The acronym stands for Anti-Anti-Communist. If you take the AAC view, you are certain that communism should be treated as not that big a deal. It’s those who tried to combat it who were a big deal–crazy, or malevolent, or both. This view reins supreme in Hollywood. Our surprise blockbuster biopic of the summer, Oppenheimer, is the biggest AAC venture to come along in years.
Who could have predicted that the story of the physicist in charge of the secret nuclear lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Second World War would be a hit? Getting exciting cinema out of scientists scribbling on chalkboards for three years is a tribute to filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s storytelling abilities, and to his players’ wonderful acting.
Many biographies have been written of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Nolan worked off of the one written in 2005 by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It was a truly AAC choice.
In the upcoming issue of Commentary magazine, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes compare the real Oppenheimer with Bird/Sherwin and with Nolan. They liked the biopic, but they correct the record about a problem that the picture carries over from the book. Was Oppenheimer’s denial that he ever belonged to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) truthful? The hearing held on his security clearance in 1954 ignited a searing public controversy. Film fodder, for sure. However, write Klehr and Haynes,
Even when Bird and Sherwin published their award-winning biography in 2005, there was already abundant evidence that Oppenheimer had indeed once been a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Their efforts to explain away or obfuscate the clear evidence that Oppenheimer lied under oath about it have been further eroded by material that has emerged from Russian archives since. But to this day, Bird (Sherwin died in 2021) has not responded to that evidence, and the writer-director Christopher Nolan did not look deeper into the question when he crafted his screenplay.
The movie seems true to the 1940s and 50s in several respects, but not that one. The authorities had good reason to worry that Oppenheimer might pass secrets to Soviet Russia to assist its atomic program. As Klehr and Haynes point out, the memoirs and the interview recollections of several of Oppenheimer’s contemporaries, and the archives of the former Soviet Union, belie his denial. As they wrote in Spies, their 2009 book, the physicist was an active communist until about 1942, but he fell away from the movement. When he did, he helped the government weed out communist scientists from the bomb-building Manhattan Project, the main site of which was at Los Alamos.
The scene in the movie where Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) rebuffs the espionage invitation of his Berkeley professor friend (Jefferson Hall) is accurate. In real life, his former comrades circled around the Los Alamos chief and tried unsuccessfully to enlist him.
Quoting from Klehr and Haynes again, page 58 of Spies:
With what is known in 2008, it is clear that in 1954 Oppenheimer was not a security risk . . . . But those making the decision in 1954 did not have the benefit of what is now known. What they had to contend with was clear evidence that Robert Oppenheimer had in the past and in sworn testimony before the Atomic Energy Commision knowingly lied about his past relationship to the Communist Party.
Interestingly, there were comrades who didn’t get the memo about his changed politics. “As late as 1945,” Klehr and Haynes write in Commentary, an FBI wiretap picked up CPUSA members meeting in the Bay Area, where Oppenheimer taught, and one communist “state[d] that Oppenheimer was a party member and another call[ed] him ‘one of our men.’”
In the movie, we are not shown any good reason why this brilliant and effective leader’s security clearance should be in jeopardy now that the Soviet Union has succeeded Nazi Germany and imperial Japan as the main threat to the free world. It’s presented as a gratuitous ordeal. The cinematic Oppenheimer is a man who mostly floats above politics, only he gets trapped by 1. having a brother (played by Dylan Arnold) and other relatives, as well as friends and colleagues, who are current or former Soviet-sympathizing communists; and 2. the small-mindedness of Republicans, especially one, a man named Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), who bears him a personal grudge. (The real Strauss, as per the admirably non-AAC historian Gregg Herken, had a vindictive streak but set himself against Oppenheimer not out of personal pique, but because the two clashed on nuclear policy.)
Does Christopher Nolan’s film survive these falsifications and omissions? Well, I can say that despite its being too long–three hours!–I’d sit through Oppenheimer again any time. It is entertaining. I appreciated how it brought back a theme that Hollywood has all but discarded: our country’s amazing feats under pressure. This feat is double-edged, to put it mildly. The bomb’s moral dilemma is handled well, and with potent artistry.
The resort to the usual Hollywood AAC attitude might be considered compensatory. As in, yeah, we’ll go ahead and make a basically pro-American picture conveying the brilliance, resourcefulness, and resoluteness of the U.S. effort to defeat the Axis Powers–but don’t think us so unsophisticated that we’d side with the hysterics who saw Reds under the beds.
Painting the Culture Red 
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