American Experience

Narrator: Oppenheimer graduated high school valedictorian and then conquered Harvard. He studied chemistry, physics, calculus; English and French literature; Western, Chinese and Hindu philosophy; he even found time to write stories and poems.

Richard Rhodes, writer: He described it as being like the Huns invading Rome, by which he meant he was going to swallow up every bit of culture and art and science that he could possibly do.

Martin Sherwin, historian: Harvard’s an environment in which the intellectual life is a rich feast, but the social life is a desert.

Narrator: In all his years at Harvard, he never had a date. He remained immature, uncertain, easily bewildered in social situations. One friend remembered “bouts of melancholy, and deep, deep depressions.” In the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, he said later, “I hardly took an action, hardly did anything that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.” His doubts about himself came clear in his poems:

J. Robert Oppenheimer (David Strathairn):

The dawn invests our substance

With desire

And the slow light betrays us,

And our wistfulness…

We find ourselves again

Each in his separate prison

Ready, hopeless

For negotiation

With other men.