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Last Sunday, Oppenheimer tallied seven Academy Awards, awards, including best director (Christopher Nolan), actor (Cillian Murphy) and best picture, but there’s more to the story that people should know. For all its undeniable artistry – Bruce Bawer called it a “Dishonest Masterpiece” – Oppenheimer is something like those 1960s beach and bikini movies; what they reveal is interesting but what they conceal is crucial. Consider this perspective from one of Oppenheimer’s students.
“As a physics graduate student at Princeton University in the early 1960s, I had occasional interactions with Oppenheimer, who was then the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies,” writes William Happer, emeritus profess of physics at Princeton and a specialist in radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei.
According to Happer, Oppenheimer was not very friendly to students but remained a “sympathetic figure.” Oppenheimer had an “easy act to follow” when he took over from Gregory Breit in 1943, but there is no Gregory Breit character in the movie. Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein but according to Happer, the Manhattan Project was “not the result of a brilliant theory” and not made possible by Einstein’s E = mc² formula. What made it possible, Happer explains, was “a rapid-fire series of accidental experimental discoveries in the 1930s, including a celebrated mistake.”
In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the electrically neutral projectile, the neutron, which could reach the surface of even the most highly-charged nucleus, uranium, with no hindrance from the nuclear charge. As Happer notes, “It was this accidental discovery that led to the Manhattan Project.” Chadwick, a Nobel laureate for physics in 1936, was part of the Manhattan project and in 1944 lived at Los Alamos with his family. In Oppenheimer, nobody plays Chadwick, hardly the only significant omission.
In the early going, Oppenheimer tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context is also important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.
Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Stalin invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” on November 30, 1939.
Under the Pact, Nazi and Soviet intelligence forces collaborated and Stalin handed hundreds of Jewish Communists over to the Gestapo. Jewish scientists in America would have been aware of that deadly exchange, but not a word in Oppenheimer.
Viewers never learn that for nearly the first two years of the war, the Communist Party USA collaborated with pro-Nazi groups in America and did everything in its power to keep America out of the conflict. In Oppenheimer, no Communist is asked to account for what he or she did during the Pact, and why they stayed in the Party after many others left, never to return.
Oppenheimer portrays Party members as misguided liberals concerned about the conflict in Spain. Viewers hear about “the brigades” but no character explains that the Abraham Lincoln Brigades were a Communist Party militia that opposed anti-Franco groups such as the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. The POUM fighters included George Orwell, author of 1984, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia.
Inquiries about Oppenheimer’s “left wing” associations fail to note that the Party had an open and secret membership, as Whittaker Chambers detailed in Witness. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr cite evidence that Oppenheimer was a member of a secret Party unit at UC Berkeley, where his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor of French literature, was an active Communist. In the movie, Jefferson Hall plays Chevalier, and Oppenheimer resists his request to pass information to the Soviets.
From 1941-1944, Stalin’s top spy in California was Gregory Kheifetz operating undercover as a vice consul in San Francisco. Tasked with obtaining atomic secrets, Kheifetz claimed in a cable that Oppenheimer was one of his recruits. Unfortunately, there is no Gregory Kheifetz character in Oppenheimer.
The film does reveal that Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), present at Los Alamos, was in fact a Soviet spy. So were American Stalinists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, was a machinist at Los Alamos. There is no Greenglass character in Oppenheimer. Viewers do not learn that the Communist spies helped Stalin explode his first atom bomb on August, 29, 1949.
By that time, Stalin had taken over Czechoslovakia, held Eastern Europe captive, and launched a purge of writers and artists. Stalin also swung the USSR and captive states back to traditional anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans.” As director Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men) noted in congressional testimony, the defendants in Czechoslovakian show trials were executed “for being Jews and nothing else.”
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. More than 70 years later in 2024, virulent anti-Semitism finds a voice in the American left. Calls to free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” are calls to kill Jews for being Jews and nothing else. Someone should make a movie about it. The struggle against a second Holocaust is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Thank you for your informative article, Mr. Billingsley..
There are traitors operating in our country now that make those spies pale in comparison. A bald faced Marxist like Mayorkass commits his brazen treason out in the open with no consequences.
Those traitors reside in Turtle Bay.
And the White House, The DNC and The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC or any campus withn intellectual pretensions.
Thanks for information, I had thought the “Imitation Game” was the worst WW2 movie, glad I skipped Oppenheimer, it only encourages Hollywood. The “Imitation Game” has Alan Turing making Churchill level decisions, but didn’t have a security clearance.
What about “Churchill” (2017). You would think that the man who was a force to save western civilization had nothing to do with it.
Post Obama history.
Thanks Lloyd! I liked most what Feynman said.
I liked “Oppenheimer,” even with all its deficiencies.
I didn’t know it won a bunch of Oscars until I read this article, though. I guess there were no movies about trannies or black Romans in the running.
