But after months of wiretaps the FBI had learned “nothing to confirm their suspicions that the young psychiatrist was Oppenheimer’s (or anyone’s) conduit for passing information to the Soviets,” as biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a memo recommending that her phone be wiretapped because she had become “the paramour of an individual possessed of vital secret information regarding this nation’s war effort.” Unlike Oppenheimer, she had not given up her Communist ties at this point. After this visit with Tatlock, that surveillance extended to her too. Oppenheimer was under “near-total surveillance” during his time at Los Alamos, with the government never letting go of their suspicions about his Communist ties. Tatlock, a Chaucer scholar who was impressed, as so many other people were, with Oppenheimer’s literary knowledge. Played by Florence Pugh in the film, Tatlock is described in American Prometheus as “a shapely woman with thick, dark curly hair, hazel-blue eyes, with heavy black lashes and naturally red lips some thought she looked ‘like an old Irish princess.’” She did first meet Oppenheimer at a party, as depicted in the film, but he was also friendly with her father, John S.P. Their relationship, a key part of Oppenheimer’s personal and also political life, is also a major element of Oppenheimer-which even at three-hours long still doesn’t have quite enough time to get into everything that’s fascinating about Jean Tatlock. He’s talking about Jean Tatlock, a medical student and eventual psychiatrist who was romantically involved with Oppenheimer for years. That quote, from Robert Oppenheimer’s close friend Robert Serber, opens a chapter in the biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.
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