The True Story Behind His Communist Connections

The Big Picture

• Oppenheimer explores J. Robert Oppenheimer’s potential ties to the Communist Party, suggesting he was at least sympathetic to the movement during the onset of the Cold War.
• Oppenheimer’s relationship with Jean Tatlock introduced him to left-wing communism, but he distanced himself from the movement in the years leading up to World War II.
• While Oppenheimer’s direct affiliation with the Communist Party is not addressed, his wife Kitty disavows the validity of communism, indicating they were verbally distancing themselves from the movement during McCarthyism.

After dominating the Critics Choice Awards and receiving a streaming date on Peacock, Christopher Nolan‘s magnum opus, Oppenheimer, is back at the forefront of conversation. There is a distinct underlying theme throughout the film about whether the father of the atomic bomb and titular character J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) was ever an actual member of the Communist Party. It is leveraged heavily in the movie that he was, at the very least, a not-so-subtle sympathizer with the movement that was gaining steam in the Soviet Union at the same time during the 1940s.

It was the onset of the Cold War, and the United States was already very wary of this new ideology based on the philosophy and writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their seminal work Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. The theory was turned into a reality after the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and championed by Vladimir Lenin and nestled within the Soviet economy later by the iron fist of Joseph Stalin in the decades leading up to when Oppenheimer takes place. There is never a direct acknowledgment regarding his political affiliation, but it is pretty obvious that he had strong opinions about the viability of communism, which was viewed by the United States as the enemy of capitalism and the American way of life.

When and How Did J. Robert Oppenheimer Develop Communist Ties?

When Oppenheimer joined the University of California at Berkeley faculty as a professor in 1929, he quickly turned it into one of the preeminent theoretical physics colleges in the country. Seven years later, the brilliant scientist entered into a relationship with Jean Tatlock who is portrayed by Florence Pugh in the movie. She was a medical student and outspoken supporter of the state-shared, communal wealth economic system that was becoming more prevalent. Before Oppenheimer met Tatlock, he was largely disinterested in politics. He didn’t even own a radio and very rarely read a magazine or newspaper. Physics was his baby, and he couldn’t be distracted by political rigmarole. She was his initial introduction to an alternative, left-wing system and though she was 10 years his junior, she had a great deal of influence over him.

Their relationship was often rocky, as he decided to remain somewhat measured in his political beliefs, and Tatlock was completely on board with the movement. Jean would later introduce Oppenheimer to influential left-wing communists. Even his brother, Frank, was a card-carrying member of the party. It’s hard to imagine that Oppenheimer himself wouldn’t have been a full-fledged member if he wasn’t aware of how much it might cost him in his future scientific pursuits. He began distancing himself from communism in the years leading up to World War II for this reason.

Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer’s Reference to Communism in ‘Oppenheimer’

Whether Oppenheimer was directly tied to the Communist Party is never specifically addressed in Oppenheimer, but there is one pointed reference to the merits of communism. Emily Blunt plays Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, who, herself, was a communist. After Oppenheimer and Tatlock broke up in 1939, he married Kitty a year later. She divorced her third husband and married Oppenheimer the same day. And when she is being questioned in the latter half of the film, she distances herself and her husband from the movement when she addresses the left-wing system by saying, “I used to think there was a distinction between communism and Soviet communism. There isn’t a distinction.” So, by the time she and Oppenheimer were having the screws put to them by the U.S. government and McCarthyism, they were at least verbally disavowing the validity of communism.

Lewis Strauss Believed J. Robert Oppenheimer To Be an “Enemy of the State”

Robert Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. Strauss is the head of the Atomic Energy Commission and came to believe that Oppenheimer’s ties to communism made him dangerous to the security of the United States. He believed the left-leaning scientist to be an “enemy of the state” and sought to revoke his security clearance. Both men were of Jewish heritage, but their paths took a very circuitous route before dovetailing into the genesis of the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project. Both had a hatred of Nazis for obvious reasons, but Strauss embraced capitalism to the fullest, making a fortune in investment banking in the ’20s and early ’30s, and he ended up on the opposite side of Oppenheimer when it came to politics.

When McCarthyism was running rampant across the country in the ’50s, Strauss found himself questioning the integrity of Oppenheimer and was quoted as telling President Dwight D. Eisenhower that he, “could not do the job at the Atomic Energy Commission if Oppenheimer was connected in any way with the program.” Though Oppenheimer was never clearly made out to be a communist, he had his security clearance revoked by Strauss and the AEC in 1954 because of his association with known party members.

Was Oppenheimer Was a Soviet Spy?

Many believed that Robert Oppenheimer was actually a long-time member of the Communist Party of the United States and that it was being kept under wraps in the early ’40s. The theory espouses that he was being used as a Soviet asset to gather intel by the Communist Underground to obtain information on American atomic science and progress on the bomb. But nothing became of this alleged association with what was called the Comintern, an International delegation of communists, up until 1944.

It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who reached an agreement with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on the dismantling of the Comintern. The Russians believed it to be too risky to have such a high-profile American under the microscope and disavowed their relationship with Oppenheimer. Can we just say that this guy had a lot on his plate while we’re at it? For a man that was so incredibly smart, he didn’t exactly go about his business very discreetly. Then again, he probably had no idea how important he would become in all of human history.

Oppenheimer is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

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