(2 of 10)
Under J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Institute's third director (the first two: Flexner and Frank Aydelotte), sitting and thinking are still encouraged. But so are writing and talking; Robert Oppenheimer thinks that ideas were meant to be shared.
He likes to tell about a Bible study group in Germany that had begun with Genesis and doggedly plowed clear through to Ezekiel. Asked an impressed visitor: "Don't you find Ezekiel terribly difficult?" Replied one Bible student: "Yes—but what we don't understand, we explain to each other."
That is a fitting motto for the Institute. It also describes the education of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who by all the standards of the market place is a well-educated man, and who by his own restless, relentless standards is still an apprentice, with 3 a lot to learn.
A Decent Character. His father was a bluff, warmhearted German-Jewish immigrant who had achieved his principal ambition—to become an American. Julius Oppenheimer had also made a very considerable success as a Manhattan textile importer: the Oppenheimers had a country house at Islip, N.Y., a sunny, nine-room apartment on Riverside Drive with three Van Gogh originals hanging in the living room. Julius doted on his son, took him to Europe four times and asked only that the boy be "a decent character."
His mother was kind in a very strict way and every inch a lady. In the Oppenheimer household, it was possible to think something rude, harsh or improper, but never possible to say it. "My life as a child," Robert recalls, "did not prepare me in any way for the fact that there are cruel and bitter things." He remembers himself unfondly as "an unctuous, repulsively good little boy." The trouble, he thinks, was that his home offered him "no normal, healthy way to be a bastard."
Lonely Man. School was the same. Manhattan's Ethical Culture Schools tried to find a moral equivalent for religion (credo: "Deed, not Creed") and went in for the production of quiz kids. By the time he graduated, Robert could read Caesar, Virgil and Horace without a Latin dictionary, had read Plato and Homer in the Greek, composed sonnets in French, and tackled treatises on polarized light.
So long as schoolboy conversations were intellectual Robert got along fine, a classmate remembers, but surrounded by small talk, Robert sat morose, "exactly as though he weren't getting enough to eat or drink." The boy told his favorite English teacher, Herbert Winslow Smith: "I'm the loneliest man in the world."
His interest in science had been kindled by accident: at five, visiting his grandfather in Germany, Robert got a little box of minerals as a gift. In time, a collection of rocks from many countries filled the Oppenheimer hallway.