Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  Instead, he turned to the kinds of experiments he always enjoyed: the fusion of science and politics. His work to gain civilian control of atomic energy, thought Szilard, was the logical first step toward the more critical task of creating an atomic-control scheme for the whole planet; what the scientists called humanity’s fateful choice between “one world or none.”

  But Hoover and his aides found Szilard’s actions so threatening to America’s “national security” that they and other federal agents kept him under surveillance long after he left the Manhattan Project in June 1946. Annoyed by this, Szilard dared to make it amusing, sometimes jumping in and out of taxis or skipping from restaurants and drugstores through a side door when he sensed he was being followed. Szilard once told physicist Harold Agnew that he wanted all records of his fingerprints returned from the Manhattan Project, because, Agnew recalled, “he saw no reason why he should be handicapped if he decided to lead a life of crime.”2 But as cold-war paranoia spread through the land and onto college campuses, as “liberals” and “internationalization” became more suspect, Szilard’s response—humor and ridicule—only prompted more FBI attention. Being naturally contrary, Szilard continued to fight for the issues he cherished: nuclear arms control and regard for the planet’s population and resources abroad, individual freedom and economic equity at home.

  Szilard’s first struggle after leaving the Manhattan Project was more mundane, however. He had to find a job. He thought of the University of Chicago’s new Institute of Physics, but his relationship with its director, Enrico Fermi, had not been easy before or during the war and had been strained further by disagreements that spring over the scientists’ lobbying. Privately, Fermi let his university colleagues know that he did not want Szilard at the institute,3 and it was September before help came—from his friend and admirer university chancellor Robert M. Hutchins. A maverick himself, Hutchins was eager to keep Szilard on campus and created a joint appointment ideally suited to his eclectic interests. Szilard would join the faculty as a half-time professor of biophysics in the new Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics and a half-time adviser to the Office of Inquiry into the Social Aspects of Atomic Energy, a new interdisciplinary project in the Division of Social Sciences. With no teaching responsibilities for his above-average $6,000-a-year salary, this was, Szilard later said, “one of the best positions that exist at any university in the United States.” Yet he would soon come to find even this arrangement too confining.4

  His newfound financial security freed Szilard’s mind for other wonders— and other worries. Besides his arms control and biology, Szilard brainstormed and wrote about whatever topics or problems seemed ripe at the moment—racial prejudice, high school education, global inflation, high-fat cheese. And yet this new freedom to think spontaneously raised an old problem: He could concentrate on anything for a while but on nothing for very long. The mental agility that led Szilard to make surprise connections among a dozen disciplines also lured him from making sustained contributions to any one.

  “Theoretically I am supposed to divide my time between finding what life is and trying to preserve it by saving the world,” he wrote to physicist Niels Bohr in 1950. “At present the world seems to be beyond saving, and that leaves me more time free for biology.”5 For Szilard the postwar years were both giddy and frightful, focusing and scattering his energies, exciting and exhausting his gallivanting mind. He moved about impulsively by train and plane, often on the road more than at “home” in his room at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club, sometimes renting hotel rooms in two cities at once in his fervent quest to find new people and places that might somehow embody his rush of fresh ideas. “Things meant little to him,” recalled law professor Hans Zeisel, a friend since the 1920s who was his neighbor at the Quadrangle Club in the 1950s. “Home was anyplace where his intellectual interests were at the moment.”6

  An itinerant scholar who had for years kept his bags packed for hasty escape, Szilard cared little about his surroundings. His university office was as gray and spare as the boxy science building that housed it. A few books leaned and lay on the shelves. A few files slumped in cabinet drawers. No pictures, photos, or parchment degrees graced the walls. And all the records, important letters, newspaper clips, and other “nuggets” he wished to preserve Szilard mailed to Gertrud (Trude) Weiss, his longtime friend in New York.

