The Learning Curve Kai Bird
[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your cohost, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and joined this week, of course, by Albert Cheng. Hello, Albert. How’s it going? Hey, going all right. Going all right. How about you? Doing great. Of course, I think our listeners want to know, do we have a baby yet?
[00:00:37] Albert Cheng: No, I mean, I’m here, so I think that gives it away.
[00:00:40] Alisha Searcy: That’s true. So we’re all watching and wishing you and your family well, and I’m sure by the next time we talk, we’ll have a new family member to the Learning Curve podcast. How about that?
[00:00:52] Albert Cheng: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I’ll let you guys know when I show back up, you know, on the show.
[00:00:56] Alisha Searcy: Excellent. Very, very exciting.
[00:00:58] Well, let’s jump in to our stories of the week. I will start, I found a really interesting, it’s really an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, and it’s entitled Financial Education in Schools is a Good Start, but the Psychology of Money is Complex and Students Need Help Navigating the Real World. So I loved this story for a couple of reasons, or this piece I should say.
[00:01:24] Number one, because I’m a big fan of financial literacy in our schools, and as you probably know, Albert, that doesn’t happen in our K 12 system, and you know, when you talk to kids about why they Some kids don’t like school, they talk about how it’s not meaningful, that they’re not learning things that they can use in real life.
[00:01:43] And so this conversation about financial education and financial literacy, I think is so important. And frankly, this piece is about the psychology of teaching that. In the U. S., I just want to get to a place where all of our kids are learning, you know, financial literacy and financial education. So, we’ve got a ways to go.
[00:02:02] But one of the things that is interesting about this article, it talks about the need to include the psychology of money with this financial literacy. So a recent study of middle school students in Italy found compelling evidence that financial education can have a causal impact on financial behaviors.
[00:02:21] The study showed that students who took a financial literacy course were significantly more likely to make better decisions and money related tasks compared to a control group. So of course we know that. But the writer goes on to say that researchers have uncovered numerous ways in which human psychology influences our financial choices, often leading us astray from what traditional economic theory would predict.
[00:02:46] And so as an example, he talks about this notion of the pain of giving up consumption today is magnified precisely because it’s felt now. And so in other words, we know, for example, right, in our age group that we need to be saving in terms of our 401k or Whatever your financial saving tool is for retirement, but it’s hard to do that when you’re also faced with, you know, can I go on this vacation this week or next week or, you know, in a few months, right?
[00:03:15] And so the joy, giving up the joy that you would have now and experiencing some kind of pain, right, in some ways, in terms of the sacrifice, for what you will get in the future. And so, it’s really interesting that it’s true. You need those financial skills. You need to know how to save and how to budget and how to use a credit card and what those things are.
[00:03:37] But he’s arguing that you also need to learn the psychology of that, so that you can make better decisions. for your life if you understand the psychology of that. So, I thought this was really, really good. And one example that he gives is, you know, teaching strategies for decision making, such as setting up automatic savings transfers to help avoid the influence of present bias, right?
[00:03:57] You get that check, you’re like, I’m going to do all these things. But if you don’t see that money because it’s already in your savings account, then it takes away that savings. That psychological challenge that you’re having with making that decision. And so, he closes by saying, in the world of personal finance, knowing what to do is only half the battle.
[00:04:15] Understanding why we often fail to do it and how to overcome those obstacles may be the key to truly improving financial well being for generations to come. So again, very good piece, very good conversation. I hope that we’ll have in a lot of our schools in the U. S. in terms of not just teaching financial literacy.
[00:04:34] But the psychology that goes behind it so that we can make good financial decisions for the right reasons, right, for the present and in the future.
[00:04:43] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a, that’s a great article. I was drawn to that article as well. And I’ll make two comments. One is I’ve weighed in on math education a bunch on this show in the past.
[00:04:52] And while I’m all for teaching the practical application of math, I hope math education doesn’t get just reduced to that. So, I hope we figure out a way to to, you know, teach financial literacy and these kinds of practical skills while not losing out on some of the more, shall I say, beautiful parts of mathematics that I think kids should uncover.
[00:05:10] But I think, I think that can be done. We just have to kind of figure that out. And you know, I really like the emphasis that you’re making and that the article is making on the psychology of it. You know, this, this actually, when I was kind of reviewing this article, it reminded me of We talked about classical education a lot and a lot of these schools that are focusing on virtue and character.
[00:05:26] And I think that’s another piece of it too. You know, how do we become the kinds of people that use money well and can have discernment over what we should be investing in and not investing in. You know, do we have the character to not completely to be, you know, to be completely self-centered in what we have and to be generous?
