Wolverton: A Life in Twilight
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That's more or less where Wolverton picks up the threads of Oppenheimer's life. JRO is by that time Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, the organization largely created to provide a place for Einstein to work. Oppenheimer held this position until his death in 1966. Ironically, Lewis Strauss was on the Board of Directors for most of that time, just to make things tense. (Strauss, in 1959, was humiliatingly rejected by the Senate as nominee to head the Department of Commerce; perjury was involved. This is thought to have been retribution for his treatment of Oppenheimer.) | That's more or less where Wolverton picks up the threads of Oppenheimer's life. JRO is by that time Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, the organization largely created to provide a place for Einstein to work. Oppenheimer held this position until his death in 1966. Ironically, Lewis Strauss was on the Board of Directors for most of that time, just to make things tense. (Strauss, in 1959, was humiliatingly rejected by the Senate as nominee to head the Department of Commerce; perjury was involved. This is thought to have been retribution for his treatment of Oppenheimer.) | ||
| - | JRO did not lose any of his celebrity during this period, even though he felt keenly the rejection and estrangement from government work. He worked at the Institute, he started traveling, giving lectures in physics around the world that were attended literally by thousands of people at each venue, people who wouldn't | + | JRO did not lose any of his celebrity during this period, even though he felt keenly the rejection and estrangement from government work. He worked at the Institute, he started traveling, giving lectures in physics around the world that were attended literally by thousands of people at each venue, people who wouldn't understand what he was saying about nuclear physics but who were enchanted just to listen to him. |
All sorts of interesting incidents linger in my mind, but I won't recount them. One that seemed notable to me: in 1954 JRO was visited at Princeton by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, who were planning to film interviews for a broadcast of Murrow's ''See It Now'' on television. In the end they used only interview material with Oppenheimer, disconcerting him somewhat. Still, they produced a show that they broadcast on 4 January 1955, one of its most-watched episodes ever. | All sorts of interesting incidents linger in my mind, but I won't recount them. One that seemed notable to me: in 1954 JRO was visited at Princeton by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, who were planning to film interviews for a broadcast of Murrow's ''See It Now'' on television. In the end they used only interview material with Oppenheimer, disconcerting him somewhat. Still, they produced a show that they broadcast on 4 January 1955, one of its most-watched episodes ever. | ||
