#kai bird

[in-love-with-movies]

Oppenheimer (2023)

[tomorrowusa]

Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire.

President Carter had an almost instantaneous effect on human rights in Latin America when he became president. The Nixon-Kissinger policy of officially propping up dictators was replaced with one of supporting democracies. A majority of Latin American countries in 1976 were authoritarian. Within a decade, a majority were democratic or at least democratizing.

The Carter human rights policy had a more subversively indirect effect on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Historian and journalist Kai Bird said this at Washington Monthly:

He put human rights, that principle, as a keystone of U.S. foreign policy, and none of his successors have been able to walk back from that or ignore it completely. They’ve talked about some of the hypocrisy and impracticality of the policy, but you can’t ignore it. I make this argument in my biography, that human rights, the talk about human rights, and the focus on dissidents in the Soviet Union, and in Czechoslovakia, and Poland—all of that did much more to weaken the Soviet empire in eastern Europe than anything Ronald Reagan did by increasing the defense budget or threatening Star Wars. The Soviet Union was a weak adversary, not a strong adversary. It was falling apart, and along comes Carter, talking about human rights, and as Jon has said, ideas are powerful, and this idea remains powerful, and it really contributed monumentally to the falling of the Berlin Wall and people seizing power in the streets, and wanting to have personal freedom. That, in part, can be attributed to Jimmy Carter.

Michael Hirsh of the journal Foreign Policy (archived) was more emphatic.

Perhaps the least understood dimension of Carter’s much-maligned, one-term presidency was that he dramatically changed the nature of the Cold War, setting the stage for the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. Carter did this with a tough but deft combination of soft and hard power. On one hand, he opened the door to Reagan’s delegitimization of the Soviet system by focusing on human rights; on the other hand, Carter aggressively funded new high-tech weapons that made Moscow realize it couldn’t compete with Washington, which in turn set off a panicky series of self-destructive moves under the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. [ ... ] Although he was mocked for being naive at the time, it was in large part thanks to Carter and his more hawkish national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that human rights issues later came to the fore inside the Eastern Bloc, acting like a gradually rising flood that eroded the foundations of Moscow’s power. Helped along by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which authorized “Helsinki monitoring groups” in Eastern­ Bloc countries (perhaps most famously with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, which set the human rights movement in motion with a 1977 petition), these newly formed dissident groups during the 1980s undermined the legitimacy of Warsaw Pact communist satellites—and thus the Soviet bloc—from within.

Daniel Friend, former US ambassador to Poland, has this to add at the Atlantic Council.

An implicit axiom of President Richard Nixon’s détente was that the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, marked by the imposition of the Iron Curtain, was a sad but by then immutable fact. Official Washington and most of US academia regarded the Soviet Bloc­­—communist-dominated Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea east of West Germany—as permanent and, though this was seldom made explicit, stabilizing. Talk of “liberating” those countries was regarded as illusion, delusion, or cant. Maintaining US-Soviet stability, under this view of Cold War realism, required accepting Europe’s realities, as these were then seen. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Final Act of Helsinki, a sort of codification of détente concluded under President Gerald Ford, did include general human rights language, and this turned out to be important. [ ... ] Carter’s shift toward human rights challenged this uber-realist consensus. It came just as democratic dissidents and workers’ movements inspired by them began to gather strength in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Carter, and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, put the United States in a better position to reach out to these movements and to work with them when communist rule began to falter as Soviet Bloc communist regimes started running past their ability to borrow money on easy “détente terms,” making them vulnerable. More broadly, by elevating human rights in the mix of US-Soviet and US-Soviet Bloc relations, Carter put the United States on offense in the Cold War and on the side of the people of the region.

President Carter's human rights policy was also popular among Americans of Eastern European descent.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Alter and Bird both dispute that Carter was weak or lost in the weeds, as he has so often been portrayed. Carter brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since; signed more legislation than any post–World War II president except LBJ; and warned of the dangers of climate change before the threat even had a name. Carter’s human rights policy played a huge and largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union—more so, perhaps, than any policies enacted by his successor Ronald Reagan.

[...]

I came to think of Carter as having lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924, but it might as well [have been] the 19th century because they had no running water or electricity, or mechanized farm equipment. He was president in the 20th century. Conflict resolution, democracy promotion, global health—these are the cutting-edge issues of the 21st century. Carter has been intimately involved in them for the first 20 years of the 21st century. So the scope of this life, I think, is under-appreciated.

