Oppenheimer's Close-Up

Was he an American patriot, a communist sympathiser, or the destroyer of worlds?

The blockbuster Oppenheimer movie focuses on two portrayals of J. Robert Oppenheimer. One is the famous physicist known as the architect of the atomic bomb, and the second is a more vulnerable man, maligned as a communist sympathiser.

Then there’s a third portrait. It makes a cameo in the film and it resides right here at the National Portrait Gallery. Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Kai Bird, whose book inspired the movie, takes a look with us.