J. Robert Oppenheimer teemed with contradictions. He was shy and bold, naïve and brilliant, a loyal husband who cheated, a gentle man whose bomb could kill millions.
That he loved quantum physics may be no accident. The field holds that some basic phenomena of the material world have opposing features that cannot be observed simultaneously, such as wave and particle behavior. Oppenheimer had a deep affection for these irreconcilable pairs. He called them “the nature of the surprise, of the miracle, of something that you could not figure out.”
In a universe of contradictions, the physicist himself grew famous as an American hero and infamous as a red sympathizer. The question of his true loyalties rang alarms 80 years ago as the Federal Bureau of Investigation probed Oppenheimer’s Communist past — and is now — surprisingly — gaining new attention.
This fall, months after Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” won seven Oscars, the Journal of Cold War Studies, a quarterly publication of Harvard University, is revisiting the Oppenheimer case.
Four historians argue that the physicist was not just a Communist ally but a full-blown member of a secret Berkeley unit who ultimately perjured himself in a federal hearing that had dug into his past. As evidence, they cite a substantial body of letters, memoirs and espionage files, some postdating the movie’s source material.
“Historians have to go where the evidence takes them,” said Gregg Herken, who leads the reassessment and is emeritus professor of history at the University of California.
In sharp disagreement is Kai Bird, co-author of “American Prometheus,” the 2005 biography of Oppenheimer on which Mr. Nolan based his film. The biographer denied that, in the 18 years since his book’s publication, any evidence has come to light confirming that the superstar of American science was in fact a true Communist.
“The only reason these folks are revisiting this issue is because of the Nolan film,” Mr. Bird said. “They’re pushing their own little crusade.”
A middle path also exists. Some scholars, not unlike the quantum physicists, see both claims about Oppenheimer as possibly true — that he was and wasn’t a dedicated Communist. Potential clues, they say, can be found in his tangled life.
“He may have wavered,” said Thomas L. Sakmyster, an expert on underground Communist units. He said that flexible rules let members see their red ties as blurry.
Oppenheimer and others, Dr. Sakmyster said, “may have thought of themselves as fellow travelers” — that is, sympathetic to Communism but not formal party members. “Probably quite a few vacillated in this in-between state.” In the idiom of the day, they were pink individuals in red groups.
Oppenheimer’s love of contradictory pairs grew into a philosophical stance. He borrowed it from his mentor Niels Bohr, also a quantum physicist. Bohr called it complementarity. He saw the opposites of quantum physics as a model for how the threat of atomic annihilation might hold the seeds of its own abolition.
So did Oppenheimer. A few months after the fiery destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the chief architect of their ruin argued that the new weapon might also end war.
“This is not only a great peril,” Oppenheimer told his Los Alamos colleagues, “but a great hope.” As he spoke, thunder echoed across the mesa.
Pink versus Red
Julius Robert Oppenheimer grew up wealthy in an elegant building on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. His family’s art collection included works by Picasso, Van Gogh and Cezanne. Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in three years. After studying in Europe with top scientists, he taught physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Erudite and charismatic, he had an otherworldly air that many of his students emulated.
Amid the social upheavals of the Great Depression, Oppenheimer, like many 1930s liberals, belonged to leftist groups that denounced fascism abroad and sought economic justice at home. Even so, the elite physicist had little in common with the “card carrying, dues paying” Communists of his day. The workers joined picket lines, went to rallies and sold newspapers that reliably echoed Moscow’s line.
The ranks of the party soon expanded, however. In the 1930s, it began to court doctors, lawyers, professors, filmmakers and other members of the middle and upper classes. Many were leery of party affiliation. In response, the American party encouraged them to join underground units where members could study Marx, adopt pseudonyms and work in secret to aid the party. They carried no cards, unlike their worker comrades.
“It was risky and thrilling,” said Dr. Sakmyster, a emeritus professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. The secret members, he added, tended to be “very idealistic, very romantic.”
