J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Abraham Pais with supplemental material by Robert P. Crease, Oxford U. Press, New York, 2006. $30.00 (353 pp.). ISBN 0-19-516673-6

As one of the iconic scientists of the past turbulent century, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) has been a central character of books, conferences, plays, films, and even an opera, Doctor Atomic, which debuted in 2005. Naturally, several new biographies have appeared near Oppenheimer’s centennial year. Robert P. Crease has completed and supplemented the unfinished biography J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life by the late Abraham Pais. Crease’s involvement came at the request of Pais’s widow, Ida Nicolaisen, who supplied her husband’s notes after he died in 2000. Before moving to Rockefeller University in New York in 1963, Pais had been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, during most of the 17 years that Oppenheimer was its director.

Both Pais and Crease have written well-received books on the history of science. For the Oppenheimer biography, Crease tried to follow the intentions of Pais, as inferred from his notes, without appreciable reorganization, and he has added four excellent supplemental chapters. The result is what C. N. Yang has called “a kaleidoscopic approach to [Oppenheimer’s] life, shedding insightful light on [his] personality and times.”

Pais’s book begins by describing Oppenheimer’s life through the 1930s, a cursory account based largely on secondary sources and on Thomas S. Kuhn’s 1963 interview with Oppenheimer. Crease tries to identify the secondary sources but doesn’t always succeed. I noticed some paragraphs that appear unaltered from Pais’s own autobiography, A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist’s Life in a Turbulent World (Princeton U. Press, 1997). The chapter on Oppenheimer as a teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1930s consists mainly of a quotation from the Kuhn interview and a longer one from Robert Serber, who went there as Oppenheimer’s postdoctoral assistant. For this earlier period of Oppenheimer’s life, I prefer one of the recent excellent biographies such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (Pi Press, 2005) by David C. Cassidy or American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman.

Oppenheimer’s life in the 1930s aside from his physics is told partly in his own words, taken from his published testimony before the 1954 Personnel Security Board (PSB) hearings that led to the removal of his security clearance. At those hearings he identified Jean Tatlock, with whom he had an affair while teaching at Berkeley, as the person who first introduced him to left-wing friends and to political issues he had ignored earlier. In the fall of 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine (“Kitty”) Puening, with whom he had two children. Tatlock later committed suicide in 1944.

Only five pages are devoted to the period between 1939 and 1945, from the discovery of nuclear fission to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet nine pages of small type present the full text of Oppenheimer’s farewell address at Los Alamos on 2 November 1945. Pais regarded the address as an important scientist’s credo. It does not offer an optimistic view of the future of nuclear weapons or their effective control. Presented in Oppenheimer’s lofty style, the speech seems dated and overly preachy.

Pais offers a full account of the Institute for Advanced Study’s history, included Oppenheimer’s directorship and the institute’s conflicts and academic politics. He gives a rundown of Oppenheimer’s role in important postwar physics conferences and includes vignettes of notable participants (some of whom were permanent residents of the institute). He also covers Oppenheimer’s sometimes unfortunate interactions with them. Pais presents brief testimonials from well-known physicists regarding Oppenheimer’s superb directorship over wartime Los Alamos. Such treatments in the book are examples of the kaleidoscopic approach that Yang refers to. Lengthy excerpts from Oppenheimer’s many public lectures tend to be repetitive.

The remaining part of Pais’s book, as distinct from Crease’s supplemental material, deals with the politics of nuclear proliferation from the early postwar years until the start of Oppenheimer’s fateful 1954 security hearing. Pais felt that Oppenheimer’s major influence on public policy reached its zenith in 1946 in the Acheson–Lilienthal report, largely the work of Oppenheimer, which proposed that a new international agency be established to control nuclear weapons and promote the use of nuclear energy. Bernard Berenson was chosen to make the proposal to the United Nations, but it was doomed from the outset because of the mutual distrust between the West and the Soviet Union. After that episode, Oppenheimer became a hardliner on the Soviet Union—not a pacifist, as some have mentioned. Yet he preferred tactical nuclear-fission weapons to the hydrogen bomb, which would be useful only for destroying large cities. His position brought him into conflict with US Air Force officials who favored a strategy of massive retaliation. It also led to his downfall.

In the supplemental material, about one-quarter of the book, Crease gives a masterful account of the PSB hearings that began on 12 April 1954, demonstrating that they were largely show trials whose purpose was to undermine Oppenheimer’s prestige and diminish his political influence. Oppenheimer’s consulting contract with the Atomic Energy Commission would, in any case, have terminated in June—and it need not have been renewed. Crease reports the reactions of various observers—scientists and others—to Oppenheimer’s “trial,” including post mortems on his testimony (which many felt was inadequate) and judgments on Oppenheimer as an emotionally charged, cultural symbol. He describes Oppenheimer’s public life after the hearings as that of an “insider in exile.” Crease’s exceptionally clear, objective, and moving story will appeal to most readers.