In fact, the council raised more than $79,000 for the 1962 Senate elections, giving more than $20,000 to McGovern and the rest to Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, Wayne Morse of Oregon, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Frank Church of Idaho. The donation to McGovern, one-fifth of his campaign expenditure, was credited with his slim 597-vote recount victory. Just the political leverage Szilard had had in mind.
“I’d have lost without the council,” McGovern later said.67 (When the council celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1992, it had helped to elect eighty senators who favor arms control, and it continues to be one of the most effective political-action committees in Washington.)
At the council, Forbes had defended Szilard’s flight to Geneva by explaining it as a quasi-official trip connected somehow with arms control and a Moscow visit. Szilard claimed it was the only rational response at the time, although sometimes he sounded defensive. “If I were to stay in Washington until the bombs begin to fall and were to perish in the disorders that would ensue, I would consider myself on my deathbed, not a hero but a fool,” he declared to his friend psychiatrist René A. Spitz.68 Szilard—still behaving as an interloper who would not learn local customs and conventions, still scheming to speak directly to those in power—seemed impatient among scholars and scientists concerned with the government and its policies.
In 1963, when his friend Marcus Raskin cofounded the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in a town house at Nineteenth Street and Florida Avenue, near Dupont Circle, Szilard asked to become a fellow and was given a small office. One day social scientist Harold Orlans invited Szilard to lunch at the more respectable Brookings Institution to give staff members an opportunity to learn about the council. But Szilard seemed oblivious to his listeners’ knowledge of Congress, Orlans recalled, and delivered a monologue past the customary 2:00 P.M. quitting time. Szilard also misbehaved by asking for a second helping of the crab dish served for lunch, something never before done by a Brookings guest. “His flight to Switzerland during the missile crisis hurt his reputation,” Orlans noted, “both as a sound analyst and as a leader of the antinuclear cause.”69
In his analysis at the time, Szilard coined two useful phrases: “saturation parity,” to define the minimal deterrence that might stabilize the US-Soviet nuclear arms race; and “sting of the bee,” to describe what minimal deterrence a country would need and how it might use it. The irony of the sting, like that of a nuclear retaliation, is that the unavoidable outcome for the bee is death. Once they reached a nuclear stalemate, Szilard had argued since the 1950s, the superpowers would finally realize they were safer scrapping arms than racing to build them—a condition that finally occurred in the late 1980s, about when The Voice of the Dolphins had predicted.70
“Preparations for the Angels Project have been moving rather slowly in Washington,” Szilard complained to Wiesner at the White House, “perhaps because I was too disheartened to push them with vigor.” He asked Roger Fisher to assume responsibility for enlisting the American participants.71 Instead, biology recaptured Szilard’s fancy, and he admitted to Jonas Salk that Washington was “not the best place” to work and that he needed to “reexamine” how long he might stay.72 If Trude could find suitable work in La Jolla, Szilard said, then he would like to join the new Salk Institute—his first long-term commitment to research in more than a decade.73 Szilard accepted Salk’s offer of a nonresident fellowship the same day the letter arrived and requested the option to become a resident fellow.74
In June 1963, Szilard left Washington for a Cold Spring Harbor biology symposium, then flew to Geneva for an informal WHO meeting on research and a “Discussion on Molecular Biology” at CERN, a meeting that laid plans to create the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Szilard proposed that grants be made to EMBO by both the US and Soviet academies of science, a typically freewheeling idea that was perfectly logical but politically zany.75
While he was busy with biology in Geneva, Szilard’s Angels Project finally gained cautious support from President Kennedy, provided it would not be considered an official US effort.76 From his office at the Palais, in July, Szilard resumed his contacts with Khrushchev. But now signals began to cross, just as the White House had feared. At the time, a delegation led by W. Averell Harriman was in Moscow negotiating a US-Soviet nuclear-test-ban treaty. Szilard told Khrushchev that Carl Kaysen, Bundy’s aide and a member of the Harriman team, “is fully familiar with all aspects of the ‘Angels Project’ . . and would be able to judge its usefulness. Americans who were then prepared to participate, Szilard reported, included Fisher, physicists Marvin Goldberger and Murray Gell-Mann of Cal Tech, and Steven Muller of Cornell. The next day, at the Soviet mission, Szilard cabled Kaysen in Moscow, asking him to answer any questions that Khrushchev might ask about the Angels. Kaysen was furious and complained that such a role was inappropriate.77
When Khrushchev realized the problems Szilard had created, he suggested that because of “certain difficulties” in organizing the Angels Project, such a meeting should best take place as part of the next Pugwash conference in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, that September, and not independently. “The Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, N. S. Khrushchev, conveys to you and to your wife his best wishes for good health and success in your noble work in defense of peace.” Szilard’s cable to Fisher was terser: “Negative response cancels Angels meeting. . . .”78
In August 1963, US and Soviet negotiators concluded a ban on nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, and under the seas, and at month’s end the Moscow-Washington hot line—actually a teletype link—clattered into service. The US Senate ratified the Test Ban Treaty in September, leaving many arms-control activists delighted. But Szilard thought that euphoria over the limited test ban obscured his more ambitious search for comprehensive arms reductions, and in a hotel room in The Hague he penned a draft of “A Farewell to Arms Control.” This restatement of his minimal-deterrence writings had a plaintive title meant to suggest that he had little more left to give.79 The “outsider” was still outside.