I think [you] explain a little bit more to the reader than I do how useful Carter’s [published] diaries are, that he kept religiously when he was president. They’re really good.

[deadpresidents]

Just saw Oppenheimer and I was a bit disappointed with how they portrayed Truman. He came across pretty poorly IMO. It was only one scene but I wondered what you thought.

I understand your disappointment and it certainly wasn't a very in-depth portrayal of Truman, but according to the book that the movie was largely based on -- American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- the meeting that Oppenheimer had with President Truman went down pretty much as depicted in the film.

As Bird and Sherwin write in American Prometheus:

(O)n October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office. President Truman was naturally curious to meet the celebrated physicist, whom he knew by reputation to be an eloquent and charismatic figure. After being introduced by Secretary [of War Robert P.] Patterson, the only other individual in the room, the three men sat down. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by asking for Oppenheimer's help in getting Congress to pass the May-Johnson bill, giving the Army permanent control over atomic energy. "The first thing is to define the national problem," Truman said, "then the international." Oppenheimer let an uncomfortably long silence pass and then said, haltingly, "Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem." He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of these weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: "Never." For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman's limitations. The "incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him," recalled Willie Higinbotham. As for Truman, a man who compensated for his insecurities with calculated displays of decisiveness, Oppenheimer seemed maddeningly tentative, obscure -- and cheerless. Finally, sensing that the President was not comprehending the deadly urgency of his message, Oppenheimer nervously wrung his hands and uttered another of those regrettable remarks that he characteristically made under pressure. "Mr. President," he said quietly, "I feel I have blood on my hands." The comment angered Truman. He later informed David Lilienthal, "I told him the blood was on my hands -- to let me worry about that." But over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, "Never mind, it'll all come out in the wash." In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, "Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?" An awkward silence followed this exchange, and then Truman stood up to signal that the meeting was over. The two men shook hands, and Truman reportedly said, "Don't worry, we're going to work something out, and you're going to help us." Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, "Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn't half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it." He later told [Secretary of State] Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again." Even in May 1946, the encounter still vivid in his mind, he wrote Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a "cry-baby scientist" who had come to "my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy."

[vintagewarhol]

[denimbex1986]

'It can be said that Christopher Nolan has always known how to end a movie. From Leonard Shelby concluding his journey where it began and asking “now where was I?” in Memento to the topper that wouldn’t stop spinning in Inception, this is a filmmaker who looks for the most potent image that will burrow its way into audiences’ heads.

Yet the final scene of his most ambitious film to date is something more impressive, if altogether disquieting. Oppenheimer definitely implants a grim idea in the viewer’s mind, but it does so by giving the uncanny impression that we are seeing it through J. Robert Oppenheimer’s eyes first. Standing by the duck pond that Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) has been consigned to by posterity, and where Oppie will be joining him in exile sooner than he realizes, the man credited with fathering the atomic bomb asks if Albert recalls Edward Teller’s theory about a nuclear explosion triggering the end of the world.

“I remember it well, what of it?” Einstein asks. “I believe we did,” Oppenheimer says while an IMAX camera plummets so deeply into Cillian Murphy’s blue eyes that the viewer feels like we are being left to drown in his despair—despair at the prospect of nuclear war, despair at self-annihilation, and the lingering, eternal despair that comes with the realization that for the rest of time on this planet, these weapons will be at humanity’s disposal. It’s a chilling signoff for a film that plumbs the ambiguities of Oppenheimer’s life without offering easy answers. While Nolan made a picture accessible to almost any viewer, he refused to provide any degree of comfort, reassurance, or easily memeable sentiment and message.

Which is one of the many reasons I’ve long been skeptical of the common criticism about Oppenheimer being too long or that “the trial” in the last hour dragged on and on. More than once, I’ve been told the movie could have ended after Trinity, the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945 which is shot and edited with all the tension of a thriller in Nolan and Jennifer Lame’s hands. It should be noted that the Trinity test, and the exuberant satisfaction Oppenheimer briefly feels toward his accomplishment as fellow scientists hoist him on their shoulders before the American flag, occurs at exactly the two-hour mark in the film.

