American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Content Warning: This section discusses death by suicide.

On December 21, 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer learned that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had deemed him a potential security risk and planned to conduct a review of his background. In Washington DC, Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, visited the Georgetown home of his lawyer, Herbert Marks, and Marks’s wife, Ann. After deciding to fight the AEC’s charges, Robert went upstairs. Moments later, Herbert, Ann, and Kitty heard a crash. Oppenheimer had collapsed. Bird and Sherwin briefly describe Oppenheimer’s coming ordeal, documented in the transcript of the AEC Personnel Security Hearing Board’s 1954 report, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The authors set this ordeal in the context of the era’s strong wave of anti-Communist sentiment.

On February 25, 1967, mourners gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, for Robert Oppenheimer’s funeral. Nobel Prize-winning physicists, scholars, and other luminaries paid their respects. The ceremony featured three eulogies, including one delivered by George Kennan, Oppenheimer’s friend and the author of the US “containment” policy against the Soviet Union (which US officials adopted in the late 1940s and pursued as a primary Cold War strategy for decades thereafter).