One story that continues to raise its head, periodically, is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a great man, the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project who was later disgraced by xxx. Many of his peers turned against him. What was xxx?
XXX is what makes the Oppenheimer story interesting. We get to debate the mystery of xxx. The latest authors to bring up the story are Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in American Prometheus: Triumph and Tragedy.. James Nuechterlein reviews the book and the history in the October Commentary.
My contribution to this issue is first hand........
My contribution to this issue is first hand. J. Robert Oppenheimer was an assimilated New York Jew who's education from K through 12 was at the Ethical Culture School. Ethical Culture is a secular religion founded by Felix Adler who took all ritual out of Jewish tradition and presumably left only secular ethics.
My mother was a classmate of J. Robert's, their families were close and my great aunt Blanche Hirsch founded and ran the K-8 part of the school. J. Robert was considered very bright in a group of students who were all very bright.
Ethical Culture was founded by Felix Adler. It was Reform Judaism made entirely secular. When Adler stripped ritual from Jewish tradition he stripped a sense of genuine history as well. Ethical Culture became a new ideology, that immediately assimilated the historicism of Hegel-Marx. Hegel-Marx believed that history was immanent and was moving inevitably toward Communism. (I wrote about this in an earlier blog.)
My mother and J. Robert saw the Russian Revolution and the great Soviet experiment as an inevitable movement toward democratic socialism and a communal society. Neither my mother nor J. Robert could see the purges of Stalin as anything but a tragic aberration; both doubted the extent of the Soviet spy network in the U.S. or its malicious intent.
With those elements at the core of J. Robert's thinking, he could not see the need for an H-bomb as a deterrent to Soviet international aims, which he took as benign to begin with.
What was xxx that brought down J. Robert Oppenheimer?
It wasn't disloyalty to the U.S. that brought about J. Robert's downfall, certainly not Sen. McCarthy, who knew little about the inner workings of the nuclear club. It was J. Robert's failure to understand and accept the premises of the Cold War in which he was expected to operate. He lost his security clearance and the right to participate in the core debates about the Cold War.