Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  “Well, that’s probably true,” replied Szilard. “But I think that reason is our only hope. So when I exaggerate the significance of reason, I am just hoping. . . .” He did not believe in a personal God, Szilard went on to say, “but in a sense, I am a religious man” because “I think that life has a meaning. . . . I will say that life has a meaning if there are things which are worth dying for.” Szilard said he would “spend four to six weeks in Washington” to assess the month-old Kennedy administration. “I will discover there,” he declared, “if there is a market for wisdom.”3

  On the day after Wallace’s interview, February 28, the Szilards rented a small room at the Dupont Plaza. Billed as “Washington’s newest hotel,” this modern glass-and-white-brick structure stood among town houses and shops at the north side of busy Dupont Circle. The neighborhood was studded with turn-of-the-century mansions, some now turned to clubs, others to restaurants. At the time, before social dropouts and drugs arrived and the neighborhood’s boutiques moved to Georgetown, Dupont Circle was Washington’s most cosmopolitan area. Diplomats from Embassy Row came to the Riggs Bank on one corner to attend to their international transactions. Art galleries, flower shops, and delicatessens crowded the tree-lined streets.

  The Szilards’ hotel was inexpensive but convenient, a five-minute taxi ride to the White House, the State Department, and most foreign embassies. Their room was modern and modest, but with a pleasant view through treetops to the irregular town-house roofs. And once the bags and papers were spread about, the room seemed crowded—a clutter that was tolerable for only a short stay. But Szilard intended to be there for only a few weeks and within hours of arriving set to work telephoning and writing his friends in the White House, seeking appointments, offering advice.

  “Szilard here,” he announced to begin each call, often surprising people who thought he still lay dying in Memorial Hospital. “I spent a month in Moscow,” Szilard announced in notes to Walt W. Rostow, an assistant to Kennedy for national security, and to Jerome Wiesner, the president’s science adviser. He asked Wiesner for “advice on how to go about” finding that “market for wisdom.” “Yes, who’s got it?” Wiesner asked in reply. They planned dinner to discuss events since their time together in Moscow and to assess the new administration’s plans for arms control.

  Wiesner and other White House recruits from academia had discovered that a handful of people seemed to be shaping foreign policy. “It was a $300 billion family business,” he recalled with a chuckle years later. “Eight or nine of us kept guard on all the business of the world.” Szilard’s access to this family at first seemed easy. Access was easy, but Szilard had no talent—or patience—for the bureaucratic scramble that led and followed decisions. “Being inside the White House, we often got caught up in day-to-day details,” Wiesner realized. “Szilard’s contribution was to look at the world at large and motivate people like us to think about it.”4

  During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had complained that fewer than a hundred federal employees worked full-time on disarmament, “the most glaring omission in the field of national security and world peace of the last eight years.” President Eisenhower had created a Disarmament Administration within the State Department in September 1960, and after the election, Kennedy named John J. McCloy as his disarmament adviser. A lawyer long involved in government, McCloy had served as an aide to Secretary of War Stimson at Potsdam and had helped draft the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report proposing international control of atomic energy. Like Stimson, he believed in the need to control the bomb. McCloy had later served as president of the World Bank and as US military governor and high commissioner for Germany, so he brought stature and authority to his new appointment. In June, McCloy recommended creating an autonomous Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), an idea Kennedy adopted and sent to Congress. The new agency was enacted in September, and McCloy was named its first board chairman. William C. Foster, a Republican who had advised Vice-President Nixon, became the ACDA’s first director.

