J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist I. I. Rabi, a friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), once told Jeremy Bernstein that Oppenheimer “lived a charade.” Now, almost 40 years after Oppenheimer’s death, Mr. Bernstein has attempted to uncover that charade — which included the famous scientist’s very name.Oppenheimer customarily told people that the initial “J.” in his name did not stand for anything, a claim accepted by numerous biographers, including Mr. Bernstein himself in his earlier years. Oppenheimer’s birth certificate, however, reveals that he shared the first name Julius with his father.

Mr. Bernstein theorizes that Oppenheimer thought the name sounded too Jewish, but does not explain how dropping it would have hidden his origins, given his surname and his family’s affiliation with Ethical Culture, a late-19th-century movement of self-denying Jews.

Oppenheimer finished Harvard in three years, graduating summa cum laude, then left for Europe. His first stop was Cambridge, where he suffered a nervous breakdown, manifested most dramatically when he suddenly tried to strangle a friend.

Nevertheless, his brilliance as a physicist was clear, and he was soon invited to Goettingen, where he earned his Ph.D. under Max Born, a founding father of the newly emerging quantum mechanics, with whom he derived an approximation that remains a standard technique for calculations involving molecules.

However, Oppenheimer’s habit in seminars of interrupting the speakers to demonstrate his own superior grasp of every topic so irritated his fellow students (some of them future Nobelists) that they circulated a petition threatening to boycott the seminar unless he was stopped.

In 1929 Oppenheimer accepted a joint position at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Caltech in Pasadena, where he became the charismatic leader of a generation of students, many of whom fell so much under his spell that they imitated his mannerisms and speech.

The most important of many significant papers he and his students published in the 1930s is probably one written jointly with Harlan Snyder which introduced the concept of a black hole. Mr. Bernstein suggests that, had Oppenheimer lived another few years, this work might have won a Nobel Prize.

With substantial private means on top of his academic income, he also enjoyed an active social life. In the late 1930s, he became heavily involved in left-wing politics, a dramatic change from his previous indifference that he attributed to factors including “a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany”; an awareness of the effects of the Depression on those who lacked his financial resources; and his love affair with Jean Tatlock, a Berkeley professor’s daughter and an on-again, off-again member of the Communist Party.

After breaking up with Tatlock he fell in love with Kitty Harrison, also a former Communist, a married woman whom he impregnated and, following her divorce, married himself. This scandalized some of the more conservative figures on the Berkeley faculty (yes, there were such people), including Ernest O. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, formerly a close friend of Oppenheimer’s.

Early in 1942, the United States launched the top-secret Manhattan Project in response to fears that Germany was building an atomic bomb. Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, who had been in charge of constructing the Pentagon, was appointed head of the project, and picked Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos laboratory, established overnight on a remote site in New Mexico where Oppenheimer had often spent vacations.

Mr. Bernstein remarks, “Never before, or since, has such a collection of scientific talent been assembled to carry out one task.” Under Oppenheimer’s leadership, within three years two kinds of atomic bombs were designed, built and dropped, ending the war against Japan.

Security was a major concern at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer’s pre-war fellow-traveling, which had ended by this time, was well known, and Gen. Groves did not regard him as a security threat. However, his propensity for strange behavior manifested itself several times when he fabricated stories during security investigations.

Most seriously, after he was approached at his home by his friend Haakon Chevalier — a member of the Communist Party, who told him that another Communist acquaintance wanted to know if Oppenheimer would share information on the Manhattan Project with the Soviet Union — Oppenheimer failed to report this contact for months, then brought up the subject obliquely with a security official, and later invented a complicated tale about his encounter with Chevalier.

After the war, Oppenheimer, by now a celebrity, was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a collection of academic superstars (most famously Albert Einstein) that he revitalized and transformed into a mecca for young scientists, including Jeremy Bernstein.

He was also elected chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission, where a major debate raged over building the so-called Super Bomb, later known as the hydrogen bomb, a weapon based on nuclear fusion that would be far more powerful than the fission bomb.

The Super had been proposed early in World War II by Edward Teller, who continued to champion the idea after the war, even though there appeared to be insuperable technical difficulties which caused Oppenheimer and other leading figures of the GAC to oppose a program to develop it.

After the Russians acquired their own atomic bomb, President Truman ordered the Super project to proceed. Shortly thereafter, Stanislaw Ulam and Teller came up with a new concept that made the Super feasible, and it was produced successfully in the early 1950s.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer had made many enemies, most significantly Lewis Strauss, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Apart from his policy disagreements with Oppenheimer, Strauss had a strong personal dislike for him — especially after Oppenheimer, in his accustomed manner, had sarcastically mocked Strauss in public.

In 1954, prompted by Strauss, the commission stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. The hearings that finalized that decision were notoriously unfair. Mr. Bernstein describes how Strauss and his allies orchestrated the witnesses’ testimony to make the most powerful case against Oppenheimer, while his defense was weakened both by his attorney’s lack of aggressiveness and by the AEC’s blocking his access to much of the case against him.

The most important witness was Edward Teller, who originally planned to testify that he did not regard him in any way as a security risk. However, before Teller testified, the AEC’s lawyer showed him an account of the Chevalier incident, which Teller found so shocking that when asked if he regarded Oppenheimer as a security risk, he replied, “I would like to see the vital interests of the country in hands which I … trust more.”

The withdrawal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance ended his service to the government, but he continued as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1963, the AEC made partial amends for its treatment of him by awarding him its highest honor, the Fermi award. The previous year’s winner was Edward Teller, who had nominated Oppenheimer.

“Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma” is full of amusing and enlightening anecdotes and asides that illuminate both Oppenheimer’s personality and the milieu in which he lived. Mr. Bernstein includes a number of stories of his own interactions with Oppenheimer; his entertaining account of life at the Institute in the late 1950s demonstrates how Oppenheimer’s pointed questions threatened the self-esteem of anyone who spoke there. If the book has a moral, it is that even a genius can be too clever by half.

Jeffrey Marsh has written widely on scientific topics and public issues ranging from nuclear strategy to social policy.