J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” has long been a darling of the left, and not because he oversaw the creation of the most devastating weapon ever used. No, for them Oppenheimer is the tortured conscience of the Cold War and the martyred saint of McCarthyism.
Kai Bird, co-author of the excellent biography on which Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is based, has penned a column in The New York Times lamenting the tragic life of the physicist, who lost security clearance in 1953. Oppenheimer was, writes Bird, “destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues, the witch-hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style.” The main culprit in this ugly tale, according to the author, is Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, “who taught former President Donald Trump his brash, wholly deranged style of politics.”
There it is. You can almost picture that innocent screenwriter, who had only briefly flirted with communism as a youngster, being accused of sedition by The Donald. The Red Scare, just ask anyone in Hollywood, was the greatest crime ever visited upon mankind. Well, perhaps the second greatest after the 2016 election. “Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change,” Bird reminds us. “This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.”
The problem is, Bird doesn’t defend Oppenheimer’s science — or any science, for that matter. Rather, he defends the physicist’s political
