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At a 2004 conference marking the centennial of Robert Oppenheimer's birth, Jon Else wondered if the notion of "the public Oppenheimer" was a misnomer. Else, whose The Day after Trinity is perhaps the best-known film about Los Alamos and its first scientific director, suggested that Oppenheimer's image has not "become a shorthand for something else," in the manner of "Einstein" or "themushroomcloud." Instead, Else proposes that what exists has been a "cascade of many public Oppenheimers." The notion that complexity characterizes both Oppenheimer himself and his image is an idea expressed by a number of writers. However, Else's words implicitly posit a scholarly opportunity-and challenge-more clearly than has yet been done. What are these images of "public Oppenheimers"? Where did they come from? And what might they tell us about the historical contexts from which they emerged?1
This article explores the nature and meaning of one prominent cluster of Oppenheimer images from the early cold war: those that depict him as a heroic figure. Scholars have begun to include examination of public personae in their analyses of Oppenheimer.Most prominently, Charles Thorpe weaves a discussion of Oppenheimer's "self-presentation as cultivated humanist and general philosopher" into his impressive account of the physicist's attempts to establish different kinds of political and cultural authority. 2 But while the excellent Oppenheimer scholarship of recent years has provided us with compelling treatments of much of Oppenheimer's life, no scholar has yet focused primarily on the nature of his public image.3 Oppenheimer's renown developed during years in which scientists became increasingly complex public figures. The advent of the atomic age in August 1945 was one major impact on cultural conceptions of "the scientist"; these conceptions were complicated still further amid escalating cold war tensions surrounding anticommunism, atomic espionage, and the arms race. Important questions about nuclear weapons made science-and therefore, scientists-central to the political, ethical, and social dilemmas that dominated much public discourse in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Oppenheimer's extraordinary public visibility afterWorldWar II revealsmuch about the images of scientists that emerged fromthat discourse.
Iconic figures do not emerge randomly; they reflect the culture that shapes them. Depictions of Oppenheimer as heroic were no exception. He proved to be an apt scientific icon for many Americans made anxious...