Poured Over: Kai Bird on American Prometheus

By Jenna Seery / August 17, 2023 at 6:00 am

“Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer. I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!”

The inspiration for the new movie Oppenheimer, Kai Bird’s incredible biography, American Prometheus follows the complicated and consequential life of one of the most influential scientists in human history. Bird joins us to talk about the film, the amount of time it took to write the book, the fluidity of history and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.      

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.  

Featured Books (Episode):
American Prometheus by Kai Bird

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and it is my great good fortune to have Kai Bird here today. You know him is the co author of American Prometheus, the triumphant tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer. It’s a prize-winning biography of the scientist, but it is also the basis for the current movie from Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer. Kai, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kai Bird

Thank you for having me. It’s terrific.

There’s so much ground I want to cover but you have this very lovely anecdote from when you were on set in New Mexico, that ties together the book, and the film in a way that I think is really quite charming. And I’m hoping you’ll I know, you’ve told it in other places, but I’m hoping you’ll tell it here. And it involves the actor who’s playing Oppenheimer.

Cillian Murphy. Yes. Yes, well, we were on set, my wife and I were invited. And it was in Los Alamos and one of the few old buildings that dated back to the 1940s. And we saw the same two and a half minute segment where the actors did their lines, I don’t know about 15 times. At one point, there was a break. And they brought Cillian Murphy over to be introduced to me. And you know, he’s wearing his baggy, brown 1940s suit and the silver, New Mexico belt buckle and the famous Oppenheimer hat. So I just spontaneously, I yelled out to him: Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer. I’ve been waiting decades to meet you. And he laughed and, and we chatted for five minutes. But I think he plays a brilliant Oppenheimer. I told him that he I thought that he had captured his voice, which is a very charismatic, magnetic voice, very soft, very eloquent. Each word is very articulated. And it’s the kind of voice you know, you have to sort of you want to lean in, to listen carefully to. And he responded that oh, you know, he tries not to mimic the voice, but to capture the spirit of it. I think he succeeded.

And I think he also told you that everyone on set was reading American Prometheus, which

He said it was required reading by everyone.

I’m incredibly happy about not just because I’m a bookseller, but also the scope of American Prometheus is really important. I think it’s really, really important the way you start us, I have to say young Oppenheimer is kind of a weird guy. I’m not the only person to say that, but you can see the brilliance. And you can see the complications. He is a messy human being, he is far from perfect, but wow, he is brilliant. I mean, we’re talking about the guy who brought quantum physics to the United States. It’s wild. But before we dive too much into the story, I want to talk about you and your co-author, Martin Sherman, who, unfortunately is not with us. He died of lung cancer at the end of 2021. But he knew the film was coming. He was there when you won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle and all sorts of lovely things. But he had gotten a little stuck. And part of my research mentions the curse of Oppenheimer. And I don’t know how real that is. I mean, it was the New York Review of Books I, well, clearly, there’s a curse because everyone knows everyone in the circle of biographers who want to write about Oppenheimer. They get a little sick of him, because he’s not really a good guy. And I’m thinking well, I don’t know. And I’m just going to ask you did Marty ever say anything to you about the curse of Oppenheimer as he was working on the book.

No, Marty never got sick of Oppenheimer. And he wasn’t really stuck. Yeah, he, he was still sufficiently obsessed as a biographer must be most biographies take at least five years, often seven or eight or 10. My first biography took 10. But Marty got into it. And he you know, he clearly caught biographers disease, which is a common affliction. It’s when you can’t stop researching. And you can’t start the writing because you believe that there’s always you know, one more archive to visit or another person to interview that is essential to telling the story. And, you know, Marty was a brilliant writer. He was very unlike many academics and historian If he really had a sense of the narrative and pacing and storytelling, he couldn’t start the writing. So 20 years into the project he came to me, and we were, we were by then, we had met in the early 80s, I’d say, and when I was a young associate editor at The Nation magazine, and but we’d become good friends by the 90s. And he came to me and he urged me to join him on his Oppenheimer project. And he was a funny guy, he said, you know, Kai, if you don’t join me, they’re going to my gravestone is going to read, he took it with him. Anyway, I did join him, you know, he, he turned over to me in the beginning. Tons of archival material, and but he said, you know, there are enormous gaps in the research, we, you know, even after 20 years, well, it wasn’t true. He had gathered 50,000 pages of archival documents, and they’ve done all these 150 interviews, and they were all neatly transcribed. And as I started to write, he would call me up every few months and, and he’d be very excited. And he says, Hi, I found another box in the, in the attic, or in, in my closet that I forgotten about. But as I started to write childhood chapters, that inspired him to start writing, and we went back and forth, and it turned into a great collaboration.

