The visiting fireman

Remembering J. Robert Oppenheimer's inspiring stay at Exeter.

J. Robert Oppenheimer stood on the Academy chapel stage, his prepared remarks to 700 boys and their teachers reaching the end of an hour.

“I am at the end of my time,” he said. “I may have spoken a little sadly; but I do not have the feeling this is bad news. I have the feeling that there is only one true danger, and that is to go into our life or through it without understanding what we are up against, what is asked of us, and by what we can reasonably be judged.”

With those words, Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” concluded his extraordinary visiting fellowship at Exeter in 1955.

Today, Oppenheimer is a household name, the result of an epic eponymous film whose nearly billion-dollar box office haul is a record for a biopic. Almost 80 years ago, he was known worldwide as the brilliant physicist behind the Manhattan Project who played a pivotal role in developing the atomic weapons that ultimately ended World War II. His leadership of the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, where the work was conducted, earned him global celebrity and influence.

But Oppenheimer was more infamous than famous when Exeter invited him to be its first “visiting fireman.” His old acquaintances and unpopular views on nuclear proliferation had turned an unforgiving spotlight on Oppenheimer in the years after the war. The fallout stained his legacy and largely cost him his career.

How he wound up at Exeter, how he spent his week on campus, and the waves his visit created are preserved in letters and newspaper and magazine clippings in the Library of Congress — and in the memories of those Exonians fortunate enough to be enrolled in the fall of 1955.

The nuclear age

The world changed greatly during the decade after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. An “iron curtain” of Soviet control fell across Eastern Europe. A three-year war on the Korean Peninsula between communist and pro-democracy forces resulted in stalemate and cost more than 35,000 American lives. A nuclear arms race was on, with the development of the atomic bomb giving way to pursuit of the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the one that flattened Hiroshima. And in hearing rooms in the U.S. Senate and in the editorial pages of American newspapers, attempts to thwart communism blossomed into a full-blown “red scare” that infected everyday life.

The race for nuclear supremacy and heightened fears about the spread of communism led to Oppenheimer’s undoing.

As the nation’s foremost scientist, and a leading voice in the fledgling Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer was against expanding the nation’s nuclear arsenal. He lobbied to end research into the hydrogen bomb — then referred to as the “Super” — and urged international oversight of nuclear weapons. Those views placed him afoul of hawks in Congress and U.S. military leadership, as well as President Harry Truman, who rejected Oppenheimer’s advice. They also led the FBI to reopen an Oppenheimer file that was started before the war because of his friendships with and connections to communists in academia.

In late 1953, an aide on the congressional committee overseeing nuclear arms sent a letter to the FBI claiming that “more probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” The resulting uproar prompted the government to conduct a security investigation into Oppenheimer. On June 1, 1954, after 19 days of closed testimony, the inquiry found that Oppenheimer was in fact loyal to his country but that his testimony in the hearings had been “less than candid” and that his views against developing the hydrogen bomb “had an adverse effect on recruitment of scientists and the progress of the scientific effort.”

The board voted to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, denying him access to the nation’s nuclear research and secrets, and effectively ending his influence on the matter. The father of the atomic bomb, a hero of American science, was relegated to exile in academia.

That’s where the Principal’s Visiting Fellows Committee and one of its members, Michael Tennican ’56, found him in 1955.

Inviting discourse

The idea of embedding a VIP — a “visiting fireman” in popular parlance — at Exeter belonged to the editorial board of The Exonian. The students pitched the program to Principal William Saltonstall in 1954. “Under the Visiting Fellows Plan,” the newspaper reported, “noted figures in fields such as history, literature, and the arts would spend from one to two weeks or perhaps more at PEA, giving lectures, visiting classes and most important, talking informally with boys.”

The choice of Oppenheimer was ambitious to say the least. He had made few public appearances after his security clearance was revoked. Only a month before Exeter’s invitation, the president of the University of Washington canceled a plan for Oppenheimer to deliver a series of lectures there. The resulting upheaval led the state of Washington to outlaw the Communist Party and require all government employees to take a loyalty oath.

“The committee as a whole was very much aware of the controversy surrounding Oppenheimer’s public stance and considered whether that controversy counseled against inviting him to Exeter,” Tennican recalls. “I think that all of us concluded that his cautions against nuclear weapons were well worth consideration and that Exeter students were plenty strong enough to weigh his arguments against contrary views, however loud.”

Saltonstall extended the formal invitation to Oppenheimer in a letter dated March 11, 1955: “For some time now, we have been discussing the possibility of inviting to the school for a week or two a Visiting Fellow. We already have many guest speakers during the year, but in every case, they come, deliver their speeches, and in a day or two are on their way again.

“It is the very strong desire of our students and faculty that we try to persuade one or two people a year to stay for a longer period of time in order that men and boys will have more of an opportunity to talk with them without a feeling of pressure. … Is it possible that you would be able to come to Exeter sometime this spring as the first Visiting Fellow?”

A month passed before Oppenheimer replied. “Dear Mr. Saltonstall. Thank you for your good letter of March 11th. I am delighted by your plan … and touched and grateful that you should have invited me. … I should like very much to accept.”

Crowded schedules led the visit to be delayed until the following fall, when it was decided that a week in mid-November worked best. In the days ahead of Oppenheimer’s arrival, Saltonstall suggested a “flexible” itinerary that included “meetings with mathematics and scientific societies, the board of the school paper and perhaps one or two of the other student organizations; discussions with faculty in the Math, Science and History departments”; and a closing address “to the boys and the faculty and their wives.”

On Nov. 16, 1955, J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived at Exeter.

