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"Oppenheimer" won the Oscar for best picture Sunday night.
Carole Johnson Phillips lives quietly on a Wayne County lake in a small family summer home her maternal grandparents bought in 1949.
The bucolic setting underscores her father’s unassuming life, one that contributed to maybe the most important episode in world history.
Few locally have probably ever heard of Phillips’ dad, but Lyall Erskine Johnson was important enough to become a character in a movie a lot of people saw last year — “Oppenheimer.”
His daughter, 79, has already seen it three times.
“I was totally mesmerized, totally mesmerized, and especially watching the characters the first time, watching the actor play him,” Phillips said.
The movie centers on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist who led the American development of the atomic bomb.
“Oppenheimer” is a favorite to win for best picture at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards airing live tonight on ABC.
Johnson played a key background role in the bomb’s development. The Army put him in charge of making sure nobody found out the United States was working on the bomb, and nobody stole the equipment and technical plans for it.
British actor Jack Cutmore-Scott played Johnson in “Oppenheimer.” Nowadays, he plays Freddy Crane, son of Frasier Crane, in the reboot of the popular sitcom, Frasier.
In “Oppenheimer,” his brief scene becomes important later in the movie.
“I was absolutely stunned how well he played my dad. I don't know how he would have known how to play his personality,” Phillips said. “And his body movements. I don't know where he got the information. And I don't know how he knew how to do it. But he did.”
Lyall Johnson, shorter than the man who played him and with straight rather than curly hair, died in 2006 at age 92. He was born more than a century ago in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.
“He just missed getting a scholarship to study engineering at Auburn University,” Phillips said. “Very disappointed that that did not come to pass, he had a series of small jobs in Birmingham, and discovered that a friend of his had found out that there was an opportunity in Washington, D.C.”
The opportunity was to attend law school by night and work as a clerk by day for the 1930s FBI. Still a pretty new agency, J. Edgar Hoover was already its leader.
Lyall Johnson didn’t like Hoover.
“My dad was able to see firsthand what a bleep Hoover was. He was a very cruel man. He treated his agents with great disdain,” Phillips said. “And my father just knew this is not a person he liked or admired.”
He didn’t leave the FBI, but instead signed up to train as an FBI agent. Assigned to Kentucky, he investigated fraud in the Civilian Conservation Corps. The corps was formed in the Great Depression to create jobs. Johnson was assigned to investigate thefts from the corps’ camps.
“And after several cases of this, my father decided this was not the kind of law enforcement he had in mind, that the people who were stealing the food were starving, starving Appalachian people. So my father, after a couple of years, quit,” Phillips said.
Johnson liked his next job, managing an insurance company in Richmond, Virginia, but then the Army drafted him just before World War II began.
For basic training, he went to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he met Harriet Savige, a Drexel University student studying to be a dietician. She grew up in the Peckville section of Blakely, a Lackawanna County borough.
They married after he finished officer candidate school and moved to San Francisco. Not long after that, probably because of his investigative background and because by then he was a lawyer, the Army assigned him to the Manhattan Project.
That was the bomb project’s code name.
“And somewhere in there, they decided my dad was the guy for this job,” Phillips said.
Basically, the job centered on keeping the bomb project a secret and making sure only people loyal to the United States worked on it.
“The job was to design a program with a set of procedures for the security of the personnel, not of the plant, nothing physical, but the personnel, and to secure the hiring, the performance, the friendships, the, you know, all of the surveillance stuff in general intelligence having to do with everybody associated with the project,” Phillips said.
Johnson knew Oppenheimer well and really respected him. In the movie scene, Oppenheimer visits Johnson to report suspicious people seeking to find out details about the bomb’s development, but declines to name his source for the information.
Phillips said her father always understood why.
Years later, Oppenheimer’s enemies used that refusal as a sign of disloyalty to the country and to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance.
“It broke my dad's heart. It broke his heart," Phillips said.
After the war, Johnson worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, which assumed oversight of the nation’s nuclear developments.
One of his bosses there was Lewis Strauss, played in the movie by Robert Downey Jr. Strauss had a major role in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance.
Johnson had no use for Strauss.
“He had to work under Lewis Strauss and … couldn't say anything and couldn't stand the guy and didn't trust him,” Phillips said.
In 1967, Oppenheimer died. He had lived for years with the shame of losing his security clearance.
“And I remember being in the kitchen, in our house in Bethesda, Maryland … when news came over the radio that Oppenheimer had died. My father's shoulders relaxed with that news,” Phillips said. “He had been carrying this in a way that was invisible to everybody for years. But immediately hearing that Oppenheimer was no longer able to suffer, my dad's shoulders relaxed. He was relieved.”
Over the years, Phillips learned many secrets her dad kept hidden — how he helped arrest and imprison Japanese-American families after the Pearl Harbor bombing; a lot of what went into setting up Los Alamos in New Mexico to build the bomb; and how he tailed a suspected Russian spy on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
She learned about the Japanese internments in a college course and asked her dad about it.
“Over time, as things were declassified, my dad was able to reveal more, and he did as he was allowed. And I will say that, from what I understood, I think that movie did a good job of reflecting what I understood to have happened,” Phillips said.
What happened later was the Americans bombed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killing tens of thousands of civilians.
The Japanese refused to surrender and three days later, another bomb fell on Nagasaki, killing many more.
Japan finally surrendered. President Harry Truman, who ordered the bombings, never questioned his decision. Neither did Lyall Johnson.
He understood all along what the bomb would mean.
“Well, they called it the gadget. And they knew it was going to be a really, amazing weapon if it actually came together,” Phillips said. “I think he felt it was a necessary evil. He had no qualms. Talking about it later on, he had no question that the decision to drop the bombs was correct because, he said, a land invasion of Japan would have been extremely costly for everybody involved.”
Years later, a quiet, normal life remained part of keeping the nation’s secrets. To his daughter, two sons, and wife, Johnson was just a father and husband. When he wasn’t busy protecting the nation’s atomic secrets, he organized skits with neighbors, hosted parties and coached his sons in baseball.
“My dad was the coach. My mother brought all the snacks and I was the scorekeeper,” Phillips said.
She wants people to also know about her mother, who isn’t in the movie.
The third time she watched the film, she paid more attention to Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, who knew her husband’s secrets.
Like Harriet Savige Johnson, Kitty Oppenheimer was highly educated, living in a remote place with strict requirements and limited resources and with a preoccupied husband.
“And I thought, that's my mother,” Phillips said.
She plans to watch the Oscars tonight and root for Oppenheimer to win.
“I think the topic is of profound importance in so many ways,” Phillips said. “So that's number one. Number two, I think that (film director) Christopher Nolan, and everybody involved did an outstanding job in every way in making the movie.”
She thinks her father and everyone who contributed to World War II and the fight against the Nazis and their allies deserves an Oscar, too.
“I really don't think that people in the United States today have any inkling of the fact that it was not a foregone conclusion that we would win, especially in the early days,” Phillips said. “The Axis powers were clearly very determined … We had to fight, we had to do what we had to do.”
