by Lloyd Billingsley
What the Oscar winner conceals is crucial.
Last Sunday, Oppenheimer tallied seven Academy Awards, awards, including best director (Christopher Nolan), actor (Cillian Murphy) and best picture, but there’s more to the story that people should know. For all its undeniable artistry – Bruce Bawer called it a “Dishonest Masterpiece” – Oppenheimer is something like those 1960s beach and bikini movies; what they reveal is interesting but what they conceal is crucial. Consider this perspective from one of Oppenheimer’s students.
“As a physics graduate student at Princeton University in the early 1960s, I had occasional interactions with Oppenheimer, who was then the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies,” writes William Happer, emeritus profess of physics at Princeton and a specialist in radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei.
According to Happer, Oppenheimer was not very friendly to students but remained a “sympathetic figure.” Oppenheimer had an “easy act to follow” when he took over from Gregory Breit in 1943, but there is no Gregory Breit character in the movie. Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein but according to Happer, the Manhattan Project was “not the result of a brilliant theory” and not made possible by Einstein’s E = mc² formula. What made it possible, Happer explains, was “a rapid-fire series of accidental experimental discoveries in the 1930s, including a celebrated mistake.”
In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the electrically neutral projectile, the neutron, which could reach the surface of even the most highly-charged nucleus, uranium, with no hindrance from the nuclear charge. As Happer notes, “It was this accidental discovery that led to the Manhattan Project.” Chadwick, a Nobel laureate for physics in 1936, was part of the Manhattan project and in 1944 lived at Los Alamos with his family. In Oppenheimer, nobody plays Chadwick, hardly the only significant omission.
In the early going, Oppenheimer tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context is also important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.
Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Stalin invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” on November 30, 1939.
Under the Pact, Nazi and Soviet intelligence forces collaborated and Stalin handed hundreds of Jewish Communists over to the Gestapo. Jewish scientists in America would have been aware of that deadly exchange, but not a word in Oppenheimer.
Viewers never learn that for nearly the first two years of the war, the Communist Party USA collaborated with pro-Nazi groups in America and did everything in its power to keep America out of the conflict. In Oppenheimer, no Communist is asked to account for what he or she did during the Pact, and why they stayed in the Party after many others left, never to return.
Oppenheimer portrays Party members as misguided liberals concerned about the conflict in Spain. Viewers hear about “the brigades” but no character explains that the Abraham Lincoln Brigades were a Communist Party militia that opposed anti-Franco groups such as the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. The POUM fighters included George Orwell, author of 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia.
Inquiries about Oppenheimer’s “left wing” associations fail to note that the Party had an open and secret membership, as Whittaker Chambers detailed in Witness. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr cite evidence that Oppenheimer was a member of a secret Party unit at UC Berkeley, where his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature, was an active Communist. In the movie, Jefferson Hall plays Chevalier, and Oppenheimer resists his request to pass information to the Soviets.
From 1941-1944, Stalin’s top spy in California was Gregory Kheifetz operating undercover as a vice consul in San Francisco. Tasked with obtaining atomic secrets, Kheifetz claimed in a cable that Oppenheimer was one of his recruits. Unfortunately, there is no Gregory Kheifetz character in Oppenheimer.
The film does reveal that Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), present at Los Alamos, was in fact a Soviet spy. So were American Stalinists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, was a machinist at Los Alamos. There is no Greenglass character in Oppenheimer. Viewers do not learn that the Communist spies helped Stalin explode his first atom bomb on August, 29, 1949.
By that time, Stalin had taken over Czechoslovakia, held Eastern Europe captive, and launched a purge of writers and artists. Stalin also swung the USSR and captive states back to traditional anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans.” As director Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men) noted in congressional testimony, the defendants in Czechoslovakian show trials were executed “for being Jews and nothing else.”
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. More than 70 years later in 2024, virulent anti-Semitism finds a voice in the American left. Calls to free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” are calls to kill Jews for being Jews and nothing else. Someone should make a movie about it. The struggle against a second Holocaust is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Yes I Con: United Fakes of America, Barack ‘Em Up: A
Literary Investigation, Hollywood Party, and numerous other works.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/oppenheimer-oversights/
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