The implication, therefore, seems to be that Oppenheimer should have ended on a note of triumph—a disastrous choice, to put it mildly, for the story of engineering a doomsday weapon—or that the movie could have glossed over Oppenheimer’s later years. Why should we care if Oppenheimer’s security clearance with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was revoked, or that the architect of his downfall, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), suffered his own public humiliation?

The answer, of course, is that it is these turns of events which elevate a riveting piece of biographic storytelling into a cinematic prophecy of doom that on its own will likely be with us for many years to come.

Living with the Bomb

The most crucial thing to understand about why Oppenheimer went on for a full third hour after World War II concluded in the shadow of a mushroom cloud is that there is no credible way to discuss this man without delving into the fact that the government which entrusted him to build the device also pillared and besmirched his name to the point of infamy.

During a panel with Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd on the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test, Nobel Prize Laureate and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne said he knew scientists early in his career who demurred from pursuing a public life in government service or policy-making because of how Oppenheimer was treated.

Said Thorne, “I was as much influenced by my father who dealt with McCarthyism as the chair of a faculty in Utah at the time. We had a governor who was dictating to the board of trustees to fire faculty with left wing tendencies. So I went through this in my own family.”

The implication that Oppenheimer was a traitor, or at least untrustworthy with American secrets due to his political leanings, sent a chill through academia and government institutions that lasted for generations. With a simple letter speciously raising doubts about Oppenheimer’s loyalty to his country, William L. Borden (who was working as a proxy for Strauss) was able to discredit and muzzle the most respected scientific mind of the 20th century in American life; the man who ended World War II and brought our boys home. If the far-right could do that to him because he expressed vocal opinions about the hydrogen bomb, no one was safe.

So any biopic about Oppenheimer legitimately needed to cover a life that eerily matched the arc of Greek tragedy to a tee. After all, historians Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin named their definitive biography on the man American Prometheus, and what is a Promethean tale if you skip the part where the gods condemn him to be chained to a rock so his guts will be pecked out each morning?

Oppenheimer dramatizes these elements, and does so with spectacular detail and specificity. Even biographer Bird remarked with astonishment at the same Trinity anniversary panel that Nolan did something he and Sherwin had not: he went through the transcript of Lewis Strauss’ failed confirmation hearing and discovered a surprise witness named Dr. David Hill (Rami Malek in the movie), who was called on to essentially smear an unprepared Strauss with the same kind of one-sided testimony Strauss used to decimate Oppenheimer in his security clearance hearing five years earlier. The dramatic irony that this was done as revenge by the scientific community against the political class’ most envious party was not lost on Nolan.

In fact, it creates one-half of the climactic crescendo wherein Strauss raves after his Cabinet post begins slipping away that “I gave [Oppenheimer] exactly what he wanted: to be remembered for Trinity! Not Hiroshima! Not Nagasaki! He should be thanking me!” Of course Strauss’ fury also articulates why the film is so much richer and, ultimately, ambiguous. It explores part and parcel the facts of Oppenheimer’s life, and in doing so invites you to descend down into the pits of Hades.

A Trial Without a Jury or a Verdict

The most powerful sequence in Oppenheimer arguably occurs at the top of the third hour. After an exhilarating taste of success and triumph, Oppenheimer is left out of the final, gruesome moments of World War II. Two nuclear bombs fell on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the span of three days in August 1945. Two hundred twenty thousand lives were snuffed out in biblical fire or the lingering, years-long horror of radiation poisoning. And J. Robert learns about it just like every other American—by listening to the radio.

Then comes Nolan’s cinematic flourish. He lets you live in Oppie’s nightmare just as it is beginning to coalesce. While giving a patriotic speech crowing about the success of the nuclear weapons’ use on Japanese cities, Oppenheimer’s unconvincing stabs at jingoism fade away as he can only hear the sound of a woman screaming; then comes a bright light as the face of a young girl melts away. It is a new world for Oppenheimer, America, and the whole the human species. But only after he has let the genie out of the bottle does the film’s interpretation of Oppenheimer begin to seriously grapple with the long term ramifications of that release.

There is an argument to be made that Oppenheimer should have shown the nuclear holocaust inflicted on the Japanese people. I respect this opinion, although Nolan’s choice to trap you in Oppenheimer’s large, yet still limited, vantage point is the dramatically right one. It took this scientist years to come to terms with the horror of what he wrought on Japan, and the movie lets it slowly seep in.