Memorable conversations

The visit surpassed Saltonstall’s hopes. “For six days he answered questions in the school’s Lamont Art Gallery,” Newsweek reported. “He was mercilessly grilled about everything from segregation to religion and science, from the Geneva Conference to how to get rid of communists in Tibet.”

The Exonian reported that Oppenheimer spent eight hours a day speaking with students and teachers: “Friday was a typical day. In the morning, the doctor, after having met with the Science Department, held discussions with four science sections. He ate lunch with eight or 10 of the leading science students. After talking with boys for most of the afternoon on the balcony of the Art Gallery, Dr. Oppenheimer had dinner with some of the faculty.”

Ben Page ’58 recalls being among a half-dozen chemistry and physics students who met informally with the scientist. “Oppenheimer was probably the smartest person I have ever encountered, in a lifetime of meeting many smart and interesting people,” says Page, now an emeritus professor at Northwestern University.

The week culminated with Oppenheimer’s remarks to the entire Exeter community on a Monday evening in chapel, the informal name then used for both the physical space in which the community gathered in the Academy Building as well as the gatherings themselves. The speech, by all accounts, was stirring. He wished for every student in attendance “to look into some area of science you do not understand, to have a sense of impotence and darkness about it, to find your way gradually into seeing what it is really all about, of seeing how it ties up with things you have known before, to see its order and its beauty. It is something that you will never forget.”

He told listeners that science is one of the “great testaments to man’s power and his reason, but it is always aware of its limits. He who practices it ought always to be aware that its powers, though great, are limited, that he is not like God, but that he is something special in his own right.”

Oppenheimer pondered aloud what Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would think of the unfathomable strides science had made in the previous 200 years, saying, “They would have been overwhelmed by what the application of science has done to man’s life, by the extent to which it has lengthened his life, made it possible to alleviate and cope with his pain and his trouble, made it possible to extend his powers, made power itself really quite abundant.”

Then he came to the heart of his remarks: three “rather troublesome points” that science had wrought.

First, he said, “science has given us the power to do a lot of things that we should not. … the exercise of this power will produce evil; the exercise of that power is disaster.”

Second, Oppenheimer said, science and politics had diverged in ways Jefferson and Franklin could not have imagined: “Because of the complexity of technical things, competence and expertness are vested in people who have not and probably should not have the authority; and people in authority are ignorant — and not always adequately aware of how ignorant — of the very technical things on which their decisions have to rest.”

Third, he said, he regretted the effect of the complexity and specialization of scientific study: “Men in one field get deep into it, devote their life to it, love it, make maybe some great discoveries in it — and really not know too much of what is going on in another.” The more we learn, the less we may know, in other words.

“I think these changes are here to stay,” he said, “because I cannot imagine anything other than a disaster that will stop the accumulation of knowledge.”

The fallout

Oppenheimer’s address received the highest marks from the students. “His speech was undoubtedly the most thought-provoking and comprehensive that has been given, and perhaps that will be given, during this year,” The Exonian reported.

“Spectacular,” Page recalls.

William “Bo” Wreden ’58 says, “The following day I wrote to my parents, first about my grades and about Thanksgiving plans and then about my impressions” of the address. He wrote, “Oppenheimer gave an excellent speech in Chapel on Monday which had the most applause I have ever heard given to a speaker (and some speakers get an aweful [sic] lot here).”

Saltonstall summarized Oppenheimer’s residency for the Boston Sunday Herald: “His enthusiasm and understanding have been a special joy to me. I’ve been happy with the whole thing.”

Others were less enamored, namely William Loeb III, the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader. He held outsize influence as a conservative kingmaker because of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary every four years. Loeb called Oppenheimer’s appearance “revolting” in an editorial published three days later. Citing the revocation of the scientist’s security clearance and his “friendship with Reds,” Loeb said it was “gross negligence” on the part of Academy leaders to allow “Oppenheimer to ‘stimulate the minds of the students.’ It is worse than that. It is an instance of glaring arrogance and of utter disregard of proprieties, patriotic and otherwise.”

The editorial prompted some letters to Saltonstall condemning the invitation. It also drew stinging retorts from students who wrote letters to the editor of the Union Leader. “If I were you, I should not worry about another’s disregard for patriotic proprieties, but about my own abuse of those liberties which we Americans so dearly cherish in this land of freedom,” wrote C. Bradley Moore ’57.

The students’ letters only further agitated Loeb. He followed with a series of editorials bearing headlines like “Mis-Education at Exeter” and “Arrogance and Illogic at Exeter,” writing “how completely these naïve young men have been taken in by Oppenheimer can be best judged from those letters.”

In a letter to Saltonstall, Oppenheimer lamented the war of words. “I have seen some of the attacks made upon Exeter for inviting me,” he wrote. “I hope they have brought you no serious trouble.”

A Christmas card Katharyn Saltonstall sent to Oppenheimer perhaps best summarized the feelings of her husband and the Exeter community. “What a rich harvest of ideas and sober thoughts your week’s visit provoked and inspired among the boys, the faculty and all of us who were privileged to meet and talk with you,” she wrote. “I remember nothing that has had quite the same impact and influence for good on the community in all the 25 years we have been at Exeter.”

Valued perspective

More visiting fellows followed Oppenheimer through the program, including Pulitzer Prize winners Ralph McGill and Mark Van Doren. In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall spent two days in Exeter. To this day, Exeter benefits from a rich and diverse roster of distinguished visiting speakers and thinkers.

As for Oppenheimer, he was director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1947 to 1966. At the time of his death in 1967, the world’s nuclear cache had reached a peak of more than 31,000 warheads.

Last year, the Biden administration reversed the 1954 decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The Atomic Energy Commission’s investigation was a “flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a news release. “As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”