  After several direct approaches, Szilard realized that if he could influence McCloy and Foster at all, the tactics must be subtle: The two men, like his friend Teller, deeply mistrusted the Russians. When Szilard wanted to have “discussions” about disarmament, the brief notes he received from McCloy during the spring and summer questioned his faith in the Russians’ willingness to negotiate a test-ban treaty and challenged Szilard’s criticism of US policies. After six months of polite but firm exchanges, Szilard finally lost interest.5

  Foster also questioned Szilard’s faith in direct negotiations and saw his role as “a one-man State Department” with Khrushchev both irksome and threatening. Mention of Szilard’s name usually led Foster to mutter to aides about the Logan Act, the federal law barring private citizens from conducting diplomatic relations.6

  Still, Szilard persevered. He wrote and met with Wiesner, with McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, and repeatedly with Bundy’s assistant, MIT economist Carl Kaysen. He called on Rostow. He met with Chester Bowles, the retired Connecticut governor and congressman now under secretary at the State Department. Tempting Bowles’s political instincts, Szilard predicted that disarmament might not take twenty-five years to achieve—as outlined in The Voice of the Dolphins—but could come about within eight, potentially the maximum term of the new administration. Yet the month he had just spent in Moscow, Szilard reported, convinced him that the Soviets would not “jump” at the first offer America made for a nuclear test-ban treaty; it was not their chief concern at the time.7

  Szilard met Lewis L. Strauss, the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman, for lunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel. He dined at the University Club with Glenn T. Seaborg, the current AEC chairman and a principal adviser on US-Soviet negotiations for a test-ban treaty. Always the bumblebee of news and gossip and ideas Szilard told Seaborg that the respected French nuclear official Bertrand Goldschmidt had recently said he thought the United States should improve its representation on the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. The next morning, Szilard sent Seaborg two names to consider: former AEC commissioner Thomas Murray and Farrington Daniels, Szilard’s former boss at the Met Lab whom he had recently seen in Washington.8 Szilard also wrote to Soviet specialist Charles Bohlen at the State Department, who said he would be delighted to get together.

  Szilard’s life at the Dupont Plaza was ideal for peddling his “wisdom” around the capital city, and the neighborhood itself seemed to match his offbeat style. He could walk out the back door of his hotel to meet people at Pierre, a French restaurant in an imposing Italian Renaissance villa at Connecticut Avenue and Q Street. He could sit in one of Washington’s first sidewalk cafés. He could stroll up Connecticut to another Italianate favorite, the Golden Parrot Restaurant at Twentieth and R streets. Edwardian panels, a stained-glass bay window, fancy stone fireplaces, coffered ceilings, and a grand piano in the lounge all reminded Szilard of bourgeois times past, of Budapest cafés and London hotels.

  The food around Dupont Circle, and nearby at the Cosmos Club, the scientists’ association in a French-style mansion, was ordinary. But so were Szilard’s tastes. His appetite was easily sated when he ate at the bars and grills that lined Connecticut Avenue just below Dupont Circle. A favorite, the Rathskeller, served European food southern style.9 Szilard began most days in his hotel’s modest restaurant, heaping orange marmalade by the spoonful onto toast or bypassing the toast entirely and simply scooping it onto his plate before eating it. Coffee he mixed with half a cup of sugar and cream. Snacks in his room throughout the day included East European favorites such as pâté or herring in sour cream spread on dark bread. A utilitarian about eating, Szilard seldom bothered with serving plates; he simply scooped the food from jars and cans.

  The appearance of The Voice of the Dolphins in April added to Szilard’s celebrity among the Washingtonians he was there to influence, and he made a point of sending most of them copies. By the spring Sz
ilard had outgrown his eighth-floor hotel room, its dresser and telephone table now covered with files and books. Besides this clutter, a card table Trude used to hold medical equipment and Szilard’s bladder appliances made movement about the room awkward. Szilard’s solution was not to rent a separate office but to spend more time working in the Dupont Plaza’s lobby. At first content to sit on a modern sofa, his papers spread about him, he eventually commandeered a desk for guests by the front window. There he sat most days, with a view of the Circle and the town houses along New Hampshire Avenue, thumbing through his pocket diary, greeting friends, editing manuscripts, and meeting people for appointments. A reluctant bellhop soon strung a telephone to this desk, and before long stenographers sat by, taking dictation. “I can work very happily in this lobby,” he told a Life magazine reporter. “I have never owned a house, and don’t feel the need of owning one.”10

