Oppenheimer Sweeps Cold War History under the Rug

R arely has a movie been the front-runner to win an award the way Oppenheimer is for Best Picture at Sunday’s Oscars. Director Christopher Nolan’s movie is a towering achievement.

Sadly, however, as National Review’s Neal Freeman noted last July, a central premise of the film — that its protagonist’s prodigious career was dramatically and unfairly curtailed after the 1954 revocation of his security clearance — doesn’t hold up to even the paltry standards of Hollywood history. Freeman writes, “Robert Oppenheimer was, beyond the slightest of all possible doubts, a security risk. The security-review panel was far from the gross miscarriage of justice that Nolan depicts.”

Oppenheimer tells two stories — the creation of the atomic bomb and the dismantling of the career of the physicist who helped build it.

Nolan has clearly fallen in love with his subject in both story lines. In the film’s production notes, he calls Oppenheimer “a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history” and concludes, “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.” That is, most would agree, a bit more than an exaggeration. Kai Bird, the co-author of American Prometheus, the 2005 biography of Oppenheimer that the film is faithfully based on, agrees with Nolan on the physicist’s towering historical importance: “We’re always going to be living with the bomb. So in that sense, he actually is the most important man who ever lived.”

When it comes to Oppenheimer’s loss of his security clearance in 1954, a decade after he worked on the bomb, Nolan has clearly taken the physicist’s side against his critics, who included Lewis Strauss, an Oppenheimer rival who was head of the Atomic Energy Commission. The film implicates Strauss in raising the allegations that Oppenheimer’s associations with known Communists made him a security risk.

Bird, too, believes that Oppenheimer was railroaded in December 1953 when the AEC ruled that his security clearance be revoked. The following May, an appeals panel voted two to one to uphold that action. In an recent interview for Agence France-Presse, Bird made it clear that he “believes the highly divisive state of US politics today can be directly traced to the 1950s McCarthyite witch hunts that brought down suspected Communist sympathizers including Oppenheimer.” He even throws in the fact that Donald Trump’s onetime lawyer in the 1970s, Roy Cohn, was chief counsel to the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy: “So there’s a direct connection between the two.” Orange Man All Bad indeed.

Bird traces what he believes is a reluctance of today’s scientists to speak out on politics — he must never have come within earshot of a climate-change conference — to Oppenheimer. “Part of the reason is exactly what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954, when he was humiliated and destroyed as a public intellectual precisely because he was using his scientific expertise to speak out” on nuclear proliferation. “That sends a message to scientists everywhere. ‘Beware of getting out of your narrow band of expertise.'”

Having put Oppenheimer on a pedestal as a victim of a right-wing witch hunt, Bird and Nolan must, of course, reject the allegations that Oppenheimer was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party of the United States. While Bird acknowledges that Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, his lover Jean Tatlock, and his future wife Kitty were all party members at one time, he bluntly concludes in American Prometheus: “Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise—as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years.” In defense of this claim, Bird and his co-author say they interviewed Communist Party members whom Oppenheimer had befriended, all of whom agreed that, while Oppenheimer attended Communist Party meetings and donated large sums to Communist front groups, he never paid dues, which members were required to do.

But there is a dissenting view that has not been effectively rebutted. It is based on documents from Soviet archives unearthed at the end of the Cold War as well as the Venona files, Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that was decrypted by the National Security Agency and released starting in 1995.

Gregg Herken, a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution, says the new documentation convinces him that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party. For example, he notes that Oppenheimer was mentioned as an unlisted member of the American Communist Party in a Soviet intelligence document dated January 7, 1946. But Herken makes clear that “I don’t think he was a spy.” “The significance of his being a Communist was that it gave him something he had to hide, and may be one explanation of why he was so quiet after 1954.”

At a 2009 seminar at the Wilson Center, noted Cold War scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr agreed with Herken that allegations of espionage against Oppenheimer were unfounded. But in a 2012 summary of their views, they conclude:

Whatever his reasons and motivation, he chose to admit only to a loose association with some Communists and to having supported and given money to various Communist causes. Oppenheimer concealed his direct participation in the CPUSA and continued to made [sic] false and misleading statements under oath. Given a considerable volume of contradictory evidence, in the end the AEC had sufficient doubts about his candor that it declined to renew his security clearance when it expired in 1954.

Knowing what we know now, America’s public interest would have been best served if Oppenheimer had been able to continue in his role as a consultant to the government on various atomic and security projects. The evidence that by the mid-1940s he had left his earlier Communist allegiance behind and sincerely supported America’s role in the Cold War is fully convincing. But, of course, one of the major contributing factors to his loss of security access was his own unwillingness to provide a candid and honest account of his earlier Communist ties and why he had put them aside. The AEC in 1954 did not know what we now know in 2011. Its decision not to renew his security clearance was understandable under the circumstances.

The reasons are pretty clear.

The Code of Federal Regulations clearly warns that a person may lose a security clearance for “concealment of information that may increase an individual’s vulnerability to coercion, exploitation, or duress, such as engaging in activities which, if known, may affect the person’s personal, professional, or community standing or render the person susceptible to blackmail.”

In his evasive maneuvers before the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer was clearly opening himself up to such blackmail. At the very heart of his defense was his firm contention that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. That was a statement any number of people could have compromised him over.

Yes, Oppenheimer is a great movie and a technical wonder. Its makers invented a new film stock, perfected the use of IMAX cameras in close-up scenes, and married sound and image in new ways. In addition to five Golden Globes, it has won accolades from the Screen Actors Guild, the Critics Choice Association, the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, and the U.K.’s BAFTA. Brian Lowry, CNN’s media critic, says, “It’s that rare movie, like ‘Titanic,’ that successfully mixes historical elements and human drama with the cinematic qualities that can pack theaters.” It’s a clear shot in Hollywood’s arm that a three-hour long, dialogue-filled movie can attract critical support while raking in nearly $1 billion at the box office.

But the movie rests on an unstable foundation — a protagonist who is depicted as he presented himself to the world, not in the shades of gray that colored his life. Once again, liberal Hollywood has refused to let history intrude into its permanently dismissive view of the genuine danger that the Communist Party posed in the America of the 1940s and 1950s. It has latched onto a narrative that’s just too satisfying to let go. It won’t allow the truth to interfere with it.