OPENING MUSIC
THEME MUSIC
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was the architect of a device
which has created the greatest moral dilemma ever faced by mankind,
the potential for nuclear annihilation.
Oppenheimer worked on the Manhattan Project.
He headed the team that helped create the world's deadliest weapon, the atomic bomb.
Then, when he saw the destructive force of his creation,
he began lobbying for arms control,
had his patriotism questioned, and his career cut short.
Biography looks at the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Well, when I was a kid, I had three professions in mind.
One was science, about which I didn't know much.
One was architecture, and one was poetry.
I still don't know.
THEME MUSIC
J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man of great charm and persuasiveness,
became not only a brilliant scientist, but one who changed our world forever.
Oppenheimer said, if you are a scientist, you have to know how the world works.
You have to know how to understand it.
And you have to take the chance that this will be for the good of mankind.
And he was talking about building a bomb.
Oppenheimer's friend, I. I. Robbie, said that at the day of Trinity,
he saw Oppenheimer walk away down the desert,
and it was a high noon kind of gait of triumph.
And sure enough, this shy, reclusive, overly intellectual scientist
became one of the best known people in the country in a very short time.
Well, like everybody else, I got fascinated by his personality,
his style and physics, the kind of thing he was interested in.
He was an exciting man to be around.
In some ways, he was a bit of a show-off.
He liked to hold forth on various subjects,
and when he did, it was always with a flourish.
During the early days, he was sort of the toast of the town,
and he was very good at entertaining his audiences.
All of a sudden, that was gone, gone completely, and it crushed him.
Here is Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous scientist whose suspension
this week by the Atomic Energy Commission surprised the nation.
The man who directed the building of the world's first atom bomb,
Dr. Oppenheimer, probably carries more nuclear secrets in his head than any other person.
The charges being investigated include that he opposed crash development of the hydrogen bomb,
that he associated with communists at one time,
that he recommended them to work on the A-bomb.
Well, you remember, we went through many years of this struggle with Mr. McCarthy,
and of course, we were dumbfounded when the same thing reached Robert Oppenheimer,
which I imagine was going to happen, but I didn't think it would happen
quite as vigorously and quite as openly and quite as hard-heartedly as it did.
It wasn't a witch hunt, but they had their witch and they burned him,
and it was very unpleasant.
Anyone who knew Oppenheimer, knew the force of his mind,
his brilliance, his qualities for penetration,
would have had to ask, what would have caused such a man to become a Soviet agent?
Why should he have done it?
To this day, there are questions about the mind and motives of the man
called the father of the atomic bomb.
There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
Sometimes they're secret because a man doesn't like to know,
and it's up to him if he can avoid it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904
to a wealthy German-Jewish family.
His father was a self-made man who imported textiles.
His mother was an artist.
It was a protected, even precious childhood in their upper West Side apartment.
It was an intelligent family, well-educated family.
His father was inordinately proud of his son, and he never let you forget it.
Oppenheimer was one of those children who even as a baby looked like a miniature adult.
He was sort of fully formed, and by the time he was three or four years old,
they realized that he was something special.
Oppenheimer, at the age of 10, was already writing poetry, but still playing with blocks.
He was remarkably precocious.
When he was 12 years old, he lectured before the New York Mineralogical Society
about the rocks that he collected.
They were surprised that he was a child.
Robert and his younger brother Frank were enrolled in the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan,
famous for its progressive approach to education.
He excelled at his studies in the classroom and out.
And we played ball on the roof. Of course, it was fenced in.
One day, a ball went over the fence and fell down into a baby carriage on the street.
And the mother of the child was very much upset, of course, and threatened to sue the school.
So young Robert went to work and figured out that a ball of a given weight and size,
thrown at a given distance, could not hurt a baby's head of a certain magnitude.
I don't think it ever went to court, but it was a nice story.
A gifted student, Oppenheimer graduated at the top of his class.
After being accepted by Harvard, he became seriously ill on a family trip to Europe.
He was forced to recuperate for over a year.
He was shipped to the Sangre de Cristo mountains just northeast of Santa Fe
and spent the summer riding horses and chowing down outdoors and became a healthy person again.
But right across from the Sangre de Cristos was this giant caldera volcano,
the slopes of which was a place called Los Alamos.
And that was his first encounter with it.
In 1925, Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard after only three years with top honors in chemistry.
Now 21, he realized his true calling, physics.
He traveled to Europe to study with the great physicists there.
At first, his studies did not go well. He was deeply unhappy at Cambridge.
