By letter and telephone Szilard repeatedly told Trude to “cheer up” as she complained about her own depression and mood swings. Still, their letters from this period seem preoccupied with illnesses, with both physical and mental pain.46
By 1955, when alternatives to his Chicago professorship failed to open up, Szilard turned harshly dour and began to worry about his own fate as well as mankind’s. Physicist Victor Weisskopf learned of Szilard’s poor health and despair and arranged some pleasant publicity to cheer up his longtime friend: On May 18, 1955, the US Patent Office awarded the late Enrico Fermi and Szilard a patent for their codesign of the first nuclear reactor.47
But despite public acclaim, Szilard’s own sense of gloom only deepened in 1955 with the illness and death of the two men most important in his life: Albert Einstein and his father. In a sense, Einstein was Szilard’s intellectual father, a mentor and authority figure he had turned to for advice and aid throughout his adult life. Beginning in 1921, Einstein had endorsed Szilard’s novel doctoral thesis, devised and shared patents, wrote recommendations for immigration and employment, vouched for the Bund and other altruistic schemes, three times signed letters to President Roosevelt about the A-bomb, and served as figurehead for the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which Szilard helped create. In 1954, Szilard had asked Einstein to promote his application for a research post at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and as late as the spring of 1955, Szilard had drafted for Einstein a cover letter to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, urging him to read Szilard’s views on the US-Chinese dispute over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu—at the time, Szilard feared the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons against China.48
On April 11, five days after sending Szilard’s letter to Nehru, Einstein signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a joint statement with British philosopher Bertrand Russell calling on the world’s scientists to unite in their efforts for nuclear disarmament and peace. It was Einstein’s last correspondence. The next day severe pains and cramps interrupted his work; then he collapsed from a chronic heart ailment. On April 18, at the age of seventy-six, he died at a hospital in Princeton.49
Interviewed about Einstein on national television that day, Szilard was grim when recalling a visit shortly after Hiroshima. “‘You see now,’ Einstein said to me, ‘that the ancient Chinese were right. It is not possible to foresee the results of what you do. The only wise thing to do is to take no action—to take absolutely no action.’”50
At the time of Einstein’s death, Szilard’s ninety-four-year-old father, Louis, lay ill at the Saw Mill River Convalescent Home in Yonkers, New York, near where his son Bela and family lived. Louis Szilard had main tained robust health for most of his life, but by 1953 had developed vitamin deficiencies and a heart condition. Leo’s visits were always brief but apparently intense, and in his final years Louis Szilard wrote that he was pleased with his life, proud of his sons’ achievements, and grateful that the United States had offered them all such opportunities. Leo and his father were always formal with each other, but when he died, Leo became upset and emotional, then left the room to hide his feelings from his brother, Bela, and his sister, Rose.51
Szilard could not conceal his depression from his good friend Eva Zeisel, niece of the Polanyi brothers, wife of a University of Chicago law professor, and a confidant since they first met in Berlin in 1927. A sculptor and ceramic designer, in 1955 she lived next to her mother, Laura Polanyi Striker, in a small fifth-floor apartment at 431 Riverside Drive in New York City. Mrs. Striker had run an avant-garde kindergarten in Budapest early in the century (writer Arthur Koestler was a pupil) and caused a scandal when she had the children dance naked to Beethoven. In later life she had researched and written an account of Capt. John Smith’s expedition to Hungary, made a few years before his celebrated journey to Virginia. Szilard often attended tea at Mrs. Striker’s, a rambling apartment with Biedermeier furnishings, but he usually just sat in an armchair amid the lively conversations, stared into the distance, and said nothing. To lift Szilard’s spirits, Eva sometimes walked across the Columbia campus to the King’s Crown Hotel, where he lived, and sat in the lobby with him, chatting in the eerie light cast by a large fishbowl. Once or twice a week, at about suppertime, Szilard turned up at her door. Eva Zeisel always invited him in, and after insisting, “I’m not hungry,” Szilard always agreed to stay. Over dinner Szilard said little, appeared lonely and preoccupied, and usually left early.
