This late to the Oppenheimer phenomenon, perhaps the only new point to highlight is that he was a klutz—“useless in the laboratory,” as he says in the movie. A right-wing author made a similar confession in a recently discovered post to a racist website. He’d been terrible working at McDonald’s, he said, so inept that his black and Mexican co-workers shook their heads at him. The racist felt this last fact to be a great shame, and perhaps typically he came to the idea that really smart people aren’t good with their hands. But I’ve met some very smart people who were fine with their hands. To cut the racist a break, I’ll allow that great klutziness, outstanding klutziness, crops up among the intelligent. Isaac Asimov finally abandoned research for full-time writing because of his klutziness. More humbly, my aunt had to quit pre-med. She was fine for grades but not test tubes or microscopes; she didn’t know what to do with them.
A klutz myself, and having found it a lifelong drag, I suspect that the condition reveals a lot about Oppenheimer. The poor little rich kid floundered among boys his age; some could stand him, but others were mean enough to paint his ass and balls green and lock him naked in an ice house. At Harvard the young prodigy amassed good grades, but he and his few peers felt stranded among yahoos. Then adulthood came. Oppenheimer claimed his avocation, relocating to Oxford to become a physicist. But he was rendered an oddball once more. Experimental physics meant lab work, and Oppenheimer was bad at lab work.
As a teenager he had his father pay for weeks of one-on-one tutoring in a lab before his first chemistry class. At Harvard most of his physics work was out of the laboratory; when he did work in the lab, the professor in question said Oppenheimer didn’t get in his hair too much. But at Oxford the ice parted and Oppenheimer’s shaky claim to competence dropped through. Oxford demanded lab work and plenty of it. The young genius was supposed to shine, and instead he was marked once again by his ghastly ineptitude. His life hurt; it had done so for a while. “In all the years of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence,”Oppenheimer remembered, “I hardly took an action, hardly did anything, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and wrong.”
That was the pre-life. Then came quantum theoretical physics. No laboratories now, just blackboards, with admiring Germans to stand by and tell him he’d figured everything out. Oppenheimer left Oxford and began his ascent into glory. One reads that physics started the 20th century as more of a laboratory matter, and that young Germans then pioneered theory because in Germany the old professors hogged the laboratories. Eventually a historical shift took place, one that allowed the stunted but gifted Oppenheimer his chance at physics greatness. History had fluked him into a new life.
Oppenheimer’s work soon made him famous, even exalted, among his colleagues. His rise began when he was 23 and he co-published his first paper. If you’re over 23, that will seem young. But not if you’re 23, and especially not if you’re a physicist. After the young man’s ups and down, the change might’ve seemed improbable: where did this new life come from? An ugly duckling wakes up in her mid-teens and she’s suddenly equipped with Uma Thurman’s body; from now on that bod bends rules, and this remade world is where she gets to live. But the world wasn’t there before; maybe it could go away. For her part, Uma may eventually have taken stock of this existential situation and figured out how to deal with it. I don’t think Oppenheimer did the same with his. He preferred to stalk about on the skyscraper gams that were his intellect. Life wasn’t comfortable for him unless everyone acknowledged those gams and reacted appropriately.
You’ll see that this would make the great man dependent on the people who did the reacting, and dependent he was. When he was among scientists and therefore had the whip hand, Oppenheimer would make a good remark and then look around to see that everyone had taken proper notice. Without the whip hand, his neediness could throw him off balance. Dealing with the hard men of national security, he was desperate for them to like him. He was also inept; it was like wires in his brain had crossed, the way they do when a klutz has to manage test tubes. “Because I was an idiot” may be Oppenheimer’s most famous original utterance (“Now I am become death” having been borrowed). He said it when asked why he’d made up a story, and the story wasn’t to cover anyone. All on his own, Oppenheimer had said there was this guy he knew who had approached people at Los Alamos about passing secrets to the Russians. As best we can tell, Oppenheimer said it because he wanted Leslie Groves to think he was on his toes. Matters ended with the guy in question, a friend of Oppenheimer’s, having to leave the United States for good. Oppenheimer hadn’t counted on that much follow-through.
In the United States, a Cold War martyr’s usually someone who wouldn’t name names. Oppenheimer’s different. He gave names (Congressman Richard Nixon thanked him), but he still wound up on the government’s hit list. Doing both demands a different order of being, a human whose nature sets him apart from other humans. Such a person doesn’t compute under the systems we typically set up to deal with each other. I mean that Uma Thurman, in her battle for healthy self-adjustment, has an advantage over the professor. In my I-read-two-books opinion, Oppenheimer exhibited the behavior and unhappy social track record of somebody located far out on the autism disorder spectrum.
If you’re on the spectrum, a case of klutzhands doesn’t have to be one of the symptoms. But when it is you’ve got a perpetual reminder of your overall condition, which means learning over and over again that normal things don’t work for you and you’re a freak. Oppenheimer, much as he loved lonely eminence, didn’t want to be a freak. He wanted in with his species, and his incredible mental gams allowed him to be in, not out, for most of his adult life. Further, he did it on his own terms. Fellow scientists would take much from him because of his superiority, which extended to superiority of wit and expression when he was allowed dominance. But he wobbled when he couldn’t set the terms, and sometimes he did badly. He brought his self-absorption to Harry Truman, who reminded him that Hiroshima wasn’t Oppenheimer’s special ticket to anguish, since Truman had given the orders for the bombing. Probably Oppenheimer was all set to make a speech, and boom, so to speak, Truman would have none of it.
The president could do that. A lower-ranking official had to watch and wait and then pick a moment. Lewis Strauss, an able investment banker and government administrator, was treated by Oppenheimer like a stooge there to be made fun of (because any chance to show those gams). As the story goes, Strauss eventually maneuvered Oppenheimer into a dire choice: resign outright or see his security clearance revoked. Oppenheimer couldn’t bear the thought of being outside, so he contested. There followed hearings on his fitness for security information, meaning his fitness as a person. It would’ve been a miserable process anyway, but it was also rigged. Oppenheimer flunked, the panel voting two–one against him. Bureaucratically that meant the Atomic Energy Commission, the body that held the hearings, withdrew his security clearance and wouldn’t employ him as a contracting consultant. In most other senses, it meant the government had placed upon its victim a black thumbmark the size of a bath mat; the superior genius had been shamed.
Oppenheimer’s contract would’ve expired anyway. In fact it did so the day after the commission’s second and final decision regarding his clearance. Somehow, before that date rolled around, he managed to subject himself to an ordeal and acquire a lifelong stain. “How can that man see so much and yet be so blind?” demands a pithy character in the Oppenheimer movie. Ithink we know. A diagnosis and some counseling would’ve helped the poor bastard.