Oppenheimer was such a precocious young man
that parts of him hadn't caught up with other parts.
And perhaps one thing that happened to him when he got to the Cavendish Laboratory
was the realization that he wasn't perfect at everything he wanted to be good at.
He had a lot of growing up to do.
This crisis between his childhood prodigy state and his adulthood
manifested itself as depression, suicidal feelings, almost a nervous breakdown.
His parents even put him in with a psychoanalyst at one point.
He seems to have made the breakthrough both emotionally, perhaps with a love affair,
and in terms of creativity, by becoming a scientist.
He made that classic leap that scientists usually make from the personal to the objective
at some sacrifice to their emotional lives.
After his early struggles in Europe, Oppenheimer quickly moved to the cutting edge of theoretical physics.
Still, he maintained his wide interests.
Oppenheimer was well known for being extremely knowledgeable about a great many fields
and even his professors.
Some of them thought he was still a tontish and that he was more of a poet or a psychologist than a physicist.
Oppenheimer returned to the U.S. with several teaching offers.
With his brother Frank, he found a small ranch in the mountains of New Mexico.
They called it Pero Caliente, hot dog.
It became their summer home.
At 25, Oppenheimer took teaching jobs at both Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.
At first, his immense talent for physics made him a poor teacher.
When he first started teaching, he really terrified the students.
First of all, he had no idea what level to teach, but also he had a very sharp tongue
that could be made from, could be very nasty.
And he was so quick and impatient.
But by the time I arrived, he had learned a great deal.
As a matter of fact, his lectures were really great.
They were inspiring somehow.
What Oppenheimer did in California was really to start a great school of American physics.
And Oppenheimer was a fabulous teacher in the sense that there were fables told about him.
And people would go across the country to become his student.
And it was those physicists, among others, who helped to win the war.
And then I was impressed by Robert Oppenheimer very, very deeply because of his enormous eloquent speed,
rapidity, clarity of thought, incredible knowledge, rich poetic vocabulary, metaphors.
And then the equations poured out of the end of his chalk.
We worked hard to keep up with him. We worked hard to do the problems.
Almost everybody took his course at least twice.
And there was one Russian girl who tried to take it a third time.
And Oppenheimer said, no, she went on a hunger strike.
He finally had to break down and let her take it again.
After a prolonged adolescence and a rarefied education,
Robert Oppenheimer came into his own as a professor at Berkeley.
By 1936, J. Robert Oppenheimer had mastered a new role,
the charismatic professor of physics.
By the time he got to Berkeley, he was flamboyant in a way.
He dressed elegantly. He would send his date roses.
But he'd send everyone else's date roses too.
So socially, in that sense, he was comfortable.
He was comfortable as a teacher.
But he hadn't really discovered the world of human beings and of suffering yet.
He said later that he'd never read a newspaper for many years as a young teacher at Berkeley.
I think he made that discovery when he met a young woman named Jean Tatlock,
who was a member of the Communist Party off and on during that time,
as so many people were, who saw communism as some kind of answer
to the terrible dilemma of the depression and the people out of work.
In hard times, many turned to radical groups like the Communist Party,
among them Oppenheimer's younger brother Frank and Frank's wife Jackie.
I was a campus radical. I was caught up in the general drift,
which I now see in the world at that time, and so was Robert Oppenheimer,
towards a kind of anti-fascist unity among many, many kinds of people
with different backgrounds and different points of view.
And Oppenheimer by then was helping with his private income
to bring family members out of Nazi Germany to help them escape.
His fellow physicists were escaping.
Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, many others, Fermi, who worked on the atomic bomb later,
just escaped almost with their lives.
So suddenly this was a different world, and he was forced, really,
to look at the facts of this new terror that was coming.
The first weeks, the spring of 1938 and the summer of 1938, were terrible times.
And what I remember most clearly is staying up late at night,
because Berkeley is many, many hours away from Nuremberg in clock time.
When Hitler spoke at noon in Nuremberg, it was four o'clock in the morning in Berkeley.
But none of us, no matter how tired we were, could miss hearing that raucous voice
with the threats that it contained, and we all could see war in the offing.
Fission was discovered in Berlin, Christmas 1938,
nine months before the beginning of the Second World War,
the height of the Nazi empire, really.
And for everyone who had been frightened by the fascism in Nazi Germany,
most of all the Jewish immigrant physicists who had now found safe haven in America,
the thought of a Third Reich empowered for a thousand years by atomic bombs was deeply terrifying.
We must have a bomb before the Germans.