[00:05:44] And I think these are all parts of the conversation too, in getting kids, and even us adults, you know, to really use money well and to think of others. And as we, you know, pursue our good, the good of our families, the good of our neighbors, I think there’s a lot to impact there.
[00:06:00] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, that’s such an excellent point. Thank you for that.
[00:06:03] Albert Cheng: So actually, the article I want to talk about is, it’s, there’s some math in it, but it’s not all about math. It actually comes from our friend Iris Stoll over at Education Next, and he was pointing readers to some data in his article about AP testing. And so, he begins the article and notes that, for instance, in the AP US History exam, about 25 percent of students who took the test earned a 4 or 5 in 2023, and this year, this past year, 2024, That pass rate, or at least the students getting a 4 or 5, it soared to 46%, so almost doubled.
[00:06:42] And what Ira wants to, is arguing in his article is this concern over, I know we talked about grade inflation with GPAs but AP test score, inflation, so to speak. And he outlines a number of, I guess, pressures that are maybe causing the college board to do this. You know, some of it is trying to increase pass rates generally, particularly for students who have been disadvantaged in the past.
[00:07:10] Certainly pressure to kind of incentivize school or students to pursue higher ed. And, you know, while I’m all for seeing improvement in, in AP test scores and closing of outcome gaps in education, you know, I think he’s got a point here. We’ve got to be worried about whether these gains in the scores are actually real learning and so I think this is something to think about and look into some more. So, I just want to flag this article for our readers to think about.
[00:07:36] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, I’m, I agree with you. This is a big thing for me. And as you all know, I work as the president of the Southern Region for Democrats for Education Reform. And one of our pillars is accountability.
[00:07:46] And I just get really fired up when we talk about lowering the standards. I want us to tell kids the truth about where they are in terms of their academic achievement, how much they know, their levels of proficiency. And I certainly get the equity issue here and making sure kids are prepared and that the tests are equitable in terms of the way that they are implemented and administered and the questions and all of that.
[00:08:10] I also believe that when you see this level of inflation, whether it’s grades, or whether it’s in AP test scores, we have to be honest with where we are so that we can tell kids and educators the truth about their progress.
[00:08:25] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, let’s see as people dig into this data, um, let’s see what we find out.
[00:08:30] You know, hopefully we can work this out for the good of our kids.
[00:08:33] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. And if students are improving at those levels, then wonderful. You know, tell us what you’re doing in your schools so that we can spread that learning all across the country. So hopefully some of those are mixed in there as well. How about that?
[00:08:45] Oh yeah. Well, we’re super excited about our guest for today. It’s Mr. Kai Bird. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winning author of American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, on which the Academy Award winning film Oppenheimer was based. So, stay tuned.
[00:09:14] Kai Bird is an award-winning historian and journalist, Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. He is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, of McGeorge and William Bundy, Robert Ames, and President Jimmy Carter. Mr. Bird won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Co-author by Martin J. Sherwin, which was adapted into the Academy Award winning film Oppenheimer. His work has been honored with the Bayeux Award for his significant contributions to the art and craft of biography. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Carleton College and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University.
[00:10:00] Welcome to the show, Mr. Bird.
[00:10:02] Albert Cheng: It’s a pleasure to have you on The Learning Curve.
[00:10:05] Kai Bird: Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure too.
[00:10:08] Albert Cheng: Let’s start with a brief overview of Oppenheimer, along with the late Martin Sherwin. You co-authored the Pulitzer Prize winning American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J.
[00:10:18] Robert Oppenheimer. I think listeners are familiar with him, but in case they’re not, you know, the theoretical physicist and leader of the Manhattan Project. And your biography was also the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award winning film Oppenheimer. So, could you just share briefly an overview of why Oppenheimer is among the most influential figures in human history?
[00:10:39] Kai Bird: Well, you know, he was born in 1904 and in 1945, he gave us the atomic age, which we’re always going to be living with. And it’s a dangerous thing. He gave humanity the possibility of destroying all civilization and destroying human existence. And we’re, 79 years later now, we’re still living with the bomb, but we’ll always be living with it.
[00:11:09] So that’s the major reason that is As Christopher Nolan, the director of the Oppenheimer film, once said in an interview, he’s probably the most important man who ever lived, precisely because he gave us the atomic age. But there are several other reasons why he’s, his life is relevant to our own times.
[00:11:29] What’s remarkable about his life in part is that nine years after he became America’s most famous scientist. He was brought down and humiliated in this terrible 1954 security hearing where his personal life was ripped apart and investigated and his loyalty and patriotism as an American citizen was questioned.
