Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Oppenheimer with Kai Bird

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Sharon’s guest today is Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of American Prometheus, which is the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that the blockbuster Christopher Nolan film was based on. Join us while Kai shares his experience of what it was like to have his work turned into a historically accurate major motion picture, and how he conducted the research required to capture the life of Oppenheimer. If you are interested in learning more about the mid-Century, World War II, his wife Kitty, or what happened to them immediately after the war, you will not want to miss this episode.  Special thanks to our guest, Kai Bird, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Kai Bird Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you joining me today. My guest is Kai Bird. I am so excited to be chatting with the author of American Prometheus, which is the biography of Robert Oppenheimer, on which the blockbuster Christopher Nolan movie was based. So if you are interested in learning more about the mid-century, if you're interested in learning more about World War II, the Manhattan Project, about Robert Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty, what happens to him after the war, you've got to stay tuned for this episode. Let's dive in. sharon mcmahon and here's where it gets interesting i am very excited to be joined by biographer kai bird thank you so much for being here today thank you sharon for having me it has been an eventful year in your life as a biographer has

it not it's been amazing. Yes. We were just chatting about your book, American Prometheus, which is an incredible biography. It's been widely critically acclaimed, of course. And it was the basis for a huge blockbuster movie this year, Oppenheimer. We're not going to talk too much about the movie because I want to talk about the book, but I would love to get your reaction about what was it like to see your work on the big screen? Oh, it was an incredible experience. I've seen it five times now. The first time I was flown out to Hollywood and the next morning at 10 a.m. I was escorted into an IMAX theater that was completely empty. And Christopher Nolan sat me right in the middle of the theater and then he adjourned to the edge of the row and sat there with his wife, Emma, and the three of us watched the movie. And I had read the screenplay about 18 months earlier. So I sort of had an idea of what to expect, but I was blown away. It was

an incredible theatrical cinematic experience. The music was overpowering, but for me, it just brought back all these memories of the research into Oppenheimer's life and the writing of the book. And Nolan is a brilliant director. He manages in three hours to capture the highlights of the book and Oppenheimer's incredible life. So I'm a very lucky biographer. It's a terrific movie, but it's historically accurate. And that is a very rare thing in Hollywood. True. Yes.

They always got to throw some things in there that up the dramatic effect, it seems like. But Oppenheimer's life didn't need it, right? He didn't need it. No, no. The movie has some very incredible scenes in it. And, you know, they're all by and large true. So there was no need to make things up. Right, right.

Okay. If somebody is listening to this who has not seen the movie, has not yet read the book, who was like, who are we talking about now? Give us a really high level overview of who Oppenheimer even was. Well, J. Robert Oppenheimer was in the popular mind, perhaps he's best known as the father of the atomic bomb. But you know, he was born in 1904. He grew up in privileged circumstances in New York City. And he became really America's first quantum physicist, studying initially in England and then Germany,

and came back here to this country in the late 20s and founded a school of theoretical physics in Berkeley. And, you know, he spent the 1930s teaching. And then in 1942, most improbably, he was selected by General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, to become the scientific director of the secret lab at Los Alamos to build the gadget. And he was only 38 years old. And he had never had any administrative experience, but he transformed himself into a brilliant administrator and a charismatic leader. And his team managed to build this weapon of mass destruction in two and a half years, just in time for it to be used on Japan at the end of the war. That story in itself is pretty incredible, but what really

makes the story resonate and have an arc to it is that in 1945, he was America's most famous scientist. His image was on the cover of Time and Life. But then nine years later, after being celebrated in such a national manner, nine years later, he's brought down in a secret court, a kangaroo court proceeding in 1954, and later publicly humiliated, stripped of his security clearance, and as a suspected secret communist, none of which was true. And so he became essentially the chief celebrity victim of the entire McCarthy era. So his life story is very relevant to our current times. He not only gave us the atomic age, which we're still grappling to live with, that story is not over, it could still end badly. But he also, what happened to him in 1954, reminds us that McCarthyism planted the seeds of our current divisive politics. And then finally, his life story is one of a scientist, and we are a society drenched in technology and science, and yet we don't have many scientific heroes.

