Martin J. Sherwin

“You have to take the whole story,” Rabi insisted. “That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man’s life.”

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER’S life—his career, his reputation, even his sense of self-worth—suddenly spun out of control four days before Christmas in 1953. “I can’t believe what is happening to me,” he exclaimed, staring through the window of the car speeding him to his lawyer’s Georgetown home in Washington, D.C. There, within a few hours, he had to confront a fateful decision. Should he resign from his government advisory positions? Or should he fight the charges contained in the letter that Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), had handed to him out of the blue earlier that afternoon?

“In the dark days of the early fifties, when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’ ”1

Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club. Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as “J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium; a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause.

fact that Katherine and her aristocratic hidalgo friends could accept this insecure New York Jewish boy in their midst was somehow a watershed event in Robert’s inner life. To be sure, he knew he was accepted inside the forgiving womb of the Ethical Culture community in New York. But here was approbation from people he liked outside his own world. “For the first time in his life,” Smith thought, “. . . [Robert] found himself loved, admired, sought after.” It was a feeling Robert cherished, and in the years ahead he would learn to cultivate the social skills required to call up such admiration on demand.

“I was very fond of music,” Boyd recalled, “but once a year he would go to an opera, with me and Bernheim usually, and he’d leave after the first act. He just couldn’t take any more.” Herbert Smith had also noticed this peculiarity, and once said to Robert, “You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical.”

Late that autumn of 1925, Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him. Consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he “poisoned” an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk. Jeffries Wyman later said, “Whether or not this was an imaginary apple, or a real apple, whatever it was, it was an act of jealousy.”

Robert was no doubt as perplexed by his own behavior as was Francis. He wrote his friend a few weeks after the incident that “You should have, not a letter, but a pilgrimage to Oxford, made in a hair shirt, with much fasting and snow and prayer. But I will keep my remorse and gratitude, and the shame I feel for my inadequacy to you, until I can do something rather less useless for you. I do not understand your forbearance nor your charity, but you must know that I will not forget them.”

Robert “gave the psychiatrist in Cambridge an outrageous song and dance. . . . The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who’s being analyzed. They don’t have anybody.”

The book was Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul. Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression. Proust’s work is a classic novel of introspection, and it left a deep and lasting impression on Oppenheimer.