At the Pugwash meeting in Dubrovnik that September, Szilard joined Joseph Rotblat and Henry Kissinger in a working group on “Denuclearized Zones” but said almost nothing during the discussions.80 Instead of dominating debate, as he had at other conferences, Szilard was content to sit in the sun and daydream, not about arms control but about aging, sex selection, birth control, and—between naps—ways to eliminate the human need for sleep.81
Even before the Test Ban Treaty was ratified, Szilard had concluded that while it “seems that some of the key people in Washington are now beginning to listen to me . . . time is running out on the Kennedy administration. . . Unless goals were set by the end of the first term in 1964, Szilard reasoned, the administration could do little by the end of Kennedy’s second term. At the same time, Szilard reflected on his hectic pace and perilous health. “While I would, of course, like to live as long as possible,” he wrote, “I also want to accomplish as much as possible while I am alive. So far I have not given up a single working day on account of my heart condition. . . ”82
That pace continued on his way home from Dubrovnik in September; Szilard stopped in Rome, checked into the Hotel Regina, and drafted a memorandum that put his Angels Project in the hands of a real expert: the pope. He suggested that the Vatican take a lead in arms control by convening US and Soviet scientists. Szilard left a package at the Vatican containing memos and reprints about his career and proposals and waited two days for a reply, passing the time by riding a horse-drawn carriage around St. Peter’s Basilica, reading in the city’s lush flower gardens, and sitting in cafés.83 But when no call came, Szilard returned to Geneva, spent ten days in London dispensing arms-control wisdom “in the shadow of the shadow Labor cabinet . . . .” and returned to Washington.84
He knew by then that his effectiveness there was at an end. And having just retired, at age sixty-five, from the University of Chicago, he also kn
ew that the Salk Institute offered his most promising outlet for creative work. Nonetheless, Szilard kept tinkering. He helped organize seminars for senators and their staffs, explaining the interplay between the technical and political requirements for arms-control agreements. And he tried to help Kennedy ease tensions over Berlin by suggesting in a letter that incidents between US and Soviet troops over the right of access to the divided city might be avoided if each side agreed to comply with the border guards’ requests before they were made. He offered to send a similar letter to Khrushchev.
Answering for the President, Bundy’s reply was curt. He thanked Szilard for his “imaginative note.” “Yours is a characteristically original suggestion, but I doubt if it would be useful for us to conduct our relations with Chairman Khrushchev through you.”85 It was the last contact Szilard would have with the Kennedy administration. The day after Bundy wrote that reply, Kennedy was assassinated and Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
Fitfully, Szilard weighed his prospects in Washington with plans for the Salk Institute. In December he redrafted “Sting of the Bee,” his thoughts about minimal deterrence, trying to define a simple and logical halt to the nuclear arms race. Szilard had first called his article “A Farewell to Arms Control” but a few days before Christmas made the title even more insistent: “Let Us Put Up, or Shut Up.”86
CHAPTER 30
La Jolla: Personal Peace
1964
La Valencia, a pink stucco, Spanish-style hotel with clay-tiled roofs, crowned the hillside at La Jolla, California, in 1964, giving the peninsula and the lazy seaside village a fairy-tale quality. From its terraces and windows the Pacific’s waves could be seen crashing on the rocks by the green park below and heard thundering into the sandstone cove nearby. Leo and Trude Szilard checked into this quaintly comfortable place in mid-January, refugees from a harsh Washington winter. “We stayed in the best suite at La Valencia,” she later recalled, “and in two weeks I was sold.”1
Leo Szilard had been “sold” on La Jolla for years, ever since visiting this Pacific outpost in the mid-1950s as a consultant to General Atomics (GA). At the time the Szilards arrived this sunny January, the town’s main scientific center was the Scripps Institute of Oceanography along the beach to the north. Above the Scripps pier, on the crest of a steep hill, stood a eucalyptus grove where former army barracks were being patched and painted into the new campus for the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). And on the sandy cliffs up the coast from Scripps and the UCSD spread the site for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, then a tree-shaded construction site and a cluster of trailers tied together by wooden decks, the first tentative offices and laboratories.
Szilard had helped found the institute—his long-sought fusion of biological and social science—and anticipated a return to basic research and brainstorming after three years’ lobbying for arms control in Washington. The locale was striking, although oddly bucolic for an urbanite like Szilard. And even in this dream world, Szilard could feel restless during these final months of his life, at peace with himself but still at odds with the elusive mysteries of nature.
In the months before this visit, Szilard had been concerned about Trude’s reaction to La Jolla, then a placid village at the north end of San Diego. He knew that she enjoyed her public health work in Washington and would miss their eclectic social life in the capital. He did not know what new and compelling interests she might find in this idyllic coastal setting. Szilard had mentioned in several recent letters to friends that he “will not live forever” and worried that if they moved to La Jolla, Trude should have a reason to remain there on her own. Her delight with the tropical climate and with the sociable community of scientists gathering at the Salk Institute soon put his mind at ease.