  Trude made sure that a book rack near the lobby newsstand was always stocked with copies of The Voice of the Dolphins, and Leo made sure that no one missed it. After lunch at the hotel restaurant one day, Szilard passed the rack with Thomas I. Emerson, a Yale law professor first known when he had worked to draft the McMahon bill in 1945. “He stopped and picked up a copy and passed it on to me,” Emerson recalled. “Somehow it was clear that I was to pay for the book. I looked at it casually and put it back on the shelf. The next day I came back and bought a copy.”11

  Szilard was encouraged enough by his many meetings and telephone calls to stay on in Washington beyond the four to six weeks he first thought it would take to find his “market for wisdom.” Gradually, over the spring and summer, he became increasingly involved as events and policies grew more troubling. On Monday, April 17, the Central Intelligence Agency launched an armed invasion of the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s south shore, at first backing and then betraying a ragtag army of anti-Castro refugees. Szilard’s first angry response came that day in a cable to a friend: “They ain’t in the market.”12

  His second response was a letter to the editor, comparing this US-backed landing with Russia’s 1956 invasion of Hungary and declaring that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” His protest letters appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,11, but Szilard yearned to do more.

  A week after the Cuban landing, Szilard was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and at once he thought of a way to use this group for a third response. “For the second time in my life I find myself drafting a petition to the President,” he explained in a memorandum about the Bay of Pigs that he mailed to more than half the NAS’s members.14 The United States, he said, “transgressed” the UN Charter, and the president “is entitled to know whether or not the policies of his administration offend our moral sensibilities. . . .”

  In the petition he mailed, Szilard said the invasion had “created the impression that henceforth the United States may intervene with her own troops in civil wars in order to prevent the establishment, or stabilization, of governments which look to the Soviet Union or China, rather than to America, for economic assistance and military protection.” He urged the president “to adopt a policy with respect to our obligations under the United Nations Charter which is in conformity with the moral and legal standards of behavior that we are demanding of others. . . .”

  Szilard also sent a copy of this petition package to the president, not directly but through Wiesner.15 And in a more playful manner he complained to Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. “Szilard could be pixieish . . . in a way that did not include gravitas,” said Marcus G. Raskin, at the time a consultant on defense policy to the National Security Council. Szilard had Raskin present Bundy with a memorandum that asked him to “tell me your side of the Bay of Pigs expedition in Cuba, so that in the event that there’s an international war-crimes trial you will have on record with me your defense.” Szilard’s playful memo “just sent Mac right up the wall,” Raskin later recalled.16

  By his June 5 deadline, Szilard received 129 replies to the 364 packages mailed out, including 56 signed petitions. (Among the signers were friends and colleagues, such as Edward Condon, Max Delbrück, Salvador Luria, geneticist Hermann J. Muller, Harlow Shapley, Cornelius B. Van Niel, and Victor Weisskopf.) In all, fourteen academy members opposed either the idea of the petition or its content, sixteen abstained, sixteen said they approved of the petition but would take other actions themselves, and twenty-seven members gave no reason for not signing.

  In a letter to Kennedy the next day, Szilard claimed that “about one in six of those to whom I wrote responded by signing the petition. . . .” But he hesitated to draw conclusions, instead urging Kennedy to consider that “there is probably no group in the population whose membership would be as reluctant to sign a petition” as this one. “It would be my guess that most of them have never signed a petition in their life.” In his usual oblique way, Szilard did not send the petition results directly to Kennedy but passed them through Edward R. Murrow, the newly appointed director of the US Information Agency. Szilard turned to Murrow “because what we think about ourselves is even more important than what others may think about us . . . .”17

  The inconclusive tallies no doubt tempered Szilard’s zeal when he sent his petition to the White House. But his oddly equivocal tone may also have come from the way some fellow scientists had censured both his message and his methods. Physicist Llewellyn H. Thomas at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory at Columbia University wrote the president directly, with a copy to Szilard. “I regard the statements made in this petition as typical special pleading,” Thomas said. Szilard “is against sin and frames his statements so that those who disagree with him would seem to be for sin. Further, the actions which he urges on you seem to be phrased vaguely and with tendentious question-begging epithets.”18

  Szilard must have felt more troubled reading the reply from physicist James Franck, a friend he had known and admired both in Berlin and at the Met Lab. Szilard had also served on the Manhattan Project committee that Franck chaired in 1945 that urged the A-bomb not be used on Japanese cities. Then Franck had been grateful for the moral and political direction Szilard had given their work. Now he questioned Szilard’s whole enterprise.