And in 2005, we get the book itself 2006 you win the Pulitzer for biography. And in the meantime, the books sort of had its own life in certain circles, and now it’s just hitting a much wider audience and your cold war historian, Martin was a cold war historian, I mean, you both written about the legacy of, well, let’s call it the Atomic Age, right? Like I mean, Oppenheimer is the start the work that he did at Los Alamos, this is the start of an entirely new universe for us, regardless of where we are, and the two of you coming together. And it turns out, I didn’t realize that Marty’s last book was also his doctoral thesis. And I had read that quite some time ago. And I can’t find my copy. So I ordered. I just want to say it’s been a minute. But we don’t talk about the legacy of the arms race, or the legacy of the Cold War, or any of the atomic age the way we had previously. And part of me is very excited that this conversation is coming back. And even Nolan has said, you know, this is something that he thought about quite a lot when he was younger, and then one of his teenage sons said to me, Oh, Dad, we don’t think about that. And my eyes got really big when I read that. So can we talk about your background as a historian and a biographer, and sitting with a legacy of a man like Oppenheimer, because there really is no one like him?

Ya know, it’s, it’s very worrisome that we have, 70 plus years after Hiroshima, that we’ve become so complacent about living with the atomic bomb. I was born in 1951 and so I grew up, when I was in this country, I actually grew up overseas, most of my childhood, but I remember being instructed, you know, in third grade to hide under our desk for atomic bomb drills, which seemed kind of, even to my young mind, it seems ridiculous. And yet, now, we don’t think about it. And yet, we’re now faced with a war in the Ukraine, where Mr. Putin has blatantly threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons. And, you know, as the book and as the movie makes it very clear Oppenheimer himself, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within months, he was giving public speeches, saying this is a weapon for aggressors. This is a weapon of surprise of terror. And it was a weapon used on an already essentially defeated enemy, and there’s no defense. And you may think it’s very expensive because we spent $2 billion on it, but actually, it’s cheap. And there are no secrets in the physics to building it and he predicted he said, you know, any nation however poor that wants to build these weapons can do so. So he was predicting North Korea and Pakistan and India, Israel, tomorrow, Iran. That’s one reason why the book is so relevant. and why I think it’s touched a chord among people just this summer, because we’re looking or the front pages of our newspapers and whatnot are filled with news about the war in Ukraine. And, you know, something terrible could still happen. We don’t know the end story of the atomic age.

No, we definitely don’t. And the thing is too that pages and pages keep being declassified. I mean, none of this is new history. A good chunk of this book happens before you and I are even on the planet, right? So you’ve got to walk, the line between creating the character that we know is Robert Oppenheimer, because we have to have something to engage in. It’s not just enough that he’s brilliant. It’s not just enough that he’s difficult or loves poetry, or, frankly, is quite a womanizer. I mean, he’s, he’s Oppenheimer. So you’ve got to get this personality alive on the page, and you’re working off of archival material. I mean, he was dead in 67.

Right? I love biography because it’s so personal. Because it’s personal. That’s precisely why you can persuade the reader to keep turning the page because they’re interested in the person and what makes them tick. And so you know, the movie begins with this episode of Oppenheimer in in a sort of personal, almost nervous breakdown. And the book too, you know, that’s completely accurate. Something happened when he was 22 years old at Cambridge. And in the book, we make a big effort to explain how fragile personality he had as a what a prolonged adolescence a struggle, he had to become an adult. And how brilliant he was even as a child, but socially awkward, and annoying.