That was, I had to breach this, you know, people were not aware of it.
We must have the bomb before the Germans.
If the Germans had the bomb and not we, we would have been in a very bad situation,
and people were not so much aware because I knew the Nazis from personal experience.
With the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, France and England declared war on Germany.
World War II had officially begun.
Prominent scientists like Albert Einstein, himself a German Jewish refugee,
urged President Franklin Roosevelt to pursue this new weapon, the atomic bomb.
So the American scientists were struggling to get the government to recognize that it was important.
They had a lot of meetings.
They needed scientists to come in and help them work out the numbers,
and Oppenheimer was a superb theoretical physicist, and that's how he first became involved.
He calculated how much uranium you'd need to make a bomb.
He was off by 50 pounds.
As the world changed dramatically, so did Oppenheimer's personal life.
Jean Tatlott refused to marry him, and on the rebound perhaps,
he met a young woman named Kitty Harrison who very quickly moved in on his affections,
and she too had a background with the American Communist Party.
Although she was married when they met, Kitty filed for divorce,
and on the day it was granted, she married Robert Oppenheimer.
December 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. entered World War II with two enemies, Germany and Japan.
Oppenheimer now worked full-time on developing the bomb at Berkeley.
The secret effort to build the bomb, known as the Manhattan Project,
spent billions and employed thousands.
It became the largest scientific project of all time.
Physicists vanished to work in the hidden laboratories.
Phil Morrison was recruited by a colleague.
He said, you know what we're doing here?
I said, well, I know, broadly speaking, as I'm doing the uranium,
obviously you all disappeared, all the nuclear physicists.
He said, yes, he said, we are making bombs.
And that surprised me.
I had no idea that it was so real, so practical, so much on the way,
and so I was scared.
It took me a couple of weeks to think about it,
and finally I said, I've got to do this.
The German menace is too great.
I'll go work for them.
It was a desperate war, you know, that was going on,
and we were, of course, all afraid that the Germans would get it first,
and we were willing, in fact, to do anything required
in order to make sure they were defeated.
We could lose the war.
When I was first hired, that's what they told me.
They said, if the war is lost,
it'll be because the Germans got this thing first.
Otherwise, we're going to win.
You'll see that was a very reasonable argument.
In early 1942, Oppenheimer was made the coordinator of rapid rupture,
or atomic fission.
Soon after, the Manhattan Project's military leader,
General Leslie Groves, chose Oppenheimer to direct the secret laboratory
at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Most people thought the choice of Oppenheimer was surprising
because he had appeared to be totally a theoretical man,
not only a theoretical physicist,
to be somewhat detached, otherworldly, certainly Bohemian.
He was a surprising choice,
and he himself later said that General Groves, who picked him,
had a weakness for good men.
Very surprising.
I mean, first of all, you wouldn't expect a theoretical physicist
to be director of a lab which was not theoretical at all,
but actually just to produce a product.
Like a lot of theoretical physicists,
Oppenheimer's reputation was that if he walked into a laboratory,
the lab equipment broke.
Why, he would be in charge of building this object.
Puzzled everybody.
He used to say, I was the last guy left.
But it wasn't that.
General Groves saw that this consummate actor
and consummately good teacher could somehow bring together
these very difficult personalities from all over Central Europe,
Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi and so on,
and get them to work together on one thing at a time.
Before he moved to New Mexico to head Los Alamos,
Oppenheimer had a fateful encounter
with an old Berkeley friend, Hacon Chevalier.
Chevalier told Oppenheimer that he had been asked
about getting secrets from the Manhattan Project
conveyed to the Russians.
The words were no sooner out of Chevalier's mouth
than Oppenheimer said that that would be treason,
and that was the end of the conversation.
It was a conversation that was to resonate
through the rest of Oppenheimer's life
and also that of Chevalier.
At first, Oppenheimer did not report
the Chevalier incident to anyone,
but his recent radical past haunted him at Los Alamos.
Because Oppenheimer had been on the fringes
of the Communist Party in San Francisco and in Berkeley,
Army security did not want to clear him
to be director of Los Alamos.
We believed that his brother Frank
was a member of the Communist Party.
We believed that his wife Kitty
had been a member of the Communist Party.
I think that if Oppie had been a less important person,
we would not have wasted our time
trying to determine whether he was a good security risk or not.
General Groves, on the other hand,
understood that there was no one else
who could do this job at that time
and insisted that he be cleared.
The price that Groves paid
was that Oppenheimer would have his phones tapped,
that he would be followed day and night,
that every intimate part of his life
would be recorded somewhere.
