The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Robert Oppenheimer is endlessly fascinating. His life engaged the most profound issues of our time: the revolution in physics, the Great Depression, the Popular Front, the development of nuclear weapons, and the corrosive influence of the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. Lindsey Banco expands our understanding of his influence by investigating his ‘meaning’ to our political culture. It is another important contribution to the Oppenheimer Library.”—Martin J. Sherwin, coauthor, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

“The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer is an intriguing book about an important issue and an equally important person. It complements and builds on existing scholarship on Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb, and is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in Cold War America, the Manhattan Project, and the enigmatic figure that is Oppenheimer.”—Allan M. Winkler, Miami University of Ohio

“Oppenheimer has always been the ghostly presence behind nuclear culture in the United States, and Banco has done him a great service by thinking about him in all his ambivalent and paradoxical brilliance. Far afield from conventional biographies, The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer explores the man and the idea of the man as a series of dualities, showing how a retiring physicist who went to the desert wound up setting the terms for so many aspects of postwar culture. A unique contribution to Cold War studies.”—Steven Belletto, author, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives