Rochester’s link to Oscar nominee ‘Oppenheimer’
When the children of David Hill watched Rami Malek deliver one of the key oratorical moments in the hit film “Oppenheimer,” they saw likenesses with their father.
It wasn't just in Malek's choice of glasses and neatly trimmed hair. It was also in the subdued calm with which he spoke to a U.S. Senate committee in a statement that helped torpedo the appointment of an Eisenhower ally who'd worked to blacklist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“The way he spoke to the Senate, that's the way my father would have spoken,” said Dr. Mary Claire Wise, a family medicine specialist who lives in Geneva, Ontario County. Her sister, Sandra Hill, also saw the similarities.
“I thought he actually looked like him,” said Hill, a registered nurse who lives in Rochester. “His diction was right on; it really caught him.”
Because of “Oppenheimer” and Malek, curiosity has grown about just who was David Hill, a renowned physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project's creation of the atomic bomb. He now shows up in articles about the fate of characters in the film, about history that the film gets right or wrong, about the film's characters rated by accuracy.
What’s typically not in the articles is this: Hill lived his final years in Brighton.
Three of his seven children — Wise, Sandra Hill, and Dr. Robert Hill — live in the Rochester region. His wife, the late Mary Shadow Hill, was an individual of significant accomplishment herself, having been elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1948 at a time when female lawmakers were a rarity.
Writing of her talking politics at a country store, Collier’s magazine said of her in 1950: “The men, noticing her sensuous curves, full red lips and wavy brown hair, gave her their attention. The women, attracted by her openhearted friendly manner, also listened.”
Rami Malek plays David Hill in ‘Oppenheimer’
When they first learned of the critically acclaimed film “Oppenheimer,” Hill’s children were intrigued, knowing that their father had crossed paths with Oppenheimer and also worked on the Manhattan Project.
Their interest grew when they heard that their father would be portrayed in the film, which on Tuesday garnered 13 Oscar nominations, more than any other 2023 movie.
“First I found out he was in it,” Wise said. “Then I found out Rami Malek was playing him. I was thinking, ‘This is getting better and better.’”
As a best actor Oscar winner for his role as Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Malek could be expected to have a consequential role throughout “Oppenheimer.” Instead, he appears in only three scenes near the film’s end, with no dialogue until the Congressional testimony.
This may have strayed somewhat from the real David Hill, said his son, Dr. Robert Hill, a biomedical engineer who lives in Brighton. “My father usually had something to say.”
The filmmakers chose to make Hill somewhat of an enigma until his Senate committee appearance. Little of David Hill is revealed in the film, except for the importance of the testimony about Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower’s nominee to head the Commerce Department. But, in the scientific arena, Hill’s life was as substantial as most others portrayed in “Oppenheimer.”
From college to the Manhattan Project
After graduating from California Institute of Technology in 1942 — Oppenheimer taught there while Hill was a student — Hill was recognized for his scientific prowess and acumen. (While at Cal Tech, according to his children, Hill and college buddies pranked a friend by disassembling a Model T then reassembling it in the student’s dorm room. He also successfully sought to have the most class hours with the highest grade point average, Robert said, while still chairing a social committee so he could meet girls from a nearby school.)
After graduation, Hill joined the team of physicist Enrico Fermi at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project work. There he was one of Fermi’s closest assistants.
Fermi, considered the “architect of the nuclear age,” and his team built the world’s first nuclear reactor en route to the A-bomb. The work was so secret that Hill could tell no one, even his family.
“He couldn’t let anybody know what he was doing,” Wise said. “He wasn’t off fighting the war. His mother was very upset with him since he wasn’t off being a soldier like most men.”
In a particularly odd coincidence, Hill and his family once lived in a Fairfield, Connecticut home previously owned by author John Hersey, whose groundbreaking 1946 article for The New Yorker revealed the horrific human consequences of the atomic bombing and fallout upon the residents of Hiroshima. The home was designed by modernist architect Eliot Noyes and was located in the same neighborhood as members of the Du Pont family.
At the dinner table, the Hill children would sometimes raise the issue of John Hersey’s work, but Hill rarely wanted to venture into the discussion.
“If we ever mentioned that it kind of got shut down,” Dr. Robert Hill said.
According to his children, Hill shied from talking of the devastation wrought by the atomic bombs upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. He rationalized the use of the weapon as a lifesaving measure for Americans, one that brought an end to World War II’s Pacific battles. But he never wanted the bomb used again.
Hill was one of the scientists who before Hiroshima signed what was called the Szilárd petition, urging President Truman to seek Japan’s surrender before the bomb was dropped. He would be a founder of what is now the Federation of American Scientists, which has promoted nuclear disarmament.
Only months after Hiroshima, Hill was a lead author among scientists who wrote an article warning of nuclear escalation.
The letter appeared in the October 1945 edition of the then wildly popular Life magazine, which was read weekly by an estimated 10 percent of the American population. (Three months before the letter from Hill and other scientists appeared in Life, Hersey had an article in the magazine about Japanese kamikazes.)
Unearthing Hill’s testimony: Research for ‘Oppenheimer’
David Hill does not appear in the Pulitzer-winning biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the book upon which much of the film “Oppenheimer” is based. Instead, filmmaker Christopher Nolan, the lead creator of “Oppenheimer,” stumbled on Hill’s Congressional testimony while immersed in a deep research dive for his film.
At a 1959 Senate hearing, Hill is called upon to testify about Lewis Strauss, President Eisenhower’s nominee as Commerce Secretary. Strauss held a grudge against Oppenheimer; the two had scrapped over whether the development of atomic weapons should be transparent — after World War II Oppenheimer feared the outcome of nuclear escalation — and whether radioactive isotopes should be transported for medical purposes. Strauss had been central to the efforts to yank Oppenheimer’s security clearance after the Manhattan Project.