And his life story should resonate for all three of those reasons. You know, I loved the beginning of his life where he's not the strongest student. He's not a genius of Einstein proportions, but one of his professors asks him something to the effect of, can you hear the music? And it speaks to, does your brain understand how this works? And that moment for me was like, oh, that's so good. Because for him, it was not about, do I know the most in this class? Am I the best in the labs? Are my experiments always working? But it was about how his mind worked. Do you think that he had a really unique intellectual talent? Or was he the right person for General Groves at the right time? What was it about him that led to this perfect convergence of circumstances?

Well, I think you're right. He was all of those things. The film doesn't cover the childhood, but he does manage to have an opening scene near the top of the movie where he's portraying this young 22-year-old student studying physics in Cambridge, England. And he's vulnerable and he's failing in the laboratory. in the laboratory. And he's awkward with his hands and breaking things in the lab. And he has a near nervous breakdown. It's referred to in the book as the poison apple incident. While we don't know exactly what happened, he may not have actually been trying to poison his tutor, but he did something that got himself either suspended or put on probation at Cambridge,

and he had to go see a series of psychiatrists. And so this is important to understand that the young Oppenheimer was fragile, like all of us human beings, fragile and emotionally immature fragile and emotionally immature and awkward around women and yet he managed to sort of overcome all these problems he failed at being an experimental physicist but he suddenly found discovered the new physics the quantum physics and theoretical physics was his forte. He could, as you said, he could hear the music of the mysterious quantum physics that was being explained. He was a complicated human being. But again, I think he was a good scientist precisely because he could talk about it in plain English because he had read a lot of literature. English because he had read a lot of literature. And this is what attracted Leslie Groves, General Groves, to hire him because this was the only physicist he had met who could explain quantum a little bit in plain English and explain what was selected to build the gadget? It could not have been without significant reservation. Couldn't have been without a significant thought. He had to know

the potential of what he was doing and decided that the risk must be taken? Oh, he was eager to get the job. He learned in 1939, basically, that fission was possible and immediately realized with a few calculations that this meant that a bomb was possible, a very big bomb. And he had studied in Germany with German physicists whom he knew were perfectly capable as he was of understanding the potential for the gadget. And he'd even attended lectures by Heisenberg, the German physicist who U.S. intelligence knew was heading the German bomb project. So he thought he was in a serious race with the Germans and he thought in all likelihood they were ahead, that they had started earlier and that it was simply a matter of building enough factories to refine enriched uranium and plutonium and to manufacture these essential materials at the core of the bomb.

Then it was an engineering question about how to ignite the damn thing. And these were problems that he knew could be solved. And Oppenheimer was, by 1939-40, he had been a man of the left, like many university professors. We argue he was only pink, not red, never really joined the Communist Party. But, you know, he was a premature anti-fascist, as they called him. And so he was eager to join the war effort. And he was delighted when Groves picked him for the job. And in fact, I'm sure he used all his charms and charisma to persuade Groves that he was the right guy to do it. persuade Gross that he was the right guy to do it. Hmm. I would love to have you explain how this project even ended up in the middle of New Mexico. Because I think a lot of Americans are like, well, how did they choose that location?

Building Los Alamos itself was a feat. They had to move so many people there. You couldn't expect the world's top scientists to just like come live in the middle of nowhere alone. It was a big undertaking. How did they end up in New Mexico? Well, it was Oppenheimer. He chose it. Years earlier, he had turned to his brother, Frank, younger brother, Frank, on a horseback ride in New Mexico and said, you know, my ambition in life, I would be happy if I could somehow find a way to combine my love of physics with my love of New Mexico. And in 1942, when Groves tapped him to become scientific director of the project, Oppenheimer took the opportunity to suggest, well, what you

should really do is build a secret city in New Mexico at a place called Los Alamos that just happened to be 40 miles down the road from his own private ranch. And so he did achieve his ambition in life. He did combine physics with New Mexico, and he did so at Los Alamos. You know, one of the things that I've heard some people mention since your book has reignited in popularity and since the movie has come out is about the effects of Los Alamos on the people of New Mexico and whether or not Oppenheimer even cared about what was going to happen to the people of New Mexico from having built this. Oh, I think he cared. I think he cared. I think he loved New Mexico and the people there and the native population. And I mean, he was very much into the culture and valued it. But he was a nerdy scientist focused on building this gadget to defeat Hitler.