Thanks for reviewing a movie I will never see. I’m so much more interested in your facts presented here than a dramatic fiction that’s supposed to tell a factual story.
We have grown up loving and even trusting movies and TV only to see the blood red hands of Hollywood that give us politicized lies and Jew hate.
Movies about history are almost all fictionalized. I recently realized how dangerous that is. Like the one about Eleanor of Aquitaine or whoever it was. I was just reading some actual history about her 🙂
The Lion in Winter was the movie I was thinking about.
That movie reminds me of “The Taming of the Shrew.”
A good book on the subject should interest you.
“HOLLYWOOD TRAITORS. Blacklisted Screenwriters. Agents of Stalin. Allies of Hitler.”
One anecdote:
That buffoon, Jim Carrey starred in a suck-up movie that no one saw titled “Tha Majestic”. It trafficks in the usual recycled slander against HUAC.
(I say no one saw it, because I didn’t even know it existed until I read the book.)
Thank you for your clarity and candor. Never forgive, never forget.
I don’t ever remember seeing … or hearing of … any Hollywood movie that dealt with Stalin’s alliance with Hitler which continued through the Battle of Britain. Stalin got more Polish territory than Hitler did, and both Nazi and Red Army divisions held celebratory meetings exactly like the ones held 6 years later between the Soviets and the American at the Elbe.
Stalin exploded “his first atom bomb on August, 29, 1949” with the assistance of Fuchs and the Rosenberg spy ring. Less than a year later, with this ultimate card up his sleeve, Stalin authorized the beginning of the Korean War and the three million dead that came with it.
You are an invaluable American, Lloyd. I am proud of serving a post while you slept.
I just viewed the Oppenheimer film last night (courtesy of our public library system). I also recently viewed the Netflix documentary (or was it Amazon?). There is also a PBS documentary available.
I’m not sure I want to know the names of ALL famous, relevant scientists in Oppenheimer’s circle. A three hour film can only introduce so many characters.
Both the film and documentary presented Oppenheimer as uncaring whether his political interests would affect his professional aspirations. I took that attitude to be the typical of a man who understood his towering intellect to open and keep doors open to acheive goals only he and his other genius scientist colleagues could pull off (and the financial backing to smooth the path). Such an ego is necessary for taking on a task like the Manhattan Project.
The film was obsessed with how many civilians the two atom bombs killed – directly or indirectly – and how Oppenheimer couldn’t later put it into perspective either. For real-life perspective all of us would be better served by understanding that dictatorial governments killing their own people (Communism is the clear winner) have outdistanced the numbers killed in all wars throughout time. I guess such stories are too ugly to commit to a film that needs to feed Hollywood
.
NOTHING supposedly “historical” coming from Hollywood should be believable. In fact, we should ALL realize that they are telling ONE story and that will NOT include anything they do not want us to know. (Kind of like the “mainstream media” does) In the mean time, they are telling their story from a vantage point THEY choose FOR A REASON and it is is NOT so we understand the TRUTH.
1st there was McCarthyism: To soften the belly populase up to those poor prosecuted “Hollywood artists.” There WERE (are?) Communist/Marxists, in the entertainment community AND in Government. It was handled all in such a blanketed way, it created outrage and sympathy from the public.
2nd we now have the “Insurrection.” A wholly fabricated fiction, used to once again elicit outrage from the public. While the full events that day, are not investigated and information is either concealed or destroyed.
70 years after McCartyism, we have no leadership in this country to stand up to the Marxist or the Islam Terrorist.
The radical Left has made sure of that. They are doing the same treatment to Trump and his supporters.
Don’t let that happen. Keep your friendships and relationships with people you disagree with and try to find common ground. When we stick together as a people, we draw our power and they lose control.
Always remember we are a Constitutional Republic. Governed for the People and by the People.
We have an ace in the hole-Donald Trump!!!
We need a Committee on UN-American Activities now more than ever. The problem would be that half of our government would be found to be American hating Marxists.
Yeah, and the committee will be comprised of government officials who will write a report that nobody will ever read that says that the government should have done something sooner or pumped in more money.
Just like the UK convid enquiry.
When I served I worked in intelligence, and had a very real interest in the VENONA intercepts. From those intercepts the government knew the Rosenbergs were guilty, and Oppenheimer was at the very least a communist sympathizer.. Time and truth are on the same side, and Hollywood is on the other side,. The antipode of truth is a lie. The mephitic ooze that’s Hollywood was exposed at the Oscars.
Since I knew about Oppenheimer, I didn’t see the movie, I have no intention of ever seeing the movie, and this is just another effort by Hollywood to obfuscate the fact Hollywood, academia, radio, the unions, the newspapers, and all those agencies created by FDR, was thoroughly infested with, Stalin spies, communists, socialists, and fellow travelers. All made clear by the VENONA intercepts released in 1996.
After RO whined about his involvement, HST called him a “pussy” to his face.