This was the moment in which Oppenheimer embraced Communism. His wife, his former fiancée, his brother, his sister-in-law and some of his best friends were party members. He called himself “a fellow traveler.” He subscribed to People’s World, a Communist newspaper, and each year gave the party up to roughly $1,000 — today the equivalent of more than $20,000.
That might have raised eyebrows in some circles, but it was not illegal. And Moscow would soon be Washington’s ally in World War II. After the war, however, Moscow got the bomb and quickly built a threatening arsenal. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era’s anti-Communism, Oppenheimer faced a secret hearing to determine if he were a security risk.
Under oath, repeatedly, the scientific head of Los Alamos denied ever belonging to a secret Communist unit or having any kind of formal Communist affiliation.
Dr. Herken, who wrote a 2002 book on Oppenheimer, said the trail of contrary evidence starts with two unpublished memoirs.
The first, by Haakon Chevalier, the physicist’s best friend at Berkeley, told of the two men joining the secret unit. The other, by Gordon Griffiths, a graduate student who became a University of Washington historian, said that he had been the Communist liaison to the group and that Oppenheimer was a member.
“American Prometheus,” which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, dismissed such evidence as insubstantial. “Quite bluntly,” Mr. Bird and his co-author Martin J. Sherwin declared, “any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a Party member is a futile exercise.”
New clues, however, kept coming to light. In 2009, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, historians of American Communism and Soviet espionage, cited old Soviet intelligence reports they saw as clearly indicating that “Oppenheimer had lied” to American officials about his party affiliation.
In Soviet spy parlance, the term for the American Communist Party was the “fellow countryman organization” or sometimes just the “fraternal” body. The reports showed that senior Soviet intelligence officials had repeatedly made references to Oppenheimer as being a “secret member” of the American party. They even gave the physicist a code name: Chester.
The evidence grew. In 2012, Dr. Haynes and Dr. Klehr cited a new document that called Oppenheimer an unacknowledged member of the Communist Party. The old intelligence report was addressed to Lavrenti P. Beria, the political head of the Soviet atom bomb program.
Barton J. Bernstein, an emeritus professor of history at Stanford University who has studied the Oppenheimer case for decades, said he was skeptical at first of the physicist’s formal Communist ties but now sees the evidence as “overwhelming.”
So does Mark Kramer, director of Cold War Studies Project at Harvard and the editor of the Journal of Cold War Studies. “I have no doubt that he was a loyal American,” he said of Oppenheimer. “I also have no doubt that he perjured himself.”
The journal’s discussion is to feature Dr. Herken, Dr. Bernstein, Dr. Haynes and Dr. Klehr. Dr. Kramer said that Mr. Bird, the biographer, had declined an invitation to address their comments and that Mr. Nolan did not respond.
To a reporter, Mr. Bird scorned the historians as petty. Moreover, in an exchange of emails, he disparaged the spy reports cited by Dr. Haynes and Dr. Klehr as “marshmallow evidence.”
The real story, Mr. Bird said, is that Oppenheimer’s charisma inspired wide feelings of personal loyalty and even devotion. Everyone wanted to think “he was their friend, colleague, comrade,” the biographer said.
The physicist’s charismatic pull, Mr. Bird added, extended to “the apparatchiks in Soviet intelligence who were enamored of any reports that he was perhaps a ‘fellow countryman.’ Everyone wanted to believe that Oppenheimer was on their team. And Oppie himself did nothing to disabuse his friends in the Communist Party that he was more than just sympathetic.”
Charles Oppenheimer, a family spokesperson, also rejected the idea that his grandfather had belonged to a secret unit. The meetings in Berkeley, he said, were nothing more than friends getting together to talk politics.
“The whole thing is ridiculous,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.
Red and Pink Simultaneously
In the shadow of these public disputes, other historians have proposed a middle path.
In a 2002 interview, Priscilla J. McMillan, a Harvard historian and author of an Oppenheimer biography, argued that Communist officials had worked hard to draw in important figures like Oppenheimer. To ease the way, they would relax the secret admission rules.