But also, don’t you have to sort of carve your own path when you’re dealing with I mean, he loves scientific theory, he loved it, it’s so clear that that was the thing. Well, okay, martinis and women and also scientific theory, but you have to sort of chart your own course. I mean, if you’re going to look at the universe, an entirely different way. I, I mean, I’ve read a little bit about quantum physics. And I know enough to understand what he did was a massive accomplishment. I also know enough to know that that will never be my path, that will never ever like it is just not like the people who love science and math. It is a calling. It’s a poetry. It’s a language of its own all of that. But Oppenheimer himself. I mean, he loves poetry. He believes that the humanities and the sciences need to be taught in concert, so we never lose sight of what we’re using the technology for. And that really, to me, puts him very far ahead of his time. In many ways, I think, am I right about that?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, he was a good physicist, precisely because he had a very fertile imagination. And he wasn’t just interested in mathematics. He was interested in poetry. He wrote his own poetry. You know, I think there’s a great scene at work early on in Nolan’s film where he has Oppenheimer, walking through an art gallery and looking at Picasso paintings. And he does that for a very good reason. Two reasons, Oppenheimer’s own mother was an art collector and painter, and owns some Picassos and Van Goghs. And Nolan is having the young Oppenheimer’s staring at a Picasso from the Cubist period. And it’s, it’s a metaphor for quantum physics. So, you know, again, that’s sort of that was Nolan’s brilliance and imagining that but…

Yeah, but I learned from you that Oppenheimer and Kitty, his wife, hung some of his dad’s paintings, which included Picassos and some others and the one in the house in Princeton, when he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which he brought TS Eliot in, and the poet to work on most physicists and mathematicians. And also I really love the idea that you sort of dropped this line and it’s early in the book, I think, like it’s not actually a great mathematician. He’s very good at getting people to work together and getting the thing to happen, which made him a natural leader for Los Alamos. But really in the grand scheme of things, not great at math, which is not really the first thing you think about, or at least item with physics. But the combination of math and science. I mean, you really do need the math in order to make the science.

His math, mathematics was okay. But you know, he just didn’t have the patience to be careful. And he would zip through it and make minor errors. And of course, you can’t do that mathematics. And for the same reason he was in when he was 22 years old, studying experimental physics in Cambridge, he was he suddenly realized he wasn’t good at it, he was awkward with his hands, and he kept breaking things and, and know his brilliance was in, in theoretical physics, which is a wholly different, you know, it’s a poetic version of physics. And, you know, his PhD thesis was, I think, not very long. It was something he wrote in less than a year. But you don’t have to write much to be a brilliant theoretical physicist.

How much of that work, though, I mean, I’m not saying you picked up a textbook and had to learn all of the elements of quantum physics or whatnot. But you have to have a slightly better working understanding of some of this, especially when we’re dealing with the Los Alamos work, then maybe I do, for instance, like I need you. And Marty, to walk me down, sort of the math parts of it, I understand the larger pieces, I’m absolutely not making light of what was done at Los Alamos, and what came later. But the idea that we need all of these pieces and all of these parts, and they don’t live separately from each other, I mean, the man was his work. The work was the man. And now we’re living with the legacy of both of those things. And I mean, clearly, you understand the piece about the humanities, and the human that is Oppenheimer and the people surrounding them. But don’t you have to also add in some sort of working, not just so you can get the metaphors right, just see you from get

You mean me as the biographer?

You as the biographer, but no?

All right. I will confess that in college, I did take a course in physics, okay. But it was entitled physics for poets.

Got it? My people? Yes.

So, you know, I was, I was not a mathematician, I was not a scientist. I don’t understand quantum physics myself. But I did, you know, have to try to Marty and I had to try to describe what Oppenheimer was doing in the 1930s, when he was exploring what became known later as black hole theory and such. And I’ll also confess that when we had a first draft of the manuscript release, we passed it by a number of historians and Cold War experts, and but also a couple of physicists, and we sent it to Jeremy Bernstein, who is a physicist who actually worked at the Institute for Advanced Study under Oppenheimer, and so he knew Oppenheimer. But he was also a physicist who had written many articles about physicists for The New Yorker, and Jeremy read the manuscript. And I’ll confess that he looked at these first drafts and we’d get emails back from as the days went by, as he was plowing through the manuscript, and he’d say, Oh, brilliant. I’m learning so much about Oppenheimer is the man that I didn’t know. But I have to tell you, your physics sucks. Okay, well, and what he meant was that, you know, we inevitably made had descriptions in there of what Oppenheimer was doing that were close, but could be wrong. Right. And, and fortunately, someone like Jeremy Bernstein could help us to smooth out the rough edges.

