Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and co-author of American Prometheus, speaks about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer during his conversation with President Michael E. Hill for the Chautauqua Lecture Series Wednesday in the Amphitheater.
The life of J. Robert Oppenheimer provides an interesting lens to view the theme “What We Got Wrong: Learning From Our Mistakes.”
But as it came up during the conversation between Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird and Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill, the impact of Oppenheimer’s life and work could be just as applicable to Week Two and “The AI Revolution.” And since Bird’s bibliography includes a biography of Jimmy Carter, and will soon include a biography of the prosecutor Roy Cohn, Bird could just as easily speak to a theme on history or American governance, like the Week One theme of “The Evolution of the Modern Presidency.”
“I’m a bit of a dilatant,” Bird told Hill during their Wednesday conversation in the Amphitheater, part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, discussing Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb, and the moral ramifications of the science that changed history.
Bird is a biographer, historian, journalist and the co-author, with the late Martin J. Sherwin, of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Bird is also the author of the The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, and biographies of Jimmy Carter, John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy.
It takes Bird at least five years to write a biography; his first took 10. American Prometheus, in contrast, took 25 years from the time Sherwin started his work before partnering with Bird, to the book’s publication in 2005.
In choosing a subject, a biographer has to be careful.
“You have to be certain that you have an immense curiosity about the subject,” Bird said. “In my case, I chose these figures because I’m interested in how power works in America. One theme that connects all of my books is the nature of power in this complicated democracy.”
In the case of Oppenheimer, Bird was naturally drawn to the father of the atomic bomb as a subject; he’s “a seminal figure in 20th-century American history. He gave us the atomic age. He is an important figure, historically.”
It was Sherwin who approached Bird, at the time in between projects and unemployed. Sherwin had been working on an Oppenheimer project since 1980, and asked Bird to help him “finish this humongous job.”
“It turned into a fabulous collaboration,” Bird said. “I spent five years on the book. But by that time, Marty had spent 20 years, gathered all of this fabulous research — Oppenheimer is a very complicated mysterious figure — but he just couldn’t stop doing the research and start writing.”
With Bird’s prodding, and writing, American Prometheus was done in five years. It earned Bird and Sherwin a 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In the summer of 2023, Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation was an inescapable part of the zeitgeist; “Oppenheimer” went on to win several Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor.
Oppenheimer — theoretical physicist, director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory and the man who oversaw the development of the world’s first nuclear weapon — is “actually a very fragile personality,” Bird said. “Extremely sensitive, highly intelligent. He came of age right at the moment when quantum physics was coming on to the world stage in the 1920s. He was complicated, and ambitious.”
Oppenheimer was also a polymath, interested in literature, poetry, and Hindu Mysticism — famously studying the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit. Raised in the “ethical, cultural school of thought” with Jewish ancestry in New York City, Bird said, he also fell in love with the spartan, high plains of New Mexico — the plains where he eventually built the atomic bomb.
Because he’d been taught to grapple with ethical questions, Bird said, yes — the question of if he should pursue the bomb at all was, indeed, on Oppenheimer’s mind.
“But in the 1930s he had been politicized,” Bird said, referencing Oppenheimer’s relationship with Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party. “He initially had been rather apolitical, focused on his physics. … He was aware of the dangers of fascism rising in Germany. When the war broke out, he was aghast at what was happening to his people, the Jews in Europe.”
Oppenheimer was “desperate to help win the war,” Bird said, and that feeling became more urgent in 1939, with the discovery of fission — in Nazi Germany.
“So when given the opportunity to join the Manhattan Project and become scientific director of Los Alamos, he jumped at the opportunity. He thought it was a moral imperative to do this. But two years into the project, he is on the cusp of giving this weapon of mass destruction to America, and he still had moral qualms about it,” Bird said. “He understood it was a terrible weapon that was going to completely change the nature of warfare. And he worried about the moral complexities of this.”
