Air University Review, November-December 1982

Oppenheimer and History According to Television

The recently broadcast television miniseries "Oppenheimer" provides a case study of the liberties that filmmakers sometimes take with historical detail in the name of a feasible and entertaining presentation of people and events.

Peter Goodchild, who produced and performed in the documentary drama for the British Broadcasting Corporation, maintains that he can verify 80 percent of what appears on the screen; the rest was "invented or condensed simply to keep the story moving on." To him, the need to resort to "dramatic convenience" resulted from the problems he faced in dealing with many complex characters and events taking place over a long period of time.

The American Playhouse, which arranged for the broadcast on PBS, offered a more candid description of the series. A representative explained that "Oppenheimer" is referred to as a "docu-drama" and is based on fact. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the series "is fictionalized in its portrayal of real characters, their associations and accoutrements, and the technology of the period."

Since most viewers accept what they see on television as reality or, in this case, history, the final but inaccurate image they receive is of J. Robert Oppenheimer as a man destroyed by the military in order to facilitate the development of the hydrogen bomb.

To what extent, then, does dramatic license excuse errors of fact and distortions of historical record in television drama? Since "Roots" blitzed the nation in 1977, historians, media critics, and producers have debated the level of truth required in productions purporting to tell it the way it really was.

Increasingly, people’s understanding of subjects such as Watergate, the Holocaust, the presidents, and the Vietnam War come from watching history according to television. Did the portrayal of Hitler’s final solution in "The Holocaust," "Playing for Time," and "The Diary of Anne Frank" recreate the savagery of Nazi Germany, or did these docudramas mute the horrors in order to retain their audiences? Did Marco Polo set out on his travels because he was involved with the daughter of a courtesan and had to get out of Genoa? Did Golda Meir get into the kibbutz only because she had a phonograph? Did "Friendly Fire" and "Rumor of War" capture the absurdities of the American experience in Vietnam? Does it even matter?

David Wolper, the producer of "Roots," "Blind Ambition," and the historical film "Bridge at Remagen," believes docudramas should provide "an overall truth" and that audiences can go to history books for the details. To him, history on television is "supposed to give an emotional feeling and a sense of what it was like." He notes that with the exception of courtrooms and the Oval Office, conversations seldom get committed to paper. Consequently, a writer must make up words to provide a sense of what people actually said. Likewise, he considers it valid to create a scene in order to portray events leading up to the production of written material.

Still, "Oppenheimer" emphasizes the risks of condensing events and having persons assume roles that inaccurately portray their true historical activities. The Army, reviewing the producer’s request for cooperation, found Peter Goodchild’s portrayal of General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s boss, to be very negative. In reply, the producer explained that part of the problem "stemmed from the use we make of him as a sounding board for all scientific explanations and this makes him seem less intelligent than he obviously was." At the same time, Goodchild claimed that he had "a great deal of evidence" from both the scientists who worked with him and his military colleagues that Groves "was a difficult and demanding man."

General K. D. Nichols, the district engineer for the Manhattan Project and a featured character in the series, talked with Goodchild about General Groves. However, after watching the series, Nichols said the portrayal of Groves contained little resemblance to the information he provided. Nichols also observed that "Not a single scene in which I appear is historically correct."

Viewers may dismiss many of these historical inaccuracies as insignificant to the portrayal of Oppenheimer as a tragic and martyred hero to the cause of nuclear disarmament. Nevertheless, historians find that misrepresentations of characters, errors of fact, distortion of detail, whether large or small, erode the credibility of the entire work.

It may be carping to note that colonels do not chauffer generals, as the series regularly portrays the then-Colonel Nichols doing, when in fact both men had their own drivers. It may not even matter that Nichols and Groves seldom traveled anywhere together anyway since each was fully occupied with his own work. Most viewers would probably accept Goodchild’s explanation that he placed the two men together so often in order to use Nichols as a sounding board for Groves’s ideas.

Such dramatic convenience does facilitate telling the story, but it creates distorted history. It does make a difference that Nichols did not accompany Oppenheimer and Groves when they decided to buy Los Alamos as the site for the atomic bomb factory, as shown in the series. The purchase took place in the fall of 1942, rather than in December on the day the scientists created the first chain reaction in Chicago. It is probably more dramatic for the two events to be juxtaposed, but it distorts history and the significant role Nichols did play in building the bomb. Likewise, it is historically inaccurate to place him at the New Mexico bomb test in July 1945, when in fact he was in Atlanta at General Groves’s direction, in order to keep foreign agents from connecting Nichols’s work at Oak Ridge with the blast.

By putting Nichols in places where he did not go, by not showing him performing his crucial work of building the bomb facilities, by portraying him as a sycophant whose primary function seemed to be buying candy bars for Groves, the series opens itself to questions of credibility in all of its portrayals of fact and personality. In particular, the last episode illustrates the problems of combining historical fact with television drama.

The writer does use the actual dialogue from the transcripts of the Atomic Energy Commission hearing on Oppenheimer’s security clearance to create an air of authenticity, with the characters generally delivering their lines in the manner of the actual persons. However historically accurate the words, the portrayal of the events leading up to the hearings as well as the writer’s need to condense two weeks of transcripts into 20 minutes of air time produce a recreation that may at most provide a flavor of what took place and at worst create a false impression of who did what to whom for what reasons.

