Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Yet Oppenheimer remained optimistic despite these dangers, he said, because of Bohr. “Bohr often spoke with deep appreciation of mortality,” said Oppenheimer, whose words—consciously or not—could be used to describe himself: “mortality that screens out the mistakes, the failures, and the follies that would otherwise encumber our future, and that makes it possible that what we have learned, and what has proved itself is transmitted for the next generations.”
33
When he finished, the audience rose in loud and sustained applause.
Oppenheimer never returned to Los Alamos again.
A bout of pneumonia the following year weakened Oppenheimer badly, and he had to give up the directorship of the Institute, accepting Einstein’s old post as senior professor of theoretical physics instead. Then he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He began radiation therapy, gave up smoking, and took to sucking lozenges to ease his sore and swollen throat. He was in considerable pain, but he went to his office each day. His spirit strengthened as his body weakened. He was serenely courageous.
By now, Oppenheimer had become less nervous than he had been in the past, and he met the misfortune that befell him with determination. Criticism did not bother him as much as it once had. He still reacted passionately to events and was no less self-absorbed, but he had learned to control himself. Tempered by the fire, he seemed to have acquired a new, steely resolve. Those around him saw the arrogance of his earlier years dissolve, replaced by a healthy irony about himself, a humility, a compassion, a gentleness. He once again recalled his legendary partnership with Lawrence in the 1930s with affection. He began to examine himself searchingly, as he did at a public forum in the summer of 1966:
Up to now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.
It turned out to be impossible… for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth… and in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.
To a historian who came to interview him in Princeton for a documentary film about Fermi, Oppenheimer whispered, when the taping was over, “Well, when do we get down to the real business, the real interviews, the real historical personal material?”
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He was prepared at last to look at himself, and to speak of himself, searchingly and honestly.
A few months before his death, Oppenheimer sat for one final, on-the-record interview. Fighting with stoic grace the painful throat cancer that would soon kill him, he amiably greeted the reporter. He wore a brown tweed jacket, dark slacks, and scuffed shoes. His large blue eyes shone brightly over reading glasses. He was very frail, with deep lines in his face and his hair a white mist. There was all of the quickness of his mind and none of the abrasiveness. The once elegant and rich voice was now only a scraping hush.
Oppenheimer took off his glasses and let his hands fall to his lap. He hunched up his shoulders and brought forth a crooked smile, in which all the ironies in his life danced and played. Speaking in a gritty voice, he reaffirmed that scientists
were
responsible for the consequences of their work. “The central question is this,” he said: “how to subject the development of [nuclear] weapons to a notion of what is right.” He recalled what Bohr had said during their wartime talks: that the atomic bomb was both a peril
and
a hope for mankind. “Very great evil is inherent in weaponry,” Oppenheimer said, “and where there is great evil is the opportunity for great good. We have forgotten now, but right after the war, this is what people were saying: that the discovery of atomic power was good, that, among other things, it created an opportunity for great human grandeur because one was dealing with such great dimensions of evil. Atomic power is
not
the same old problem of evil with which man has always been confronted, but you lose an essential dimension when you view it without considering good and evil.” He regretted that the world had grown to include many other atomic powers and believed the United States bore much responsibility for this. “As long as we say, ‘It is all right for us, but don’t you do it,’” Oppenheimer sadly predicted, “efforts to prevent proliferation aren’t going to be very effective.” About the future, he said: “I’m not very sanguine, but at least the ideas I expressed are no longer radical.”
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Oppenheimer remained preoccupied with the morality of nuclear weapons and his role in their creation for the rest of his days. It was not long before his death that, speaking of the role he played in building the atomic bomb, he said he was not entirely free of guilt.
36
Two weeks before the end came, he told Rudolf Peierls, the head of the British wartime team at Los Alamos who had come to see him a final time at Princeton, that he should have resigned from the GAC as soon as Truman overruled his recommendation against the superbomb. “You know,” Oppenheimer told Peierls, “there is the attitude that says, ‘As long as I keep riding on this train, it won’t go to the wrong destination.’”
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His tone was one of regret rather than bitterness.
Even as Oppenheimer suffered the final ravages of his illness, he remembered his friends. Unable to attend Bethe’s sixtieth birthday celebration in Ithaca in October 1966, he sent Bethe a warm congratulatory telegram instead. Bethe replied with a handwritten note that illustrated the deep bond that had grown between them over the years:
Dear Robert,
Thanks for your especially warm telegram. It was very good to see you two weeks ago. Your words express, better than I can, what I feel for you—admiration, affection, enduring gratitude and friendship.
That same month Oppenheimer wrote friends, “My cancer is spreading rapidly; thus I am being radiated further.” In November, “I am much less able to speak and eat now.” And in the following February, he wrote, “I am in some pain…. my hearing and my speech are very poor.” But he was content. “I have to die some year, and mine has been a pretty good life,” he remarked to a friend.
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On the night of Saturday, February 18, 1967, Robert Oppenheimer died at his home in Princeton at the age of 62. Kitty had his body cremated and his ashes scattered in the quiet seas of the Caribbean, where in his later years he found the peace that had always eluded him.
