After the final decision was made to remove his security
clearance, Oppenheimer fled the scene of his disgrace, taking his
family on vacation to their house in the Virgin Islands. He eventually
returned to the Institute for Advanced Study. Although his opponents
had tried to convince the school not to renew his position as director, they
had been unsuccessful.
Oppenheimer's life was riddled with ironies and contradictions. A
consummate theorist, Oppenheimer led the greatest experimental
endeavor of the twentieth century. A lover of peace, he became the
man most responsible for a new era of war. Oppenheimer built his
career on the development of the most powerful weapon in history,
but then he saw that career destroyed by the development of an even
more powerful one. But perhaps the greatest contradiction inherent
in the Oppenheimer story is that Oppenheimer was the man trusted
with the nation's greatest secret in a time of peril, the man who
spearheaded the greatest scientific enterprise of the twentieth
century, and the man who, during the war years, seemed to hold
the fate of the world in his hands. And yet, in the end, he was thrown
away by a government who labeled him arrogant, naïve, and duplicitous.
He served his country–and helped save his country–and in return
was publicly humiliated and cast aside.
Oppenheimer's exile was short-lived. Joseph McCarthy himself was
publicly disgraced, and when McCarthy died in 1957, McCarthyism
died with him. Perhaps a bit embarrassed by their treatment of
Oppenheimer, the country offered him an act of contrition; in 1963,
the General Advisory Committee of the AEC awarded him the Enrico
Fermi Award for Excellence in the field of nuclear research. Edward
Teller, father of the Super and former enemy of Oppenheimer, had
won it the year before.
But the government's conciliation proved a case of too
little, too late. Oppenheimer continued to make public appearances
in support of his beliefs about nuclear power and, as the years
went on, he gained the increasing respect of the public for both
his Los Alamos and post-war activities. But he never again reached
the heights of his prominence of the 1940s, nor did he ever fully
recover from the lows of the 1950s. Oppenheimer died of throat
cancer on February 18, 1967, at the age of 62. Now, from a distance
of several decades, it is easier than ever to see the remarkable
impact that Oppenheimer made on American life.
