Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  But for all the satisfaction he may have enjoyed by proposing and publicizing his “mined cities” scheme, Szilard had begun to realize his limits both as a humorist and as an “outsider” in Washington—a serious and self-important city that squanders laughter and lives by cliques. Being a jocular outsider was Szilard’s advantage when he first arrived, but by the fall, after eight months of “lobbying” from the lobby of the Dupont Plaza, he had learned enough about how the capital works to realize that dispensing wisdom was not enough.

  Over a dinner at the Raskins’, Szilard heard his friend James R. Newman, a brilliant mathematician he had collaborated with on the McMahon bill, complain about his own career. Then Newman turned on Szilard and his dubious position.

  “Szilard,” he said, “you’re not known beyond Dupont Circle.”

  “That’s why I never leave there,” Szilard replied.45

  Szilard’s peculiar status in Washington was dramatized again, more painfully, when he learned that a Soviet delegation—including some friends from the Pugwash conferences—would soon arrive. Szilard enlisted his nephew, Andy Silard, to drive the forty miles out to the new Dulles Airport in rural Virginia. Patiently they waited by the exit from customs, but when Szilard’s friends came into view and he approached to offer a welcoming handshake, they were whisked past by State Department and security officials. During the long drive back to the city Szilard sat fuming with anger, not saying a word.

  CHAPTER 29

  Seeking a More Livable World

  1961–1963

  When at Brandeis University to receive an honorary degree in October 1961, Leo Szilard voiced his fears about the nuclear arms race at a dinner for trustees and fellows.

  “Suppose you are right?” someone asked. “What can we do?”

  “I had to admit,” Szilard later recalled, “that this was a legitimate question and that I had no answer.”1 Somehow, he realized, thinking up clever ideas for arms control is not enough. You also need the power— political, legal, financial—to enforce your views.

  Szilard mused about this problem back in Washington and in the Virginia countryside, where he attended a “Strategy for Peace” conference at Airlie House. His interlude at the rustic conference center offered a welcome time to think. To daydream. And from these musings came an answer to the questioner at Brandeis and one of Szilard’s most successful legacies—a political-action committee for arms control.

  But his years in Washington brought Szilard fresh heartaches as well. Attempts to influence President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were frustrating failures, and his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis harmed his stature in the arms-control community. Szilard’s “sweet voice of reason” never became shrill despite his many setbacks, although to those who still listened it was beginning to sound more and more desperate.

  Typically, Szilard joined few discussion groups at the Airlie conference; he preferred to buttonhole people in the halls or to wander in the fresh autumn air—through the formal garden, around the duck pond, or along the farm roads that swung through rolling pastures. When living in England, Szilard had felt “in Oxford but not of Oxford” because he had no affiliation with a college, the heart of the university’s social and intellectual system. In Washington, too, Szilard had no affiliation. He was still a professor of biophysics from the University of Chicago. Not a consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). Not a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). Not a fellow at a local think tank or a consultant to a congressional committee. As he had discovered during his first months in the capital, Washington is a city where what you do is often less important than where you do it.

  At Airlie, Szilard thought about creating “a sort of lobby” that “would not only speak with the voice of reason” but also “deliver the votes.” And as he paced around the grounds that fall weekend, ideas spun together. “Neither reason nor votes alone mean very much, but the combination,” he thought, could be “unbeatable.”2 He may have recalled his 1952 “lobby for real peace in Washington” idea, his brief hope of influencing that year’s presidential elections. This time his idea would become reality.

  How, Szilard wondered, could an informed minority use its unity and its money effectively? A rational cost-benefit calculation led him to target the US Senate. At some point, he hoped, the United States and Soviet Union would sign treaties, first to ban nuclear tests, eventually to limit nuclear weapons. Treaties must be ratified with the “advice and consent” of the US Senate. Here Szilard combined the calculus for law and democracy. Each state has two senators, regardless of size or population. It is much cheaper to be elected in a less populous western state, so a western senator’s treaty vote comes at a bargain. By raising relatively small amounts of money, Szilard calculated, he hoped over time to help elect western senators who shared his own arms-control views. Senators serve for six years, so the “investment” need not be made as often as in the biennial House elections. Then, when arms-control treaties come before the Senate in a few years, votes for ratification would be there. His was a clever scheme, working at the margin of power to widen the “margin of hope.”

  Szilard called aside Roger Fisher, a Harvard Law School professor who specialized in international negotiations, and sat him on the stone steps by the side of Airlie’s large yellow farmhouse. Fisher listened, liked the peace-lobby idea, and invited Szilard to describe the plan at a law school forum.3

  As soon as Szilard returned to Washington, he began drafting a speech and a proposal.4 At the time, President John F. Kennedy’s administration was proving to be a disappointment. First came the Bay of Pigs invasion, then the stormy Vienna summit with Khrushchev and overreaction to the Berlin Wall, and now a defiant campaign for fallout shelters. Behind these events was a graver fear, for conversations with White House advisers convinced Szilard that the administration had shifted from a “no-first-use” policy for nuclear weapons to a “counterforce” strategy that picks military targets for a preemptive strike.

