Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (120 page)

There
had
been progress, Oppenheimer insisted, ‘not merely in man’s understanding, but in the conditions of man’s life, in his civility, in the nobility of his institutions and his freedom’, and science had played a large role in that progress. However, in the process, ‘we have so largely lost the ability to talk with one another’, and this is why the ‘re-knitting’ was so urgent and so important.

In September 1960, Oppenheimer and Kitty spent three weeks in Japan as a guest of the Japan Committee for Intellectual Interchange. On his arrival in Tokyo, Oppenheimer took part in what one newspaper described as a ‘terribly ill-planned’ press conference, at which he was asked the question he had no doubt been expecting, and to which he seemed to have planned his answer: did he regret making the bomb? ‘I do not regret that I had something to do with the technical success of the atomic bomb,’ he replied. ‘It isn’t that I don’t feel bad; it is that I don’t feel worse tonight than I did last night.’ Fearing a negative reaction and bad publicity, the Committee for Intellectual Interchange had kept Hiroshima off Oppenheimer’s itinerary. They probably need not have worried; wherever Oppenheimer went, he was met with large and appreciative audiences. From the surviving typescripts and the press reports one can see that, with one glaring and interesting exception, his talks repeated the themes of the public lectures he had given elsewhere.

The exception was his participation in a discussion organised by the Society of Science and Man, a group of professors from various disciplines that met in Tokyo every month ‘to discuss various problems concerning the relationship between science and technology on the one hand and man and society on the other’. The discussion, billed as ‘An Afternoon with Professor Oppenheimer’, was not broadcast or published, but survives in a typed transcript that was presumably circulated among the participants, a copy of which was among Oppenheimer’s private papers. His
contributions to this discussion are remarkable for their tone, the courtly, evasive and elaborate style that he often used when speaking in public giving way to the blunt and abrasive directness of a man determined to speak his mind.

Some of the opinions thus expressed are surprising. C.P. Snow’s famous essay, ‘The Two Cultures’, for example, the central message of which (that our society is becoming polarised into two groups: those who understand science but not art, and those who understand art but not science) one might have expected Oppenheimer to applaud, is dismissed by him as exhibiting nothing but ‘triviality and childishness’. Most of the other opinions he expresses are not so much surprising in themselves as for the vehemence with which they are expressed. England is ‘a small society because of its inherent snobbery’, whose leading elite ‘go to the same colleges, they meet at the same clubs and they frequent each other and read the same things’. English philosophers are ‘out of touch with science, they are out of touch with politics, they are out of touch with history. And what they are in touch with is themselves.’ As for advertisers, they:

The discussion ends with Oppenheimer’s venomous telling of an anecdote about John Foster Dulles, the late US Secretary of State, who had died just four months earlier. When Dulles met the Indian physicist Homi J. Bhabha, Oppenheimer said, Bhabha told Dulles that his impression of Russian science was rather favourable, to which Dulles replied: ‘That does not surprise me. After all they are a materialist and godless civilization, whereas we are religious and spiritual.’ ‘Well,’ concluded Oppenheimer, ‘as long as a leading politician with the destiny of the world in part in his hands can talk such blasphemous rubbish, we are not making good contact with politicians.’

Oppenheimer and Kitty got back home to find the US in the middle of one of the most intense and momentous presidential elections of the twentieth century, in which the Republican Vice President, Richard Nixon, faced the charismatic young-looking Democrat, John F. Kennedy.
^fn71
The Oppenheimers got back in time to watch three of the four televised
debates, in which, it is generally agreed, Kennedy outshone his rival. The election was held on 8 November and, by the slenderest of margins, Kennedy won.

For the first year of Kennedy’s term of office, the change in administration had very little effect on Oppenheimer. As before, he gave public talks, attended to institute business and spent vacations on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands. The Oppenheimer family had been going to the Virgin Islands in the spring, summer and winter breaks since 1954, and by 1960 they had their own beach house there. Their immediate neighbours on the island were Bob Gibney and his wife, Nancy. Bob Gibney had been editor of
The New Republic
and Nancy had worked on
Vogue
, and both were initially impressed by their new neighbours. The more they got to know the Oppenheimers, however, the less they liked them, and from about 1960 onwards the two families lived in a constant state of feuding with each other.

The other islanders were friendlier; some of them found Kitty alarming, especially when she was drunk, but most of them remembered Oppenheimer himself with warmth and admiration, and all of them, except the Gibneys, were happy to accept the annual invitation to the Oppenheimer’s New Year’s Eve party, which would arrive without fail in September. When the children were small, they both accompanied their parents to St John two or three times a year, but, on reaching adulthood, Peter stayed away, preferring to spend his holidays in New Mexico. Toni, on the other hand, loved everything about the island: its music, its people, its beaches and its relaxed way of life. All three – Oppenheimer, Kitty and Toni – acquired reputations as expert sailors and they would go off sailing for days at a time.