In researching American Prometheus, Bird was able to interview Anne Wilson, Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. She told Bird that, just after the Trinity Test, she was walking to work with her boss; Oppenheimer started muttering to himself: “Those poor little people.”
Wilson asked Oppenheimer what he meant.
“Trinity shows the bomb works,” Wilson remembered Oppenheimer saying. “The gadget works. … Now it’s going to be used on a Japanese city and victims are going to be women and children and old men.”
That was three weeks before Hiroshima, while he was meeting with pilots and bombers, instructing them on the best altitude to release the bomb — “best,” Bird said, meant “at what altitude it should be ignited … to inflict the highest number of casualties. Civilian casualties.”
Wilson’s story captures Oppenheimer’s complexity, Bird said: “He is doing his duty, fulfilling his responsibilities to the War Department. At the same time, he is worrying about the moral consequences of his own actions.”
We know now, based on letters written by Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, that the physicist fell into a deep depression after the war. But he recovered, and Bird called back to the week’s theme: The rest of Oppenheimer’s life, he said, was spent “warning us of the mistake that these are not weapons of defense. … These are weapons for aggressors. These are weapons of terror.”
Bird even called back to last week’s theme: With artificial intelligence, he said, “we’re actually facing another Oppenheimer moment, where suddenly a new technology has enormous potential for evil and disruption — and we need smart people, scientists in particular, to be talking to us about the consequences and the moral and ethical choices we face.”
The world has “grown to be very complacent, living with the bomb,” Bird said; in the immediate years following World War II, “when we had the opportunity to maybe put controls on the weapons, we did not do so. I would argue on the theme of this week that this was a mistake.”
Oppenheimer’s life story is a window into mid-century American politics as a whole, Bird said — especially the world of McCarthyism — and there are stark correlations to what American politics are like now, nearly 25 years into the next century.
“We are a society just as drenched in technology and science and grappling with a rapidly changing world, and AI will just change our world in the next five to 10 years in ways that we probably can’t even imagine yet,” Bird said. “(Oppenheimer’s) story as a scientist is so very relevant.”
One of the reason’s Bird was as happy with Nolan’s film as he was, was that “Oppenheimer” didn’t just focus on the story of the atomic bomb — “that was actually a secondary story to the fact of what happened to Oppenheimer’s life after the bomb,” Bird said. “I think that story is so very relevant to both understanding Oppenheimer himself, but also understanding ourselves. We’re still living with McCarthyism. We are still living with divisive politics — the politics of fear, the politics of false facts, and politics of smear.”
In 1954, the United States Atomic Energy Commission — after a lengthy, controversial private hearing — revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance. This ended Oppenheimer’s work with the U.S. government.
“He was discredited, and the fact they could take away his security clearance — and then, after a month-long secret kangaroo court of a hearing, they could leak the entire transcript of that hearing, revealing his private life, love affairs, rumors about his politics … the insinuation was there that he was disloyal and perhaps a spy for the Soviets,” Bird said. “None of which is true.”
America’s foremost public intellectual became a pariah, sending a signal to scientists everywhere, Bird said, to “beware of getting out of your narrow lane and pretending that you can use your status as an expert, as a scientist, to be able to pontificate on politics, on policy.”
Bird thinks this has carried over to the present day, and is why “we no longer, in America, have any really famous public intellectuals who are scientists.”
This is a mistake, Bird said. In a society so drenched in science and technology — much of which laypeople don’t understand — we need scientists.
“During the pandemic, you had a wave of distrust of public health officials, a wave of distrust of science,” he said. “This is a reflection that average citizens apparently don’t understand that what scientists do is experiment.”
Hypothesize, experiment, learn. Sometimes, Bird said, a hypothesis doesn’t work out.
“And yet we’re so vulnerable to the technology that we have created, that we need to understand that we need to be careful with technology — careful with nuclear weapons and careful with AI,” Bird said. “This is the lesson we should learn from Oppenheimer’s life.”