In essence, the episode shows General Nichols in civilian clothes, but not identified as the General Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, ordering AEC lawyers to draw up a bill of particulars against Oppenheimer as the first step in removing his security clearance. Nichols’s action fulfills the role of a flunky and villain, which the producers assigned to Nichols beginning in episode two and developed during the next four programs through historically inaccurate representations and distortions of his relationship with General Groves.

This portrayal reaches its zenith when Nichols is shown lurking in the background during Oppenheimer’s 1949 appearance before the House Un-American Activities hearings. Since Nichols did not attend the hearings, a conclusion can be drawn that his fictional appearance was used to presage his later vendetta against Oppenheimer, when he not only orders the charges to be created but joins Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the AEC, and a lawyer working on the case to listen gleefully to a tape the FBI made by bugging Oppenheimer’s lawyers’ office.

The truth of the matter bears little resemblance to the television recreation. The impetus for the security hearings actually came from President Eisenhower’s response to a letter accusing Oppenheimer of being a Communist. The President, not Nichols, ordered a security wall to be placed between Oppenheimer and secret AEC material until the hearings produced a finding. As AEC General Manager, Nichols had to convene the hearings and then make a recommendation to the commission based on the hearing record.

Nichols did advise the commission that Oppenheimer posed a security risk but not because of any Communist leanings or his opposition to the building of the hydrogen bomb as portrayed in the episode. His recommendation was based solely on the fact that Oppenheimer told at least two and perhaps three conflicting stories about a wartime approach by a friend asking if the scientist would pass on information about his work on the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The approach itself was not the issue since Oppenheimer had told security people about it, albeit reluctantly. However, according to Nichols, the conflicting stories that Oppenheimer was never willing or able to resolve made him unreliable and thus a security risk. Ultimately, President Eisenhower made the decision to remove Oppenheimer’s clearance—not Nichols, the AEC, or the military— a fact the episode never mentioned.

Apart from not portraying the sequence of events accurately, filmmakers created an anti-government bias by fabricating information. According to Roger Robb, the AEC Counsel for the hearing board, the FBI did not bug Oppenheimer’s lawyers’ office. Moreover, when interviewed by Goodchild, Robb told the producer he knew nothing about any bugging. Nevertheless, Goodchild not only included the story in the program but colored it further by showing Nichols listening to the tape. (On his part, Nichols says he never listened to any FBI tape, and as far as he knows, no bugging ever took place.)

In regard to the hearings themselves, Robb felt the recreation was as good as could be expected but not as good as he would have liked because of the impossibility of compressing two weeks of testimony into 20 minutes. While he found the portrayal of Edward Teller and Hans Bethe’s testimony and portrayal accurately recreated, he pointed out that neither Oppenheimer’s appearance nor his own characterization were entirely accurate. He recalled that Oppenheimer reacted to key questions more emotionally than portrayed. As for his part, he neither smiled nor badgered the witnesses as shown nor did he move around the room as his counterpart did. In a more serious criticism, Robb says the episode was wrong to have shown him giving Edward Teller a copy of the FBI report on Oppenheimer before he testified. Robb explained that he gave Teller a transcript of a relevant portion of Oppenheimer’s earlier testimony so that the scientist, as a possible rebuttal witness, would know what had been said.

The sum total of these inaccuracies and the manner in which the series presents its subsidiary characters raise doubts about the portrayal of the title character. In fact, most of the people who knew and worked with Oppenheimer and watched the series felt that the portrayal was relatively faithful to the essence of the man. Hans Bethe, one of the physicists who worked with Oppenheimer on the bomb project at Los Alamos, for example, found the portrayal of his character "substantially correct." He compared the portrayal to an Impressionistic painting in which the important features are there but some of the details are missing. At the same time, however, Bethe had strong objections to the portrayal of Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, explaining that while she did have a drinking problem, as the series indicated in great detail, she was by no means the shrew presented. The actress who portrayed Kitty acknowledged that her research into the character produced a wide range of impressions from bitch to loving, supportive wife. But rather than create a synthesis, the actress and director chose to emphasize the negative.

Given such diversities in portrayal of people and events, what options does a viewer have? David Wolper, for one, believes that anyone wanting more information can always go to history books for the factual details. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the time or inclination to research everything they see on television. More to the point, most people have come to accept what they see on television screens as reality and so see no reason to question the portrayals of historical personalities. To the public, then, the final image they take from the series is that Oppenheimer was destroyed by the military in order to facilitate the development of the hydrogen bomb.

In the end, the failure to adhere more closely to the truth may tell us more about the producer’s problems translating history to drama and about his political and artistic views than about the complex man who contributed so much to the world in which we live. We may have an overall truth about Oppenheimer, but it remains a truth whose credibility is open to question because of the distortions of fact in the portrayal of his life and work.

The true story remains more interesting, complex, and ambiguous than the docudrama. Oppenheimer had opposed an all-out crash program to build the hydrogen bomb on technical grounds and concern that another Manhattan-type effort would leave the United States vulnerable in the area of conventional warfare. He argued for a balanced allocation of the nation’s resources and the production of weapon systems that might not lead to a nuclear holocaust. The villain in the Oppenheimer tragedy was the hysteria generated by Senator Joe McCarthy and the Cold War, not the military as personified by General Nichols. Nevertheless, the latter is the image that most viewers probably carried away with them after viewing the BBC series.

Lawrence H. Suid (B.A., Western Reserve University; Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University) is a contract historian for the Department of Defense. Dr. Suid is the author of Guts and Glory (1978). His doctoral dissertation was on Hollywood and the movies of the Vietnam era.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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