‘Oppenheimer’ doesn’t get it right
A homeboy at heart, I half-waited for Gen. George C. Marshall to show up in “Oppenheimer” the movie.
The Uniontown native and Army chief of staff during World War II did make a screen appearance, or at least I assume that was him being depicted sitting alongside Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The two were attending a meeting with other officials at which Japanese cities were picked over for destruction by the first two atomic bombs.
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his gang of scientists, laboring at a secret facility in the wilds of New Mexico, were even then readying the lethal devices Little Boy and Fat Man for delivery to Japan.
True to life, Stimson quickly removed the ancient imperial city of Kyoto from the target list. It was the cultural heart of Japan, Stimson explained. Kyoto was too precious to destroy.
Unspoken, I suppose, was the idea that the Japanese would never forgive us, would never be reconciled to their imminent defeat, if Kyoto was incinerated.
Movies being movies, Stimson’s elimination of Kyoto from consideration didn’t happen as it was depicted by “Oppenheimer” director, Christopher Nolan.
According to Richard Rhodes’ sweeping history, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” Stimson picked out Kyoto from a list of cities, including Hiroshima, informally presented to him by Leslie Groves, the MIT-educated Army general in charge of the non-scientific aspects of the Manhattan Project.
As Groves recalled, Stimson told him, while alone, “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” The secretary then “walked to the door separating his office from General Marshall’s, opened it, and said: ‘General Marshall, if you’re not busy I wish you’d come in.'”
Groves, knowing that Stimson had short-circuited military procedure by cutting Marshall out of the decision-making loop, felt “double-crossed” when the secretary said to Marshall, “Groves just brought me his report on the proposed targets. I don’t like it.”
Wittingly or not, “Oppenheimer” would have you believe that only a fraction of persons concerned with the bomb were bothered by the searing consequences of unleashing weaponized atoms on the Japanese. In fact, there was a great deal of hand-wringing and quite a lot of discussion about the sheer destructive potential of packing the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT into a single device.
These concerns were taken to President Truman by Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-born physicist who fled Europe in 1938 and wrote the letter delivered through Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt alerting FDR to the necessity of beating the Germans to the bomb.
“Oppenheimer” depicts Szilard as a fellow-traveler or worse as a starry-eyed naif. He was neither.
Hard-nosed Jimmy Byrnes, Truman’s future secretary of state, was “thoroughly frightened,” according to Rhodes, by the bomb’s potential.
Oppenheimer himself was “deeply impressed” by Marshall’s cautious attitude toward atomic warfare and diplomacy. In wartime deliberations, it appears that Oppenheimer was the first to raise the notion of disclosing to the Soviet Union – an ally in the war against the Nazis – that work on the bomb was underway.
Rhodes reports that “Oppenheimer found an ally in George Marshall…. The surprise of the morning meeting was Marshall’s proposed opening to Moscow. ‘He raised the question whether it might be desirable to invite two prominent Russian scientists to witness the [first atomic] test.’ Groves must have winced; after the thousands of numb man-hours of security work….”
Constrained by running time and the dictates of visualization, movies reliably butcher reality. If you depend on Hollywood to deliver history, you’ll be hoodwinked every time. Between history that is drama-filled or merely informative, a director will choose the drama-filled every time.
That may help to explain the choice director Nolan made in depicting Truman’s meeting at the White House with Oppenheimer, well after the war’s end. The story of the meeting that has come down to us is that the physicist really did say that he felt that he had blood on his hands, a result of 200,000 dead at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“American Prometheus,” the book upon which “Oppenheimer” is based, apparently lays out two versions of what Truman said or did in response. In the one Nolan chose, Truman rudely pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and is on the verge of handing it to Oppenheimer; as a presidential gesture toward a national hero, the scene rings false.
The response not depicted has a sympathetic Truman saying to the distraught scientist, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work something out, and you’re going to help us.”
“You’re going to help us” sounds right to me.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.