By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, New York, 2005 Click to Buy this Book!

In the Author’s Note and Acknowledgments section, Martin Sherwin informs the reader that this biography was 25 years in the making. The work began in 1979 with a visit to the “Oppenheimer Ranch” in New Mexico, called Perro Caliente (“hot dog”), a few months after Sherwin signed a contract with publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Here he met Peter Oppenheimer, Robert’s son. Kai Bird, author of The Color of Truth, was invited to join him as co-author in 2000. Both authors “acknowledge the percipiency” of two friends who suggested the title of the book, “American Prometheus.” It will be indicated at the conclusion of this review, however, that this is not an appropriate title: J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) hardly stands up at all by comparison with the Titan Prometheus.

The five-part biography is 721 pages in length, and the reader may soon begin to wonder why it was necessary to include so many personal or private details about the life of Oppenheimer and those he knew or influenced. To the degree that biographical research and writing make no attempt to approach the science of the spirit, as is called for in our time, it risks sinking, by way of compensation, into a haze of insignificant details that will eventually prove tiresome for the most determined of readers. In contrast to American Prometheus, author William Sheehan approaches and enters into the realm of the spirit, although tentatively, in his biography of Edward Emerson Barnard, The Immortal Fire Within.

The Preface of American Prometheus introduces the central theme of Oppenheimer’s personal trials that began in the year 1953 when his life “suddenly spun out of control” after he received a letter from the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hinting at espionage activities and stating that Oppenheimer had been declared a security risk. The government, i.e., J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, had been hounding Oppenheimer for years with constant surveillance and illegal wire-taps because of his affiliations with the Communist Party in the 1930s. Through long detailed expositions, the authors stress that interest in communism was popular among many young academic intellectuals at that time. They were seeking, through involvement with various left-wing movements, the ideal of a humanitarian social order along the lines of socialism or communal sharing, and were apparently unaware of the dark and brutal side of Russian communism. The conclusions of the AEC’s hearings are revealed near the end of the book, in Chapter Thirty-Seven, titled “A Black Mark on the Escutcheon of Our Country.” “By a vote of two to one, the board deemed Oppenheimer a loyal citizen who was nevertheless a security risk.” Oppenheimer (often affectionately called Opje or Oppie) had his security clearance revoked, yet went on to live the rich and rewarding life of a respected professor of physics and an international celebrity. Ironically, in Latin America the admired physicist was called “El Padre de la Bomba Atomica.” (There is no evidence in this thoroughly researched book that Oppenheimer ever passed on secrets about the atomic bomb to Russia, as claimed in the 1994, 1995 book by Pavel A. Sudoplatov, who had been a KGB agent, a spy and an assassin. Who, besides conspiracy theorists, would believe the word of someone like Sudoplatov?) More »