And they were aware that there was going to be a potential for fallout, radioactive fallout. But they weren't exactly sure what the full extent of the dangers would be. They weren't exactly sure what the full extent of the dangers would be. And I don't think he understood until years, years later that people may have suffered or percentage of people coming down with cancers caused by this exposure had gone up. The evidence for all of this came out many years later and only actually in a definitive way in the last, well, last two decades, maybe. What was life like for people who lived at Los Alamos? You know, it was very Spartan initially, not luxurious, nothing fancy. not luxurious, nothing fancy, but they did build a small town and they had a movie theater and they built a couple of churches. And, you know, initially there were a few hundred people

and then it grew to, by the end of the war, to around 6,000. And Oppenheimer himself lived in a small rock cottage. It was very Spartan. And yet Oppenheimer, as a charismatic leader, inspired his scientists and engineers and mechanics and chemists to work hard, but also to play hard. So, you know, in the winter, they constructed a ski slope with a ski line. So, you know, in the winter, they constructed a ski slope with a ski line. In the summers, they went horseback riding, hiking, and they partied hard. Oppenheimer was famous as a host for pouring his gin martinis with the glass rims dipped in honey. A lot of these scientists working on building this weapon of mass destruction later described living in Los Alamos in those years as the best years of their life because it was an exciting time and they

thought their work was important and they formed deep and long-lasting friendships. I'm Jenna Fisher and I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast office ladies where we rewatched every single episode of the office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Yes. We're sitting next to me. Steve.

In the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that I was really struck by reading this book is you mentioned his

tumultuous relationship with his wife, Kitty. But I was really struck by the apparent difficulty they had with parenting. That parenting seemed to be not a source of joy, but like a tremendous burden and difficulty for them. Am I interpreting that correctly? I think you are. I think there's a fair amount of hinting at this in the book and in the movie. And Kitty was, without a doubt, a sort of early proto-feminist. When she met Oppenheimer in 1940, she was, I think, 29 years old and she'd already been married four times. She was a spitfire. She was very colorful. She was quite beautiful and attractive,

very colorful. She was quite beautiful and attractive. But she also had gone to college and she had gotten a master's in botanical biology. And she was a smart woman. And she was impatient with motherhood. And I think in retrospect, it's quite clear after the birth of her first son, Peter, and then Tony, she experienced postpartum depression. She works a little bit. She's given a job testing for radiation in the health unit, gets bored by it. And yet she's bored trying to raise a feisty young two-year-old. bored trying to raise a feisty young two-year-old. And Oppenheimer is serving her his martinis every night. And I think she had a really tough time adapting to the isolation of Los Alamos, but also trying to adapt to the role of being the wife of the director, she had higher ambitions. And being a mother was not at the top of the list. Yeah, I think it seems pretty obvious. I agree with you that it seems

quite apparent that she had postpartum depression. And then when you add in the lack of meaningful work, right? She didn't feel that she had meaningful work because that was not her field. It wasn't what she was passionate about. Even if she believed in the war effort, what she was being asked to do was not meaningful work to her. She didn't appear to have the same sense of community that many of the other scientists had. So she's isolated. She has no meaningful work. She has postpartum depression. She just seemed miserable. The whole thing seemed miserable for Kitty. I actually had quite a bit of compassion for her. It seemed like so much of her existence, at least once she became in his orbit, that she

just seemed miserable. Yeah. And then even after the war, he becomes a celebrity, in effect. And then I guess her role then becomes to promote him and protect him and defend his reputation and his career. And this comes to a head in the 1954 security hearing where Oppenheimer is put on trial, in effect. security hearing where Oppenheimer is put on trial in effect. And he's oddly incapable of defending himself very aggressively. And yet Kitty steps in and is called to the witness stand and just rips into the prosecutor and parries his questions and rallies to her husband's defense in a way that a tiger would defending her cubs. She had her qualities, but she was a handful, and yet they stayed married, and it was a close partnership until the day Oppenheimer died. And I feel a great deal of sympathy for Kitty too. She was trapped at times in roles that she just wasn't suited for. Right. Yes. Okay. So we obviously know that the Manhattan Project is successful, that they successfully build these atomic weapons, that they drop them on Japan, build these atomic weapons, that they drop them on Japan, that it is a spectacle to end all spectacles. And we usher in a new era of world history, the atomic era. His work at Los Alamos