[00:11:56] He was stripped of his security clearance and then publicly humiliated, leaving the suggestion in the minds of Americans that this famous scientist might have been disloyal or maybe even a spy. He becomes the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthy era. And of course, we’re still living with the bomb, but we’re also still living with the consequences of McCarthyism, you can see it in our divisive politics today, and Oppenheimer symbolizes that.
[00:12:30] Finally, I would argue that he is important, his life is important to understand because, precisely because he was a scientist, because he was on the cutting edge of quantum physics in the 1920s. And we, today, live in the 21st century, we’re in a society, a civilization drenched in science and technology, and yet many of our citizens, our common citizens, are ignorant of the scientific process of experimentation and hypothesis and fact, evidence, experimentation, and they distrust science.
[00:13:15] And they distrust scientists, yet we are dependent on science and technology in the society we live in, and we should actually be paying more attention to scientists as public intellectuals. But precisely what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954 sent a message to, you know, scientists everywhere to beware of getting out of their narrow lane, right?
[00:13:41] And pretending to be. Experts to be able to weigh in on public policy or politics, and this is a tragedy since we’re again, as we speak, on the cusp of yet another scientific revolution, artificial intelligence, and we need scientists of the caliber and public intellectual caliber of someone like Oppenheimer to explain to us the choices we face.
[00:14:08] So, these are three powerful reasons why the Oppenheimer biography is so important. You know, living with the bomb, we’ve become too complacent, understanding our politics and McCarthyism, the legacy of McCarthyism, and the need for scientists as public intellectuals.
[00:14:27] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s get into Oppenheimer’s life in a bit more detail, and let’s begin with his earlier years.
[00:14:33] He said of himself, quote, I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy, end quote. So could you discuss Oppenheimer’s family background, his early life and education, any formative intellectual interests and experiences, which, which you actually, you describe in your book. as quote, a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism, the ethical culture society that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. So, unpack that quote and tell us a bit about his earlier years.
[00:15:04] Kai Bird: Well, as I said, he was born in 1904 in New York City. His father was a German immigrant. His mother was of German ancestry, though born in Baltimore. They are both of Jewish ancestry, but by the time Oppenheimer was born, they were very much part of the Ethical Culture Society, which was indeed an offshoot of Reformed Judaism.
[00:15:26] And was sort of a secular religion that emphasized science, among other things, but ethics and progressive politics, you know, they revered books and study, and education and young Oppenheimer was Schooled at the Ethical Culture School, which is today still in existence, known as the Fieldston School in New York City.
[00:15:52] And you know, he was raised in very privileged circ*mstances. His father was sort of a self-made man who made a fortune on the clothing business. And his mother was a art collector and painter herself. And they lived in a 10-room apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. He grew up with a cook and a maid and a chauffeur for the car.
[00:16:19] And, when he was a teenager, his father bought him a beautiful schooner sailing boat. He lived in quite privileged circ*mstances. He finished high school at the Ethical Culture School and then went on to Harvard, finished three years studying chemistry. He was always, you know, quite interested in science and chemistry and gradually physics.
[00:16:45] And then he went off to Cambridge, England, to study in graduate school. Thought he wanted to be an experimental physicist. in the laboratory doing experiments and he turned out he was quite awkward with his hands and physically awkward and not just not very good at it. So, he had his first confrontation with failure as a young man in Cambridge, England.
[00:17:11] But he discovered the sort of early debates surrounding the discovery of quantum physics and within a year he was off to Göttingen, Germany, where he studied quantum physics under Max Born, a German physicist.
[00:17:30] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s press into his education a bit more. As you mentioned, he attended Harvard, University of Göttingen, and then he eventually joins the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, which is my alma mater.
[00:17:43] And so he made, as you’ve been alluding to, these contributions, significant ones to physics, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, even, tell us a bit more about his scientific work and in particular, how it really set the stage for him to lead the Manhattan Project.
[00:17:59] Kai Bird: He came to Berkeley in the late twenties and founded essentially Berkeley’s department of theoretical physics.
[00:18:10] Berkeley quickly became the sort of, on the cutting edge of the study of quantum physics in America. You know, it had been discovered in Germany, but it brought the quantum to America as such. And initially, you know, he, he never managed more than a handful of graduate students. Initially he wasn’t a very charismatic teacher, but he, he transformed himself into that.
[00:18:34] He learned to teach, learned how to lecture and acquired a, uh, Quite a following of students who just loved his teaching methods and his personality. He was quite intense, but he was also sort of, and I think this is what made him a good physicist, is that he had other interests. He wasn’t just interested in science per se.
