist, the "father" of the atomic bomb, and a national hero. Oppenheimer was declared a security risk by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, making him the most prominent victim of America's anticommunist crusade. Nobelists, including Albert Einstein's daughter, Margot, Robert Serber, Hans Bethe, and Irva Denham Green, attended the memorial service. The event was attended by powerful luminaries of America's foreign policy establishment, including John J. McCloy, General Leslie R. Groves, Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey.

Oppenheimer's life was shrouded in controversy, myth, and mystery, compared to the 1633 trial of Galileo Galilei by a medieval-minded church and Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s. Despite his controversies, Oppenheimer's dedication to science and rational thought led to his unique role as an architect of the nuclear era.

PART ONE

He Received Every New Idea as Perfectly Beautiful

His Separate Prison

In September 1922, Robert Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard, despite not receiving a fellowship. He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River. At nineteen, he was an oddly handsome young man with extreme features, such as a thin, kinky black hair and a straight Roman nose. At Harvard, his intellect thrived, but his social development floundered. He was on his own, and he made very few new friends.

Robert was already reading darkspirited writers like Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, and his favorite Shakespearean character was Hamlet. He had bouts of melancholy and depressions as a youngster, and his flair for the intellectual went beyond the merely ostentatious. He formed a friendship with Frederick Bernheim, a pre-med student who had graduated from the Ethical Culture School a year after him. They shared adjacent rooms in an old house at 60 Mount Auburn Street, close to the offices of the Harvard Crimson.

Robert was considered a hypochondriac, and he was often seen as a dominant figure in his room. Bernheim credited him with inspiring his later career in medical research. William Clouser Boyd, another Harvard student, took an instant liking to Robert and they shared interests aside from science. They tried to write poetry and short stories imitative of Chekhov, and Boyd called him "Clowser."

Robert Oppenheimer initially struggled with choosing an academic path, taking various unrelated courses, including philosophy, French literature, English, introductory calculus, history, and three chemistry courses. He briefly considered architecture, but eventually settled on chemistry as his first passion.

Harvard's political culture in the early 1920s was conservative, with a quota to restrict the number of Jewish students. In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported that the university's former president Charles W. Eliot declared it "unfortunate" that growing numbers of the "Jewish race" were intermarrying with Christians. President A. Lawrence Lowell refused to allow Negroes to reside in freshman dormitories with whites. Robert joined the Student Liberal Club, founded three years earlier, which took a formal stand against the university's discriminatory admissions policies.

By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Robert decided that he had made a mistake in selecting chemistry as his major. He found that what he liked in chemistry was very close to physics, and he petitioned the Physics Department for graduate standing, which would allow him to take upper-level physics courses.

His primary tutor in physics was Percy Bridgman, who later won a Nobel Prize. Oppenheimer found Bridgman a wonderful teacher, but he felt insecure about the gaps in his knowledge and believed that he should have learned more mathematics through being with people. Despite his struggles, Oppenheimer's love for physics and his intellectual pursuits led him to become a renowned scientific god in Europe. His life was filled with erotic poetry and a deep connection to the world around him.

I Am Having a Pretty Bad Time

Robert Harvey, a Harvard student, experienced mixed experiences in his life, with his intellectual growth and social experiences leaving his emotional life taut and strained. He met Francis Fergusson in Swanage, Dorsetshire, England, and arrived at Cambridge University during a time of excitement in physics. Robert struggled with his lab work and his relationship with Fred Bernheim, who would become his wife. He was also struggling with depression and his mother's struggles.

Fergusson concluded that Robert had a first-class case of depression, and his parents, Ella and Julius, insisted on rushing across the Atlantic to be with their troubled son, Robert Oppenheimer. Robert was in a state of emotional distress when he kissed a woman in a third-class carriage, but she was overcome with remorse and begged her pardon. He later met Inez Pollak, a classmate from the Ethical Culture School, and they were informally engaged but were eventually stomped off in a huff.

Robert's emotional state deteriorated, and he complained about his troubled relationship with his head tutor, Patrick Blackett, who hounded him to do more laboratory work. In late autumn 1925, Robert poisoned the head steward of a restaurant, which was considered a potentially lethal act of jealousy. He was placed on probation and had regular sessions with a prominent psychiatrist in London, but his visits were unsuccessful, and he was diagnosed with dementia praecox, an archaic label for symptoms associated with schizophrenia.