didn't just change the world because he built the bomb. It changed the world because it thrust the United States into a place in the world stage that it had never occupied before, a place that we still in many ways occupy. And I'm very curious about what happened after the war ends, because there's this moment where they realize they're successful and this sort of jubilation of like, we did it. We did it. We won. It wasn't for nothing. And you can understand how amazing that had to feel. It had to feel like we got Olympic gold. It had to just feel like all of this work was worth it. And then it was just over. It just ended. What happened to Robert, or Oppie as people called him, and Kitty after? I mean, I want to get to the trial, but what do they do immediately following the dropping of these weapons? Well, Api himself, according to Kitty,

to letters she wrote to friends in late August of 45, Api plunges into a deep depression. He reads the accounts of the end of the war and what happened in Hiroshima, and he knows what happened. Over 200,000 people were incinerated. He's deeply troubled by it all. He doesn't regret it. He never apologizes, but he is human, and he is affected by the knowledge that he had played such an important role in this tragedy, and he knows that it's a tragedy. So he plunges into depression. He then pivots. He comes out of it, and by the fall of 1945, he is giving speeches publicly in places like Philadelphia and Washington, New York, talking about the nature of this new weapon. And he's trying to explain that it's not like any other weapon. And he says some starkly dramatic things like in Philadelphia in mid-October, he says, you may think that this

weapon was very expensive because it cost $2 billion, but actually it was cheap. And you may think that it is difficult to build. Actually, any country, however poor, anywhere in the world that decides to build this weapon can do so. There are no secrets to its manufacture. And then he says, this weapon is a weapon for aggressors. This weapon is a weapon of terror. And it was used in the first instance on a virtually already defeated enemy. So, you know, he's saying that this is not something that America can rely on for its defense. He's saying, yes, we used it. And yes, we invented it because it was going to be invented.

And yes, we invented it because it was going to be invented. And it had to be invented in this war rather than the next. And it had to be demonstrated so people would understand how terrible it was. And hopefully the next war would not be fought by two nuclear armed adversaries. Because that would be Armageddon. And he's using his newfound national celebrity to try to educate the politicians and people about this extraordinary weapon and how it needs to be contained and regulated,

how it should be banned, and there should be international controls surrounding nuclear technology, that we should develop the energy aspects of it for peaceful uses, but we should not develop military weapons. He makes this argument to Harry Truman in 1945, and Harry doesn't listen. He makes it to Eisenhower. No one is listening. And he's quickly becoming a threat to the national security establishment, to the defense department, to the army, the Navy, the Air Force, all of whom want to get more and better of these weapons and build bigger and better bombs. And when the Soviets test their own nuclear device, an atomic weapon in 1949,

this sets off a wave of political hysteria in America. And it plants the notion that we have to build a hydrogen bomb. And Oppenheimer comes out against the development of the hydrogen. And again, this makes him many enemies in Washington, which is why he's put on trial in 1954. I thought it was very interesting that you mentioned this sort of direct line between McCarthy and today. am very curious about this kangaroo court and about how they set their sights on him and making him sort of this sacrificial lamb for this broader goal that they are trying to achieve, which is in part, you know, ridding the United States of communists. How did they even decide who we got to get rid of? Was it his ongoing vociferous opposition to the sort of military industrial complex development of

nuclear weapons? Yes, that was the motivation. And in the words of Edward Teller, one of his fellow physicists at Los Alamos, there was a need people realized in the defense national security establishment. Teller argued there was a need to defrock Oppenheimer in his own church, to strip away his legitimacy as a celebrity scientist and to deny him the platform as a public intellectual to talk about things nuclear, but also nuclear policy and defense policy. Is that because he was so popular that they were worried that too many Americans would believe him? Because it's not like alone he had all of the power to make military

decisions. He didn't. Is it the public sentiment that they were concerned about? He had a huge platform nationally as a celebrity scientist, and he had positions in Washington. He sat on the advisory board to the atomic agency that had the responsibility for overseeing things nuclear and development of how to use these weapons and what to develop. So he, as chairman of the advisory committee, he and his committee came out with a report recommending against development of the hydrogen bomb. Well, this made many enemies, including one Louis Strauss, who was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, appointed by Eisenhower in early 1953. And Strauss was the man who had actually hired Oppenheimer to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Strauss was chairman of the board of trustees. And he had recruited Oppenheimer

and then he'd grown to have a visceral dislike for the man. They had just bad chemistry. Strauss was very insecure. He had a high school degree and that was it. Self-made businessman, very wealthy. But he was no nuclear physicist. How long did it take to research a book about Robert Oppenheimer? And how long does it generally take you? Because this is not the only biography you've written.