Well, as a non science person, thank you.

Right. It’s hard.

And again, Oppenheimer’s legacy is so much bigger than the actual science of the thing. All respect to physicists, but the legacy that we all live with, regardless of where we are in the world, where we live or what country we’re a part of. We all live with a this legacy and Oppenheimer is there as science becomes militarized in a way that it may be previously not, he becomes famous in a way that let’s take Einstein out of the equation for a second. Einstein was sort of his own right. He’s his own level. But Oppenheimer almost becomes a celebrity.

Oh, he does become one.

You have an anecdote about him, winking at Joseph McCarthy in an elevator because he’s convinced that his notoriety is going to protect him. And I’m thinking, you know, if anyone’s gonna wink at Joe McCarthy, it may as well be Oppenheimer. But wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a choice. That’s a choice winking at Joe McCarthy, as Joe McCarthy is the peak of Joe McCarthy. And the idea, though, right, that, and this is going to bring me to the tragedy part of Oppenheimer story, which obviously, we can’t leave out and is a huge part of the American Prometheus story. But here’s this man who has taken science and America to an entirely new level. And a lot of the story has stopped at that point, right. It’s like we’ve invented this thing, we’re going to win the war, never mind, the fact that the Japanese really were on their knees. And anyway, that’s a whole other story. But the idea that say Truman even was more concerned about what his legacy was going to be what happened after we dropped the bomb. And ultimately, with Oppenheimer, what happened after we dropped the bomb and what happened for communities in New Mexico that were downwind of the Trinity test. And what happened obviously, for the Japanese in not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but certainly starting there, right? Like, all of the what happened at like, it’s, it’s a hinge moment that we have no parallel for, before tips into after in a way that we have not seen until that moment. And you’re the guy who’s capturing all of it.

No, no, it’s, it’s an incredible tipping point. And in 1945, you’re right, Oppenheimer becomes sort of the first science celebrity. Now as his image is flashed on the cover of Time Magazine and Life and, you know, strangers, stop them on the street to greet him, this is at a at the height of America’s power, right, also at the beginning of the Cold War. And Oppenheimer is you know, he’s in 1945, 46, he’s a very torn man, because he actually is enjoying the celebrity status, right. And he’s trying to use it for good to try to influence the policymakers, the President of the United States, Harry Truman, to engage in arms, serious arms control, to put this weapon back in the bottle, so to speak, and, and ban it and regulate it and create an international atomic authority that would have inspection powers to prevent anyone else from building these weapons. But, you know, no one listens to him. You know, it’s, it’s not taken seriously. And yet, there’s, you know, Oppenheimer himself is like, he’s very torn. He’s smart enough to understand that the celebrity is maybe a passing thing. He wants to use it, he enjoys walking the halls of the Senate and the War Department and, and he enjoys the power. He’s actually personally, he’s a very shy man in some ways. And yet he’s capable of getting up on the stage and being theatrical. So your, your reference to being in an elevator with Joe McCarthy and winking at him. Like, who would do that, except someone who had a sense of, there’s sort of the actor in it. In the same way, you know, he this famous line that he has from the Bhagavad Gita, I am death, destroyer of worlds. Well, that’s not what he said when he saw the Trinity test. Either he or Frank, his brother turned to each other and simply said it worked. But then when he’s interviewed the next day by the New York Times reporter, oh, what went through your head when you saw? Oppenheimer, you know, dredges up a theatrical statement that we all know now.

The man has a sense of narrative. I mean, ultimately, they’re gonna bring 6000 people together in a place like Los Alamos, I mean, and 6000 obviously includes families and support staff, you have to be able to sell the idea. Even if you can’t speak of it outside of that community. I mean, we all know that once you got to Los Alamos, except for the spies, you really were supposed to keep everything contained within. And that takes a special kind of leadership and a special kind of personality to get people to do the thing that had never been done before.