  3309 Avon Road

  Durham, North Carolina

  May 21, 1961

  Dear Szilard,

  I am more than sorry that I can not sign your petition. In spite of the fact that I agree with you that our Cuban adventure meant all that you express in your letter, there are three reasons why I refuse to sign your petition.

  One is that I am certain that Kennedy himself knows that what he did in Cuba was not only an error in judgment, but also a violation of the democratic principles to which we adhere.

  Two, I am absolutely against it that scientists as a class believe that their scientific reputation is a proof that they are also experts in political reasoning. As citizens, we have just as much right as others to tell our opinions and, if we judge ourselves as a relatively intelligent group, we can also hope our opinions should carry some weight. However, here you ask only scientists who are members of the National Academy to join your appeal. I believe that there are a great number of people, for instance in humanities, who would be at least as competent as we are as a group. You can argue with some right that you do not deny that, but everyone should stir up his own group in times in which basic political decisions seem to go haywire. However, we scientists had in the last years more [than] enough opportunity and duty to say our opinions about matters directly connected with our science. We endanger our influence in these particular questions if we speak up as a group in matters not directly connected with our profession.

  Three, right now, I believe that it would be quite necessary that we as scientists not insist on a foolproof mutual control in the discussions with Russia about the bann [sic] of atomic tests. All of us know that such a control is not possible, and, if it were, it would be a snooping around which w
e would dislike just as much as would Russia. . . .

  He closed with “a few personal words” about Dolphins, saying “my wife and I did not know whether we should laugh or cry. Your satire and your style are wonderful. . . . If you can, drop me a few lines to tell me why you are in Washington and how you are. With greetings and all good wishes. Yours as ever, James Franck.”19

  This candid advice from an esteemed friend must have shaken Szilard, for after he received it, he ceased all efforts to publicize or use his academy petition. He also abandoned the use of petitions as a way to influence public policy. Besides, Szilard may have finally realized, petitions were for outsiders, which he had become. How, he must have worried, could he become a Washington insider?

  Franck was not the only person wondering why Szilard was in Washington. Soon after Szilard’s letters to newspapers about Cuba appeared, Byron R. White, deputy attorney general, telephoned FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to request background information on Szilard.20 When the bureau could provide no new material and only reported that Szilard associated with known “liberals” and supported “internationalization of the atomic program,” White apparently dropped the matter.

  For his part, Szilard was so eager to advise his government that while circulating a petition critical of the president and assailing White House aides, he also sought to meet with Kennedy in person, hoping to advise him on the forthcoming “summit” meeting with Premier Khrushchev in Vienna.21 Typically, Szilard was oblique, addressing Kennedy’s appointments secretary, Kenneth O’Donnell, but also calling Harris Wofford, a former colleague of Chester Bowles’s who was then a special assistant to the president. “He is one of the finest men in our midst,” Wofford advised O’Donnell, “with a roving imaginative mind, and an angle on Khrushchev and arms negotiations which the President might appreciate.”22 Szilard also alerted Bowles in the State Department, who replied, “I hope it will be possible for you to see the President before he leaves for Europe. . . .”23 But no meeting was arranged. Szilard wanted to urge Kennedy to be jocular and flexible with Khrushchev in their first meeting, in effect to behave just as he had during his own 1960 meeting in New York. The same advice to be informal came to Kennedy en route to the summit, from veteran diplomat W. Averell Harriman. But when Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna, their first encounter was testy. Bold statements led to bellicose threats. “It will be a cold winter,” Kennedy told Khrushchev as they parted.24