[00:18:58] He loved the poetry of T. S. Eliot. He liked the novels of Hemingway. He was somewhat of a polymath. He was raised in ethical culture. Jewish offshoot, but he also suddenly in the early 1930s, he started reading Hindu mystic scriptures and became so interested in Hindu mysticism that he began to teach himself Sanskrit so that he could read the Gita in the original.
[00:19:31] So, you know, he was a polymath, and I think this is what helped him to sort of have the imagination to ask imaginative questions in the field of science and astrophysics, as you mentioned. But he was somewhat of a dilettante in his scientific, uh, work. You know, so for instance, he, in 1939, wrote, co-wrote with a graduate student of his, a very short paper positing the theoretical possibility that the universe was inhabited by black holes, ancient stars that had turned on themselves and collapsed out of gravitational pull.
[00:20:11] And, you know, there was no physical evidence for black holes in 1939, but. He asked himself the right questions and had the imagination to explore the subject and math itself and his understanding of quantum made it possible for him to sort of be the first to do so. physicists to posit the existence of black holes, which of course were proven actually to exist physically when x ray telescopes came along in the 1960s and we could finally prove the existence of such a phenomenon.
[00:20:49] But Oppenheimer, you know, was somewhat of a dilettante in this in that he wrote this short paper with one of his grad students and then moved on to other questions. If he had focused on black hole theory for a number of years, many people think he might well have at some point won the Nobel Prize, which he never did, but that was not the kind of, you know, his curiosity and his imagination kept moving him to go on to other subjects.
[00:21:21] Albert Cheng: Right, right. Well, speaking of, you know, as you describe him being a polymath and giving his attention to lots of different topics, I want to bring in his views on politics. In the 30s, during the Spanish Civil War, Oppenheimer supported the Spanish Republicans, and some of his closest intimates were active in the Communist Party in the 30s and 40s, including his brother Frank, his wife Kitty, and he had a girlfriend and mistress, Jeanne Tatlock, and several grad students too at Berkeley, so Just, you know, before we get back to the Manhattan Project, could you talk a little bit about his politics and just relationships with some of these individuals and women in his life?
[00:21:58] Kai Bird: Initially in, let’s say, the early 1930s, he was rather apolitical, focused on his science and his life in Berkeley, and his other passion was horseback riding in New Mexico. But, in the mid-1930s, he met a woman, Jean Tatlock, who was very bright, intellectual, studying to be a medical doctor and psychiatrist at Berkeley.
[00:22:24] Oppenheimer was clearly attracted to intelligent women. Anyway, Jean Tatlock was herself politically active, and by the time she met Oppenheimer, she was already a member of the Communist Party. And she sort of nagged up E. T. Oppie was his nickname, to become more politically aware, and more politically aware, particularly in the depths of the 1930s depression of how, you know, the average American citizen was struggling to survive economically.
[00:22:58] And capitalism seemed to be failing, and she, you know, pushed him to become more politically aware. Now, there’s a mystery. There are always mysteries about Oppenheimer, but one of the mysteries is just how close to the Communist Party did he become? Was he just pink, or was he also red? A full member of the Communist Party.
[00:23:20] Did he have a Communist Party card? Did he pay dues? It’s a mystery. Even the 7,000 plus pages of his FBI file don’t definitively clear this up. He was clearly left wing. Which was not surprising in the 1930s for a university professor. But it’s quite clear he did give as much as 400 a year to various activities sponsored by the local Communist Party in California.
[00:23:53] Things like, you know, desegregating the public sector. Swimming pool in Berkeley or helping farm workers to organize in a union or raising money to send a, an ambulance to the Spanish Republic in the midst of the Civil War. And yes, Tatlock is his first love of his life whom he actually proposed marriage to twice.
[00:24:20] She was a member of the party. Then when she turned down his marriage offers, he moved on and met, in 1940, Kitty Oppenheimer, Kitty Pruney, who was then 29 years old and had already been married three times. Kitty was, you know, a very vivacious, smart woman who was then studying biology in a master’s program at Berkeley.
[00:24:47] So she was herself Anyway, they met at a co*cktail party in Pasadena in 1940, and he invited her to come up and join him at his cabin in the Picos Mountains in New Mexico at 9, 000 feet. And she came, leaving behind her husband, and by the end of the summer, she was pregnant. She got a Las Vegas divorce and married Oppenheimer.
[00:25:14] They had a very long 20-year marriage. Marriage until he died, but it was a rocky marriage as well. She was a tempestuous woman and frustrated, particularly in the years she had to spend in Los Alamos. So that was, you know, his personal life too. It’s always a little complicated and a mystery.
