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 blog 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 projects)! 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 he simply leave the United States and practice his brilliance for physics elsewhere. Albert Einstein famously told him that he owed nothing more to a country that he had done so much for, and he should tell us all to go to Hell and storm off the stage. A tearful Oppenheimer responded to his friends: “but damn it, I happen love this country!” 

I have had a version of this same conversation with students over my years of teaching American History, and I realized how many of my colleagues must have had these similar thoughts in their heads as we have been pulled into a national culture war over what should and should not be taught to our students. With my students, we explore all the deep dark corners of American History, and the ways that past moral failings continue to shape the struggles of our present. More than a few of my students over the years have sifted through these historical developments and made comments to me about how America sucks and we should just give up on ever trying to pretend otherwise. I’ve found myself pushing back against them, because with everything I know about America’s mistakes—damn it, I do still happen to love this country. To many people, patriotism is a simple and undying love—of flags, of anthems, and of a belief that America is the greatest, always has been, and always will be. My love of my country is complex, measured, and often filled with sadness and disappointment—but is yet there still, and it probably always will be. 

No one understood what a complicated feeling this could be better than J. Robert Oppenheimer. A brilliant physicist from an early age who mastered the new theory of quantum mechanics, Oppenheimer spent much of his youth flirting with various left-wing causes, including Communist ones, largely because at the time those were the only groups trying to stop the rise of European fascism. That past eventually destroyed him, but a desperate United States government was willing to overlook it if he would help us to become the first country to successfully develop an atomic bomb. By all accounts, Oppenheimer took to this task with fervor, based on the assumption that the bomb would be used to aid in the collapse of Nazi Germany. When Germany collapsed before Japan, he and his team of physicists at the Manhattan Project were much more ambivalent about switching the bomb targets to civilian cities in Japan, a country which they suspected as on the verge of surrendering regardless (whether that was true or not has been debated by historians ever since). But whatever personal objections he had, Oppenheimer played the role of the good soldier scientist, publicly proclaiming to his dying day that Hiroshima had been a necessary evil that could lead to a better, more peaceful future had the post-war situation been handled correctly. 

It was the different realities of Cold War America that put Oppenheimer directly in the crosshairs of the U.S. government. Hoping to see an international ban on atomic weapons, he was adamantly against the escalation of the nuclear arms race and especially the decision to develop the infamous hydrogen bomb, a weapon that had no practical purpose short of the total annihilation of much of human civilization. In the confusion and paranoia of post-war America, America’s national security agencies saw anyone with a leftist past as a potential Soviet agent and mistook Oppenheimer’s dissent against the madness of nuclear weapons for disloyal intent. Oppenheimer’s own tendency to humiliate his opponents further made him a target of petty government officials such as Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. By the time the anti-Communist fervor subsided in the 1960’s, Oppenheimer was forgiven by presidents such as JFK, but was still seen as too damaged of a figure politically to be given any real position of power and authority. By the time Oppenheimer died at a relatively young age of throat cancer, he was living out a quiet life of semi-retirement at a scientific institute. 

Oppenheimer was nothing if not a complicated figure, by many angles. As noted, I found his patriotism and love of America a stunning and admirable fact, given how relentlessly the U.S. government abused his work and reputation. There are historical figures whom one could argue are more heroic or villainous, but Oppenheimer was like the vast majority of us all who find ourselves stuck firmly somewhere in the middle. Those who want to see him as a bold anti-nuclear activist, martyred for the cause of world peace, would be disappointed to hear of his lack of regret for the atomic bombings of Japan—of which the debate over how morally correct it was will perhaps never stop being debated. Those who want to see him as a villain who played a major role in the deaths of 200,000 civilians, would perhaps be stunned to meet the quiet man who fought for racial equality long before it became widely accepted, and who was haunted by visions of a nuclear apocalypse he was desperate to avoid at all costs. But one way I unambiguously admire Oppenheimer was in his lifelong belief that science should be used for the advancement of humanity and should never be fully co-opted for military and selfish reasons. And like him, damn it, I happen to love this country, for no matter how badly we fail we also have the capability of achieving anything we put our minds to enough.