By Katie Dowd July 20, 2023 (SFGate.com)
Director Christopher Nolan (center) stands behind actor Cillian Murphy (far right) on the set of “Oppenheimer.”Universal Pictures
Although President Harry Truman, the man who made the final decision to drop the world’s first atomic weapon on Hiroshima, appears for only a few minutes in “Oppenheimer,” his scene is a memorable one. (Minor spoilers ahead, if you want to go into “Oppenheimer” completely blind.)
In it, Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer meets with Truman in the Oval Office after the bomb is dropped. Truman, played by Gary Oldman, is initially excited to meet the man in charge of the Manhattan Project, but his delight soon turns to anger when a nervous Oppenheimer says he feels he has “blood on my hands.” The meeting ends with Truman coldly offering his handkerchief and calling Oppenheimer a “crybaby” as they part ways.
But is that what actually happened when Oppenheimer met the president?
Remarkably, it really did go that poorly. In the weeks after Hiroshima, the reality of how the world had changed weighed heavily on Oppenheimer. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, Oppenheimer asked for a meeting with Truman. On Oct. 25, 1945, Truman was introduced for the very first time to the man who had headed the Manhattan Project.
The meeting was convivial at first, but the tone shifted when Truman asked Oppenheimer when he thought the Soviet Union would have its first nuclear weapon. Oppenheimer replied that he didn’t know. “Never!” Truman boisterously responded.
Reporters gathered in the Oval Office on Aug. 14, 1945, to listen to President Harry Truman’s announcement that World War II was over. Historical/Corbis via Getty Images
This did not go over well with Oppenheimer, who was sure that scientists in other countries could certainly figure out what the Americans had. (Neither Oppenheimer nor Truman yet knew that spies at Los Alamos had already given the Soviets the critical information they needed for their nuclear weapons program.) Flustered, Oppenheimer then made a mistake.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”
Oppenheimer’s biographers in “American Prometheus” recounted how Truman would later retell the incident: “Over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, ‘Never mind, it’ll all come out in the wash.’ In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, ‘Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?’”
Ultimately, “American Prometheus” posits the most likely response Truman gave to Oppenheimer was a bit less dramatic. “I told him the blood was on my hands — to let me worry about that,” Truman allegedly said to a colleague.
However it went down, the exchange destroyed any collegiality the men might have formed. Truman stood up to signal the meeting was over, and Oppie walked out defeated. “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have,” Truman was overheard saying afterward. “You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
“I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again,” Truman reportedly told Secretary of State Dean Acheson. In a letter to Acheson the next year, Truman referred to Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist.”
FILE: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer is shown at his study in Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., Dec. 15, 1957.John Rooney
The failure was not just an interpersonal one. Oppenheimer “had the opportunity to impress the one man who possessed the power to help him return the nuclear genie to the bottle,” wrote Oppenheimer’s biographers, “and he had utterly failed.”
Instead, Truman and the presidents to come would rely on the advice of Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller (played by Josh Hartnett and Benny Safdie in “Oppenheimer,” respectively). Unlike Oppenheimer, who came to believe the government should stay out of scientific study, these two Manhattan Project physicists believed in the union of government and nuclear weapons research. In partnership with the Truman administration, Lawrence and Teller continued nuclear weapons development under the oversight of the U.S. government.
Shown at the White House in 1957 are, from left to right, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence; Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss; Dr. Edward Teller, “father of the H-bomb”; and Dr. Mark Mills.Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
While Oppenheimer cautioned against the creation of the H-bomb, Teller went on to become the so-called “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a weapon far more destructive than the ones dropped on Japan.
More on Oppenheimer
— Robert Oppenheimer’s stranger-than-Hollywood love life
— What really happened to Jean Tatlock, the love of Oppenheimer’s life
— What the people depicted in ‘Oppenheimer’ actually looked like
— What are the white badges characters wear in ‘Oppenheimer’?
— ‘Crybaby’: The disastrous meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman
— The real relationship between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein
July 20, 2023
By Katie Dowd
Katie Dowd is the SFGATE managing editor.