[00:25:38] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, let’s get back to the Manhattan Project on that note.
[00:25:42] So that started during World War II, and in 1943, he was appointed director of the project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, whose mission it was to develop the first atomic bomb. So, could you discuss how his leadership at Los Alamos Integrated, I mean, he’s coming from an academic setting, right?
[00:26:03] Integrated his deep knowledge of quantum physics with the administration of an enormously complex and top-secret World War II military project.
[00:26:13] Kai Bird: In the 1930s, actually, Oppenheimer said he could really find happiness in life if he could somehow find a way to combine his love for physics with his love for New Mexico.
[00:26:26] And, of course, he did. So, when General Leslie Groves came to Berkeley in 1942 to interview him and others for He was looking to appoint a scientific director to lead the project. Oppenheimer came up with the notion, he told Groves, that what you need to do is instead of scattering these scientists all over in different university laboratories across the country, you need to bring the people you need all together in one place.
[00:26:55] And I understand you have a concern for security, so you should bring them to an isolated spot and put them behind a barbed wire fence and let them talk freely to each other behind the barbed wire and collaborate as scientists want to do. That would be the strategy for producing this gadget. General Groves was quite taken with this idea, and Oppenheimer actually had the notion of, you know, he had an idea of where it should be located.
[00:27:28] He suggested the Los Alamos Boys School in a very isolated spot in the mountains on the high plains of New Mexico, which just happened to be about 40 miles down the road from his loved cabin in the Picos. So, indeed, he was successful in combining his love for physics with his love for New Mexico. Now, at Los Alamos, you know, initially, they only thought that, you know, Oppenheimer only thought he needed maybe a hundred scientists.
[00:27:59] Well, it quickly grew within months to a thousand, and then eventually, by 6, 000 people living in this secret city. He, again, transformed himself. He’d never really been an administrator, but he learned how to do it, and he had a particularly charismatic style of leadership and management. You know, he was dealing with a lot of big ego scientists, and typically, instead of convening a meeting and standing at the head of the room behind a lectern or desk, Oppenheimer would stand at the back of the room and let other people talk.
[00:28:37] And then at precisely the right emotional moment, he would step forward and summarize what everyone had been saying, proving that he had been listening carefully. And he would summarize the conversation in such a way that it became clear that he to everyone what the next step was in their problem solving and trying to figure out how to build this gadget.
[00:29:06] And so, you know, everyone we interviewed in the course of our research on Los Alamos, everyone says, you know, that if Oppenheimer had not been selected, the gadget would not have been produced in two and a half years. It would have happened, but it would have been three or four or five years down the road.
[00:29:26] Alisha Searcy: So, Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project’s first test of the atomic bomb, the Trinity, on July 16, 1945. And this implosion designed test bomb, called the Gadget, which you referred to, was the same design as a World War II bomb. The U. S. later dropped on the Japanese cities. of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th of 1945.
[00:29:52] Tell us more about Oppenheimer’s role in the Trinity test, as well as explain the famous quotation he drew from the Hindu scripture while watching the Trinity, where he said, Now I am, become death, the destroyer of worlds.
[00:30:07] Kai Bird: So, the Trinity test that occurred on July 16th, 1945, was testing the plutonium based device.
[00:30:17] They weren’t quite sure that it would work. It required taking a piece of plutonium that had to be manufactured in the laboratory painstakingly, and they took a piece that was about the size of a softball and then surrounded it with conventional explosives to sort of push inward to create an implosion to compress the plutonium and create a chain reaction.
[00:30:45] The other type of bomb was the uranium sort of shotgun design, and they knew pretty well that that was going to work, so they didn’t even test that. And one such bomb was used on one Japanese city, and the other was used on Hiroshima. And of course, Oppenheimer, uh, When the Trinity test was clearly successful, you know, he was lying on the desert floor, anticipating this explosion.
[00:31:14] And when it happened, it was an enormous explosion, much larger than he had expected, actually. He turned to his brother, Frank, and said, it worked. But, a few days later, a New York Times reporter came to interview him in preparation for publishing a series of stories about the making of the atomic bomb after the end of the war, and this reporter asked him what went through his mind when he saw the Trinity explosion, and Oppenheimer was, had a sense of the dramatic, and he drew on his love of the Gita, Hindu Recall the, one of the most famous lines from those scriptures where the Hindu god turns to Arun and says, I am death, destroyer of worlds.
[00:32:06] And uh, it’s, you know, a quite dramatic quote in the context of the atomic bomb.