There is also the uncomfortable fact that this story is bigger than just World War II. In the film, Oppenheimer considers the irony that his former tutor opined in the press that the nuclear bomb not so much ended World War II as it began what we now call the Cold War with the Soviet Union (which really happened). But the point of the Oppenheimer film is that what those scientists at Los Alamos did was bigger than just World War II or the Cold War—or even the 20th century itself.

Oppenheimer built, sharpened, and fastened a global Sword of Damocles above our collective heads, and it hangs there still. It will, in fact, hang there forever, unless one nation finally pushes the button and invites the inevitable response.

The last hour is about Oppenheimer, as a character and a film, coming to terms with that legacy. This is not a typical biopic about a great man, but a portrait of a soul damned by unspoken regrets and second-guesses that he never articulated to anyone. The film even posits Oppenheimer went through the humiliation of an unwinnable security clearance hearing as some form of penance for fathering the bomb.

“Did you think if you let them tar and feather you that the world will forgive you?” his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) asks. “It won’t.”

“We’ll see” is Oppenheimer’s cryptic response. While we suspect Oppenheimer’s fight for political survival was not quite so history book-minded, the reality is he truly did tell the President of the United States “I have blood on my hands,” and spent the rest of his brief public life attempting to steer the United States away from the infinitely more deadly hydrogen bomb and the arms race it inevitably courted. He was then banished to the duck pond next to Einstein for his troubles.

Dramatically seeing that destruction is as cathartic as it is disturbing, with Jason Clarke’s government attorney Roger Robb embodying Zeus’ hungry eagle which is always eager to feast on Prometheus’ liver. It should be noted, this context also is what allows Kitty Oppenheimer, a brilliant woman whose mind is left to curdle by the oppressive expectations of her era, to finally speak candidly in one of the best scenes in the movie.

In the end though, the finale asks the audience to interrogate Oppenheimer the man. Can you forgive him? Should you even bother entertaining the idea? The real man never publicly admitted remorse over what happened in Japan, and whether he felt profound guilt or not, he still ushered in a nuclear age without end. There is no escape from the future Oppenheimer has wrought—not even for J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is professionally and spiritually destroyed by the legacy he pursued with wide open arms.

The last hour of Oppenheimer is not about the father of the atomic bomb; it’s about the father of our tomorrow and each and every one that will come after. Until one day, maybe it won’t.'

[ohmysatan42]

I'm almost certain if Robert oppenhimer was born today he'd be a melodramatic fainting emo girl. This is all I've learnt in the first 100 odd pages of American prometheus.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

[watchingalotofmovies]

To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb

To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb    [trailer]

Documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Exploring how one man's brilliance, hubris and relentless drive changed the nature of war forever.

An excellent companion piece to Christopher Nolan's film. It obviously covers very similar ground as the movie. But it's nice to see original footage of Oppenheimer and hearing from experts about the historical context.

Oppenheimer is a fascination person. At the end, all the events that had happened clearly seem to haunt him.

Conveniently, the doc is part of the Oppenheimer BluRay.

[cinesludge]

Movie #28 of 2024: Oppenheimer

[kammartinez]

I’ve always been curious about what it feels like for an author to see their work translated into another medium. The question seems particularly interesting with a film like Oppenheimer, the biopic directed by Christopher Nolan that opened in theaters this week. It tells the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and is based on a mammoth, Pulitzer Prize–winning 2005 biography that took 25 years to research and write. American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is more than 700 pages long; at first glance, it’s difficult to imagine how a book this granular about a subject this complex became a movie. Sadly, Sherwin passed away two years ago, but Bird was able to have the uncanny experience of “meeting” Oppenheimer while visiting the set of Nolan’s film. I talked with him about this encounter and about his book’s path to Hollywood.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Bird and I spoke over the phone a day before the film’s release. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: How are you feeling?

Kai Bird: Well, my head is spinning a little bit. It’s very weird. This book came out 18 years ago. Where was everyone then?

Beckerman: Well, you did win the Pulitzer Prize. So you can’t say that it was ignored.

Bird: That’s true. I can’t complain. But, you know, it got on the paperback-best-seller list last week. It never made it on the best-seller list back then.

Beckerman: It took a long time for it to be picked up and adapted.

