ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

A brilliant mind.

“The bomb still haunts us. And because it does, so does Oppenheimer,” writes nonfiction author and policy analyst Rieff. Oppenheimer was dazzlingly gifted, adept at nearly everything he put a hand or thought to, able to quickly learn difficult languages, such as Sanskrit, which gave the newly nuclear world a frightening motto: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” There were many ironies in Oppenheimer’s life, as Rieff portrays him. One is that, though this is a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, Oppenheimer was seemingly indifferent to that aspect of his identity, which yields a difficult formulation on Rieff’s part: “It seems to me that Oppenheimer understood his Jewishness…[as] out of his mind as long as he could feel it would stay out of other people’s minds as well.” Oppenheimer was also wealthy, “almost certainly…the richest physicist to have ever lived.” That wealth notwithstanding, he also involved himself in leftist causes, which eventually led to his being removed from his postwar position as head of the Atomic Energy Commission at the height of the McCarthy era. However, notes Rieff, suspicion had long attached to him: “There was no point from the late 1930s through to the end of World War II that Oppenheimer was not being investigated by the FBI or by army intelligence.” He was kept on at the Manhattan Project because the bomb likely wouldn’t have happened without him, but another irony is that he was devoted to the war effort and intensely patriotic in his own way. Being thrown out of the atomic club, as Rieff writes, wasn’t too painful: Oppenheimer had his wealth, a professorship, and international renown. And he was ultimately “rehabilitated” as well; one last irony was being awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize by the very agency that fired him a decade earlier.

Lucid, psychologically nuanced portrait of an embattled genius.