There are few figures in American history as mythologized as J. Robert Oppenheimer — in no small part due to the man himself.
So building a cohesive story about him — the physicist who helped define an entire scientific field so new and arcane it was called “boys’ physics”; the precocious child-genius who delivered a scientific lecture at 12; the prideful, self-promoting “father of the atomic bomb”; the financial supporter of both communists and Jewish victims of the Nazis; the forgetful and rude philanderer whose first media attention came from leaving a woman stranded in a car on a mountain peak as
