1960s

The 1960s were the last decade of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, a period marked by a striking withdrawal from public argument, a late reconsideration of the atomic bomb’s use, and the illness that led to his death at sixty-two. The former political activist and prominent government adviser watched new crises unfold with little public comment; the silence itself sharpened the contrast with his earlier efforts to influence the country’s course.

Withdrawal from public controversy

At the beginning of the decade, as Americans dug atomic bomb shelters in their backyards, Oppenheimer did not speak publicly against the surrounding alarm. When David Lilienthal pressed him, he said, “There is nothing I can do about what is going on; I would be the worst person to speak out about them in any case.” His explanation connected his silence not to indifference but to his own disqualification, as he saw it, from intervening. During the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965–66, he again had nothing to say in public. In private conversations with Peter Oppenheimer, however, he showed skepticism about the administration’s increasing commitment.

That reserve was a late change in the life of someone whose public conduct had once been shaped by vigorous political engagement. The biography places those earlier commitments in the setting of the Depression and the rise of fascism, and treats private experience as part of the background to public behavior and policy choices. By the 1960s, the distance between that politically active past and his muted response to current events had become part of his story.

The bomb’s history returns

In 1964, Oppenheimer received an advance copy of Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. Drawing on newly opened archival materials, including the diaries of Henry L. Stimson and State Department records concerning James F. Byrnes, Alperovitz argued that atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union had figured in President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use the bomb against Japan, whose military defeat, he contended, was already apparent.

Asked for his comments, Oppenheimer replied that much of the account had been largely unknown to him, while adding that he recognized Alperovitz’s portraits of Byrnes and Stimson. He declined to enter the controversy. Yet his response did not erase an older view: as with P. M. S. Blackett’s earlier book Fear, War and the Bomb, Oppenheimer still appeared to believe that the Truman administration had used atomic weapons against an enemy already essentially defeated. The episode shows a man avoiding a public dispute without surrendering the judgment that lay beneath it.

Illness and the unfinished house

In autumn 1965, after an infrequent physical examination, Oppenheimer came home saying he had received a clean bill of health. He joked, “I am going to outlive every one of you.” Within two months his smoker’s cough had worsened. At Christmas on St. John, he complained to Sis Frank of a “terrible sore throat” and wondered, “Maybe I’m smoking too much.” Katherine(Kitty)Oppenheimer thought it was a bad cold; in February 1966, she took him to a doctor in New York and learned that he had cancer.

After four decades of heavy tobacco use, Oppenheimer had cancer of the larynx. He underwent a painful, inconclusive operation in March, then began cobalt radiation therapy at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. He spoke candidly with friends about the illness, telling Francis Fergusson that he had a “faint hope that it could be stopped where it was.” By late May, he was visibly wasting away. The worsening illness coincided with a change in the couple’s plans: after trustees reversed their decision over a proposed Princeton house, construction began in September 1966. The house was completed the following spring, but Oppenheimer would never live in it.

Death and public memory

In the weeks before his death, Oppenheimer’s old attentiveness to guests remained visible even as his body failed. When Louis Fischer visited, Oppenheimer instinctively lit a cigarette for him, although Fischer did not smoke and was leaving. At the door, with his speech thick, Oppenheimer said, “Come again.” On February 17, 1967, Francis Fergusson found him so feeble that he walked him to his bedroom before leaving. The next day, Oppenheimer died in his sleep at 10:40 p.m. He was sixty-two; his remains were cremated two days later.

Katherine(Kitty)Oppenheimer later described the decline in devastating terms: “His death was pitiful. He turned into a child first, then an infant. He made noises. I couldn’t go into the room; I had to go into the room, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Public remembrances registered his stature but did not agree on what deserved emphasis. The Times of London called him a Renaissance man; David Lilienthal praised the union of poetry and science in a noble spirit. Edward Teller recalled above all Oppenheimer’s necessary work organizing Los Alamos Laboratory. In the Senate, Senator Fulbright urged listeners to remember not only what Oppenheimer’s genius had done for the country, but also what the country had done to him. That contrast—achievement beside injury—made his death a judgment on the era as well as the close of an individual life.