Oh, absolutely. And you know, he had never administered anything except a handful of graduate students, when he was recruited in 1942. But he was, you know, a most improbable choice and yet the perfect choice. And General Leslie Groves who made the decision, obviously sort of saw enough ninebark his ambition, his brilliance and this spark of charisma, and groves, appreciate the fact that Oppenheimer could speak in plain English about very complicated scientific issues. So when Oppenheimer was putting together the scientists, you know, he had to get chemists and engineers and explosive experts and theoretical physicists, and these are all really smart people with big egos. And there, he’s got to get them to work together. But he’s a great synthesizer, he understands how to sort of stand at the back of the room as that was his style, let everyone argue, and then they just the right moment, he would step forward and summarize what everyone was saying in a way that sort of pointed the way forward, or the next step to solve the problem at hand.

He did also have a dear friend though, who said I can’t do this, I can’t be part of creating a tool that could destroy the entire world. I mean, there were people who…

You’re referring to Isidor Rabi

Isidor Rabi exactly, you know, a noted scientist of his own right, but also very committed to the idea that he would pop in every now and again, just say hello to his panel and make sure that Oppenheimer was eating and things like that. But he was not a part of it, though. They stayed very close for a very long time.

Well, if he had the same hesitations, Rabi did, but, you know, he also had this intense ambition. And he just, he had a certainty that the German physicists that he had studied with in the 1920s were just as capable as he was building this thing. And he wanted to make sure that the Americans got it first. And not Hitler.

The more though that he spoke out against the bomb, and the more he butted heads. I mean, Truman was not a fan, Eisenhower kind kept him at arm’s length, because of Louis, it brings us to why do we call this event I mean, it wasn’t a trial. But he’s brought up in front of the Atomic Energy Commission, and essentially run through the wringer. His entire life gets laid out and things from his past that he’d been very open about and said, Well, you know, this could be a problem for you down the road. But it was personal. And it was because he wasn’t toeing the line and saying, oh, no, we have to do we have to keep going bigger and better with weapons of mass destruction.

Oh, it was it was really all about the decision to build the hydrogen bomb, right. And he was opposed to that. Okay. And he was opposed to Eisenhower’s reliance on more and more nuclear weapons. Eisenhower, sort of had the notion was convinced that atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs can be a cheap defense, and that it would save money on a conventional defense budget, which turned out to be wildly inaccurate. These were actually very expensive weapons, and useless weapons, not military weapons. And Oppenheimer understood this and Eisenhower didn’t and Truman didn’t and, and Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission didn’t and Oppenheimer had also alienated Strauss, insulted him made fun of them publicly. This is all reflected in both the book and in the film, and, you know, it became clear by 1953 that Oppenheimer was going public in a major way. He had authored a long essay in foreign affairs, the, you know, the Journal of the American foreign policy establishment, attacking the whole idea of relying on these weapons. And so, Strauss and the whole defense establishment realized he was becoming a threat to their budgets to their worldview. And the father of the atomic bomb had to be, in the words of Edward Teller, defrocked in his own church. So that’s what this security hearing was all about. And it’s just remarkable that Oppenheimer, this is a sign of his naivete. He didn’t realize what how the cards were stacked against him. His security clearance was expiring at the end of 1953, when he was given charges in a letter by Louis Strauss. And he decided he had to fight it. He wanted to fight it, he wanted to retain his security clearance, he wanted to retain his access to Washington. And to be able to walk the corridors of power. I tell this funny story in the book that illustrates this in which, on the eve of the trial, that security hearing, he goes down the hallway to knock on the door of Albert Einstein, who’s one of the fellows, you know, Oppenheimer is sort of Einstein’s boss is the director of the Institute, but not really. And they’re good friends, although they disagree about their physics from time to time. And he tells Albert, you know, I’m going to be absent for several weeks, I have to go down to Washington to go through this security hearing. They’re charging me with being disloyal. And Einstein is flabbergasted. He can’t understand why Oppenheimer would subject himself to this. And he, he says, Robert, you’re Mr. Atomic, why don’t you just walk away? Why subject yourself to this witch hunt. And they argue, Oppenheimer tries to explain to Einstein that he needs to use his status to try to educate the people in Washington about the dangers of these weapons and, and he turns around and walks away. And, and as he walks away, Feinstein turns to the Secretary and says, there goes on are the Yiddish for a fool. Yeah, and it’s true, he was being very foolish and politically naive. And he was doing this partly out of ego, he couldn’t bear to give up his status as a member of the establishment and, and of course, he’s, you know, just terribly publicly humiliated. This kangaroo court of a proceeding.