[00:32:13] Alisha Searcy: Wow. So, I want to talk more about that. Your book notes that more than 95 percent of the roughly. 250, 000 people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians, mostly women and children. And at least half of those victims died of radiation poisoning in the months following the initial blast.
[00:32:34] So can you talk about his thoughts, his understanding, the ethical concerns about playing such a central role in developing a weapon of mass destruction and his reservations about scientific advances potentially leading to a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union?
[00:32:50] Kai Bird: Yes, well, he was very concerned, and he did think about these ethical issues.
[00:32:56] I think the best story to illustrate this is, I interviewed his last secretary working for him at Los Alamos, Anne Wilson, and she told me that one day, soon after the Trinity test in July of 45, she was walking to work with Oppenheimer, and he suddenly started muttering to himself, those poor little people, those poor little people.
[00:33:22] And she turned to him and said, Robert, what are you talking about? And he said, well, you know, the Trinity test, we now know from the Trinity test that the gadget works. And it is now going to be used on a Japanese city. I know the victims are going to be mostly innocents, women and children, old men, very few soldiers, because the bomb was so large that it had to have.
[00:33:49] A large target to demonstrate its power and its destructiveness. So, there was no military target large enough for such a weapon. And in fact, the army had reserved five Japanese cities as virgin targets, pristine targets that were undamaged by all the fire bombings. from the spring of 1945. So, they were pristine targets that could be used where an atomic bomb could be used and would then demonstrate the horrific nature of its destructive powers.
[00:34:26] Anyway, he told Anne Wilson that, you know, these were now going to be used on a Japanese city and those were going to be the victims. Now, what’s interesting about this story is that we know that same week Oppenheimer was meeting with some of the bombardiers who were going to be on the Enola Gay mission.
[00:34:46] the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb, and he was instructing them at exactly what altitude the gadget should be released from the plane, and at what altitude it should be ignited to have the most destructive firepower. So, this is a complicated man. He’s capable of doing his duty, carrying out his responsibilities as the scientific director of this weapons lab, and giving the bomb to the generals and the politicians back in Washington to determine how to use it.
[00:35:20] And at the same time, he’s privately worrying and in anguish about the tragedy that is about to unfold and the victims. So, he’s very aware of the ethical concerns, but he thought he had to do his duty. And he also made an argument to himself that if this weapon was not used in this war, That humanity just was incapable of understanding the terrible nature of the weapon.
[00:35:52] And he feared that in the next war, then, the war would be fought by two or three or four adversaries, all of whom would be armed with these nuclear weapons. And that could mean Armageddon. So, Oppenheimer was ethically troubled, and he spent the rest of his life actually trying to warn humanity and Americans in particular about the dangers of these weapons.
[00:36:19] Alisha Searcy: So, I want to talk about sort of the other side of this, because to your point, after World War II, Oppenheimer became the most famous scientist in the world, and an iconic figure of the Cold War’s technocratic culture. Can you share with us the other side or narrative of Oppenheimer’s story, including his directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the work with the Atomic Energy Commission, or the AEC, and ultimately his decline and fall at the hands of Louis Straw, the AEC, and the FBI during his spring 1954 closed door security clearance hearings?
[00:36:58] Kai Bird: Yes, well in You know, Oppenheimer, after the war, he did not want to continue working on atomic weapons. He left Los Alamos, even suggesting that the weapons lab should be returned to the Native Americans. Well, of course, they continued to build weapons at Los Alamos, but Oppenheimer left, and in 1947, he accepted the position of director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which was a sort of private think tank where prominent intellectuals, many largely scientists, mathematicians, and so on.
[00:37:38] A few historians were invited to just simply think and do their work, not to teach. It was a perfect job for Oppenheimer. He loved it, and he used it as a platform from which to continue to try to exercise his knowledge. And it was his influence to use his celebrity status as a scientist to influence Washington and the President and the generals and the Pentagon on how to think about nuclear weapons.
[00:38:09] And he became more and more outspoken as the years went by. He talked about these weapons as weapons for aggressors, weapons of terror, weapons that, you know, he argued can’t be used to defend America. They can only be used to sort of Terrorize your opponent, and that’s a dangerous thing. So he was arguing for international controls.
[00:38:34] He wanted to ban atomic weapons. He came out in 1949 against the development of a super bomb, the hydrogen bomb. But he lost that argument and continued to argue against it. Reliance on these weapons, and this is what got them into trouble with the authorities. The Army and the Air Force and the Navy in 1949, 50, 51, were all eager to spend more money developing their own nuclear arsenals.