In January 1962, after spending Christmas on St John as usual, and hosting their customary New Year’s Eve beach party, the Oppenheimers left for Canada, where Robert had been invited to give the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University. The purpose of these lectures, in the words of the then-principal of University College, McMaster, ‘is to help students cross the barriers separating the academic departments of a modern university’. The three lectures – ‘Space and Time’, ‘Atom and Field’ and ‘War and the Nations’ – cover ground that was pretty well trodden by Oppenheimer by this time, but, presumably because they were aimed at students rather than at the general public, the ground was covered in greater depth and Oppenheimer was less inhibited in using mathematical expressions. In 1964, they were published as a small book with the puzzling and inaccurate title
The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists
.

Soon after he arrived back in Princeton, Oppenheimer received a letter dated 1 February from
The Christian Century
, a non-denominational
magazine, asking him to ‘jot down – almost on impulse’ a list of up to ten books ‘that most shaped your attitudes in your vocation and philosophy of life’. The list he sent them was as follows:

As an exercise in polymathic showing off, the list is peerless. In just ten titles Oppenheimer has managed to include works of drama, fiction, poetry, mathematics, physics and Hinduism, written in a total of no fewer than six languages: Sanskrit, Greek, Italian, French, German and English. Moreover, in leaving out, in most cases, the author’s name, Oppenheimer is making rather large assumptions about the readers of
The Christian Century
: that they would know that
Les Fleurs du mal
is a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire, that the
Theaetetus
is a dialogue by Plato, that
L’Éducation sentimentale
and
Divina Commedia
were works by, respectively, Flaubert and Dante, and, most obscure of all, that by ‘Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems’ he meant the
Śatakatraya
, which are usually translated as ‘The Three Centuries’, but which Oppenheimer’s old friend Arthur Ryder translated as ‘Women’s Eyes’. The letter inviting Oppenheimer to take part in this feature had said that the lists ‘should inform, intrigue, and possibly inspire our readers’. Well, they were probably
intrigued
at least.

On 29 April 1962, President Kennedy hosted a formal reception and dinner at the White House for forty-nine American Nobel Prize-winners plus additional guests, among whom was Oppenheimer. The company included scientists such as Linus Pauling and Glenn Seaborg (but not, significantly, Edward Teller), and writers like Robert Frost and Pearl Buck. It was, said Kennedy, ‘the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone’. After dinner, Seaborg took Oppenheimer aside and told him that there was a good chance of reinstating his security clearance. All Oppenheimer had to do was submit himself once more
to a security-board hearing. Would he do that? The answer was swift and final: ‘Not on your life.’

In September 1962, Oppenheimer was one of three speakers at the dedication of the Niels Bohr Library of the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in New York. The other two speakers were Richard Courant, professor at New York University, and George Uhlenbeck from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Less than two months later, on 18 November, Bohr died at the age of seventy-seven. For the next
Year Book of the American Philosophical Society
Oppenheimer wrote a long and detailed, but emotionally restrained, biographical memoir of Bohr. Reading it, one would never imagine that he was here writing about the man he revered above all others.

Oppenheimer gave so many public talks during this time, many of them subsequently published as magazine articles, that, inevitably, their quality varied and he increasingly began to repeat himself. In the October 1962 edition of
Encounter
, the in-house magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he published an article called ‘Science and Culture’, which seems to be little more than a rehashing of thoughts that he had published many times before. Slightly more inspired, if only for its title, was a talk he gave at the National Book Awards in New York on 12 March 1963. The title, of which he was very proud, was ‘The Added Cubit’, an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount as given in St Matthew, in which Jesus, in the context of exhorting his followers to ‘Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink’ – that is, to trust God to provide these things – says: ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’

Before giving the lecture, Oppenheimer stopped off at Columbia and, while there, asked everyone what his title meant, and where it came from. No one knew. Jeremy Bernstein had recently joined the faculty at Columbia, and a colleague called him to tell him about Oppenheimer’s triumphant exposure of the physicists’ ignorance of the Bible, whereupon Bernstein, being curious, phoned his friend Robert Merton, who immediately identified the relevant passage from St Matthew. Then, Bernstein recalls:

It is hard to see quite why Oppenheimer was so proud of this title, but proud he was. He even ended the talk with an example of the amusement he derived from the failure of people to identify its source:

Oppenheimer’s theme in this talk is that, contrary to what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, we
should
‘take thought’ and
not
place our trust in fate, or God, or our leaders. ‘By taking thought of our often grim responsibility,’ Oppenheimer told his audience, ‘by knowing something of our profound and omnipresent imperfection, we may help our children’s children to a world less cruel, perhaps less unjust, less likely to end in a catastrophe beyond words. We may even find our way to put an end to the orgy, the killing and the brutality that is war.’

The ‘imperfection’ of mankind had by this time become one of Oppenheimer’s favourite themes, though it is here given a new intensity. In our secularised age, he says, we have lost something that can be found in the great religions and is ‘a truth whose recognition seems to me essential to the very possibility of a permanently peaceful world, and to be indispensable also in our dealings with people with radically different history and culture and tradition’: