History with David Rubenstein

(theme music playing) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm gonna be in conversation today with Kai Bird, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

He's also the co-author of, The American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. We're coming to you from the Robert Smith Auditorium at the New York Historical Society.

So Kai, thank you very much for being with us.

BIRD: Thank you, David, for having me.

RUBENSTEIN: So when you turned in the manuscript for this book, uh, how long did it take to write it, by the way?

BIRD: Only 25 years.

RUBENSTEIN: 25 years, okay.

So after you turned it in, after 25 years, did you say, "This is gonna win an award not only of the Pulitzer Prize but also Picture of the Year?"

Did you ever think that?

BIRD: Uh, actually, when we've turned in the manuscript with my co-author, the late Martin J. Sherwin, uh, he had worked on it 20 years, and after 20 years of research, he hadn't started to write, and he came to me and he said, "If you don't join me on this project, my gravestone is gonna read, 'He took it with him.'"

So we then spent another five years.

And when we finished, I turned to him and I said, "Marty, this is a great book.

I think we have a shot at the Pulitzer."

And he scoffed at me.

We weren't thinking of the, the Academy Award at that point, but I'm an optimist.

RUBENSTEIN: Well...

So this book came out in 2005.

Uh, when was it optioned to be a movie?

BIRD: 2006.

RUBENSTEIN: '06.

When option a movie to somebody, your a writer, you option it.

Do you get a net percentage of all the profits from the movie that come forward?

BIRD: David, this is a sore point.

The answer is no.

RUBENSTEIN: No, okay.

Well let's talk about Robert Oppenheimer.

Where is he born?

BIRD: Here in New York.

RUBENSTEIN: And were his parents, uh, prominent people?

BIRD: No, not really.

He, his father was an immigrant from Germany.

His mother was of German ancestry, born in Baltimore.

RUBENSTEIN: And where did he go, where did, um, Robert Oppenheimer go school?

BIRD: Right around the corner at the Ethical Culture School.

RUBENSTEIN: Ethical Culture School.

And was he a superstar there?

BIRD: He was considered to be a boy genius with a love for chemistry and physics, even in high-high school.

RUBENSTEIN: So where did he go to college?

BIRD: He studied chemistry at Harvard, graduated in three years, went off to Cambridge, England to study experimental physics, and he was a failure at it.

He was awkward with his hands.

He kept breaking things.

He had a, an emotional crisis there, uh, a near nervous breakdown.

RUBENSTEIN: So after the nervous breakdown, he gets a different field, is that right, or?

BIRD: He discovers quantum and theoretical physics, and he has, you know, he can hear the music of quantum, he can, uh, understand it and, uh, it's, it's exciting.

He's right on the cutting edge of this new science in the 1920s, and he's very good at it.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he gets his PhD in Europe?

BIRD: He gets his PhD in, at Gottingen in Germany.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

Gets his PhD.

And then where does he get a teaching job back in the States?

BIRD: He could have gotten a job almost anywhere.

He, he was offered Harvard, but he wanted to go out west because as a young man, he had fallen in love with New Mexico.

At the age of 17, his father sent him out there, he fell in love with horseback riding, and this spartan camping existence, and, at one point, he turned to his younger brother, Frank, and he said, "You know, I could be happy in life if I could s-somehow find a way to combine my love for physics and quantum with my love for New Mexico."

And of course, he did.

RUBENSTEIN: He did.

So he's teaching at Berkeley.

Um, is he a well-regarded professor there?

BIRD: Berkeley, he chooses because it's out west, it's near New Mexico, and he wanted to found the only theoretical physics department in the country.

This is a very esoteric field, and you know, he had no administrative experience during the 1930s.

He administered a handful of maybe a dozen graduate students, but he was good at it.

RUBENSTEIN: So there's another theoretical physicist, I can't remember his name.

Oh, Albert Einstein.

(laughter) Um, now he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, uh, the essence of which is that we better do something about a potential atomic bomb 'cause the Germans might be doing this, so who does Roosevelt talk to, his Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State?

Who does he talk to about following through?

BIRD: Henry Stimson was his Secretary of War, and Stimson established a project to explore this notion.

And he appointed a, a general, Leslie Groves, who had just finished building the Pentagon.

And Groves, he'd gone to MIT, he'd studied engineering.

He, he was a smart guy.

He wasn't a physicist.

But he, Groves went around the country to the major laboratories in Chicago, and here in New York, and out west eventually to Berkley and he met Oppenheimer, who was then 38 years old, had never administered anything.

Um, but Oppenheimer impressed him.

He didn't have a Nobel Prize, unlike some of the people that Groves had interviewed.

But, uh, he could see in Oppenheimer ambition and smarts.

And Oppenheimer was one of the few scientists that he had interviewed who could talk to him in plain English about what was necessary.

And this is Oppenheimer's genius.

He was not only a quantum physicist, he was a, he was a polymath, he was a humanist.

He read the novels of Ernest Hemingway.

He loved poetry, he wrote poetry, he thought philosophically about the human condition.

And so, he was able to talk to Groves and explain to him what was necessary.

And he made the argument that what you need to do is bring all the best scientists you have in one place and isolate them so that you have security.

Put barbed wire around, but let them talk to each other.

Let them have open discussions about what was necessary to build this thing.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

When did they start building it?

If you look at the movie, they, you know, they constructed in, you know, a couple of minutes or so, but it took how long?

How long did, how long did it take to really build it?

BIRD: Uh, you know, initially, Oppenheimer told Groves that he only needed about 100 scientists and, uh, you know, a few buildings they could take over the Los Alamos Boys school.

Well, within six months it grew to 1,000.

And, uh, by the end of the war, there were 6,000 people living in this city.

RUBENSTEIN: 6,000 people?

BIRD: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And they call it, "The Gadget."

Why do they call it, "The Gadget?"

BIRD: It was Grove's obsession with secrecy, 'Don't refer to it as a bomb.'

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so in the movie, you see a time when they're getting ready for the big test, and there's an explosion that the, the skies lit up and so forth, and they're shielding their eyes and so forth.

But it looked like they were relatively close compared to where they should have been.

Did they realize that radiation was a big problem with these kind of bombs?

BIRD: You know, they were 5 miles to 10 miles.

Some of them were 10 miles away.

Um, and... RUBENSTEIN: And that's enough to... BIRD: They, they, they did take into account radiation, but they believed that it would dissipate with the winds.

And that's why they were so concerned at the test site about the weather.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

BIRD: They didn't want the test to take place during a rainstorm.

RUBENSTEIN: So did people who worked there because they were exposed to radiation, even though they were 5 or 10 miles away, did they ever have a high degree of cancer afterwards or, we don't know?

BIRD: You know, there's no real evidence that the scientists themselves ever came down with it... RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

BIRD: But there is evidence that farmers downwind in New Mexico and as far away as Nevada and other places did, over the years, experience-larger rates of cancer and such.

RUBENSTEIN: President Roosevelt obviously authorized this.

He didn't tell his vice president.

So it is often said that Harry Truman learned about this for the first time when he became president, but he knew a little bit about it from the Senate investigations.

BIRD: Yeah, right.

RUBENSTEIN: But he didn't know the full extent of its success, right?

BIRD: No, it was, it, it wasn't tested at Trinity until July.

RUBENSTEIN: July of '40... BIRD: '45.

RUBENSTEIN: '45, okay.

In July of '45, they test it.

BIRD: And he was in Potsdam at that, at that point.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BIRD: And was sent to, word that it worked, and actually there's an interesting story about Oppenheimer.

you know, after the Trinity Test in July of '45, when he knew it was this, uh, uh, a success, they had tested the plutonium bomb and it worked.

Uh, he was walking to work one day in Los Alamos with his secretary, um, Anne Wilson.

And suddenly, Anne heard Oppenheimer muttering to himself, "Those poor little people.

Those poor little people."

And she stopped him and said, "Robert, what are you talking about?"

And he says, "Well, you know, the gadget works now we know it.

It's now gonna be used on a Japanese city, and the victims are going to be civilians, old men, and women and children."

And I got this story from Anne Wilson.

I tracked her down in Georgetown, she was still alive.

I ran home and called up Marty Sherwin and told him about the story.

And he said, "Well, that's very interesting because that is actually the very same week that Robert Oppenheimer was meeting in Los Alamos with the Bombardiers who are going to be on the Enola Gay that was gonna drop the first bomb on, on Hiroshima.

And he was instructing them exactly at what altitude the device should be released from the plane, and at what altitude it should be ignited to have the most maximum destructive power.

RUBENSTEIN: So the pilots and the crew from Enola Gay, they came to Los Alamos?

BIRD: Uh, the bomb- bombardiers... RUBENSTEIN: Bombardiers.

BIRD: Were to get briefed.

RUBENSTEIN: But when they're told it's an atomic bomb, did people think that the bombing was like a, a thousand bombs, it would just have more explosive power?

Or did they peop-everybody realize that that's the radiation which would last for some time would, would cause, uh, more and more deaths?

BIRD: They assumed that the real impact of "The Gadget" was going to be its firepower, its destructive firepower.

And they were instructed, the pilot, was instructed that as soon as he released the bomb, he had to veer sharply away and a climb as high in altitude as he could.

RUBENSTEIN: And they're told not to look back?

BIRD: And, no, they were looking back.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, they could look back.

BIRD: Yeah, they could.

They were filming it.

RUBENSTEIN: All right, so they- BIRD: And there was a another plane following the Enola Gay to actually film the... RUBENSTEIN: What altitude were they when they dropped the bomb?

BIRD: Oh, I think it was like 20,000 feet.

RUBENSTEIN: So 20,000 feet.

And then, after Hiroshima, we didn't know exactly what the extent of the damage was either in the United States, I think in the Japanese maybe didn't know.

The Japanese did not surrender.

They were still assessing the situation.

Did Truman have to approve a second bomb?

BIRD: Truman was actually surprised that the, that Nagasaki happened three days after Hiroshima.

And at that point, we know from his handwritten diary that he jotted down, said, "I've given the order to not use this weapon again.

I hate the thought of..." RUBENSTEIN: After the second one?

BIRD: After the second one.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So ultimately, the Japanese, uh, surrender.

There's a, a mini coup against the, the, uh, Japanese government and the emperor, but ultimately that's squashed.

The Japanese, uh, emperor, in fact, surrenders.

BIRD: Right.

You're right.

But David, I think it's important, and this is actually depicted heavily, we argue about this in the book, RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BIRD: But it's also in the movie.

Uh, you know, in the movie, you see suddenly Oppenheimer turning to Edward Teller, at one point after Hiroshima, after Nagasaki, after the surrender, Oppenheimer had just come back from a briefing in Washington.

And he turns to Teller and he says, "You know, Edward, I just learned in Washington that, from these briefings, that we essentially used this weapon on an already defeated enemy."

Meaning, that he had learned that the Japanese were in the process of surrendering.

And Truman knew that the Japanese emperor had sent a cable to his ambassador in Moscow saying, "The war is over.

We have been defeated.

And the only obstacle to our surrender now is a promise.

We must get a promise from the Americans that they will not, uh, abolish the institution of the Emperorship and put the emperor on trial."

And that's exactly what happened after two bombs.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

Well, in Potsdam, uh, Truman had said, unconditional surrender is what we want.

BIRD: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: And if the emperor could stay in power, it wasn't unconditional surrender.

But ultimately, I think Truman signed off on and Stimson signed off on letting, uh, the emperor stay in power.

BIRD: Well, there, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Is that right?

BIRD: But there was a debate inside the White House and the Pentagon... RUBENSTEIN: Right, okay.

BIRD: About whether we should amend the co-the terms of unconditional surrender.

And, you know, in retrospect, Marty, and I believe, actually, that the atomic bomb, you know, it was a shock.

But the real shock to the emperor and the hard-line Japanese generals around him was the fact that the, the Soviets had finally entered the war, and they absolutely did not want the war to end with Soviet troops occupying the Japanese home islands.

And so that was actually the-the tipping point that persuaded them to surrender, not the atomic bomb.

RUBENSTEIN: So in the book and in the movie, there's a scene where Oppenheimer goes to the Oval Office, and meets the president, I guess, for the first time.

And, uh, what does he say to President Truman?

And what does Truman say to him?

BIRD: Oppenheimer was really eager for this meeting.

It was his chance to explain, this is three months after Hiroshima, to explain to the President of the United States that this is a weapon that is so dangerous that it is not something that you can rely on for defense.

He was going around giving speeches, that very month in Philadelphia, for instance, saying, "These are weapons for aggressors.

They are weapons of terror."

And so, he wanted to use this opportunity with Truman in the Oval Office to explain we needed to, uh, control this new technology, put international controls on it, ban the weapon.

And as he was trying to make this argument, Harry Truman interrupted him and said, "Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, when do you think the Russians are going to get this weapon?"

And Oppenheimer replied, "Well, sir, I'm not sure, but in a few years."

And Truman interrupts him again and says, "Well, I know.

Never.

They're not capable of doing what the Americans did."

And at that moment, Oppenheimer understood that the President of the United States, Harry Truman, did not understand that there were no longer any secrets about this.

There are no secrets of physics.

It was simply an engineering problem.

And any country anywhere would be able to build these weapons.

And they were a real threat to us.

They took away the great moats, the Pacific and the Atlantic.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BIRD: And, and for the first time, America was gonna be vulnerable to a surprise attack with atomic weapons.

And so Oppenheimer loses it, and in his frustration, he turns to Harry Truman, and says exactly the wrong.

He says, "Well, sir, you don't understand.

We have blood on our hands, or I have blood on my hands."

And at that, that ends the meeting.

Truman... RUBENSTEIN: Truman says, goodbye?

BIRD: Truman turns to his aide and says, "Well, please escort Dr. Oppenheimer out."

A-as he's leaving, he re-reportedly, he, he turned to his aide and he said, "I don't want to ever see that crybaby scientist again."

RUBENSTEIN: Oppenheimer comes back, the war is over.

Um, and what is his job next?

BIRD: He decides he's not going to stay in Los Alamos.

He goes back to Berkeley.

He doesn't want to work on nuclear weapons.

Uh, and he's recruited by one, Lewis Strauss in 1947 to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he can become, ironically, Albert Einstein's boss.

RUBENSTEIN: So at one point, um, someone goes after Oppenheimer and wants to strip him of his security clearance.

Why did they wanna strip him of his security clearance after the war?

Why not, if he had such problems, why not before he knew all our secrets?

BIRD: Well, Lewis Strauss was the chairman of the board of trustees at the Institute for Advanced Study, but also chairman appointed in 1953 by Eisenhower of the Atomic Energy Commission.

And Oppenheimer had retained his security clearance so that he could continue to advise presidents and the generals in the Pentagon about nuclear weapons.

And he was trying, again, to make the argument that these weapons are dangerous and we have to find a way to control them.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BIRD: Came out against the development of the hydrogen bomb, and this made Lewis Strauss suspicious, on top of which Oppenheimer had gone out of his way to insult Strauss repeatedly and be rude to him in social settings.

Oppenheimer's security clearance was expiring at the end of 1953, and he wanted to renew it.

He wanted to continue to be able to come down to Washington and walk the halls of the Pentagon and, and give his advice.

And Strauss wanted to strip him of the security clearance.

And he wanted to do it in a manner that would, in the words of Edward Teller, "Defrock him in his own church."

RUBENSTEIN: The reason was he felt that Oppenheimer had insulted him or not treated him well?

BIRD: It was personal, but it was also a dispute over policy, a dispute over whether they should have gone ahead to build the hydrogen bomb, whether they should continue to spend billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.

RUBENSTEIN: At the hearing, as described in the book and the movie, um, it's a situation where people point out that, um, Oppenheimer had some sympathies for the Communist Party in maybe the 1930s or so.

Can you explain what it means to have sympathies for the Communist Party, not a member of the Communist Party as far as we know, and were many other people in the United States at that time, sympathetic to the, to the Communist Party or members and weren't there a lot of famous people in that cat-category?

BIRD: Yeah.

In the 1930s, you know, capitalism was at risk.

It seemed to be failing.

There was this massive depression.

And so, yeah, it was no surprise that Oppenheimer and other intellectuals in university settings might be sympathetic to the Communist Party that was arguing for workers' rights and unions.

And, and with fascism looming as a threat in Europe under Hitler, uh, Oppenheimer became more politically active and he began contributing to causes of the Communist Party.

So for instance, he gave money to help a campaign in Berkeley to try to desegregate the public swimming pool in Berkeley.

This was... RUBENSTEIN: Well that's clearly communist, right?

BIRD: Yeah, that was, it was a Communist Party project.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, but he never actually, as far as we know, joined the Communist Party, right?

BIRD: No, there's very mixed evidence.

J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was trying to prove that Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party.

And as early as 1941, he put him on a list of quote, "Potential subversives who should be picked up in the case of a national emergency."

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, he's never a member technically as far as anybody knew?

BIRD: We think he was only pink, not red.

