By the time I was 300 pages into Ray Monk's formidable biography of J Robert Oppenheimer, I couldn't imagine why anyone in his right mind would have chosen this man as director of the secret laboratory that built the first atomic bomb. If the whole thing had failed, what a harebrained scheme it would have seemed.
True enough, Oppenheimer had established himself as a brilliant theoretical physicist, even if his mathematics, by the standards of his profession, was considered a little sloppy. While he had applied the new quantum theory to solve some important problems, his contributions paled alongside those of Paul Dirac and other wunderkinder. Far from being a team player, he was a loner and an elitist, as Mr Monk recounts in Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Centre, expressing his ideas in the most oblique, Delphic terms.
Charming one moment, caustic the next, he still carried, at age 38, the markings of a spoiled, impetuous rich kid whose depressive behaviour occasionally swung toward the erratic. There were times when he even seemed crazy. During a year abroad from Harvard to study at Cambridge University, Oppenheimer confessed to putting a poisoned apple on his tutor's desk.
By the time Brig Gen Leslie Groves was seeking a director for the bomb laboratory, Oppenheimer had gained the respect of the world's most eminent physicists, and he had attracted a coterie of admiring students. But he seemed aloof and lost in abstractions, pretentiously interjecting among his equations riffs from French literature or the Upanishads. And while hardly a threat to American security, Oppenheimer appears to have been as close as a person can get to being a supporter of the Communist Party without actually carrying a membership card.
As soon as Groves met the young scientist, none of that mattered. In a meeting at Berkeley, he impressed the general with the breadth of his knowledge and what Groves saw as his practicality. More than any other scientist the general had talked to, Oppenheimer appeared to understand what had to be done to go from abstract theories to the making of a nuclear bomb.
This was not just a physics problem. It would be an unparalleled feat of engineering, and one that must progress while basic theoretical problems were still being solved. There was no place better to do this, Oppenheimer believed, than outside the universities - in a remote, central laboratory. He didn't object to the idea that the operation be overseen by the military. Oppenheimer, as Mr Monk observes, seemed to have had "an unerring sense of what Groves wished to hear".
History, of course, has vindicated the decision. The brooding introvert became a leader, harnessing the efforts of a headstrong cast of brilliant physicists for an all-but-impossible task: assembling on a barely accessible New Mexico mesa top - an unlikely spot Oppenheimer had discovered on a vacation horseback ride - not just an advanced nuclear laboratory but a whole town. While he worked, he remained under surveillance, just in case Groves had misjudged him and he turned out to be a Soviet spy.
It is an extraordinary story, and Mr Monk - the author of acclaimed biographies of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein - tells it well.
But I'm not sure it has brought us that much closer to the man. The details of Oppenheimer's physics, though laid out clearly, reveal little about his perplexing psyche. While his childhood is neatly drawn - the privileged son of nonobservant German Jews and a product of the private Ethical Culture School in New York - we learn almost nothing about his mess of a marriage or his distant relationship with his children.
Whatever Oppenheimer did to so thoroughly impress Groves and to motivate the scientists at Los Alamos doesn't really come across here or in anything else I've read. What made him so inspiring, so indispensable? It almost seems as if he had everyone hypnotised.
But when the war was over, the spell was broken. Now the enemy was the Soviet Union, and Oppenheimer's calls for avoiding a thermonuclear showdown by sharing technology and holding back on the hydrogen bomb were used by his opponents to mark him as a Red. His past indiscretions gave them plenty of ammunition.
After the war came the legendary security hearings - what a government lawyer reviewing the case later called "a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system". No evidence came out that he had engaged in espionage. An Atomic Energy Commission personnel board concluded he was a loyal citizen. But he was not above suspicion. That was enough for them to strip him of his security clearance.
An authority on self-destructive behaviour, Oppenheimer memorably described the United States and the Soviet Union as "two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life". He was himself the casualty of scorpions fighting each other in Washington. And of the scorpions that remained corked tightly in Oppenheimer's mind.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
A Life Inside the Centre
Ray Monk
Doubleday; 825 pages; $37.50
