Next Szilard revealed that during his last visit to Washington he had discussed with sympathetic senators the possibility of introducing special legislation to compensate him for the early inventions. He said he preferred not to file for compensation; this would only create lengthy legal proceedings and press coverage that might imperil his chances for the Fermi Award. Above all, Tabin remembered, Szilard “felt that time was running out” and that he should not delay in taking some action. At Tabin’s request, Szilard agreed to gather up all his documents bearing on the atomic patents.35
Perhaps it was his whole life’s forward momentum, its restless surges and pursuits. Perhaps it was mere habit. Perhaps a deeper unrest he could never explain. But for some reason, Szilard had been at the Salk Institute for only about three months—and officially a resident fellow for about three weeks—before he entertained thoughts about leaving, at least for a while. “There was something driving Leo,” Salk recalled later. “He was not conscious of it, but he kept on going. Moving about. Searching to find something in the wind.”36
In January 1964, Szilard had declined an invitation to spend the fall semester as regents lecturer at the University of California in Santa Barbara. But in April, when invited again, Szilard held on to the letter and puzzled over it. His friend Robert Hutchins, the former president and later chancellor of the University of Chicago, was then heading the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara and for more than three years had written exuberant invitations to Szilard to visit. This strong tie may have added to the lectureship’s appeal, for on May 27, Szilard asked Bronowski, the Salk Institute’s deputy director, about whether he might accept the regents lectureship that fall.37
A few days earlier, Szilard had told Trude about other travel plans. Before writing the second and third parts to his “Memory and Recall” paper, Szilard said, he needed to appraise the latest research on neurobiology. This he could do by spending two or three weeks at MIT, “to learn about their experiments and perhaps to start some new ones.”38
Still, Szilard was ambivalent about leaving La Jolla, and when invited to participate in Cornell University’s centenary celebration, he replied with mixed feelings. He wrote on May 13:
As a rule, I have in the past declined such invitations because, while they sound very attractive at the time when you receive them, when the time comes to fulfill the obligation, it usually turns out to interfere with some other urgent activity. Because I moved to La Jolla, which is somewhat isolated, upon receipt of your letter I did some soul-searching to see whether I ought to change my attitude towards invitations of this particular kind. I came to the conclusion that I should not.39
La Jolla, Szilard reported to researcher and CLW supporter Betty Goetz Lall in May, “is a wonderful place and very good for my work in science, but it puts me out of circulation regarding the field of arms control.” Yet Szilard could not escape what had for years been his life’s governing purpose.40 In March the Boston Herald published an attack on the CLW by conservative columnist Holmes Alexander. Calling the council “one of these unilateral disarmament groups,” he denounced “The Liveable (with Communism) Worlders” and named the candidates receiving their money. A week later, in the Herald and several other papers, Alexander attacked again. His “Cold War Comes into Wyoming” compared Sen. Gale McGee’s acceptance of council money with other candidates’ support by Robert Welch’s ultraconservative John Birch Society.41
On March 10, H. Ashton Crosby, the council’s executive director, mailed Szilard the two Boston Herald clips, adding: “I am not worried about the impact on the Council but I am worried about what these articles may do to our Senators.” Crosby reported that he and CLW counsel John Silard (Bela’s son) were planning to draft a statement “from somebody high up in the Administration that they support the Council’s efforts and know that it is a responsible organization.”42 By May, after several letters were exchanged between Alexander and Crosby, the council became the subject of a Senate debate that would continue for months.43 Szilard finally became annoyed enough to join the dispute when North Dakota’s Quentin Burdick charged in a speech on the Senate floor that the council had advocated that the United States “should unilaterally disarm.” Writing to Burdick on May 28, Szilard challenged him to show where such a notion was ever stated in council documents. All Szilard had ever favored, he insisted, was “multilateral disarmament, carried out step by step with proper guarantees.”44
Szilard dictated but did not sign that letter. There is no record of how he spent the next day, a Friday, but apparently he worked from the cottage to plan a research program for his memory and recall studies. By telephone he invited chemist Anna Beck to be one of his research assistants. Laboratory space in the new institute buildings would be available within a few months.45 He envisioned several years’ work, pursuing clinically the ideas he was still devising in theory. On that Friday night, CLW board member Matthew Meselson joined Trude and Leo. After a meal, they all chatted and enjoyed the Bob Hope show on television, then Leo went off to bed “feeling fine.”46