Bird: Well, the book was optioned. But, you know, years went by, and nothing happened. So we were very lucky when I suddenly got a phone call in September of 2021, and I was told that Christopher Nolan wants to speak to me. I didn’t realize it then, but looking back at all his other work, he’s really the perfect director for this book. He’s always been interested in time and space and memory, science and science fiction. So it makes perfect sense that he could be attracted to a book about a guy who was a quantum physicist.

Beckerman: So the shift to film felt pretty seamless to you?

Bird: The way Marty [Sherwin] and I both thought about the book—and this would be true of any potential film as well—was that it might be an interesting story to follow the making of the atomic bomb, but that if that’s all there was, we wouldn’t be spending all these years—25 years—on it. What gives the story its arc is both the triumph of [Oppenheimer’s] achievement in Los Alamos but then the tragedy of what happens to him nine years later, when he’s brought down from being America’s most famous scientist to becoming a nonentity, humiliated on the front pages of The New York Times. His loyalty to the country is questioned. That’s what makes the story really interesting. And so, when I first had a meeting with Nolan, he was not sharing the script with me at that point. He said he works confidentially, although he’d done a whole draft already. He works very fast. I told him I thought it was important to focus on the trial. And I think he was relieved to hear me say that, because when he showed me the screenplay a few months later, it really is a lot about the trial.

Beckerman: Were there aspects of the book that you thought would be particularly difficult to communicate in film without the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of pages?

Bird: The quantum physics. This was also a struggle in the book, because it’s so complex. But actually, Nolan really attempts to explain quantum or give you a sense of the music of it. He develops a good analogy in the film. He has Oppenheimer walking through an art gallery in the 1920s, when he’s studying quantum, and he’s looking at Cubist pictures done by Picasso. And he’s staring at them, and he’s seeing the quantum in Picasso’s images. That’s not specifically in the book, but, you know, Oppenheimer’s mother was a painter and an art collector. She bought early van Goghs and several Picassos, so it’s entirely appropriate.

Beckerman: Did you learn anything about filmmaking through this process?

Bird: I saw the film for the fourth time last night. And each time I see it, I see layers that I didn’t see on the first occasion. I hear some of the dialogue that I missed on previous occasions, because it is very fast-paced. Nolan is really quite interesting as a filmmaker, I think, precisely because he’s not trying to bring you along. He’s not trying to make sure you understand everything. He’s leaving little clues throughout the visual experience that he doesn’t explain. So, for example, if you know who the physicist Richard Feynman is, he is portrayed in the film, but he’s never identified. But on several occasions, you see this young man banging furiously on a bongo, and that’s Feynman.

Beckerman: And if you know, you know!

Bird: Exactly. He wants people to leave the theater with questions: Oh, who was that? And questions about, you know, McCarthyism, living with the bomb, and why did that happen to Oppenheimer? Was it just or unjust? He’s not giving you the answers. And he does that with the whole very weighty issue of the decision to actually use the bomb, which is still controversial history.

Beckerman: I know that you went to visit the set while they were filming. I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit more about what that experience was like, just the uncanniness of it. And, you know, meeting Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer.

Bird: It was very bizarre. When I met Cillian, he was being introduced to me after shooting a scene, and I shouted out, “Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been waiting all these years.” And then we had a five-minute conversation. And I told him I thought it was interesting how well he had captured Oppie’s voice. Oppenheimer’s voice was always very soft-spoken. It’s the kind of voice that makes you want to lean forward to make sure you’ve caught every word. And each word is pronounced very meticulously. And he speaks in whole paragraphs. Cillian’s response was Oh, well, I’m glad you think so—but, you know, we try not to imitate the voice; we try to simply capture the spirit of it.

Beckerman: Well, that seems a pretty apt description of adaptation when it works well, as it sounds like it did in this case.

Bird: I just think I’m a lucky, lucky author.

[khelinski]

And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book - and not a psychiatrist - which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression

Kai Bird/Martin J. Sherwin

[darshanan-blog]

Oppenheimer - Movie Review

Epic-maker movie “Oppenheimer”, directed by Christopher Nolan tells the story leading up to atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards the end of World War II that changed the course of history forever.  The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Deeply heartrending…

[bob-the-movie-man-film-reviews]

Oppenheimer (15): Fission + Fusion = Cinematic Brilliance.

