There’s been a lot of justifiable fuss over the recently released biopic about Robert Oppenheimer the man who led the team that created the world’s first nuclear weapon. As with any cinematic biography there was bound to be stuff that was left out or stuff that was rewritten to be more appealing to the audience or to fit the movie format. However, in the case of the Oppenheimer movie and some of the textual sources that the movie was based on, a big bit of the story has been left out and that is Robert Oppenheimer’s support for Communism and Communist causes.

The Jewish conservative magazine Commentary has recently published an article that tries to address the bits that have been left out of the Robert Oppenheimer story such as Oppenheimer’s position as a Communist fellow traveller and possibly something much worse. As this is a very lengthy article I will not be taking too much out of it but would urge readers to go to Commentary magazine and read it there.

Whilst there are some who make quite persuasive arguments that Oppenheimer was not an actual card carrying member of the Communist Party, there is enough evidence and enough associations between Oppenheimer and communists, to show that he was, at the very least a Communist supporter. He was a supporter of Communist front groups and Communist causes but allegedly didn’t hold a party card during his time with the Manhattan Project. But the Commentary authors, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes claim that he was a member of the Communist Party of the USA earlier in his life and that this membership was kept secret by both the Communists and Oppenheimer himself.

Commentary said of the film:

Oppenheimer is visually arresting, well-acted, and reasonably faithful to the historical facts. It offers a nuanced portrait of Oppenheimer, who was a tormented person even before he was forced to live with the knowledge that the bomb he and his fellow scientists had created immolated tens of thousands of people and raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. But the film gets one very important feature of Oppenheimer’s life wrong.

Like the book that inspired it—the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin called American Prometheus—the movie maintains that Oppenheimer was truthful when he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). 

Following the lead of Bird and Sherwin, Oppenheimer acknowledges that many of its subject’s relatives—including his wife Kitty, brother Frank, and sister-in-law Jackie—had been party members, as had numerous friends and graduate students Oppie taught and mentored. It mentions his generous donations to causes supported by the CPUSA, most notably during the Spanish Civil War. It details his support of the efforts by the Communist-aligned Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians to unionize the radiation laboratory at Berkeley. But it also accepts, even stresses, Oppenheimer’s own denials of party membership and repeats Kitty Oppenheimer’s insistent testimony that Robert had never joined the party. This echoes the claims of Bird and Sherwin that Oppenheimer was never more than a Communist fellow traveler—someone who shared the party’s beliefs and policy prescriptions but never actually joined it or submitted to the party’s rules and discipline.

Even when Bird and Sherwin published their award-winning biography in 2005, there was already abundant evidence that Oppenheimer had indeed once been a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Their efforts to explain away or obfuscate the clear evidence that Oppenheimer lied under oath about it have been further eroded by material that has emerged from Russian archives since. But to this day, Bird (Sherwin died in 2021) has not responded to that evidence, and the writer-director Christopher Nolan did not look deeper into the question when he crafted his screenplay. That is unfortunate, because reckoning with the truth about Oppenheimer would have deepened the movie’s portrait of this singular American and added more layers of ambiguity and complexity to what is already a remarkably ambiguous and complex work of portraiture.

Read the entirety of this excellent piece on Oppenheimer and what the movie and the movie’s source material left out via the link below:

https://www.commentary.org/articles/harvey-klehr/oppenheimer-was-a-communist/