Robert Oppenheimer, 38 years old,
now headed the secret bomb laboratory at Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer helped General Groves
find an isolated location necessary for security reasons
on the site of the Los Alamos School for Boys
high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Its remote splendor and ready-made buildings
were a head start for the Mammoth Project ahead.
On this rustic site, Oppenheimer insisted on a break
with Manhattan Project secrecy.
The scientists were allowed to talk to one another.
The sense of unity and sense of commonality
was so superb there.
Oppenheimer had arranged that all the technical people
were not compartmented, they could talk to each other.
To some extent, that was the payment
that we were given, quite sensibly,
to keep us unified by separating ourselves from the world
by going to Los Alamos.
From the original projection of 100 scientists,
the Los Alamos staff swelled to more than 6,000 people.
Even Oppenheimer's old friends were amazed
that he could head such a project.
He was the ideal leader for an isolated
and devoted laboratory in wartime.
He knew everything.
He was friendly to all the people who were there.
He tried to keep up with the crises
that were developing everywhere,
and he would come to offer help by his silent presence
in the middle of the night
when you're doing some key experiment.
Do that a few times, it becomes mythical.
It was surprising to the people who had known him at Berkeley,
but they hadn't really understood
what a chameleon he was as a character.
And in fact, if Oppenheimer was always somewhat split
as a person, which he was,
that split healed when he was the director of Los Alamos.
He knew what his job was.
He knew what his role was.
He had an extremely difficult job, not only technically,
but, you know, you couldn't assemble
a greater bunch of primadonnas anywhere.
Among the physicists, Edward Teller balked
at working on the atom bomb.
He was consumed with dreams of a bigger hydrogen bomb
called the Super.
But Oppenheimer's diverse staff remained united
by the continuing threat of the Nazis getting the bomb first.
You can describe it in two ways.
It was a time of enormous warmth and support
from an entire community.
And second, it was carried out in a part of the country
so beautiful to the eye and so interesting to the mind
that it was an overwhelming experience.
And of course it had behind it this terrible tragedy
which was built in.
They were making a bomb there, which never left us,
but that gave this duality that I've been talking about.
Oppenheimer's conscience was even clearer
than the question of we're doing it
because we want to beat the Germans.
He understood that this new discovery would change the world.
It would put an end to major war forever
because it would make every nation that had a bomb so insecure
that there would just be no chance that you would dare use it.
That gave them hope that what they were doing
was not simply building a weapon of mass destruction.
Americans rejoiced as the Nazis surrendered in May 1945.
But the war with Japan seemed endless,
and it grew increasingly brutal.
For the scientists at Los Alamos, their work continued.
The bomb's target would be Japan.
We thought we could end the war with the bomb.
That was our purpose.
It had been very clear, but no doubt at all in my mind
that if we could do that, that was a great thing.
The new president, Harry Truman,
hadn't even known the bomb existed until after Roosevelt's death.
Now he wanted it tested during the Potsdam Conference
so he could test it.
He wanted it tested during the Potsdam Conference
so he could use it to bargain with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
It had been two years since the first scientists arrived at Los Alamos.
The nuclear age was born in the desert south of Santa Fe
at a site called Trinity.
The bomb was painstakingly assembled.
But the weather refused to cooperate.
People were so keyed up by then.
Oppenheimer was chain-smoking.
He was down to 115 pounds, and this was a man who was six feet tall.
They were so concerned that this happened.
And it was dark, and there had been a rainstorm
and lightning and some concern about whether lightning might hit the tower
and set off the weaponry.
I was in base camp.
All the big wigs were all lying on the ground around me,
and we finally heard the famous countdown.
But I'll never forget the main experience is feeling the heat at ten miles away,
that flash of heat on your face, as though the sun had risen,
exactly as though the sun had risen on the dark desert.
Tremendous, you know, this famous mushroom.
Tremendous explosion.
Color, first white, then yellow, then red.
It was one of the greatest experiences I had in my life.
I wished only that it would never explode into inhabited areas.
We knew the world would not be the same.
Few people laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty,
and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says,
now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
Three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
A second was dropped three days later on Nagasaki.
Within a week, the war was over.
Oppenheimer seems to have been much affected by the actual bombings.
There was film footage that came back from Hiroshima and from Nagasaki, and it was pretty horrible.
Within a few months, it was in Truman's office saying, Mr. President, I have blood on my hands,
which Truman was insulted by, because Truman is a man who was proud of his decisions,
and dropping the atomic bomb was one of his decisions.