“You look so bourgeois,” she once teased him at the door as he pulled on his huge, double-breasted, blue vicuña topcoat. “It must give you a feeling of luxury.”
“Still, I like it,” he said, wrapping the thick collar around his neck. “It makes me feel warm.”52
Szilard was restrained with Zeisel but could be more gregarious and “found great solace” talking to children (among them her daughter Jean). Szilard also enjoyed talking with Eva Zeisel’s German-born friend Inge, then a twenty-two-year-old photojournalist, later the wife of the Italian publisher and political activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. At the Zeisel’s country house in New City, New York, near the Hudson River town of Nyack, Szilard seemed awkward as he sat about in “crumpled, sober city clothes,” Feltrinelli recalled. But back in the city Szilard perked up in Inge’s company, teased her in an avuncular way, and entertained her in his own quirky style: one night she remembers his taking her to a Mexican restaurant and a Japanese film. (Or was it the other way around?) Mostly she found Szilard “very depressed in these times, having no particular job,” but remembered “one charming moment” when, at the airport as she was leaving for Europe, “he gave me fifty dollars, ‘just for drinks, and you never know!’ So nice of him, as he didn’t have much money himself.”53
In fact, in 1955 money was not one of Szilard’s worries. He had about $21,000 in his checking account at the Chase Bank, was drawing a $10,500- a-year salary from the University of Chicago, and earned consulting fees and generous travel expenses from Spanel and the University of Colorado. What troubled him deeply, however, was his future earnings: He anticipated only a modest pension because he had joined the Chicago faculty at the age of forty-eight and could scarcely work for twenty years before retirement. By year’s end, Theodore Puck finally admitted that he could not offer Szilard the full-time appointment in Colorado he had hoped for.54 Puck’s rejection upset both Leo and Trude. To him it meant loss of a full-time research job; to her, a missed opportunity to live in the same place with her husband.
Independently, Szilard’s situation and behavior had come to anger even his fondest friends. Eva Zeisel thought Szilard mistreated Trude by not living with her in Denver, and she disliked the fact that he never mentioned to her friends that he was married. At one party in New York, which Leo and Trude both attended, he meant to introduce her as “Dr. Weiss” but slipped and called her “Dr. Wife.” Biologist Maurice Fox, a longtime friend, recalled a situation in New York in the late 1950s when Leo and Trude attended the same medical conference separately. “When I met Trude, I proposed that she come to our house for dinner,” Fox remembered, “and she said, ‘Yes, if Leo’s agreeable.’ She searched around the conference to find him and only accepted our invitation when he had consented.” As the Szilards’ longtime friend Victor Weisskopf quipped about Leo, “It was always said that he has a wife in Denver, an office in Chicago, and lives in a hotel in New York.”55
Most of the time, Szilard found it easier to dispense rational advice about marriage to others than to confront the emotional dimensions of his own life. Biologist Bernard Davis complained that he was confounded by loneliness and so insecure that he fell hopelessly in love with the first young woman he met. As a result, Davis said, he was unable to make a thoughtful decision about whom to marry. “I think,” Szilard answered, “that if you can’t stand to be lonely and can’t wait to make the right choice, you should go to a place where statistics are in your favor. Get a fellowship and go to Denmark!”56
When trying to fath
om his own peculiar marriage, Szilard theorized that his emotions and Trude’s were somehow interdependent. “Maybe you felt so bad lately because of complementarity,” he wrote her in 1957, referring to the theory in physics that electrons or photons can behave as either particles or waves but not as both at the same time. He reported that as he recently felt a need to channel his thoughts positively, in what he called “a massive constitutional,” perhaps at the time she was having a pleasant time eating lobster. “I am gaining weight, and since the sum remains constant, you will probably have lost weight. And your depression is probably also because I enjoyed myself in Heidelberg.”