And that is the tragedy. And without the tragedy, we don’t have the full story of the world we’re living in now. I mean, as you said, his security clearance was about to expire. This had become wildly personal and all about sort of the human characteristics of a guy who liked his martinis and was a womanizer, brilliant again, but also had a personality that wasn’t entirely clean cut, right?

He was very human. And, you know, what was dragged out and used against him was the fact that he had been a man of the left in the 1930s. We argue in the book, Marty and I, that he was sort of pink but not Red, you know, contributed to causes supported by the Communist Party, but he never actually joined the party or submitted Himself to party discipline, but he contributed as much as $400 a year to party activities. And his wife Kitty had been a member of the party and his brother Frank was a member of the party. his close friend, Haakon Chevalier, a French literature professor was a CP, member of the party. The first love of his life, Jean Tatlock was a medical student studying to become a psychiatrist and was also a member of the party. And he kept up his relations with Tatlock and even visited her in San Francisco and on a trip from Los Alamos in the midst of World War Two, and this was monitored by the FBI. And so all of this was brought out at the hearing in the presence of Kitty, his wife. And so you know, it was a personal sort of humiliation. But no see, you know, he’d been quite open about all of this and they’re real, no real secrets about it.

You do poke a little bit at J Edgar Hoover, and the FBI for never being able to prove, in fact, because I, the phones were tapped, they were following him, it could have easily been interpreted as harassment, and yet, he’s Oppenheimer, he doesn’t, Oppenheimer commits to science. And that’s about it. He likes his life. He likes New Mexico. But really, the one thing that he truly, without a doubt commits to is science and scientific inquiry. And the people sort of come in and out of his life. And there’s some, you know, obviously, Kitty has had rather a rough go of it. And I can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be in her position. I mean, here’s the world telling you your husband’s brilliant, and yet she’s, she’s not in a good place.

Yeah, it’s a very human story. She’s a wonderful character. She’s living as a professional, educated woman who was a biologist, she met Oppie, in 1940, when she was 29 years old, and she was already married three times.

I was thinking Kitty was not great at being married, but…

Not great at being married. But she fell in love with Oppenheimer, and they had a turbulent relationship. But she was very high strung, and in some ways difficult. And maybe not a great mother. She suffered from obviously, from what we would call today postpartum depression after one of her pregnancies. And up in Los Alamos, you know, she was bored silly because she wasn’t allowed to actually work professionally. And she was the wife of the director and yet she was completely devoted to him. And so, you know, she began to drink a little too much. We sort of argued that she was very high functioning alcoholic at some stages of her life, and difficult and outrageous behavior at times. And yet, during that trial, during the 1954 kangaroo court proceeding, Oppenheimer himself sort of falls apart, fails to defend himself and admits that he was an idiot who made up cock and bull stories and, and he, you know, he just wasn’t very good at defending themselves. Kitty gets up on the witness stand. And she turns out to be ferocious and witty, and a fighter and she, you know, puts down the, the so called prosecutors questions and makes fun of them. And, you know, they had a difficult marriage, but it, it lasted until he died.

Yeah, Kitty really, really shows up for him in so many different ways. But after the book came out, and we know that Oppenheimer security clearance had been revoked in this horrible kangaroo court. I’m delighted to call it a kangaroo court because that is the best description of the terrible thing that happened. But you and Marty started to see if you could help rehab and I do need a better word than that, Oppenheimer’s sort of legacy with the US government. And can we tell a little bit of that story here? Because I just I love the idea of you and Marty saying, well, we’re not done with this book. Because again, I just want to add the context outside of this magnificent 721-page book, but that it lives on and that you were able to do a little more.

