the Manhattan project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union. On December 16, 2022, Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of the United States Department of Energy – the successor organization to the AEC – cleared Oppenheimer of the allegations that led to the 1954 revocation of his security clearance. Her statement said that, "In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed." Dramatizations Most popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Edward Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. Many historians have contested this as an oversimplification. Haakon Chevalier fictionalised the affair, and his self-exculpating view of the whole preceding history, in the roman à clef The Man Who Would Be God in 1959; the Oppenheimer-like protagonist was renamed "Dr. Sebastian Bloch". The translations sold well in France, where he had moved by then, and throughout the Soviet bloc. He returned to the topic in Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (1965). The hearing was dramatized in a 1964 play by German playwright Heinar Kipphardt, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer objected to the play, threatening suit and decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved", including its portrayal of him as viewing the bomb as a "work of the devil". His letter to Kipphardt said, "You may well have forgotten Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden and Tokyo. I have not." Of his security hearing, he said: "The whole damn thing was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it." In a response, Kipphardt offered to make corrections but defended the play, which premiered on Broadway in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman in the Oppenheimer role. New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius". Notes References External links J. Robert Oppenheimer Personnel Hearings Transcripts 1982 Audio Interview with Haakon Chevalier by Martin Sherwin Voices