  The red-brick Georgian-style Lowell Lecture Hall at Harvard was packed with students and faculty on Friday afternoon, November 17, 1961, when Fisher led Szilard to the stage. His talk was called “Are We on the Road to War?,” but Szilard began in a droll, almost teasing way, his words clustered and clipped by his Hungarian-German accent. He was really there, Szilard said, “to invite those of you who are adventurous to participate in an experiment that might show that I am all wrong.”5

  The title question he answered right away: “We are headed towards an all-out war” with Russia, and “our chances of getting through the next ten years without war are slim.” Just as quickly came his solution. It is conceivable, Szilard said, that “a rebellious minority” might “take effective political action” to change the American government’s attitudes about Russia and the arms race. A new organization might combine a thoughtful 10 percent of the voters with the “sweet voice of reason” and “substantial political contributions.” That combination, he said, might become “the most powerful lobby that ever hit Washington.”

  This lobby’s “political objectives” echoed Szilard’s own, among them: Renounce a first-strike policy against Russia; avoid “meaningless battles in the cold war” that might escalate to nuclear confrontation; and improve East-West relations. Private discussions should begin to explore “how to secure the peace in a disarmed world,” he said, how to bring about “an orderly and livable world” in Southeast Asia and Africa by devising new forms of democracy for these regions, and how to develop effective and acceptable birth-control methods for poor countries.

  If a “sizable minority” were to back these objectives, Szilard said, he might “go further” and propose a new Council for Abolishing War, complete with scientists and scholars on the board and members who would pledge “2 percent of their total income” to support candidates who share these policies. The council’s elitist rationality resembled Szilard’s Bund from thirty years before, but with one i
mportant difference: This time he was trying to influence not just public officials but elective politics.

  For the “experiment,” Szilard urged the audience to ask how many other people might join such a lobby. Perhaps, he surmised, 25,000 students “would go all-out in support of this movement,” and if each brought ten members, it would “attain 250,000 members within twelve months. This would represent about $25 million a year in political contributions. . . .”

  The hall erupted with applause. “For those who heard him then,” remembered historian Barton J. Bernstein, Szilard’s “words were an inspiring call for action in a country where some liberals were losing heart with the Kennedy administration. . . .” They “were not offended by the implicit elitism of this arrangement,” nor were most troubled that it “seemed politically daring and risky” for the time.

  To some, however, Szilard’s idea seemed dangerous. A navy official promptly warned US intelligence that the proposed council was “subversive and Communist inspired,” and the FBI increased its watch on Szilard. He scoffed when asked later if he feared that the group might be infiltrated, saying, “In order to manipulate me, the others would have to be much brighter, and I don’t think there are many of that kind.”6 Szilard even welcomed being hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee for leading his new “movement.” “This would be a very nice spectacle,” he said, “and I have no doubt at all who would come out on top.” Besides being more clever than congressmen, Szilard declared, scientists should lead his movement because—unlike politicians—they have “integrity and purity.”

  “Why not mothers in the same context?” asked a voice from the audience.

  “The trouble with mothers,” Szilard admitted over a rumble of laughter, “is there are so many of them I would not know how to choose.”7

  Szilard was hardly charismatic, and the “movement” he advocated depended more on logic and reason than on emotion. But when he met with students in Holmes Hall the next day, Szilard was eager to answer their questions, patient and giving with his time and ideas.8 They talked for hours, until Szilard had to leave for the airport. He delivered the same speech that night at Swarthmore College, again to enthusiastic response.

  A capacity audience of students and faculty from Western Reserve University packed into Severance Hall in Cleveland on a late November evening as Szilard opened his second “Road to War” speaking tour.9 And a lively crowd in the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall gave Szilard an affectionate homecoming welcome. This talk gained Szilard his first national press for the proposed council, including local and national talk- show appearances, stories and a cheering editorial in Chicago’s papers, and coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the wire services. ABC’s national six o’clock television news ended a description of Szilard’s efforts with the comment “We wish him good luck.”10 Commonweal magazine praised Szilard’s “rare combination of idealism and hard practicality.” Newsweek quoted the talk in a feature on human nature and war: “If you observe how we, as a nation, respond to Russia’s actions and how they respond to our responses, you can see a pattern of behavior emerging which, more likely than not, will lead to war within a period of, say, ten years.” FBI agents also monitored Szilard’s movements, adding fresh press clips to his swelling file.11

  Now Szilard had to decide how his council might actually operate; he enjoyed devising institutions but had little patience for running them. Help came at the right time when Allan Forbes, Jr., a filmmaker and anthropologist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, volunteered his services. Forbes said he had “been on the fringes of the peace movement in various ways for several years and have just recently backed out, more or less in disgust, due to the futility of the standard approach. . . .” Szilard’s idea for the council offered the hope he and other activists needed.12