[00:39:08] And here is the father of the atomic bomb coming along and saying that these are immoral weapons. So, at one point, Edward Teller suggested that Oppenheimer needed to be defrocked in his own church. They needed to find a way to undermine the legitimacy of Oppenheimer’s voice as a public intellectual.
[00:39:32] Edward Teller, of course, had worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos and was a proponent of building the hydrogen bomb. So, they disagreed, but then along in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, the new president, appoints Louis Strauss. to become the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, and at this point Oppenheimer was still a consultant with a security clearance working for the AEC.
[00:39:59] And Strauss got it into his head that Oppenheimer was dangerous because of his opposition to nuclear weapons, and that he needed to be silenced. He suggested privately that perhaps, after looking at his FBI file, maybe he was even a security risk. Maybe he was a spy for the Russians. Strauss was the one who orchestrated this security hearing and brought charges against Oppenheimer.
[00:40:29] And then in the spring of 1954, there was a one-month secret trial. Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance and Strauss made sure that the entire record of the proceedings was published in the New York Times and other newspapers around the country, thus humiliating Oppenheimer and destroying him as a public intellectual.
[00:40:52] Alisha Searcy: Hmm. Very interesting. Oppenheimer is remembered as a genius scientist, the leader of the Manhattan Project and father of the atomic bomb. Can you talk about more about his legacy and perhaps some of the cautionary lessons from his life? That teachers and students alike should learn, as well as some of the thorny conflicts between science, technology, the military, and politics.
[00:41:17] Kai Bird: I think, you know, Oppenheimer’s life story, and particularly the tragedy that happened to him in 1954, is very instructive. It reminds us that science is a complicated profession and it has consequences, and we face choices in the technology that we use. Sam Altman, one of the founders of OpenAI, has himself been talking about our confrontation, our encounter with artificial intelligence as another Oppenheimer moment.
[00:41:54] And what he means is, in the same way that Oppenheimer was arguing that we needed to think hard and long about how to regulate this new technology of atomic weapons, in the same way the scientists who are giving us artificial intelligence are suggesting that we need to have a debate about how to use this technology.
[00:42:18] What kind of regulations should be imposed? What kind of rules about privacy and rules against creating fake narratives? So, it’s a very difficult problem. And it’s just very reminiscent of the problems that Oppenheimer faced. At the dawn of the atomic age.
[00:42:38] Alisha Searcy: Wow. I appreciate you bringing up the point about AI and all of that we’ve got to think about there.
[00:42:44] For you and your fellow co-author Martin Sherwin, this has to have been a remarkable 30- or 40-year journey, including researching and writing a Pulitzer winning biography and then having it turned into, oh, just an Oscar winning film. Directed by Christopher Nolan. So, can you talk to us about sharing the importance of biography writing to the teaching of history and what it’s like to have your work become internationally famous and be portrayed by a star-studded cast on the big screen?
[00:43:18] Kai Bird: Yes, well, I’m very sorry that Martin Sherwin isn’t with us any longer. He died of lung cancer in 2021, just two weeks after knowing that Christopher Nolan was about to embark on making a film based on American Prometheus. Marty was 84. At the time of his death, but he’d been in good health, he’d been skiing black diamond slopes in Colorado the year before.
[00:43:47] And Marty was a wonderful historian, very funny guy, and a great historian of the Cold War. And he spent 25 years working on Oppenheimer. on his life story. 20 years doing the research and then he came to me in sort of frustration. He hadn’t started writing and he just was buried in archival documents. So, he came to me and suggested that I join him and I did eventually and but then it still took another five years to write the book with him.
[00:44:21] It was a terrific collaboration, and the book came out in 2005 and won the Pulitzer in 2006. Actually, three different Hollywood parties attempted to do a film based on the book over the years. And they all gave up. And then in 2021, Christopher Nolan suddenly appeared and called me up and said that he had already written a screenplay based on the book and was going to start filming in a few months.
[00:44:52] So it all, it was a Hollywood miracle. It doesn’t often happen this way. Artie and I had given up on the possibility of a film until Nolan came along. The film is a triumph in many ways. I think it’s just cinematically brilliant and captivating on the big screen. But the most satisfying thing to me is that it is also historically accurate.
[00:45:16] Nolan really kept very close to the book. I can recognize whole, Paragraphs of dialogue that come straight out of the biography. And he was very careful to sort of capture Oppenheimer’s personality and to tell the history based on what Marty and I thought was the right historical narrative.
[00:45:38] Alisha Searcy: Wow, so very important. So, Mr. Bird, you’ve had this great success with your biography and now the movie. Can you tell us what’s next?
