A lesson learned from "AMERICAN PROMETHEUS," by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Sometimes there are no easy lessons to take away—because patriotism and moral reckonings can be complicated things. As I finished Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s masterful Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus , I realized I had a problem in titling this blo g post; I realized I had A LOT to say about the life of Oppenheimer, yet there wasn’t necessarily one easy lesson to take away from it (I really should think of such difficulties before taking on these projec ts)! I certainly could not say anything more eloquently than the talented filmmaker Christopher Nolan, who made the biography the outline of his 2023 film Oppenheimer . However, there was a line in the book itself that hit me hard, given my profession and how much of my life I spend thinking on historical topics. As Oppenheimer went through a brutal inquiry from a McCarthy- esque government panel that eventually declared him a national security risk and invoked his clearance, various allies of his recommended h...