Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
Today we present, for the first time, a guest contribution from someone I’ve known, if from a distance, for quite some time. Gene Dannen posted what follows as a Twitter (excuse me, an “X”) thread yesterday and I was so intrigued I asked him if I could use it, slightly adapted, here. Gene, who lives in Oregon, has researched and written about the life of Leo Szilard for many years, along with the decision to use the bombs in 1945. Now read this. Then subscribe if you have not, it’s still free!
By Gene Dannen
Fact-checking the Oppenheimer Film:
Lewis Strauss didn’t lose his confirmation hearings because of his persecution of Robert Oppenheimer, as the movie portrays it. I have Nolan’s screenplay, and a PDF of the full transcript of the hearings.
Strauss’ hearings are mentioned in a single paragraph in the book American Prometheus, on which the movie is based. They are a major, repeating central theme throughout the movie, as it shifts back and forth in time. It would be hard to exaggerate how much of the screenplay, and the movie, is taken up by the Strauss hearings.
As Nolan tells it, the testimony of one scientist leads to Strauss’ downfall and Oppenheimer’s vindication.
In the movie, Strauss is doomed by the testimony of David L. Hill, who devastatingly lays out Strauss’ unethical persecution of Oppenheimer. Hill becomes a modern-day David who single-handedly slays Strauss’ Goliath.
Hill’s testimony in the movie is based on the transcript, but edited and arranged in a way to make it appear that he focused on Oppenheimer. He didn’t, and his testimony wasn’t the key factor in the hearings as Nolan portrays it.
He was a theoretical physicist on leave from Los Alamos, and former chairman of the Federation of American Scientists. Hill really did testify – courageously and impressively – against the powerful Strauss.
Strauss was unfit, Hill said, for many reasons — ONLY ONE of which was his treatment of Oppenheimer.
Among the reasons were:
- his opposition to shipping isotopes abroad
- Keeping radioactive fallout data secret
- withholding seismic monitoring data to prevent an underground testing treaty
- Making false claims about efforts to develop a “clean bomb”
David R. Inglis, a theoretical physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, also testified. The Federation council had voted overwhelmingly to oppose the nomination. Inglis emphasized that Strauss had unilaterally opposed arms control and committed the country to ever-increasing bomb building and a nuclear arms race, thereby actually endangering America’s security.
Senators supporting Strauss attacked Hill and Inglis, accusing them of communist sympathies. Their tactics were reminiscent of the McCarthy era, and those used in Oppenheimer’s own hearing.
A much more prominent witness was Senator Clinton Anderson. As Chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, he had long been troubled by Strauss’ conduct. He urged investigation of Strauss’ entire record.
The totality of Strauss’ past actions brought him down. He also brought himself down as he attempted to justify himself – by his false statements and evasions, his arrogance and self-righteousness. Strauss’ role in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance was only one factor among many.
The behind-the-scenes dialogue between Strauss and his aide appears to be solely the product of Nolan’s imagination.
Bottom line:
Nolan’s version of the Strauss hearings can’t be regarded as factual. His emphasis on them is also completely out of proportion to their minor significance in Oppenheimer’s life.
Just published: an expanded edition of my book Atomic Cover-up, now with several thousand words of mine re: Oppenheimer. And it’s on sale as an ebook for just $3.99 (vs. $11.95 for the paperback). Also learned this month my film of the same name coming to PBS starting in November.
Thanks for reading Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent award-winning The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years. He writes often at Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
The movie lies to make the viewers root for a communist as a poor persecuted victim, and bringing down Strauss is a victory against the evil conservatives, etc. It’s part of the usual falsification of history. Meanwhile Oppenheimer’s first girlfriend, his brother and his wife were all communists, and he eagerly called himself a “fellow traveler”. The communists infesting the nuclear project gave the secrets to Stalin, who killed more than 60 million people, the greatest mass murderer in history. They helped the murderer develop nuclear weapons intended to kill hundreds of millions in the West. Even neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland would be attacked with 50 nukes each. But opposing the communists means you’re the criminal.
Typical Hollywood socialist propaganda.