#onemannsmovies review of "Oppenheimer" (2023). #OppenheimerFilm. Nolan's stunning biopic that demands to be seen on the big screen. 5/5.

A One Mann’s Movies review of “Oppenheimer” (2023). The “Barbenheimer” tag for this week’s releases is slightly bonkers since you could hardly imagine two more different films than “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”! Both have been packing cinema screens this weekend (hooray!). “Barbie” was surprisingly good. But, having had disappointments from Nolan (“Dunkirk“, I’m specifically looking at you here!)…

[deadpresidents]

Watched “Oppenheimer” last night, and I keep thinking about the scene with Gary Oldman as Truman. While I absolutely believe that Truman would have claimed all the credit & blame of dropping the bombs for himself, and also that Truman would have called Oppenheimer a cry baby and an s.o.b., I am struggling to think of Truman as being so naive that he thought that Russia would “never” develop their own bomb. I checked the reference — Ray Monk’s “Robert Oppenheimer” (2013) is the source for the scene, but I can’t get at his sources to see what he’s drawing from. McCullough’s “Truman” corroborates the cry baby comment and the blood-on-my-hands but not the “never” quote.

Do you have anything to hand about Truman’s belief in the Russian’s ability to build the bomb? How could anyone think that the Russians would “never” create a bomb?

In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), which I believe was one of Christopher Nolan's major inspirations for the film, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin go into detail about that meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer and the scene in the film takes almost word-for-word what is written in the book. Truman is actually quoted in the book as saying "Never" after asking Oppenheimer when he thought the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb and not getting a response.

The sources that Bird and Sherwin list for that meeting and the "Never" comment are Nuel Pharr Davis in the 1968 book Lawrence and Oppenheimer, and Murray Kempton, who wrote about the meeting and the comment in the December 1983 issue of Esquire Magazine and his book Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. I haven't read either of those books, but I did read Kempton's Esquire article and he also directly quotes Truman as saying "Never".

I agree that it seems really naive of President Truman to not think the Soviets would ever develop their own nuclear weapons. The only possible explanation that I can imagine for that mindset was that the meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer that is portrayed in the film took place in real-life on October 25, 1945. (In Kempton's Esquire article, he says it took place in 1946, but he was mistaken because Bird and Sherwin researched Truman's Presidential appointment calendar and were able to pinpoint the correct date.) The U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively. Japan surrendered on August 15 and the war officially ended when Japan signed the instrument of surrender on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. So, the meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer took place less than two months after the war finally ended. I can only imagine that Truman had still not fully shifted towards what the next conflict might be and was focused on trying to stabilize what was left of the world and mobilize the government in a different direction than it had been after 15 years of Depression, economic recovery, defense preparations, and fighting the war.

Plus, it's worth remembering that Truman didn't know anything about the existence of the American nuclear program until after President Roosevelt's sudden death thrust him into the White House and the military realized, "Oh shit, we should probably tell the new President that we're very close to building the most powerful weapon in the history of history!"

I don't think it was necessarily naivety on President Truman's part. I think, as Kempton suggests in the Esquire article, that is was just a fundamental lack of understanding by Truman that the Soviet Union didn't need Oppenheimer to build the bomb, especially since the war was now over and they wouldn't be under the time constraints or immediate pressures that made the work of the Manhattan Project so much more difficult. The knowledge was out there and the very fact that it had been proven by the Americans made it clear to the Russians and everyone else that it could be done. Harry S. Truman was a provincial politician from the outskirts of Kansas City who had a healthy dose of American Exceptionalism in him even before becoming a national figure, so the realities of nuclear physics were probably not easy for him to decipher.

[kamreadsandrecs]

I’ve always been curious about what it feels like for an author to see their work translated into another medium. The question seems particularly interesting with a film like Oppenheimer, the biopic directed by Christopher Nolan that opened in theaters this week. It tells the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and is based on a mammoth, Pulitzer Prize–winning 2005 biography that took 25 years to research and write. American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is more than 700 pages long; at first glance, it’s difficult to imagine how a book this granular about a subject this complex became a movie. Sadly, Sherwin passed away two years ago, but Bird was able to have the uncanny experience of “meeting” Oppenheimer while visiting the set of Nolan’s film. I talked with him about this encounter and about his book’s path to Hollywood.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Bird and I spoke over the phone a day before the film’s release. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: How are you feeling?