That spring, Szilard told Margaret Brenman Gibson, a board member at the Council for a Livable World (CLW), that he had decided to live in La Jolla because at his age it offered “a foretaste of paradise.” Indeed, so at ease did Szilard seem during his sunny January visit that he and Trude found themselves looking around for not only an apartment to rent but also a house they might buy—the first time in his life that such stability seemed appealing.2 Yet mentally Szilard was as restless as ever. In his suitcase came a draft of “Sting of the Bee and Saturation Parity” for revision and review by his colleagues. Its ominous last sentence captured Szilard’s anxieties about the nuclear arms race as well as any he had ever written: “To make progress is not enough, for if the progress is not fast enough, something is going to overtake us.”3
With time, life in La Jolla enticed Szilard from the worries of arms control to the wonders of science. He poked his nose into the makeshift laboratories where his institute colleagues worked. He wandered about the concrete slabs rising nearby—the structures taking shape in architect Louis Kahn’s sweeping courtyard and reflecting-pool design for the institute. Almost every day he sat in a deck chair on the wooden patio, scribbling in his biology notebooks and squinting into the sun’s reflection on the blue sea far below.
At first, the Szilards were intrigued by a beachfront cabana on La Jolla Shores, at the Beach and Tennis Club across the bay from the cove and the village center. But before they returned to Washington in early February, the couple settled, instead, on a quiet cottage behind the Del Charro Motel.4 Situated on Torrey Pines Road, the winding, two-lane route that tied the village to the new science and research establishments growing on the cliffs above, this was an ideal location for both work and play. A stable behind the motel had been converted to a two-room apartment, and from the large windows the Szilards viewed palms and flowers that framed the lawn. The arched ceiling, with wood beams exposed, gave the place an informal air. Yet there were maids and room service, along with a small dining room in the motel. This small but elegant place seemed just right for Trude to live in, for Leo to think in.
Back in Washington that February, Trude packed their belongings at the Dupont Plaza and prepared for the move, saying farewell to friends and colleagues at Georgetown University and the Pan American Health Organization. She would later call her interlude in Washington “the happiest time of my life.”5 Szilard dashed about town to conclude his arms-control lobbying. In a February note to McGeorge Bundy, who had remained as national security adviser in the Johnson administration, Szilard sent a copy of “Sting of the Bee.” “In the unlikely case that you should find time these days to read this paper, I should appreciate the opportunity to answer any questions which you might have before February 20,” Szilard wrote. “On that date I am leaving for the West Coast, where I intend to stay ‘permanently.’ ”6
Over lunch at the garish Genghis Khan Restaurant with Herbert (Pete) Scoville, the former technical director of the Central Intelligence Agency who was then working at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Szilard talked about ways to verify arms agreements.7 He tried to meet Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in order to explain the Angels Project, and when this failed, Szilard finally abandoned the whole idea.8 On Capitol Hill, he paid farewell calls to senators helped by the council, including Fulbright, Church, Clark, and McGovern.
In his cluttered room at the Dupont Plaza and in his small office at the Institute for Policy Studies nearby, Szilard polished his “Sting of the Bee” manuscript and drafted a statement criticizing a multilateral nuclear force.9 He also wrote to magazine editors, seeking popular outlets for his ideas, but only the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists would agree to publish his manuscripts.
While he was in Washington, Holiday magazine featured a long and flattering profile, “Leo Szilard: The Conscience of a Scientist,” written by Tristram Coffin and illustrated with dramatically posed photographs by Arnold Newman. The article cited science historian Alice K. Smith’s conclusion that Szilard was one among five men in the past century who have done the most to change our times; the others were Lincoln, Gandhi, Hitler, and Churchill. “The creative scientist
has much in common with the artist and the poet,” the article quoted Szilard as saying. “Logical thinking and an analytical ability are necessary attributes to a scientist, but they are far from sufficient for creative work. Those insights in science which have led to a breakthrough were not logically derived from preexisting knowledge; the creative processes on which the progress of science is based operate on the level of the subconscious.”
What excites him now, Szilard said, is biology. “The mysteries of biology are no less deep than the mysteries of physics were one or two generations ago, and the tools are available to solve them provided only that we believe they can be solved.”10
But while anticipating the pleasures of science, Szilard could not stop worrying about the perils of the nuclear arms race or yet escape his role in it. After the move to La Jolla in late February and just before he began dictating his ambitious theory on memory and recall, Szilard still mused about the strategic nuclear situation. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were testing large nuclear warheads. The “missile gap,” a Kennedy campaign device in 1960, was actually prompting a Soviet buildup; at that year’s end the USSR had fewer than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), while the United States had more than 600 ICBMs and 160 SLBMs and continued building them rapidly. Understandably, when the United States proposed, in January 1964, that both superpowers stop producing fissionable materials for nuclear weapons, the plea was promptly rejected.
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