American Prometheus [antikvár]

PREFACE 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 ofthe Atomic Energy Commission (ABC), had handed to him out of the blue earlier that afternoon? The letter informed him that a new review of his background and policy recommendations had resulted in his being declared a security risk, and went on to delineate thirty-four charges ranging from the ridiculous—"it was reported that in 1940 you were listed as a sponsor of the Friends of the Chinese People"^—to the political—"in the autumn of 1949, and subsequently, you strongly opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb." Curiously, ever since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer had been harboring a vague premonition that something dark and ominous lay in wait for him. A few years earlier, in the late 1940s, at a time when he had achieved a veritably iconic status in American society as the most respected and admired scientist and public policy adviser of his generation—even being featured on the covers of Time and Life magazines—he had read Henry James' short story "The Beast in the Jungle." Oppenheimer was utterly transfixed by this tale of obsession and tormented egotism in which the protagonist is haunted by a premonition that he was "being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen." Whatever it was, he knew that it would "overwhelm" him. As the tide of anticommunism rose in postwar America, Oppenheimer became increasingly aware that "a beast in the jungle" was stalking him. His appearances before Red-hunting congressional investigative committees, the FBI taps on his home and office phones, the scurrilous stories about his political past and policy recommendations planted in the press made him feel hke a hunted man. His left-wing activities during the 1930s