Party officials, Dr. McMillan said, “wanted so much to have some kind of connection to a person of his prominence that they would let you write your own ticket.” That freedom, she added, may also have given Oppenheimer “a way he could think he was not a member.”
Dr. Sakmyster, who studied the secret units for his 2011 book, “Red Conspirator,” gave an example of that kind of accommodation. He said members of the underground groups could forgo regular dues — a duty for the rank and file. Secret members, he said, were given the option to make large donations, preferably in cash because it was difficult to trace.
Dr. Sakmyster added that the renunciation of cards and regular dues raised basic questions for him on whether the secret unit members were true Communists. In researching his book, he said he had found many cases where members saw themselves as pink rather than red. “It’s a difficulty,” Dr. Sakmyster said, in determining what defined a Communist back then.
Significantly, Dr. Griffiths, who told of being the liaison to Oppenheimer’s secret unit and described his job as handing out party literature and collecting dues, pointed in his memoir to that kind of muddle.
“I was given to understand that Oppenheimer, as a man of independent wealth, made his contribution through some special channel,” Dr. Griffiths wrote. “Nobody carried a party card. If payment of dues was the only test of membership, I could not testify that Oppenheimer was a member.”
Overall, proponents of the middle path see Oppenheimer as simultaneously being and not being a real Communist, as red and pink at the same time.
For instance, Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., described the Berkeley unit as “designed to be plausibly deniable” but disparaged it as “an ineffectual group of professors who played at subversive politics.”
So too, Dr. Wellerstein, echoing Dr. McMillan, raised the possibility that Oppenheimer “rewrote his own memory” so he could more readily think of himself as a “fellow traveler” rather than as a party member.
The Red Indictment
After the war, Oppenheimer seized on the complementarity idea to push for the bomb’s undoing. He called for the establishment of a world government that would bar deadly threats and advance peaceful ends. He also called on Washington to hold back on the hydrogen bomb and to bare atomic secrets.
The arms establishment bristled. In 1954, after subjecting Oppenheimer to a humiliating trial, the government revoked his top-secret clearance and declared him a security risk, bringing his status as a national hero to an end.
The physicist and his wife sought refuge in the Virgin Islands, drinking heavily. Oppenheimer had frequent nightmares. The couple fell into bitter conflict with their neighbors. Never again did he speak out publicly on nuclear policy. For 13 years — until he died at 62 — the physicist remained silent. Why?
In the new edition of his book, which came out months after the movie, Dr. Herken argues that Oppenheimer went silent because he “desperately wanted” to hide his red past. Admitting the truth at his 1954 trial, he said, would have contradicted his previous denials and made him vulnerable to a perjury charge. Under federal law, perjury can lead to up to five years in prison.
“The possibility that his secret party membership would come to light,” Dr. Herken wrote, “haunted him the rest of his days.”
Mr. Bird in “American Prometheus” argued that Oppenheimer had nothing to hide and was silenced by the country’s arms complex. The book likened him to the Greek god who stole fire from the pantheon, gave it to humans and suffered eternal punishment for his crime.
Dr. Wellerstein, the historian of science, suggested that a jumble of factors and contradictions likely undid Oppenheimer, not just one or two.
What prompted his silencing, Dr. Wellerstein said, was probably not so much the fear of incarceration as the shattering of his former life. The historian described Oppenheimer’s loss of both his security clearance and his access to the corridors of power as “psychologically crippling. It broke him. He no longer had any desire to get involved with anything. He became bitter.”
Oppenheimer, if alive today, might enjoy how the experts contradict one another on what contributed to his unraveling. After all, he loved the scientific inconsistencies.
In the end, however, his own temperament and set of ambiguities did him in, turning the hero into a sullen recluse.
“He could have become a grand old man of physics,” Dr. Wellerstein said. “Instead, he became this increasingly depressed figure, drinking himself into oblivion.”
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