Reaction to Oppenheimer’s death was swift and moving. “It was as if an older brother had died,” lamented Bethe, who added wistfully, “Where he was, there was always life and excitement.”
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“We were friends,” said Rabi. “Oppenheimer meant a great deal to me. I miss him.”
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In Japan, where bombs made under Oppenheimer’s direction had destroyed two cities, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hideki Yukawa called Oppenheimer “a symbol of the tragedy of the modern nuclear scientists.”
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Perhaps Oppenheimer’s Princeton colleague and fellow physicist Abraham Pais put it best: “In the years to come, the physicist will speak of him. So will the historian and the psychologist, the playwright and the poet.”
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There were so many facets to him. “Oppenheimer was a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters” in the perceptive words of Rabi.
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It was intensely cold on February 25, 1967, the day that friends, associates, and admirers gathered in Princeton University’s Alexander Hall to pay their final respects to J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the front row sat Kitty, Peter, Toni, and Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank. Behind them sat many notables of American science and government—among them Rabi and Groves, now white haired, who had flown in on a specially chartered plane to attend the service.
Those who delivered eulogies spoke with visible emotion. Bethe talked movingly of Oppenheimer’s time of glory:
Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement, but I never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great times of their lives.
George Kennan, who had become Oppenheimer’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, recalled a poignant story. “In the dark days of the early 1950s,” said Kennan, “when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of the controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. With tears in his eyes, he replied, ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’” “On no one,” concluded Kennan, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.” Nor was there anyone “who more passionately desired to be useful in averting the catastrophes to which the development of the weapons of mass destruction threatened to lead.”
45
At the end of the service the Juilliard String Quartet performed the adagio and allegro movements of Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Back in the 1930s, the C-sharp minor had been the emblem that Oppenheimer and the aspiring theoretical physicists at his feet in Berkeley had held up to proclaim their own refinement and purity. They had been too innocent to discover that Beethoven had instructed his publisher that “it must be dedicated to Lieutenant General Field Marshal von Stutterheim.” The ghost of war had hovered in the background of the seminar rooms where they had dreamed, presaging a future that would haunt each and every one of them.
46
Oppenheimer came to understand this irony and commented on it in the last years of his life. “The atom bomb and nuclear weapons will not go away,” he said. “These weapons are as present as the desire to have them and to use them. We can only hope that they will increasingly appear irrelevant and thus in the end preposterous, that some day we will look back ashamed of how stupid we were [to want them].”
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“Our experience in World War II had a profound effect on the scientific community,” I. I. Rabi had said after the war. “We saw how our command of scientific knowledge and method, aided by vast sums of money and support, have made it absurdly easy to kill human beings. This fateful truth has brought home to many scientists the fact that they cannot escape the social responsibility of their actions. No longer can science be just ‘fun and games.’”
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This realization had changed the direction of Rabi’s life. He gave up experimental physics and began advising the government. Trips to Washington came with increasing frequency. Demanding positions on the GAC and the PSAC did not impede his bursts of laughter in moments of amusement, nor did they impede his concern for the state of science and society. A quiet and self-confident man who projected toughness with a smile, Rabi played the inside game, operating behind the scenes to help chart America’s course in the new world that the atomic age had created. “I thought that by working from within, we might be able to do something about getting rid of the atomic bomb,” he said later.
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Rabi confined his opinion to the inner councils of government, but in those councils he never had the slightest fear of speaking his mind to anyone.
Throughout these years Rabi had worked closely with Oppenheimer. They had served together on the powerful GAC: Oppenheimer as its first chairman, Rabi succeeding him in 1952. Some physicists questioned the propriety of Rabi succeeding Oppenheimer after his close friend had been hounded from government service. The pragmatic Rabi had offered a quick reply. “If I had quit in a huff, I would have gotten two lines in the
New York Times
, and nobody would ever listen to me again on these questions. If I want to have any influence on what’s going on, I have to stay on the inside.”
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His style as an adviser differed from Oppenheimer’s. Rabi stayed out of the limelight. He was quiet and wise, where Oppenheimer had been vocal and brilliant. Rabi deliberately played second fiddle because he wanted to be effective. “During the war,” he said, “I had learned that you either get the credit or you get it done.”
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Rabi wanted to get it done.
When he was not advising the government, he was teaching. Every morning until he retired as professor of physics at Columbia University, the short, bantamlike Rabi put on his horn-rimmed glasses, left his faculty apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River, and strolled up a gentle slope to Pupin Hall, a red-brick pile with limestone trim, where he rode an elevator to his eighth-floor office. Colleagues always knew when he got off the elevator because he hummed as he walked down the corridor. Inside his large, plain office was a huge blackboard that ran the length of an entire wall to large double windows, beneath which sat a green couch stacked with learned journals. He always kept his door open, did his own filing, and answered his own telephone. He maintained close, warm relations with people ranging from Nobel Prize-winning physicists to freshman students.