You've written a book about Jimmy Carter. You're working on another one. How long does a project of this magnitude take? Long time. Marty Sherwin, my late co-author on American Prometheus, started working on this book in 1980. American Prometheus, started working on this book in 1980. And then in the year 2000, he came to me and asked me to join him on the project as a co-author. And he was a very funny guy.

He said, Kai, if you say no, then my gravestone is going to read, he took it with him. Because Marty was a brilliant historian, a great writer, but he sort of had caught biographer's disease, which is when you can't stop researching because there's always one more archive or one more person to interview. Yes, I'm very familiar with this. And you can't start writing. So after 20 years, he came to me, and I did join him. And it still took us another

five years to write the book together and publish it. So American Prometheus is the result of 25 years. Most biographies take at least five years. My first took 10 years. My second took seven. years. My second took seven. Jimmy Carter took six. And I suspect my Roy Cohn book is going to take at least four years, but we'll see. There's always one more archive. Fortunately and unfortunately, Roy Cohn may take me less than the average five years because he burned all his papers. So there is no archive for me to... Yep, yep. And didn't something happen to his secretary's papers too? Oh, you're very up on this. He's very interesting to me.

I've spent a lot of time researching him. Something happened to his secretary's papers. Yes, it's a very different story than the story of Oppenheimer. Roy Cohn and Robert Oppenheimer are probably complete opposites in every way. Just to sort of wrap this up, what do you hope the reader takes away if they read American Prometheus? What do you hope the reader learns or knows about Robert Oppenheimer at the end of the story?

Well, it's a very readable, long biography, and you'll learn a lot of history. You'll get to know Oppenheimer the man, his passions, his love life, his politics, a little bit of quantum physics, but you'll learn a lot of history about America in the Depression and World War II and the McCarthy era. And it's, you know, as I argue earlier, it will teach you a little bit about the roots of Donald Trump's politics and dating back to the McCarthy era and Roy Cohn.

politics, dating back to the McCarthy era and Roy Cohn. It will teach you a lot about the conundrum that we still face, trying to live in the atomic era with nuclear weapons, which is a very dangerous thing. Just look at what's happening in the Ukraine, in that war that Vladimir Putin has waged and in which he has made not so veiled threats to use tactical nuclear weapons. So the story is very relevant to our times. I totally agree. And I loved it. You're right that it is long, but this is a complicated story. He's a complicated man. These were complicated times and you couldn't just be like, he was really smart and then he got picked to build a gadget and then they dropped it. You can't just end it there. You have to tell the story of what

happens to him afterwards and how he is brought down by these external forces who wanted to silence him. It's such a great arc of a story. And I really, really enjoyed reading it and felt like even as somebody who is very interested in the mid-century, knows a lot about the Manhattan Project, et cetera, I learned so much reading it. And I just really enjoyed it. Well, thank you, Sharon. Thank you for reading. It's my pleasure. Do you write biographies full time? Is this just like what you do from sun up to sun down? I'm not good for anything else. So I work on biographies one at a time. I do the last seven years have a part time day job as the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York City at City University.

And it's a terrific institution, the only institution in the country that has as its agenda to promote the art and craft of biography. I don't teach, but I have the pleasure of handing out five $72,000 fellowships every year to working biographers. And we host them with office space. And then we have 20 events or so every year where we put a biographer on stage to talk about their new biography. And it's a terrific thing precisely because I believe that biography is the best form of history. It's the most accessible vehicle for transmitting information about history and the human condition. And we human beings need to know our stories in order to understand ourselves. And biography is the best vehicle for doing that. So it's a lot of fun.

Thank you so much for being here today. I absolutely loved getting to know more about both your work and also more about Robert Oppenheimer. Thank you. Thank you, Sharon. You can buy American Prometheus wherever you buy your books. And you might consider ordering from bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. Thanks for being here. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast

platform. And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.