---
title: "J. Robert Oppenheimer"
chunk: 4/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:07:13.473219+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

He didn't have Sitzfleisch, "sitting flesh," when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn't have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic.

== Private and political life ==
Oppenheimer's mother died in 1931, after which he grew closer to his father, who, though still residing in New York, became a frequent visitor to California. When his father died in 1937, leaving $392,602 (equivalent to $8.6 million in 2024) to be divided between Oppenheimer and his brother Frank, Oppenheimer promptly wrote a will bequeathing his estate to the University of California to fund graduate scholarships.

=== Politics ===
During the 1920s, Oppenheimer remained uninformed about world affairs. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or popular magazines and only learned of the Wall Street crash of 1929 while he was on a walk with Ernest Lawrence six months after the crash occurred. He once remarked that he never cast a vote until the 1936 presidential election. From 1934 on, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. In 1934, he earmarked three percent of his annual salary—about $100 (equivalent to $2,400 in 2025)—for two years to support German physicists fleeing Nazi Germany. During the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, he and some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Serber, attended a longshoremen's rally.
After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Oppenheimer hosted fundraisers for the Spanish Republican cause. In 1939, he joined the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which campaigned against the persecution of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany. Like most liberal groups of the era, the committee was later branded a communist front.
Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the 1930s or 1940s, including his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Kitty, Jean Tatlock, his landlady Mary Ellen Washburn, and several of his graduate students at Berkeley. Whether Oppenheimer was a party member has been debated. Cassidy states that he never openly joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), but Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev state that he "was, in fact, a concealed member of the CPUSA in the late 1930s". From 1937 to 1942, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group", which fellow members Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths later said was a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a file on Oppenheimer in March 1941. It recorded that he attended a meeting in December 1940 at Chevalier's home that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary, William Schneiderman, and its treasurer, Isaac Folkoff. The FBI noted that Oppenheimer was on the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which it considered a communist front organization. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency.
When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast." Years later, he claimed that he did not remember writing this, that it was not true, and that if he had written anything along those lines, it was "a half-jocular overstatement". He was a subscriber to the People's World, a Communist Party organ, and testified in 1954, "I was associated with the communist movement."
In 1953, Oppenheimer was on the sponsoring committee for a conference on "Science and Freedom" organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist cultural organization.
At his 1954 security clearance hearings, Oppenheimer denied being a member of the Communist Party but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of communism's goals but is not willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist Party apparatus. According to biographer Ray Monk: "He was, in a very practical and real sense, a supporter of the Communist Party. Moreover, in terms of the time, effort and money spent on party activities, he was a very committed supporter."