The covers of Real TIME in Oppenheimer – News Block

Oppie would round up a handful of his favorite students, drive them in his big, fast car to a quiet banquet at San Francisco restaurants like Amelio’s and Jack’s. Good conversation was cheap, but dinner was always expensive; it was Oppie who picked up the checks.

A more fluent conversationalist than in the shy old days, the dashing bachelor Oppie was highly sought after as a guest at cocktail parties and dinner parties. He hosted bachelor dinners, serving his own expertly cooked hot Mexican dishes, and mixed a mediocre Martini with lab precision.

After a late party, he would often spend most of the night working on some complicated problem (“How much sleep do I need? This is like what Mrs. Lenin said about meat: ‘When we’re hungry, we cook it for five minutes; when we’re not hungry, two hours'”). Once, on a date with a student in the Berkeley hills, he felt the need to solve a physics problem, got out of the car to wander around and got lost in the night. On another occasion, emboldened by his own martinis, Oppenheimer decided to phone a girl he “knew” and discovered that he couldn’t remember her name; all he remembered was that her address was a power of seven.

Because it is the personality, and not the competence, of Lewis Strauss that is clearly at stake when he approaches the crisis of his career. Strauss, due to the extraordinary ingredients of his composition, is someone who arouses superlatives of praise and reproach, admiration and disgust. In the eyes of his friends, he is brilliant, devoted, courageous and, in his more relaxed moments, utterly charming. His enemies consider him arrogant, evasive, suspicious, prideful, and an excessively tough fighter. (“He has more elbows than an octopus”).

…A vital key to Lewis Strauss’s character is a perfectionism that still seems to bother him at an age when it could have softened more. It shows in the studied elegance of his tailoring, in a precision of word that comes naturally to him from long habit but seems a bit affected to hostile ears, and above all in a fierce reluctance to admit his mistakes, however human and understandable they may have been. Part of his perfectionism stems from a feeling of being an outsider. As a Jew, he has sometimes felt the stinging edges of anti-Semitism (and again last week, that ugly term popped up). For all his wealth (he’s a millionaire) and his intellect (even his enemies admit he’s smart), Strauss seems unable to live in his own mind the awareness that he never went to college and started out as a shoe peddler.