In the same letter Szilard reported that Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, a new book about the Manhattan Project, had made him a “great man” in Germany. “I have sent you a book by airmail, today, for you to see what a fine husband you have. (‘Better a fine husband far away than a horrid one close by.’)”57
And yet for all his anguish and protest at being a husband, Szilard also found ways to be supportive, more in sickness than in health. When Trude was hospitalized in Denver after a serious automobile accident in 1957, he visited and called her often. Illness drew them together again, in 1958, when Szilard stayed in Denver while recuperating from a mild heart attack that he suffered during his last trip to Europe.58
In June 1959, Szilard brought Trude along to a Pugwash conference for the first time—the Fourth Pugwash Conference, on “Arms Control and World Security,” held in Baden, Austria. And that fall a medical emergency finally united Leo and Trude for the rest of their lives. In Vienna after the conference, Szilard noticed traces of blood in his urine, had tests performed there and in Stockholm, and returned to New York, where doctors ordered him hospitalized. Immediately, Trude took a leave from her teaching in Denver, flew to New York, and moved into a graduate students’ dormitory at Rockefeller University, near Leo’s hospital. Illness, it seemed, was the best tonic for their ailing marriage, for it allowed Leo and Trude to realize how desperately they needed each other.
CHAPTER 23
Oppenheimer and Teller
1946–1959
Leo Szilard’s many trips to the Colorado Rockies freed him from Chicago’s oppressive summer climate, but he could not escape the anticommunism that spread to college campuses and throughout the government in the postwar years. In Boulder on one visit he met Walter Orr Roberts, a solar astronomer who had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his professional contacts with Soviet scientists. Szilard wrote letters supporting Roberts and probably had him in mind when penning “Security and Equality,” an essay that argued that universities should continue the salaries of scientists removed from their jobs as security risks until they find new work.1 These salaries might be subsidized, Szilard proposed, by deducting 1 percent from all academics’ paychecks. At the time, Szilard also attacked the loyalty declaration required for Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) fellowships.2
In September and October 1950, Szilard himself became the target of CIA and FBI surveillance when his name was linked with physicists Philip Morrison and Katharine Way, whom he had known at the Met Lab during the war. Incorrectly, Szilard was also said to be an “associate” of George N. Perazich, who had recently been named as a member of a Soviet espionage ring. Szilard had no contact with Perazich or the Communist party, but the FBI still tried for years to uncover damaging information about him.3
“Szilard was outraged that nobody spoke up at the German universities against Hitler in the 1930s,” recalled Roberts, “and he was outraged that nobody spoke up against HUAC and the AEC in the 1950s.”4
In 1952, Szilard urged his colleagues to take “some collective action” when the AEC denied a security clearance to David M. Bonner, a biologist he had met at the Cold Spring Harbor biology symposium the previous summer.5 And he tried to raise money for University of Colorado philosopher David Hawkins (a wartime aide to J. Robert Oppenheimer who had belonged to the US Communist party at Berkeley in the 1930s) and coached Hawkins on testifying before HUAC.
“Call your friends, and all agree to name each other and not to talk about each other,” advised Szilard. “That way you’re cooperative but you’re not an informer.” Growing furious at the thought of HUAC’s heavy-handed tactics, Szilard urged Hawkins to be even more defiant.
“Say you’ll testify but don’t want to talk about your friends. Then answer their questions freely. Then announce at the end of your statement, ‘Now I wish to rejoin the Communist party. It is no different from your behavior, and it has better aims.’”6
“Are you serious?” Hawkins wondered. Szilard said he wasn’t really sure.
As he had done for refugee scholars from Nazi Germany in 1933, Szilard raised money to support the victims of anti-Communist discrimination. He urged University of Chicago chancellor Robert M. Hutchins to seek Ford Foundation support for researchers denied National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants because of problems with a federal loyalty oath, and he appealed for funds to Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural-science programs.7
The AEC was the logical focus for America’s anti-Communist fervor: It alone protected the atomic secrets behind the accelerating nuclear arms race, and through its network of national laboratories the agency dominated federally funded science. With the Eisenhower administration in 1953 came a new intensity to the cold war and new precautions to protect the nation’s common defense and security.8 Soon after financier Lewis L. Strauss became AEC chairman that July, the commission was embroiled in a bitter scandal over physicist Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Wartime director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory that had designed and tested the first A-bombs, Oppenheimer then headed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and served as a consultant to the AEC.
It all started with solicited charges made to FBI agents the year before by Edward Teller, ambitious promoter of the “super,” or H-bomb, and an obsessive anti-Communist. Teller saw Oppenheimer as an opponent of his cherished weapon and in two interviews raised doubts about his Communist sympathies. When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received charges against Oppenheimer’s loyalty in a letter by William L. Borden, former executive director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hoover promptly reported Borden’s allegations to the White House. President Eisenhower quickly ordered a “blank wall” erected between Oppenheimer and the AEC’s secrets.9 The AEC revoked Oppenheimer’s clearance on December 23, 1953, and when he protested, a special Personnel Security Board was set up to review the threat he posed to “national security.”
As the incident became public, Szilard deplored the AEC’s use of clearances for what seemed to be political and ideological ends; Oppenheimer’s public questioning of the H-bomb was at odds with the administration’s enthusiasm to test and deploy the new weapon. Typically, Szilard struck back first with political satire. In Colorado during the Christmas holidays, he wrote “Security Risk,” a fictional tale of anti-Communist paranoia and fears of blackmail in the State Department.10 Szilard even wrote himself into the story, as a character advising the department to “simply publish once a month a list of known homosexuals on your payroll,” for “clearly those whose names you have made public can no longer be blackmailed.” The story’s narrator confessed that “with Szilard, I never know when he is serious and when he is joking, and I suspect that often he does not know himself.”11 But the outcome in Szilard’s satire was no joke: Based on details that were later proven to be false, the State Department imposed rigid security restrictions that forced a diplomat of unquestioned loyalty to lose his security clearance and his job.
On New Year’s Day, 1954, at the stately Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Szilard penned a letter to the editor criticizing security checks but apparently never mailed it.12 The next day, however, he drafted “Cyclotron,” a satire on academic politics that included the anti-Communist antics of Wisconsin’s Republican senator Joseph McCarthy and the
cumbersome procedures for obtaining security clearances.13 That spring, Szilard drafted a “statement” about Oppenheimer, again half sarcastic, half serious. “We are now rapidly approaching a state of affairs when scientists will say to each other, ‘Some of my best friends are security risks.’” Of the many scientists that Szilard spoke with about the case, none thought Oppenheimer would leak secret information to Russia. And if real grounds for suspicion did exist, Szilard wrote, then with all that Oppenheimer knew, “wouldn’t arresting him and shooting him without trial be the only prudent course of action from the point of view of ‘National Security’?”
Szilard’s caustic humor brewed to outrage in his statement’s final line: “Classing Oppenheimer as a Security Risk and subjecting him to a formal hearing is regarded by scientists in this country as an indignity and an affront to all; it is regarded by our friends abroad as a sign of insanity— which it probably is.”14
Szilard and Oppenheimer had first met in 1945 during the Manhattan Project. In March of that year Szilard had telephoned Oppenheimer to seek his advice and help on an attempt to educate the cabinet about the postwar problems that would be created by the A-bomb. In May, just before his visit to the White House and to James Byrnes, Szilard wrote Oppenheimer to argue that a nuclear arms race might be forestalled if the United States decided not to use the A-bomb against Japan. Szilard assumed, correctly, that Oppenheimer favored using the new weapon but still invited his views, enclosing at the same time the memo he had prepared for President Roosevelt on the need for postwar arrangements. When Szilard and Oppenheimer met in Washington at the end of May, they disagreed over using the A-bomb on Japanese cities, and that summer, at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer barred the circulation of Szilard’s petition to President Truman.
After the war, both men favored the atom’s civilian control at home and its international control abroad, although with differing priorities: Szilard thought one would lead to the other, while Oppenheimer thought, correctly, that the fight for a civilian atomic agency in the United States would deflect the scientists’ efforts to gain international control. As a result, Oppenheimer had at first supported continued army control of the bomb and only backed the McMahon bill when passage seemed assured. Yet in 1946 they each wrote a chapter in One World or None, the scientists’ book on nuclear arms control and disarmament, and they conferred in 1947 when Szilard’s passport was revoked by the State Department to prevent him from attending an international peace conference.15
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