  Publicist Harold Oram, who had known Szilard since their work together on the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in 1946, joined him and molecular biologist Maurice Fox for dinner in Washington to brainstorm about fund-raising. Oram mentioned a meeting planned by several philanthropists in New York, and a few days after Fox attended and described the council, two checks arrived at the Dupont Plaza; donations to Szilard from Sallie and Eleanor Bingham, wealthy sisters from the renowned Louisville publishing family. Their $7,000 was the council’s first “seed money.”13 As the 1961 Christmas holidays approached, Szilard received more good news from peace-movement supporters Ralph and Jo Pomerance, who sent a check to finance a speaking tour and promised more help later.14

  But mindful of a recent kidney infection, Szilard resisted making plans. “Even though I have no trouble and no symptoms at present,” he wrote in late December, “I have made it a rule not to make any long-term commitments except at one month’s notice at most.”15 In Pageant magazine, he was quoted as saying: “Death is part of life. If it didn’t exist, one would have to invent it. There is nothing alarming in thinking that after your death you’ll be in the same state as you were before birth.” For the article, Szilard even composed his own epitaph, “He did his best.”16

  In January 1962, Szilard flew west with his “Road to War” speech, this time renaming his “experiment” the “Council for a Livable World.” Capacity crowds greeted him at the University of California in Berkeley, at Stanford University, at Reed College, and at the University of Oregon.17 He also addressed a SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) rally at Santa Monica Auditorium, near Los Angeles.18 Throughout this hectic schedule Szilard’s wife, Trude, was with him, introduced at most stops as “my doctor.”19 Also along, but less conspicuous, was a team of FBI agents.

  The speeches generated a radio interview on WBAI in New York, broadcast nationwide by the Pacifica network, and a feature in the Christian Science Monitor.20 But good press alone could not make the council a success, and those able to help were frustrated by Szilard’s impetuous style. Enrico Fermi’s widow, Laura, and Szilard’s Manhattan Project colleague Samuel Allison wrote from Chicago to complain that “a small group of faculty, students and interested citizens” had met a few times to discuss ways to implement the Mandel Hall speech but could do no more “unless we have definite information on the evolution of your ideas.” Without an “immediate” statement the interest Szilard’s speech had aroused there “will wane fast,” they warned, and urged him to appoint scientists to the proposed board quickly.21

  But Szilard did almost nothing for months, still unsure what reactions his experiment might produce. Some responses were personal. Psychologist Margaret Brenman Gibson wrote to praise his “Road to War” speech and described reactions to it by peace activists in western Massachusetts. “My young son, aged 8, hearing me on the phone for hours asked, ‘Mommy, how much is 2 per cent of a quarter? I could give some of my allowance.’ When told that would be half-a-cent a week, he replied: ‘I’d even give three cents a week if that would help.’”22 Some responses were professional. In February, theater and film director Arthur Penn invited Szilard to his Manhattan home to meet friends in the arts, including comics Mike Nichols and Elaine May. They and other entertainers volunteered to host fund-raising parties in New York and Beverly Hills for the council.23 “Certainly I’m with you for 2 per cent of my income whenever you ask,” actress Anne Bancroft wrote Szilard. “And whether you ask or not you have many of my prayers.”24

  While in New York, Szilard also spoke at Sarah Lawrence College in suburban Bronxville, the last stop on the nine-campus tour. By late February about four hundred people had pledged 2 percent of their incomes, far from the twenty-five thousand Szilard had thought necessary to begin the council’s political work. Still, Szilard loved to devise detailed plans for his “institutional inventions,” as friend Edward Shils called them, and in a memorandum in February 1962 defined interconnected roles for the council’s fellows, a panel of political advisers, a board of directors, and the associates.25

  But for all the layers of authority that Szilard devised, it w
as the new council’s board of directors that became his principal interest and the driving force for his Washington activities. Its founding meeting, in June 1962, chose Szilard and Yale chemist William Doering as cochairmen. Members included Forbes, Fox, and Penn; Ruth Adams, an editor at the Bulletin; University of Chicago sociologist Morton Grodzins; physicist Bernard T. Feld; James Patton, president of the Farmer’s Union; photographer Charles Pratt, Jr.; and attorney Daniel M. Singer, counsel for the Federation of American Scientists, who would serve as secretary and treasurer. Adams later asked Szilard how he had assembled this remarkable group, and he admitted to but one criterion: “Your sense of humor.”26

  Jennifer Robbins, the council’s first secretary, also had a sense of humor but was hired for quite another reason. When she appeared for an interview, Szilard sat her on a couch in the Dupont Plaza lobby and began to pace around.

  “Do you speak German?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” she said.

  “Good,” said Szilard. “I want to be able to speak to Trude without being understood.” After testing her note-taking skills, he hired Robbins and led her to a tiny room on the seventh floor, a converted maid’s closet so narrow that Szilard had to shut a desk drawer to sidle past a couch. On the couch were piled letters and checks, many postmarked and dated months before. By mid-August the couch was clear, and a filing system was in place.27

  As office manager, Szilard hired Ruth Pinkson, once a secretary to Henry Wallace. “I have three kids at home,” she said when interviewed, “and I have to have a nine-to-five job, five days a week.”

  “No problem! No problem!” Szilard assured her. But before long, he began dictating letters only in the late afternoon and expected her to work into the evening.