[00:45:48] Kai Bird: Well, actually, I’m writing another biography of an American lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was the chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950 McCarthy witch hunts. So, it’s a subject sort of somewhat related to Oppenheimer, but I do want to mention that there’s going to be a young adult edition of American Prometheus.
[00:46:13] That’s already been adapted from the book and written and edited and it will be published next spring and will be, I hope, will be available for junior high and high school students and others who are interested in an abbreviated edition of this 720-page narrative biography. So, I’m very pleased with that. It’s very exciting.
[00:46:41] Alisha Searcy: Excellent. Congratulations. We look forward to that. Thank you. Before we close, would you read for us a paragraph from the book?
[00:46:50] Kai Bird: Let’s see. I’ll try to cobble together a few sentences from the couple of paragraphs at the beginning. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, his career, his reputation, even his sense of self-worth, suddenly spun out of control four days before Christmas in 1953.
[00:47:08] That’s actually the first sentence of the entire book. Then we go on to say, we quote him, I can’t believe what is happening to me, he exclaimed, staring through the window of the car speeding him to his lawyer’s Georgetown home in Washington, D. C. There, within a few hours, he had to confront a fateful decision.
[00:47:29] Should he resign from his government advisory positions, or should he fight the charges contained in the letter that Louis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had handed him out of the blue earlier that afternoon? So then, he adjourns to the home of his lawyer, and good friend, Herbert and Anne Marks, in their Georgetown home, and they’re sitting around having a drink and discussing what he should do.
[00:47:59] And by the end of the evening, Robert was exhausted and despondent. After several drinks, he retired upstairs to the guest bedroom. A few minutes later, Anne, Herbert, and Robert’s wife, Kitty, who had accompanied him to Washington, heard a terrible crash. Racing upstairs, they found the bedroom empty, and the bathroom door closed.
[00:48:22] I couldn’t get it open, Anne said, and I couldn’t get a response from Robert. He had collapsed on the bathroom floor, and his unconscious body was blocking the door. They gradually forced it open, pushing Robert’s limp form to one side. When he revived, quote, he sure was mumbly, Anne recalled. He said he had taken one of Kitty’s prescription sleeping pills.
[00:48:49] Don’t let him go to sleep, a doctor warned over the phone. So for almost an hour until the doctor arrived, they walked Robert back and forth, coaxing him to swallow sips of coffee. Robert’s beast had pounced, the ordeal that would end his career in public service, and ironically, both enhance his reputation and secure his legacy, had begun. So that’s the opening, basically, of American Prometheus.
[00:49:18] Alisha Searcy: Very powerful. Thank you for sharing and thank you so much for being with us, Mr. Burr. What a privilege. We’ve learned a lot about history and science and ethics and so many things. So, we appreciate your time with us today.
[00:49:31] Kai Bird: Okay. Well, thank you for having me.
[00:49:45] Alisha Searcy: Well, Albert, just as we expected, that was a pretty fascinating interview.
[00:49:50] Albert Cheng: You know, I have to say, I actually haven’t seen the movie yet and I think I’m kind of excited to watch the movie now,
[00:49:55] Alisha Searcy: knowing all this stuff. I’m definitely excited. I haven’t seen it either, but I certainly will be seeing it now.
[00:50:01] Before we go, why don’t you talk to us about the tweet of the week?
[00:50:05] Albert Cheng: Oh yeah, sure. Well, this one comes from CyberNews. There’s a robotics company in Boston called Boston Dynamics, and they’ve got a, I guess it’s this robot named Atlas. And for those of you who are like me, big fans of, I’m going to nerd out here, MechWarrior and Battletech, you know what the Atlas is. Just had to get that in. I just want to point readers to this tweet and watch the video of this robot doing the things that it’s doing. I mean, it looks pretty agile and it’s like carrying things upstairs and it’s, you know, clunky, unwieldy thing. So, it’s pretty fascinating where we’ve gone with robotics now.
[00:50:41] Alisha Searcy: And don’t forget about that cool little dance. He also does.
[00:50:44] Albert Cheng: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So, check it out. It’s fun to watch.
[00:50:47] Alisha Searcy: For sure. Well, Albert, thanks for joining me this week. Great interview. Great to be with you. We’re looking forward to our next episode where we’ll have Professor Arnold Rampersad. He is the Sarah Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford University and the author of the biography, Jackie Robinson. So, we’ll look forward to seeing you next week, Albert.
[00:51:10] Albert Cheng: Hopefully, but if not, soon.
[00:51:13] Alisha Searcy: For sure. Take care.