I think Oppenheimer would have loved to have put the genie back in the bottle at that time,
but he understood very well that there was no way to do that ever again.
I have been asked whether in the years to come it will be possible to kill 40 million American people
in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night.
I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes.
It was an irony that this thin, tortured-looking person appeared on the cover of Life magazine.
He became, for Americans, the personification of science.
There is no doubt that Robert Oppenheimer fell rather easily into what I think became a trap for him.
He was so conspicuous as leader of Los Alamos.
He was so articulate, he was so persuasive that he rapidly rose in the circles of the United States government,
which seemed to me fragile.
It is very hard to take a left-wing physics professor and elevate him to a great statesman in a very short time.
In 1947, Oppenheimer became director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
home of Einstein and other great minds.
That year he was also made an advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission.
He was again investigated and given a security clearance.
Are you now, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?
Anti-Communism was on the rise.
Oppenheimer's brother Frank was exposed as a former Communist.
A talented physicist, Frank was blacklisted from teaching for the next ten years.
If there is another World War, this civilization may go under.
We need to ask ourselves whether we're doing all we can to avert that.
He felt particularly strongly because he was, of course, aware that he was the man who had made possible the creation of this weapon.
And it was really the greatest element of tragedy in his professional life,
that having taken that responsibility under orders, of course, of developing the weapon,
he now was unable to control the uses that were to be made of it.
Oppenheimer was strongly opposed to the development of the hydrogen or H-bomb.
His views angered the Air Force and others in power who wanted more and bigger bombs.
At one hearing he locked horns with AEC Commissioner Louis Strauss.
Oppenheimer not only disagreed, but ridiculed Strauss' position.
And then when he finished, I was sitting with him.
He turned to me and said, Joe, how did I do?
And I had been watching Strauss, whose jaws were working a mile a minute while this was going on.
And I said, Robin, I'm afraid you did too well.
I could see in Strauss' face really hatred for this man who had been so brutal towards him.
With the Soviet bomb, there was a real movement of paranoia in the United States.
It's usually attributed to Joseph McCartney.
But I think much more deeply, we were all horrified that someone else had the atomic bomb.
And there was a general question of who were the spies that put us in this terrible position.
And those who suspected Oppenheimer began to look at him again.
We have affidavits that he had been a member of the party,
that he had recommended communists for working the A-bomb, H-bomb plants.
In the fall of 1953, a former congressional aide sent a letter to the FBI
charging that Oppenheimer was a security risk and probably a Soviet spy.
He cited as evidence the Chevalier incident and Oppenheimer's old radical associations.
Oppenheimer was asked to resign or face yet another security hearing.
The AEC security hearings began in April 1954.
They were secret, no reporters or cameras allowed.
But the news was leaked. All the world soon knew that J. Robert Oppenheimer was under suspicion.
The president directed that pending a security review of the material in the file,
a blank wall be placed between Dr. Oppenheimer and any secret data.
Louis Strauss was now the powerful chair of the AEC.
He was determined to get rid of Oppenheimer.
The first thing Louis Strauss did when they decided to have a hearing
was to ask J. Edgar Hoover to tap Oppenheimer's phones.
Strauss was privy to Oppenheimer's private conversations with his lawyers.
A perfect position to be in.
And Strauss was the man who was going to have to make the final decision about the clearance.
Scurrilous behavior.
Noted lawyer Lloyd Garrison took on the case with co-counsel Samuel Silverman.
We had to be very careful about what we said because it was going to be bugged.
I don't know if you really had something quite secret to say,
you better go out and walk in the park or something.
The head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Louis Strauss,
had handpicked the quote judges,
and he picked as a prosecutor Roger Robb,
a Washington lawyer who behaved as if he were a prosecutor of a criminal defendant.
Oppenheimer's lawyers did not have security clearance,
so they had to leave him alone in the hearing room whenever classified material was discussed.
Edward Teller declared Oppenheimer's resistance slowed development of the H-bomb,
but many other witnesses came to Oppenheimer's defense.
I was completely responsible for the selection of Dr. Oppenheimer
as the head of the Los Alamos bomb laboratory.
Nothing has happened during the affair or afterwards
that led me to believe that that was not a wise choice.
The conduct of the hearing and the handling of this thing was an outrage.
This is the way our government ordered a man who had perhaps made the most important contributions
to the devices that won the war.
And how do we reward him? We reward him by bringing false accusations against him
in subjecting the hearing and so on. I'm still outraged by it.
