Greg Mitchell: The Oppenheimer Countdown Begins

After months of hype, the Christopher Nolan film debuts this week. But related offerings are already here, including my own book.

I knew this was coming and now it has just been posted to the New York Times site, the story of how two of my friends, Marty Sherwin and Kai Bird, collaborated on their bio of Robert Oppenheimer that now serves as the source book for the Christopher Nolan movie (and is back on the bestsellers list). I happen to know something about this.

For years in the 1990s, Marty and I both attended the annual October meetings in Wellfleet, MA. hosted by my friend and co-author on two books, Robert Jay Lifton. Every year, when we went around the table, often joined by folks like Dan Elsberg and Norman Mailer, Marty would, with a chuckle, explain that, damn it, his Oppenheimer book, already long overdue, was still not coming together. He’d done all the research but couldn’t get the writing going, at all. We talked about some of the content, but that was it. An annual rite.

Miraculously, presto, a few years later the bio would be published by Knopf and go on to win a Pulitzer. The Times story reveals how Marty asked Kai Bird to salvage his research, with a lot of advice from their spouses. I’d known Kai since we played on the same softball team for The Nation in the early 1980s. Then we joined in some 50th anniversary of Hiroshima activities in 1995. And so forth. So he was a good man for the job.

Just a few years ago, Marty read and approved the many pages on Oppenheimer in my book that is now gaining new attention, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It explores the startling story of the first movie on the atomic bomb, from MGM, and how Truman and the Pentagon sabotaged it to defend the use of the new weapon against Japan and building bigger ones. Oppenheimer played a central role in this drama, but in a rather disgraceful and revealing way, with lessons relevant for today.

To aid my book, Marty directed me to a key transcript of a tapped phone call in the physicist’s FBI file relating to that movie. He had not used it. I did. And then he served as adviser to my 2021 documentary, Atomic Cover-up, offering useful notes almost up to his untimely passing.

So read the Times piece, it charts a kind of miracle. Also note:

The internet memes are already here. The ouchy references to its “bombshell” and “blockbuster” status far from exhausted. Soon after people start actually watching it, we might hear “it’s da bomb” (though we might have to suffer through claims by box office analysts that is merely “a bomb”). Of course we refer to Christopher Nolan’s long-hyped Oppenheimer biopic, which opens nationwide on July 21.

I first wrote about it here last December after the first trailer dropped, and most recently three weeks ago when I expressed certain fears about it based on what I’d heard and what had been published. Amazingly there have been no leaks of script excerpts or bits of footage beyond the trailers, and no one breaking the review embargo. I will attend one of the first screenings next weekend where my own questions about the content of the movie will be answered, while feelings about Oppenheimer, the man, will no doubt remain divided.

So, awaiting that, I will hold off any further speculation and rumination, for now, and simply mention some offerings related to the film already appearing, such as my own book. For example, my old friend Kai Bird, who co-wrote Nolan’s source book, has a piece just up at The New Yorker’s site on his long and longshot campaign to erase the black mark that capsized Oppenheimer’s life going back to 1954, when a witchhunt led to him losing his security clearance. Kai accomplished this with another of my longtime friends, and co-writer of his Oppenheimer bio, the late Marty Sherwin. They were finally successful just last December.

Coming soon will be major articles that I have written for well-known publications. Also, today a new publicity campaign around my award-winning 2020 book The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb will begin. If you would like to chat with me for a media outlet, or your own site or newsletter, let me know.

That book explores the first “atomic bomb movie” from MGM in 1947 and how the studio allowed insane pressure from the Pentagon and White House (even by Truman himself) to transform a script that warned about future nuclear dangers into pro-bomb propaganda. Oppenheimer is a key character/narrator. He had dithered but then signed a release allowing his depiction despite all the dangerous falsehoods in the screenplay. (In image below he visits the MGM set and chats with actor who portrayed him, a sadly miscast Hume Cronyn.) He even sat down for not one but two interviews with Ayn Rand for a rival project! Don’t expect to see this in the Nolan film but you can read more or order here.

Last week, MSNBC aired (squeezed between dozens of commercials) a new 87-minute documentary To End All War on Oppenheimer (it’s now at NBC’s Peacock site). Among those interviewed are Kai Bird and Christopher Nolan. I suppose it is kind of an eye-opener for younger folks and others coming cold to Oppenheimer, and the making and use of the bomb against Japan, but I found little new – and it follows the same Hiroshima narrative of justification that I have studied and tried to undermine for four decades now. I tweeted (yes, I am still surviving the scent of Musk there) the following while the film aired:

New Oppenheimer doc film being aired on MSNBC (still on) with the usual utterly inadequate picture of options U.S. had to not drop the atomic bombs or at least delay. And 80 minutes in – not a single reference to radiation.

Film on MSNBC (still on) claims "tens of thousands" died in the two cities hit by atomic bomb – when it was closer to 200,000 – and it does not reveal that about 85% were civilians, mainly women and children.

In the MSNBC film on Oppenheimer and bomb – now at end – not a single mention of bomb’s new radiation effects, and radiation disease, and impact on the Japanese and later Americans. Not a word.

New six-minute featurette for Oppenheimer just dropped.

Greg Mitchell is the author of The Tunnels and a dozen other books and writer-director of the documentary Atomic Cover-up.