25 Years of Work Behind “Oppenheimer,” a Prizewinning Biography
25 Years of Work Behind “Oppenheimer,” a Prizewinning Biography
Martin Sherwin was not a typical example of a writer who felt blocked. People who knew him well describe him as the antithesis of a neurotic person because he was outgoing, witty, and athletic.
However, by the late 1990s, he was forced to concede that he was in a rut. Sherwin, a history professor who had already authored one book, had committed, twenty years before, to write a comprehensive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Now, he was beginning to worry if he would ever be able to complete it. He had conducted a significant amount of study — an astonishing amount, in fact, gathering around 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified papers, and F.B.I. dossiers, which he had stashed in what appeared to be an unending number of boxes in his basement, attic, and office. However, he hadn’t even written a word yet.
Sherwin’s wife recalls that he initially tried to back out of the project, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t believe he was experienced enough to tackle such a weighty topic as J. Robert Oppenheimer, also known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Sherwin eventually changed his mind and agreed to work on the biography. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism, insisted on it. Cameron had also been a victim of McCarthyism.
Therefore, on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a contract with Knopf for the project that was worth seventy thousand dollars. He had to pay half to get started, and he anticipated that it would take him five years to complete it.
In the end, it took Sherwin 25 years to write the book, and he wasn’t the only one involved in the process.
The narrative of J. Robert Oppenheimer will be introduced to a large number of younger Americans for the very first time on July 21, when Christopher Nolan’s picture “Oppenheimer” is released in theatres. However, the success of that picture might be attributed to Sherwin and Kai Bird’s biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which is 721 pages long and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. This biography was authored jointly by Sherwin and Bird.
This masterpiece was first published in 2005 by Knopf. But “American Prometheus” was only written because of a unique partnership between two tireless authors, as well as a profound relationship based on their mutual commitment to the art of biography as a life’s work. Without either of these factors, the book never would have been written.
Any biographer who attempted to tackle the subject of OPPENHEIMER would have done so with great difficulty.
He was a public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, and he led the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Under his direction, the atomic bomb went from being a scary possibility to being a terrifying reality in an unbelievably short amount of time. Later on, he became known as a sort of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear period. He openly opposed the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and as a result, he became a symbol of both the technological genius and the conscience of the United States of America.
Because of this position,
Oppenheimer became a target during the McCarthy era, and his detractors began portraying him as a Communist sympathiser as a result. During a hearing that was held in 1954 by the Atomic Energy Commission, he was denied further access to classified information and ultimately lost his security clearance. He spent the rest of his life in a weakened state and passed away in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1967, at the age of 62.
When Sherwin first started doing interviews with people who had known him in that location, he was surprised by how strongly they felt about him. There was lingering resentment among scientists and the widows of physicists regarding Oppenheimer’s cavalier disregard for the welfare of his family.
Yet, after Sherwin relocated his own family to Boston for a job at Tufts University, he and his wife Susan met scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who confessed with embarrassment that their years working under Oppenheimer on the bomb were some of the happiest of their lives. Sherwin and Susan also met scientists from the University of Chicago, who confessed that their years working on the Manhattan Project were some of the happiest of their lives.
Haakon Chevalier,
who was once Oppenheimer’s best friend and whose connections to the Communist party were used as part of the evidence against him in the investigation, and Edward Teller, whose testimony at the 1954 hearing contributed to the demise of Teller’s career, were two of the dozens of persons that Sherwin also examined.
Sherwin brought his family to the Pecos Wilderness outside Santa Fe, saddled up a horse and went to the Oppenheimers’ rustic cabin. Once there, he wrangled a chance to chat to the scientist’s son while the two men were building a fence. Oppenheimer’s son Peter denied a formal interview, so Sherwin had to get creative. “Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” said Susan Sherwin, who survived him and accompanied him on several research trips. “Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” Susan Sherwin said. But he had a natural talent for making connections with others.
The deadline that Sherwin had set has passed. After his editor retired, he made every effort to avoid working with his replacement editor. There was always another person to interview, or another document to read. Both of these things were ongoing.
The fact that the book was never completed turned into a running joke in the Sherwin home.
His son Alex said that during his whole youth, they displayed a cartoon from The New Yorker on the family refrigerator. “There’s a guy working at a typewriter who’s surrounded by piles of paper,” the narrator says. His wife can be seen in the background, standing at the threshold of the door leading into his office. And then he asks, “Complete it? Why on earth would I want to continue doing this?'”
KAI BIRD, who had once worked as an associate editor at The Nation, was looking for work. In 1999, even though Bird had published a pair of biographies that had moderate levels of popularity, as a 48-year-old historian without a Ph.D., he was underqualified for a tenure-track academic position and overqualified for practically everything else. Nevertheless, he decided to pursue a career as a journalist. His wife, Susan Goldmark, who worked at the World Bank and made a good living there, was growing weary of being the primary provider for the family.
Bird had been searching for work in the newspaper industry without any success when he received some news from an old acquaintance. Sherwin treated Bird to dinner, during which he made the proposition that they work together to take down Oppenheimer.
Their connection was cemented in the middle of the 1990s, when Bird included Sherwin’s writings in a volume about the controversy surrounding a planned Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb. Although they had known each other for years, it was during this time that their relationship became closer.
However, there was one complexity to the situation. “My first book started out as a collaboration with my best friend,” the author Max Holland Bird stated, “and eight years later ended in divorce.” Things came to a head in part because of disputes about the appropriate level of research to conduct.
The event that occurred had been distressing. His wife admonished him to never do it again.
“I responded by telling Marty, ‘No, I can’t. I like you too much,’ ” Bird remarked.
As a result, the year-long charm offensive to convince Bird, and most importantly Goldmark, that things would be different this time was launched. “I was watching very carefully, looking at them interacting and finishing each other’s sentences the way that couples sometimes do,” she recounted. “I was looking at them as if they were my own,” she added. They were both adorable in their own way.
Finally, after everyone was on the same page, Bird’s agent Gail Ross negotiated a new contract with Knopf, in which the publishing house agreed to pay the pair an additional $290,000 to complete the book.
Sherwin warned Bird that there were holes in his research, which Bird acknowledged. However, over a short period of time, according to Bird’s wife, “untold numbers of boxes” began arriving at their residence. As Bird started to go through everything, he became aware of how painstakingly detailed and mind-bogglingly comprehensive Sherwin’s study was. “There were no gaps,” Bird said in his memory.
It was time to put pen to paper. Bird began their journey at the very beginning.
“I wrote a draught of the early childhood years,” he stated, “and Marty took it and rewrote it.” Bird expressed his approval after receiving the revised document from Sherwin. “He knew exactly what was missing in the anecdotes,” said Bird. “He was spot on.”