You know, the book came out in 2005. You know, 25 years after Marty started work on it, and won the Pulitzer the next year. And Marty at one point, turned to me and said, you know, rereading the chapter on the 1954 trial is so outrageous what was done to him maybe there’s something we could do to rehabilitate is reputation in the historical record. And so we wrote a memo and took it to a lawyer in Washington, to one of these high powered law firms. They agreed to take on the case pro bono to research whether there was anything that could be done through the courts, you know, maybe through some kind of judicial, we can sue them to overturn the hearing or something. And they assigned a young associate lawyer to research this case. And about three months into it, we got a phone call, and they said, Oh, we have a problem. One of our senior partners is C. Boyden Gray, who was a powerful Republican lawyer, former chief, White House counsel to President George HW Bush and it just happens he was the son of Gordon Gray, who chaired the panel that convicted Oppenheimer. And so he objected to us to his own law firm doing any of this research to overturn the verdict. So they had to withdraw. You know, Washington’s a small town. And it’s still really personal.

Oppenheimer had been dead for decades.

And C Boyden gray did not want this case to be revisited. He was personally defending his own father’s reputation and so we moved on to another law firm. And they finally told us that there was no hope in the courts that we’d have to get an executive order from the president or maybe the Secretary of Energy. And so we proceeded to lobby the Obama administration at that point, unsuccessfully, we kept getting the door shut in our face saying no, this is not possible. And then Donald Trump was elected and we gave up. And then Biden comes into the White House and, and we revived the idea and teamed up with a Senate staffer named Ken Reaser, chief aide to Senator Leahy of Vermont. And Tim Reaser actually took it up and refused to give up and he persuaded 43 senators to sign a letter in support of the notion of nullifying the decision from 1954. And we lobbied the Secretary of Energy and, and last December, in a miracle, the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, in a really courageous act, sort of overruled her own lawyers and the Energy Department and said, What happened to Oppenheimer was outrageous, and we violated our own procedures of how to conduct security hearing of this type, and we need to, we can’t restore the security clearance to Oppenheimer, he’s gone. But we will formally nullify for the history books, what him what was decided in 1954. And so that sort of adds a sweet ending to the story and it’s important for the historical record.

And that’s why I asked you to tell the story because the idea that history is something that evolves, right, we’re living in history, we are any given moment, we wake up on a Tuesday morning, and we make breakfast. And that’s going to be history someday. Not necessarily for the historical record, but I’m just using that in a loose framework for time, obviously, no one cares what I had for breakfast. But the idea that history is the static thing that happened, right, we can add to the historical record, we can talk about the 19,000 people who are living around Los Alamos.

History is not static. It’s always changing and evolving, because we find new documents or we look at the old documents or old interviews, and we see them in a new light, given the passage of time, and that’s the nature of history. And it’s, it’s a very vibrant thing. You know, we’re going to be arguing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki 100 years from now, because precisely because it’s such a pivotal historical moment, and it raises all these ethical issues about war and peace and living with the atomic bomb.

And someday you and I Come back to the Smithsonian in 94 and the Enola Gay, but you only have so much time. But that’s another conversation altogether, the idea that we need to tell the stories, right? Like, I’m just people can Google it, I just we need to tell the stories “properly” is a dangerous word to use. But like, let’s tell the whole thing. And let’s include the consequences. And let’s include the humanity of it all I the idea of pretending that, you know, a plane is just a plane.

You mentioned this Smithsonian controversy. This happened in 94, 95. And it’s actually an affair that brought Marty and I closer together because we were so outraged that the Smithsonian museums exhibit on the end of World War Two and Hiroshima was being censored for political reasons. But again, history is not static. And here we are, all these many years later. And I don’t think Nolan’s film could have been produced in 95 because of political atmosphere. But he has managed to take the history in the book and without, you know, being ideological or, or pounding you over the head, he presents the history and presents Oppenheimer’s political and ethical dilemmas. And you walk out of the theater, asking questions about all that history. That’s what we wanted to see happen.

That’s a really good note to end the show on but I have to ask you about your Roy Cohn biography that you’re working on, because I really want to read it. Do you have an ETA for the manuscript? Do you know roughly when you’re going to be handing this in?

