J. Oppenheimer Was Allegedly Cast As A Communist After His Affair With Jean Tatlock ( Photo Credit – Instagram )
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J. Robert Oppenheimer may come across as a brooding scientist with an overwrought conscience and penchant for misquoting the Bhagavad Gita, but he was also a romantic whose first serious affair unwittingly led to the unravelling of his career.
This romance continued even after the physicist married German-born Katherine ‘Kitty’ Oppenheimer, a biologist, card-carrying communist and alcoholic prone to accidents, played by Emily Blunt in Christopher Nolan’s film.
The affair was with his fellow scientist, Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh. It disgraced Oppenheimer in US political circles, ruining his image and his life. And this is how it happened.
Tatlock and Oppenheimer met at a house party in 1936 when she was a student at Stanford Medical School and he was a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The two had a 10-year age gap, but Tatlock was the love of Oppenheimer’s life.
The couple started dating and carried on an intense romantic relationship until 1939. In these years, Oppenheimer proposed to Tatlock twice only to be turned down each time.
According to the book “An Atomic Love Story”: “Twice they had come close to declaring themselves engaged. But how was it possible to think of fulfilling his needs, of becoming a mothre and caring for children? Sometime that year she told him she could not marry him.”
They still remained close after the breakup: “They cared too much for each other to stay far apart,” the book says.
Early in their relationship, Tatlock and Oppenheimer bonded over a shared interest in English literature, and Tatlock introduced Oppenheimer to the works of the 17th-century English poet John Donne.
It is believed that the name Trinity, or what Oppenheimer called the first test of an atomic weapon at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, was inspired by Tatlock via Donne’s poetry, though the connection isn’t very clear.
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, on which Nolan’s biopic is based, note that when the scientist was asked (in 1962, by Manhattan Project leader Leslie Groves) why he called the first nuclear explosion the Trinity Test, he replied: “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.”
In the minds of many, this underscores Tatlock’s profound influence on his life.”
Although Tatlock was known for her relationship with Oppenheimer, she grappled with her sexuality growing up. In letters to her friends, Tatlock expressed fears that she might be attracted to women.
Tatlock’s s*xual confusion tormented her. As a student of Freudian psychiatry, which called homos*xuality a mental defect, Tatlock was in a great dilemma. She was torn between her love for Oppenheimer and her confusion, which led to her ending their relationship in 1939.
Their affair may have ended in 1939 and Oppenheimer went on to marry Katherine, the two continued their romance till 1943, remaining in close contact on at least more than one occasion, until he became director of the Manhattan Project.
By 1943, the nuclear physicist had become the scientific director of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and stopped communications with Tatlock, which devastated her as she relied greatly on him for emotional support. She took her own life in 1944 at the age of 29.
But it wasn’t Tatlock introducing him to John Donne and other literature, but rather her background as a member of the American Communist Party during World War Two unleashed havoc in his life.
As the scientist continued to work on the bomb, unknown to him, he was being tailed by FBI agents and the American military intelligence who believed that he had communist links due to his closeness to Tatlock.
His wife Kitty too had links with the Communist Party. This led to increased surveillance of Oppenheimer by federal agents, and after the war, with the onset of the Cold War, his life was pretty much destroyed as he was accused of being a Communist himself.
After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer entered a phase of depression and in 1945 told US President Harry J. Truman that he felt he had “blood on his hands”. This attitude had disgusted Truman and political establishment in the US began to turn against the scientist.
By 1946, Oppenheimer had become an outspoken critic of atomic warfare, telling the US Senate that the bomb was altogether an evil thing. In 1949, he warned the newly formed US Atomic Energy Commission against the dangers of building the hydrogen bomb, which he said was a weapon of destruction far greater than even the bombs used in the Japanese cities, calling it “a weapon of human genocide”.
By the 1950’s, the US had entered into an arms race against the Soviet Union, which had built its own nuclear bomb in 1949 and it was even more powerful than the American bomb. This triggered an arms race.
In 1953, Oppenheimer gave a speech likening the nuclear-capable United States and Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life”.
The two countries, he said, were engaged in a race to build super weapons. This race would lead to eventual human destruction.
Oppenheimer’s outspoken warnings and vocal criticism of nuclear development made him a prime target leading to the controversial 1954 hearing held by the founder of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, who, suspecting the scientist of being either a Communist himself or a sympathiser, revoked his security clearance.
After the infamous Senate hearing, Oppenheimer reportedly struggled to reconcile his beliefs with reality and was incredibly depressed. There was an attempt later to publicly rehabilitate his image by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who proceeded to give Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award, which was the Commission’s highest honour, in 1963, the scientist never fully recovered.
Oppenheimer lived out the rest of his days in Princeton, where he kept his job at the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966, and died of cancer in February 1967 bringing an end to a life torn apart by contradictions.