  Impulsive travels and his very diverse half-time appointments kept Szilard from having a full-time secretary, so he hired or cajoled help any way he could. When in Chicago, Szilard turned most often to Norene Mann, a lively and patient veteran of the Met Lab who had been physicist James Franck’s secretary since 1941. She opened Szilard’s mail when he was away and took his dictation in her free moments. Some evenings Szilard walked to Mann’s apartment on Maryland Avenue to dictate letters and papers; some days he sat at her desk or at Franck’s. For this assistance Szilard paid her with sporadic checks and bribed her with flowers, ice cream cones, or—when her work became exhausting—use of his room at the nearby Quadrangle Club for a midday nap. She remembers Szilard as “extraordinarily generous” but also “exasperating” for his frantic dictation and urgently scribbled editing on papers, draft after draft.

  Once annoyed that Szilard had ignored her advice on punctuation, Mann sighed and grimaced. He paused, sensing her frustration. “If you stop for a minute. I’d like to tell you a funny story,” he said in a grinning attempt to break the rising tension. Szilard also enjoyed performing small favors for Mann, such as taking her letters to the mailbox. And when her seven-year-old granddaughter sloshed into the office from school one day, soaked from a spring downpour, Szilard took the girl’s hand. “You come with me,” he said, flashing an avuncular grin as he led her to his biology laboratory and stood her in front of a hot-air vent to dry.7

  Away from Chicago, Szilard hired stenographers wherever he stopped: scribbling notes on planes and trains, dictating letters and article drafts in paper-strewn hotel rooms, then “filing” his papers in small suitcases that he bought in transit and stashed in friends’ and relatives’ closets.8 Yet from this frantic thought and motion came some original results. Szilard helped to frame the emerging field of molecular biology by arranging informal fortnightly seminars around the Midwest with Joshua Lederberg, James Watson, and Salvador Luria as a way to speed information exchange in a rapidly developing field. And he drafted plans for a research center that addressed both scientific and social concerns (eventually realized as the Salk Institute for Biological Studies), his way to foster the blend of reason and imagination that energized his own restless life. Also, Szilard helped create new forums for arms control, such as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

  As in the past, Szilard pursued his urgent activities by working mainly alone; publicly in the shadows of science and world affairs, privately in the contours of his potent and playful mind. And, as in the past, this fumbling genius amused, annoyed, and bewildered the very people he tried to help and who, in turn, might have helped him stabilize his vagabond life. He enjoyed generating ideas that people in power might use and spouted advice to anyone who would listen. But he shunned the commitments and perseverance needed to join and flourish in the scientific and foreign policy “establishment.”

  Indeed, Szilard’s quirky and creative life left many who knew him wondering if he were serious—a question he sometimes had to ask himself. On a live, nationally broadcast radio discussion about the hydrogen bomb in 1950, he stunned fellow scientists Hans Bethe, Harrison Brown, and Frederick Seitz by proposing that the new weapon—if built—should be made so dreadful that no nation would dare use it. His proposal led to the idea of the cobalt bomb, later a model for the doomsday machine in the film Dr. Strangelove.9

  Often lonely and forlorn, Szilard gradually began to appreciate after the war the uses and pleasures of sociability. Shy behind his bombastic quips and wisecracks, Szilard savored the friendly lunchtime conversations at the round table
s in the Quadrangle Club’s dining room, yet often returned there to eat his dinner alone: reading, scribbling notes, or simply staring across the huge, dark room. Even when dining with friends, he could be alone with his thoughts. After working late at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists one night, Szilard invited editor Katharine Way to join him for dinner at the club, then added: “But bring a book. . . . I have to do some thinking.”10

  Szilard cared about the lives of his colleagues, showering them with heartfelt advice even as he hid his own pleasures and pains. In this turbulent period he married Trude Weiss, although they would not live together for another decade. And while a nomad himself, Szilard helped create structures and systems that gave permanence to the work of others, institutions that endured even as he pushed on to other ripe ideas. For after years of trying to master the effects of his genius, Szilard finally discovered in the postwar years that solitary struggles, no matter how brilliantly conceived or cleverly executed, are seldom as effective as enterprises shared.

