FBI investigation into the Oppenheimer Communist Casting Affair

J. Robert Oppenheimer may come across as a somber scientist with a troubled conscience and a propensity for misquoting the Bhagavad Gita, but he was also a romantic whose first serious relationship unintentionally caused his career to fall apart.

This relationship persisted even after the physicist wed Katherine ‘Kitty’ Oppenheimer, a biologist, card-carrying communist, and accident-prone drinker who was born in Germany and was portrayed by Emily Blunt in Christopher Nolan’s film.

He had an affair with Jean Tatlock, a fellow scientist who was portrayed by Elizabeth Pugh. Oppenheimer’s reputation and life were ruined in US political circles as a result of it. And this is what took place.

 

When Tatlock was a medical student at Stanford University and Oppenheimer was a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, they first met at a home party in 1936. Despite having a 10-year age difference, Oppenheimer’s true love was Tatlock.

 

They began dating and had a passionate romance that lasted till 1939. Oppenheimer twice made a marriage proposal to Tatlock during this period, but each time she declined.

 

Two times they were on the verge of saying they were engaged, but she realized she couldn’t imagine taking care of his needs, becoming a mother, and raising children, so she informed him later that year that she couldn’t marry him.

 

Even when their relationship ended, they stayed close because “they cared too much for each other to stay far apart,” according to the book.

 

Tatlock and Oppenheimer connected early on in their relationship through a love of English literature, and Tatlock introduced Oppenheimer to the writings of the English poet John Donne who lived in the 17th century.

 

Though the relationship between the two is not entirely obvious, it is thought that Tatlock was the inspiration for the term Trinity, or what Oppenheimer dubbed the first atomic bomb test at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, via Donne’s poetry.

 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which served as the inspiration for Nolan’s biopic, was written by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. They point out that when Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, questioned the scientist in 1962 about why he named the first nuclear explosion the Trinity Test, the scientist responded, “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind.

 

This emphasizes, in the eyes of many, Tatlock’s enormous effect on his life.

 

Tatlock struggled with her sexuality as a child while being famous for her marriage to Oppenheimer. Tatlock worried that she would be attracted to women in letters to her pals.

 

She was tortured by Tatlock’s sexual turmoil. Tatlock had a difficult choice since he was studying Freudian psychology, which saw homosexuality as a psychiatric disease. She struggled to reconcile her feelings for Oppenheimer with her perplexity, and as a result, they broke up in 1939.

 

Despite the fact that their relationship may have ended in 1939 and Oppenheimer later wed Katherine, the two remained in close touch up until he was appointed head of the Manhattan Project in 1943.

 

The nuclear scientist abruptly cut off contact with Tatlock in 1943 when he was appointed scientific head of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, which devastated the woman who had depended heavily on him for emotional support. She committed herself in 1944 when she was 29 years old.

 

But it wasn’t Tatlock who introduced him to John Donne and other writers; rather, the fact that she had been an American Communist Party member during World War Two had a disastrous effect on his life.

 

Unbeknownst to him, the scientist was being followed by FBI agents and American military intelligence who thought that he had communist ties because of his connection to Tatlock while he continued to work on the bomb.

 

His wife Kitty had connections to the Communist Party as well. As a result, federal officials began to closely monitor Oppenheimer. When the Cold War began after the war, he was again accused of being a Communist, thereby destroying his life.

 

Oppenheimer had a depressive episode after the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in 1945 he confided in US President Harry J. Truman that he believed he had “blood on his hands.” Truman was outraged by this attitude, and the American political elite started to turn against the scientist.

 

By 1946, Oppenheimer had developed a reputation for being a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons, telling the US Senate that the bomb was inherently wicked. He forewarned the newly established US Atomic Energy Commission in 1949 about the risks of developing the hydrogen bomb, which he described as “a weapon of human genocide” and said was a weapon of devastation considerably larger than even the bombs used in the Japanese cities.

 

The US and the Soviet Union had started an arms race by the 1950s; the Soviet bomb, which had been developed in 1949, was more potent than the American bomb. An arms race ensued as a result.

 

In a lecture from 1953, Oppenheimer compared the nuclear-armed United States and Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle,” each of which could only kill the other at the cost of his own life.

 

He said that the two nations were competing to develop super weapons. This race would ultimately lead to the extinction of humanity.

 

The controversial 1954 hearing held by Lewis Strauss, the founder of the US Atomic Energy Commission, was sparked by Oppenheimer’s outspoken warnings and vocal criticism of nuclear development. Strauss suspected the scientist of being either a Communist himself or a sympathizer and revoked his security clearance.

 

Oppenheimer apparently found it difficult to reconcile his views with reality during the notorious Senate hearing and experienced severe depression. President Lyndon B. Johnson made an effort to repair Oppenheimer’s reputation later on and presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Commission, in 1963, but Oppenheimer never entirely recovered.

 

Oppenheimer spent the remainder of his life at Princeton, where he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966. He passed away from cancer in February 1967, putting an end to a conflicted existence.