I think Robert Oppenheimer felt he was doomed.
I had that feeling that he thought this was going to end up with a denial of clearance.
This was merely a hearing, but the truth is it was conducted as a trial.
Oppenheimer was ferociously cross-examined.
Roger Robb caught Oppenheimer in a series of contradictions.
He made him feel a fool.
Oppenheimer finally cried out in a kind of agony in answer to a question.
Robb said, why did you do that, Dr. Oppenheimer? Because I was an idiot.
They described to me what was going on in the hearings, and I thought it was outrageous.
And I recommended very strongly that they walk out,
because this was a no-win situation for Robert Oppenheimer.
And I once said to him, Robert, there isn't a university in Europe
that wouldn't have you momentarily if you wanted to come on to their faculty.
Why do you submit to this? Why don't you go over and take a professorship over there?
And the tears came to his eyes, and he said, damn it, I happen to love this country.
The Oppenheimer hearings ended after three grueling weeks.
Samuel Silverman reads from Garrison's summation.
There is more than Dr. Oppenheimer on trial in this room.
The government of the United States is here on trial also.
Our whole security process is on trial here, and is in your keeping as is his life.
America must not devour her own children, Mr. Chairman and members of the board.
We've got to be strong.
The board stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.
The decision was upheld by the AEC.
They destroyed the man. Everyone who knew him said he was never the same afterwards.
He had wanted to be at the center of government. It was glittering. It was exciting.
But at a deeper level and a more important level,
it was a chance to influence the world in this new phenomenon of nuclear weapons.
To be cut out of that because of these old problems,
because people didn't agree with your opinions in a country where speech is supposed to be free, was heinous.
He was really judged on his character.
And to be told that you are not trustworthy, as he literally was, because of flaws of character,
that's a judgment which stays with you the rest of your life.
And for someone like Oppenheimer, who grew up worrying about being flawed,
it could not have been a crueler judgment.
Many scientists supported Oppenheimer.
He was re-elected director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
While he nurtured another generation of scholars, he was cut off from his own field.
For Oppenheimer to lose his security clearance essentially meant that he could no longer take part
in any of the discussions around this issue of which he had been the acknowledged leader for the last 20 years.
You can't talk about changes in nuclear weapons if you don't have security clearance
because you don't know what those changes are.
Dr. Oppenheimer, could you tell us what your thoughts are about what our atomic policy should be?
No, I can't do that. I'm not close enough to the facts,
and I'm not close enough to the thoughts of those who are worrying about it.
To this day, Oppenheimer's reputation is haunted by the unproven charge that he was a Russian spy.
There's an elaborate FBI record of surveillance of Oppenheimer.
He was watched night and day. His phone was tapped and so forth.
They knew what he did in the bedroom, poor man.
And he was never found to be engaged in any kind of espionage.
No, I think there's no possibility that he was a spy at any level, advergent or inadvertent.
Later in the day, Mr. Johnson, on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission, awarded a medal to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The commission made the award even though Oppenheimer is still listed in its files as a security risk and has been since 1954.
I was surprised that he accepted it. They'd have kicked me in the face like they did Oppenheimer.
I certainly wouldn't have done such a thing.
I think it's just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some clarity and some courage for you to make this award today.
He got it at the time when it was harmless to give it to him.
It wasn't very nice. It should have kicked me many years before.
I thought his spirit was broken.
He spent his time writing and lecturing and running the Institute.
But his heart wasn't in it.
I think he aged a lot.
And then, of course, at almost the same time, he got cancer in the throat.
And he really wasn't well.
He really had a hard time after that.
In 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer died at the age of 62.
During that brief hour at Los Alamos, all his forces were harnessed to that one objective, and he performed brilliantly.
He was only very badly treated by history, by accidental acquaintances, and he was not perfect by any means.
Everybody has tried to explain what was so fascinating about Oppenheimer's personality.
Nobody's ever really succeeded.
He was just a great man.
But at last, he did something in the world.
It may not be something we like having been done.
He built the first atomic bombs.
They were demonstrated on two Japanese cities, and they changed history.
So tragic he may have been, but his was not a lost life.
And he had that moment of historical significance, I won't say greatness, that he dreamed of having.
We remember Robert Oppenheimer.
America's decision to drop the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan remains controversial,
as demonstrated by recent protests against exhibits commemorating the 50th anniversary of that bombing.
But while the ethical issues continue to be argued, Oppenheimer's bomb has forever changed the course of warfare on this planet.
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