I hesitate to say but you know, Scribner wants it by the spring of ‘25. That’s very soon and I’m working on it. But no, it’s an important story. And actually, you know, I’ve written about Roy Cohn in all my other books on my biography of John McCloy, on Bundy, even an Oppenheimer, even in my biography two years ago, they came out on Jimmy Carter, Roy Cohn makes an appearance. And he’s an important vehicle for explaining the legacy of McCarthyism, New York City politics, and, of course, Donald Trump, because Donald Trump exists because of what was planted in McCarthy, the McCarthy era and Roy Cohn was chief of staff to Joseph McCarthy, and later became the chief lawyer to Donald Trump as a young real estate developer in New York and Roy Cohn taught Trump everything he knew, how to act with the press, how to deny everything, how to double down how to countersue all the behavior that you see in Donald Trump comes from Roy Cohn’s playbook. It’s just astonishing.

Which goes back to our very original point, which is history is right now, we’re living in history, this is it is not a static thing. It’s not something that someone hands you a textbook to, it is the thing that we live and breathe every single day. And it can change and it can mutate. And it can be different things. And it’s just it’s really exciting to know that you’re out there doing the work. And I really do want to read this Roy Cohn book. But before I let you go, I do also just want to mention just for the show, there’s great reporting from UNM and also New Hampshire Public Radio on the Downwinders from New Mexico and their attempts to get compensation from the US government for the cancer. There’s some reporting, too, on the CDC website, that’s it’s really if it’s people should take some time and spend some time with that information as well. But American Prometheus, I mean, it’s coming out in hardcover again, very shortly. We just got that date today. And also, I hear there’s a YA version coming as well.

There is a young adult version that is in the works.

I think it’s great. I think everyone should just sit down. I mean, again, I set it at the top of the show, I will not stop saying it. Robert Oppenheimer is a huge part of who we are, as a world and a community and the society. I mean, he has made us who we are, and I’m just excited for people to really sit down with it, whether it’s the movie, I mean, start with the book.

Start with the book.

The movie is lovely, but the book is great.

No, no, the book will help you understand a very complicated movie. And Christopher Nolan, his screenplay is incredible. It’s very layered. And he does not stop to explain things. It’s, he lets the theater goer figure it out. And you’re going to have to go back and watch the movie. Not for a second time, but maybe for a third or fourth time to figure it all out.

But that’s the luxury of reading a book.

Like yes, why not just read the book.

We have space, we have space in the pages of a book. I mean, you have 700. And also I have to say, the reference material, it was great, the index is great. The bibliography is great. There’s, you can really go down a rabbit hole with American Prometheus is what I’m saying. But before I let you go, Kai, you are also the director of the Levy Center for Biography.

Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University.

So can we just talk about that for two seconds because I love the idea that you’re teaching an entire generation of biographers how to do because I do think biographies and art I really like you could write a thing that becomes quite turgid. And it has all of the facts and it’s just not fun to read. And clearly, that’s not how you operate as a biographer. Even with Mac Bundy. Even with Mac Bundy, you may I have issues with Mac, but how do you teach that art? How do you teach people to be a great biographer?

Well, I’ll confess I don’t do much teaching, in my biography center, my job is wonderful. It consists of giving away money working biographers. But along the way, I have started a very unique master’s program in biography and memoir, which is the only such program in the country. And there are now like almost 60 students enrolled, and they are being taught how to write a biography. And they start out, for instance, learning to write an obituary in 600 words, right? To try to capsulize a whole life and 600 words. And it’s a terrific program. And you know, people suddenly it’s a very popular program. And we’re finding that university professors who teach history and English are very much attracted to teaching biography, and they want to write biographies themselves, again, because they’re accessible. And sometimes they find a readership unlike some academic writing. And, yes, art and biography is an art. It’s not dry history. It’s telling on the life of another human being is really complicated. And it’s not just about dates. And you’re trying to tell an entertaining story that also resonates with history and has footnotes.

Oh, we’re really lucky. We are really, really lucky that you cold war historian Kai Bird decided to also write a biography, or more than one actually because I have read the other books too. But that just tells you I’m a history nerd. Anyway. Kai, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.