Greg Mitchell mentions the McCarthy hearings as the ultimate bogeyman, of course. You must always attack someone to the Right to show you’re not a fascist when you write something like this. It is never mentioned that McCarthy was right, there were many Soviet spies in the U.S. government, working for Stalin’s plans. The Venona tapes made that very clear. But there will of course never be a movie about that. Nothing makes the Hollywood crowd angrier than McCarthy, which is because the poor little victims in Hollywood were in fact members of communist front groups. We won’t see a movie mentioning that either. Or the communist terrorism carried out in the U.S., in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, before and after the first World War, murdering politicians, diplomats businessmen and others.
You’ve shared history and your personal analysis of it (some I agree with) to a audience that tends toward a one-sided analysis without nuance on the opposite side as you.
(Russia was better when it was the USSR and what you shared is not true because Wikicrapedia says so plus CNN disagrees too;-)
You have fun with those with a scant knowledge of history and what they do know is a inch deep….lol.
Then add in a political and philosophical disagreement….
Who influence’s and gives dictates to Hollywood?
March 27, 2022 “Hollywood is Full of CIA Agents,” Says Ben Affleck
For decades, the Pentagon and CIA have rewritten scripts and censored Hollywood films—with dire consequences for humanity.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/03/27/hollywood-is-full-of-cia-agents-says-ben-affleck/
https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/or-unite-or-die-ciahollywoodstar-unite-or-die-or-m.png?w=600&ssl=1
You do know both can be true?
Hollyweird in the “old” days and today?
Absolutely so. Hand in hand is very profitable.
It is amazing how some have attached them to a film because so few would pay attention to their views without it being a prominent part of their scribbles.
Fraser Ottanelli – The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War Two
William Z. Foster – History of the Communist Party of the United States
The 1930s was the “Red decade.” With the Depression, Red urban activists formed unemployment councils, organized hunger marches and got relief for the poor from the government. In the rural South and West, Communist workers sacrificed their lives, fighting for the miners in Appalachian coal strikes and organizing Alabama share croppers. The Reds were the only integrated force working for civil rights in the South in those days. The sit down strikes of 1937 at General Motors was organized by Communist activists–as were the whole subsequent epic unionization of the auto, steel and other great basic industries of America, much of the work done by Communists working for the C.I.O. The Party had much cultural influence too. Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, John dos Passos, Dashiell Hammet, Paul Robeson and many others were regarded as “fellow travelers.”
With the coming of World War Two, thousands of left wing American workers volunteered for combat to fight the Fascists. Typically, many who had originally helped organize the union
found themselves thrown out as Reds upon their return. It was not Republican Joe McCarthy
but Democratic President Harry Truman who first demanded loyalty oaths from thousand of Federal workers, firing some after investigations. In 1948, Truman put on trial Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, which made the teaching of Marxism a crime until 1957. In the 1950s, over a hundred CPUSA leaders were sent to Federal prison for up to eight years. In industries across the country, thousands of workers were fired for being Communists. (The Party’s New York school alone had 5000 students, when it was padlocked by the FBI in 1956.)
It is a fact that Communists were at one time influential in the movie industry. John Howard Lawson, the Party’s main man in Hollywood, wrote two Humphrey Bogart pictures, “Action in the North Atlantic” and “Sahara;” Berthold Brecht wrote “Hangmen Also Die” for Fritz Lang; etc. And even conservative director John Ford bought an ambulance for the Abraham Lincoln brigade, young American volunteers fighting the Fascists in Spain. They were admired for their courage, many returning to the fight even after having been wounded.
Is that movie supposed to be more than a fictionalized version of things?
Unrelated but I could swore I read an article on Antiwar.com that said the Oppenheimer (or perhaps a different film) ended with the Enola Gay over a black screen grimly stating “test successful”.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I went through this Oppenheimer series but could not find it.
Nolan’s excellent film Oppenheimer was a dramatic movie not a documentary. What’s the point of this article …. movies are not documentaries?
I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard someone say the other day that the whole thing about Oppenheimer saying “Behold, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” right after the Trinity test explosion was BS, and that people who were there recalled him saying something completely different: “Well, I guess it works.”