  To appreciate Szilard’s frantic creativity, consider what he did in the summer of 1946, after he returned to Chicago from lobbying for the McMahon bill in Washington. First he drafted an essay on racial security, suggesting ways to guarantee the rights of racial minorities under a world government. Next he drafted a plan to organize the proposed National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF should sponsor research on “unrecognized problems,” he wrote, ignoring those already known; and it should pay scientists $12,000 a year to study whatever interests them, assuring the “leisure” needed for creative science.11 Then he boarded a train for his first visit to California, where he rewrote scenes portraying himself and Albert Einstein in an M-G-M film about the A-bomb, The Beginning or the End. After three days around the movie lot in Culver City, Szilard flew to New York to lobby for Bernard Baruch’s American proposal for international control of atomic energy at the UN Atomic Energy Commission.12 Then he returned to Chicago and flew off to a conference on the atom’s international control at Estes Park, Colorado, a visit that sparked his love of the Rocky Mountains.

  Back at the University of Chicago, Szilard turned his mind to a sweeping philosophical review of the A-bomb’s creation in a public lecture entitled “Creative Intelligence and Society: The Case of Atomic Research, the Background in Fundamental Science.” In bursts of thought, with each paragraph just a sentence or two, he dramatized the findings and mistakes that had led nuclear science to its present, fateful condition.13

  Beginning with Becquerel’s 1896 discovery of radioactivity, Szilard described how Madame Curie isolated radium. His speech was exuberant, his delivery pithy and direct.

  Transmuting one chemical element to another chemical element was, as you

  know, the unsolved problem of the alchemists.

  But Madame Curie, who isolated radium, could not pride herself to be a successful alchemist.

  She did not produce radium.

  She merely separated it chemically. . . .

  So, in spite of this new discovery, God remained the first and only successful alchemist.

  Simply, abruptly, dramatically, Szilard spoke on, leading his audience through vivid descriptions of alpha particles and on to Ernest Lawrence and his cyclotron. Szilard first made public his recollection of thinking up the nuclear chain reaction while crossing London’s Southampton Row in 1933. He credited H. G. Wells’s 1914 science-fiction story The World Set Free as the source that prompted this discovery, dramatizing the connection between literature and science. And he praised Princeton physicist Louis A. Turner for recognizing that nonfissionable uranium238 might be converted to fissionable plutonium. Then came this stirring conclusion.

  The first use of plutonium, as you know, was in the form of a bomb which destroyed a city.

  The next use of plutonium might be the same again.

  With the production of plutonium carried out on an industrial scale during the war, the dream of the alchemists came true and now we can change, at will, one element into another.

  This is more than Madame Curie could do.

  But while the first successful alchemist was undoubtedly God, I sometimes wonder whether the second successful alchemist may not have been the Devil himself.

  Szilard’s return to Chicago in the summer of 1946 and his move back to the Quadrangle Club restored his favored morning routine of soaking for an hour or two in his bathtub to dream up ideas and schemes that he might ponder and proclaim throughout the day. His next-door neighbor at the club, Hans Zeisel, knew Szilard’s routine well and noticed after a day or two that he was not coming down for meals. Yet he heard Szilard’s bath running each morning for those long and thoughtful soaks. A week passed. Then two. Finally, Szilard appeared at breakfast, smiling.

  “Where were you, friend?” Zeisel asked.

  “Working on a problem,” he said with obvious delight. “I had a theory. But it was all wrong. It didn’t lead anywhere.”14

  Many of Szilard’s proposals didn’t lead anywhere, but he found such pleasure in thought itself—in chasing ideas to their limits, and beyond— that he seldom cared if his speculations were right or wrong. To him, disproving a hypothesis was just as important as proving it. Szilard “was as generous with his ideas as a Maori chief with his wives,” said microbiologist Jacques Monod, who acknowledged winning a Nobel Prize with a concept Szilard had pressed on him. Szilard “was too rich in ideas, whether scientific or political, too joyfully familiar with all of them; he derived too much sheer pleasure in playing with them as a child with his toys ever uniquely to pursue only one of them, aggressively reiterating, illustrating, and defending it, as most of us do.”15

