A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer

"He basically stayed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and did a lot of speaking around the world. He was sort of an elder statesman of science but he also was very careful not to get too publicly involved with policy. He would be asked sometimes by reporters, ‘What do you think about this latest thing with the hydrogen bomb or these disarmament talks?’ And even though he would definitely have opinions on it, he would say, ‘I can’t really comment on that, because I’m too far from the center of events now.’ He just lay low and lived out his life. He was destroyed by the security hearing, as we see in the movie, but maybe not quite as much as some people thought. One thing I think comes out in the movie is that he did have something of a martyr complex. That was also there in his later life. I think Einstein just had such a special status—and had had it for so long. In some ways, he was immune from being canceled (as we’d say nowadays) like Oppenheimer was. One thing that’s tragic about his later years is that Oppenheimer was doing really interesting, valuable research before the Manhattan Project. On black holes, and so forth, as you see in the movie. He dropped all of that for the Manhattan Project. He could have picked that up after, especially after he was out of government and he no longer had those responsibilities. But he never did. When I was researching my book, I talked to people like Freeman Dyson, who knew him. Dyson once asked Oppenheimer, ‘You did all this great stuff. Why don’t you get back into it? Why don’t you do more of that?’ But he just didn’t seem interested in doing it anymore. Maybe because he was just so demoralized. But he could have. He could maybe have won the Nobel Prize if he had."