While researching the Strauss confirmation hearing, Nolan unearthed Hill’s remarks amid 1,000 pages of hearing testimony. What Malek says in the film are verbatim excerpts straight from the 1959 testimony.
“When I found David Hill’s testimony, where he just got up in front of a Senate committee in front of the whole nation and told the truth about who Lewis Strauss was, that’s an extraordinary moment,” Nolan says in the book, “Unleashing Oppenheimer: Inside Christopher Nolan’s Explosive Atomic-Age Thriller.”
“His testimony was devastating because he literally talked about Strauss’s vengeful nature. These things don’t happen in real life, usually. It is the stuff of artifice.”
After seeing “Oppenheimer,” Robert Hill went online to find the testimony of his father. He was not surprised to read Hill’s direct if low-key condemnation of the character of Strauss, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the film.
“When you read the testimony, my dad does not really delve into his opinion (of Strauss),” Hill said. Instead, David Hill’s testimony, spread over two days, is a fact-based dissection of actions taken by Strauss. There is no character assassination, making it even more eviscerating.
The testimony did not surprise Robert. It was his father who, after all, used an incident when Robert was 5 as a teaching moment.
Robert had stolen money from his father’s dresser drawers, envisioning its use for the purchase of a wealth of bubble gum. When confronted, Robert at first lied. Later, he admitted his actions. His father did not rebuke him for the theft, but instead for the initial dishonesty. Be honest and be true was the message from his father.
There also was more in the testimony that resonated with Robert Hill.
On the first day of testimony only three senators showed up. David Hill questioned whether the hearing could continue since he was unsure whether a quorum was present. This was the kind of eye for minute detail expected from a scientist who’d worked hand-in-glove with others to find ways to split the atom.
It was, Robert Hill said, the kind of question he’d expect from his father.
Mary Hill’s political successes
While in college, Mary Shadow wrote a political science paper about how political machines could control elected offices and be more self-serving than constituent-serving. Her paper analyzed just how such a machine could be beaten, and the kind of candidate it would take.
Mary Shadow, who would later marry David Hill, realized two things with her research: First, her home area in Tennessee was its own political fiefdom with a Republican state lawmaker who seemed intractable. Second, she herself had the exact attributes to beat him — a newcomer with no political baggage or ties who could openly speak to wouldbe constituents and suffer no harm by vigorously challenging the record of the incumbent.
There were also two obstacles: She was a Democrat, and a woman.
But she convinced the Democratic Party to let her run, and in 1948 at the age of 23, she won. Shadow, who grew up farming and also learned to pilot airplanes, was the first unmarried woman elected to the Tennessee legislature.
While in office she built an impressive resume. The state press deemed her one of the most productive lawmakers. She pushed for the elimination of poll taxes as well as the right of women to serve on grand juries. She introduced legislation to jettison a law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in schools; the proposal would pass in a later legislature. Shadow’s district was home to the infamous Scopes trial.
“She was a wonderful woman, always speaking out and doing what was right,” Robert Hill said.
It was also while in the legislature when she met Hill, who was then teaching at Vanderbilt University. The two married, and his nuclear physicist career then took him to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb had been developed for World War II. Mary Shadow Hill made an unsuccessful run for Congress there in a very close race.
Oppenheimer would return to Los Alamos after the Manhattan Project and there, according to Hill’s children, he and Hill would sometimes connect. Robert Hill still has his mother’s security pass from the federal Atomic Energy Commission for entrance into parts of Los Alamos.
Remembering Mary Hill
Stricken with breast cancer, Mary Hill died in 1992. Upon losing his wife, David Hill wrote an 18-page memoriam, highlighting what she’d achieved in life, her plans for books she hoped to write and the impact of the cancer upon her.
The memoriam is matter-of-fact, yet the pain slips through.
“It is never easy to say goodbye to someone that you love and it is exceedingly difficult today,” Hill wrote. “While we must of necessity join in sharing our grief at the separation from a beloved person ... we may also join in celebrating the life that we have known. It is a time for remembering. It is a time for recalling the treasure that we have known, the treasure that we have shared.”
David Hill’s post-Manhattan Project life was replete with different ventures: graduate studies at Princeton; university teaching; creating private companies with devices to better measure radiation as well as another to help enforce patents; work on some of the earliest calculators.
Two of his children, Robert and Mary, came to Rochester for education and employment. He followed them in the early 2000s.
In Rochester, Hill met Sharon Vincent, a Brighton resident who would be his partner for the final years of his life. Vincent recalled how Hill occasionally bicycled by her home as she gardened. At first she didn’t find it unusual — “people ride around the block,” she said — then it began to seem more commonplace. Once, he stopped and they struck up a conversation.
Soon, they were having meals and going to friends’ parties and events together.
At the first meeting, Vincent said she heard Hill’s manner of speech and for some reason “the first thing that came to mind was Princeton.” She did not know then that Princeton was Hill’s graduate studies alma mater. (A Mississippi native, Hill decided early in life to try to lose his Southern accent, his children said.)
Vincent and Hill, who never remarried after the death of Mary, were partners until Hill died in late 2008. He was 89.
Much like Malek’s performance in “Oppenheimer,” his obituary is concise yet hints at so much more to the man and what he accomplished.
“David was a renowned nuclear physicist who worked with Enrico Fermi in building the first nuclear chain reactor,” the 111-word obituary simply states. “He lived a full and active life.”
— Gary Craig is a veteran reporter with the Democrat and Chronicle, covering courts and crime and more. You can reach Craig at gcraig@rocheste.gannett.com.