  Theories and ideas were made in such earnest, as so many new ways to save the world, that they claimed Szilard’s serious attention even when they seemed farfetched. In September 1946, Szilard turned his mind to economics, writing “Market Economy Free from Trade Cycles,” his plan to diminish inflation and reconcile the different values of national currencies. Curbing trade cycles was an essential step, he argued, toward establishing the world government needed to control the atom. His scheme called for a two-currency system (red and green dollars) to stabilize prices for different kinds of transactions.16

  University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman often played tennis on courts behind the Quadrangle Club, and there Szilard assaulted him with his ideas. Friedman came to expect a “sophisticated economic proposition” whenever they met: by the courts, over lunch in the club, or elsewhere around the campus. He found Szilard’s brainstorming “fascinating,” often “clever,” sometimes “insightful,” always amusing, and “most surprising, it was usually correct. . . .” Friedman saw that Szilard focused intuitively on issues and problems then at the heart of the profession’s debates, often reworking contemporary details with arcane statistical techniques.17 Szilard also buttonholed economist Jacob Marschak, a friend from Berlin and Oxford who thought that Szilard was “prophetically aware” of economic trends without following the field’s literature.18

  The two-currency scheme was proposed to eliminate boom-and-bust trade cycles in market economies. Money serves two different purposes, Szilard reasoned: spending and saving. By having green dollars for spending and red dollars for saving and enforcing a floating exchange rate between them, the economy would have more flexibility than with a single currency, making it easier for both governments and markets to respond to trade cycles. Szilard reworked this scheme in 1948 and again in 1949, by then just for fun because there was no longer much hope for a world government.

  Colleagues and friends soon learned that even Szilard was not always sure when his ideas were serious and when they were playful. Often they were both. “My Trial as a War Criminal,” written in 1947, was Szilard’s bitter reaction when the Justice Department censured his efforts to start arms-control discussions with Soviet scientists and to urge US-Soviet peace talks in an open letter to Stalin. Yet in the story, Szilard also revealed his playful-serious spirit by rejecting
the chance to move to Russia: “How many years would it take me to get a sufficient command of Russian,” he wondered, “to be able to turn a phrase and to be slightly malicious without being outright offensive?”19

  Away from his Quadrangle Club routine, Szilard found a bracing outlet for his many ideas in the Colorado Rockies, where, he said, “the lack of air stimulated thought.”20 Szilard’s friend Trude moved from New York City to Denver in 1950 to teach public health at the University of Colorado Medical School, and about that time he also hoped for a post there.

  Once in the mountains, Szilard shed his customary dark suit for a tan gabardine zippered jacket. Sometimes he even tugged off his necktie and rolled up his shirtsleeves. On one outing he wrapped his head in a red bandanna and sat, Buddha-like, on a flat rock in a field of wildflowers. But he never relaxed enough to change his black dress shoes from the city, and on bright days he donned a floppy canvas hat, dark glasses, and a tan raincoat kept buttoned to his neck—all to protect his skin from the sun. Now much heavier than when he enjoyed daylong hikes in the Swiss Alps in the 1930s, Szilard only strolled on the wooded paths around his lodging or rode by automobile through the steep passes of the Rocky Mountain National Park along the Continental Divide. When he left the car, it was to step into a meadow, sit on a boulder or tree stump, or settle in a folding beach chair at the edge of the dusty road.

  Much of Szilard’s time in Colorado centered around a log cabin that he and Trude rented on the Stead Ranch near Estes Park or in the ranch’s large inn, where the guests dined. Often Szilard sat in a corner of the inn’s lobby or in the small reading room, there to peruse books and magazines, to scribble rapidly on a yellow legal pad, or to stare away in thought, oblivious to the people strolling and chatting about him. Sometimes his eyes closed as his mind played and pondered, giving the appearance he was napping when he was really only “botching.”