RUBENSTEIN: And when you're stripped of your security clearance, what does that mean?

He basically can no longer advise the government.

He doesn't know what's going on.

And, and is he basically defrocked as it was said?

BIRD: Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, what happened to Oppenheimer in, in April of '54 was, uh, a huge humiliation.

It was a secret trial, initially, for over a month.

And then Strauss, who was orchestrating all of this from behind the scenes, uh, after the vote to strip him of his security clearance, Strauss made sure that the entire transcript of the security hearing was leaked to the New York Times.

RUBENSTEIN: So, Oppenheimer still stays at the Institute for Advanced Study?

BIRD: He almost loses his job at the Institute.

Strauss tries to get him fired as the director of the Institute.

RUBENSTEIN: And that doesn't happen?

BIRD: It doesn't happen only because, uh, 20 or 30 fellows at the Institute signed a letter saying that if Oppenheimer goes, they're, they're leaving as well.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about his family.

Uh, we haven't talked about his wife.

Uh, where did he meet his wife?

BIRD: Kitty, in Berkeley, at a cocktail party.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

And how long were they married?

BIRD: Uh, from 1940 until he died in '67.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

And, uh, in the movie, there are, and obviously in the book as well, there are scenes of his having an affair with somebody.

BIRD: Jean.

RUBENSTEIN: Who was that person?

BIRD: Jean Tatlock, who was his first love.

They, they were engaged to be married, but Jean was sort of conflicted about her sexual identity.

And, uh, she was studying to become a psychiatrist, a Freudian psychiatrist at a time when the Freudians believed that homosexuality was, uh, a medical illness.

Uh, and she was also a member of the Communist Parties.

And the Communist Party, at the time, uh, also believed that homosexuality was deviancy and, uh, uh, disease.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BIRD: And, uh, it seems clear that Tatlock was bisexual.

Uh, and, uh... RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BIRD: So she was very conflicted in her relationship with Oppenheimer.

But Oppenheimer was in love with her for four years.

Uh, proposed marriage two or three times, and finally, she sort of threw him out.

But he continued to see her occasionally.

And in 1943, he went back on a visit to San Francisco from Los Alamos, where he was building "The Gadget."

And under surveillance by FBI agents who followed him, uh, he went and spent the night with Tatlock.

And this was reported to J. Edgar Hoover.

RUBENSTEIN: Wow.

So ultimately, what happens to her?

BIRD: She committed suicide about four months later, in January of '44.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So he's presumably devastated, and, uh... BIRD: He was devastated.

RUBENSTEIN: Did his wife ever find out about this relationship?

BIRD: Yes, she... he confessed it to her.

RUBENSTEIN: And so she put it behind her.

They stayed married?

BIRD: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: What happened to his wife?

BIRD: Kitty was, you know, vivacious, smart, a firecracker, and at Los Alamo, she developed a sort of, uh, high functioning alcoholism.

She was bored silly at Los Alamos, and not allowed to work.

She could be, uh, very entertaining.

And, uh, she was a great conversationalist.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

BIRD: But she, she had two young children at the time, and she was not a great mother.

RUBENSTEIN: So, what happened to his two children?

BIRD: Toni, sadly, was a brilliant linguist, knew Russian, French, Spanish, and she tried to get a job here in New York at the United Nations, and as an American citizen to become an employee of the UN at that time, she was required to get a security clearance.

And the FBI opened a file on her, and reopened as part of that, brought into her file all of her father's FBI file, and she never got the clearance.

So she sort of floundered and in a fit of depression, she hung herself.

His son, Peter, is still with us, lives in, he's retired, uh, in Santa Fe.

He was a carpenter most of his life.

RUBENSTEIN: He never wanted to be a physicist or anything like that?

BIRD: No.

No, in fact, he campaigned as a anti-nuclear peace activist in, in New Mexico going door to door.

RUBENSTEIN: While his father, while his father was alive?

BIRD: No, this is long after.

RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, later?

So, um, quite a story.

Uh, let me ask you, what's your next book gonna be?

BIRD: Roy Cohn, the notorious scoundrel of a lawyer here in New York City.

RUBENSTEIN: So when the book comes out, uh, and you option it, try to get a percentage, okay?

(Bird laughs).

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, this was a great story.

Thank you very much, Kai.

Thank you.

BIRD: Thank you, David.

(music plays through credits)