Kai Bird: Well, my head is spinning a little bit. It’s very weird. This book came out 18 years ago. Where was everyone then?

Beckerman: Well, you did win the Pulitzer Prize. So you can’t say that it was ignored.

Bird: That’s true. I can’t complain. But, you know, it got on the paperback-best-seller list last week. It never made it on the best-seller list back then.

Beckerman: It took a long time for it to be picked up and adapted.

Bird: Well, the book was optioned. But, you know, years went by, and nothing happened. So we were very lucky when I suddenly got a phone call in September of 2021, and I was told that Christopher Nolan wants to speak to me. I didn’t realize it then, but looking back at all his other work, he’s really the perfect director for this book. He’s always been interested in time and space and memory, science and science fiction. So it makes perfect sense that he could be attracted to a book about a guy who was a quantum physicist.

Beckerman: So the shift to film felt pretty seamless to you?

Bird: The way Marty [Sherwin] and I both thought about the book—and this would be true of any potential film as well—was that it might be an interesting story to follow the making of the atomic bomb, but that if that’s all there was, we wouldn’t be spending all these years—25 years—on it. What gives the story its arc is both the triumph of [Oppenheimer’s] achievement in Los Alamos but then the tragedy of what happens to him nine years later, when he’s brought down from being America’s most famous scientist to becoming a nonentity, humiliated on the front pages of The New York Times. His loyalty to the country is questioned. That’s what makes the story really interesting. And so, when I first had a meeting with Nolan, he was not sharing the script with me at that point. He said he works confidentially, although he’d done a whole draft already. He works very fast. I told him I thought it was important to focus on the trial. And I think he was relieved to hear me say that, because when he showed me the screenplay a few months later, it really is a lot about the trial.

Beckerman: Were there aspects of the book that you thought would be particularly difficult to communicate in film without the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of pages?

Bird: The quantum physics. This was also a struggle in the book, because it’s so complex. But actually, Nolan really attempts to explain quantum or give you a sense of the music of it. He develops a good analogy in the film. He has Oppenheimer walking through an art gallery in the 1920s, when he’s studying quantum, and he’s looking at Cubist pictures done by Picasso. And he’s staring at them, and he’s seeing the quantum in Picasso’s images. That’s not specifically in the book, but, you know, Oppenheimer’s mother was a painter and an art collector. She bought early van Goghs and several Picassos, so it’s entirely appropriate.

Beckerman: Did you learn anything about filmmaking through this process?

Bird: I saw the film for the fourth time last night. And each time I see it, I see layers that I didn’t see on the first occasion. I hear some of the dialogue that I missed on previous occasions, because it is very fast-paced. Nolan is really quite interesting as a filmmaker, I think, precisely because he’s not trying to bring you along. He’s not trying to make sure you understand everything. He’s leaving little clues throughout the visual experience that he doesn’t explain. So, for example, if you know who the physicist Richard Feynman is, he is portrayed in the film, but he’s never identified. But on several occasions, you see this young man banging furiously on a bongo, and that’s Feynman.

Beckerman: And if you know, you know!

Bird: Exactly. He wants people to leave the theater with questions: Oh, who was that? And questions about, you know, McCarthyism, living with the bomb, and why did that happen to Oppenheimer? Was it just or unjust? He’s not giving you the answers. And he does that with the whole very weighty issue of the decision to actually use the bomb, which is still controversial history.

Beckerman: I know that you went to visit the set while they were filming. I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit more about what that experience was like, just the uncanniness of it. And, you know, meeting Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer.

Bird: It was very bizarre. When I met Cillian, he was being introduced to me after shooting a scene, and I shouted out, “Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been waiting all these years.” And then we had a five-minute conversation. And I told him I thought it was interesting how well he had captured Oppie’s voice. Oppenheimer’s voice was always very soft-spoken. It’s the kind of voice that makes you want to lean forward to make sure you’ve caught every word. And each word is pronounced very meticulously. And he speaks in whole paragraphs. Cillian’s response was Oh, well, I’m glad you think so—but, you know, we try not to imitate the voice; we try to simply capture the spirit of it.

Beckerman: Well, that seems a pretty apt description of adaptation when it works well, as it sounds like it did in this case.

Bird: I just think I’m a lucky, lucky author.