Trude awoke before dawn the next morning, Saturday, May 30. The alarm clock glowing in the darkness read 3:55. The room was quiet. Too quiet, she thought. Leo wasn’t snoring or breathing heavily. Then Trude touched him and discovered that he was still. She tried to arouse him. No response. Terrified, she began artificial respiration, then pulmonary resuscitation, her medical skills overtaking collapsing emotions. Still no response. She now realized there was no life to revive. Leo had died in his sleep, taken by a massive heart attack.47
Trude telephoned La Jolla’s emergency number, then their friend Robert Livingston, then Jonas Salk. The San Diego County coroner sent a man to the cottage, who certified Szilard’s death and said that an autopsy was required. Salk telephoned institute biologist Edwin Lennox and Szilard’s new urologist in La Jolla, James Whisenand. A call came from Trude to her sister, Frances, in Mount Vernon, New York. “The most terrible thing in the world has happened,” she whispered, breaking the sad news. Frances called Bela, who lived nearby. In La Jolla, Livingston telephoned the Associated Press, and at 9:54 A.M., Pacific daylight time, bells clanged on AP tickers in newsrooms around the country to signal an important story: “BULLETIN, SAN DIEGO, CALIF., MAY 30 (AP)—DR. LEO SZILARD, A TOP US NUCLEAR PHYSICIST AND ONE OF THE MEN CREDITED WITH KEY WORK IN DEVELOPING THE ATOMIC BOMB, DIED TODAY AT HIS LA JOLLA HOME. HE WAS 66.
“HIS DEATH WAS ATTRIBUTED TO A HEART ATTACK.”48
Within an hour, a complete story moved on the wires, crediting Szilard as the scientist “who helped the United States become an atomic power, and then later campaigned for peace. . . Correctly the AP account mentioned Szilard’s role in the 1939 Einstein letter to Roosevelt, his codesign of the first nuclear reactor with Fermi, his 1947 letter to Stalin, and the 1960 Atoms for Peace Award. Incorrectly, it noted that his name is pronounced “ZilARD, not SILard.”49
By that time, Szilard’s body had been moved to the San Diego County Morgue, where Whisenand and a coroner’s pathologist prepared for the autopsy. The task wasn’t easy, Whisenand recalled, “with Jonas Salk and Ed Lennox breathing down our necks” and with the widow determined to have detailed information about their subject’s bladder. They found “no gross evidence of any tumor or abnormality in the urinary tract,” Whisenand later reported to James Whitmore at Memorial Hospital in New York.50 At Trude’s request, both the bladder and urinary tract were removed during the autopsy and sent to Memorial Hospital, where a detailed biopsy later confirmed that the cancer had been completely eradicated.51
But what they found in Szilard’s heart confirmed that a life of indulgent eating and little exercise had, at last, proved fatal. “He had died so quickly” from a coronary thrombosis, Whisenand reported, that there had been no time for any secondary effects or changes in his heart. Serious coronary arteriosclerosis and scars from his 1957 heart attack were apparent. Salk later reassured Trude that her attempts to resuscitat
e Leo could not have succeeded. She had done all that was possible, but by then nothing could have saved him.
Wire-service dispatches later that day praised Szilard as a “tireless campaigner for peace” and the New York Times, in a page 1 obituary the next morning, called him “one of the great physicists of the century” and detailed the many achievements in his long and varied career. His demeanor, the paper reported, “was that of a volatile owl.” In London, the more stately Times called Szilard “a leading American physicist who played an important part in the wartime development of nuclear energy. . . . He was not of Fermi’s stature—few are—but he had qualities of quick imagination combined with persistance [sic] which gave him a position of importance during the whole of the early formative period of American work on nuclear energy. He has left his mark on history as well as physics.”52
Rose Szilard Detre was just leaving Denver for Budapest when she learned about her brother’s death and decided she could best represent the family by continuing her trip. She bore the sad news to her friends and relatives. Alice Danos, Szilard’s high school sweetheart, told Rose she would miss Leo, although they had not spoken for nearly three decades. “Just knowing all those years that he was alive and up to his surprises” made her feel good, she said.53 In Princeton, Eugene Wigner heard the news on his radio and sat down, tearfully, to pen a note to Trude, praising “the friendship of a lifetime” with “the most imaginative man I ever knew.” Chemist John Polanyi recalled Szilard’s “greatness and sweetness.” Albert Rosenfeld, Life’s science editor, considered him “one of the great and good human beings of our time.”54 And Edward Teller, Szilard’s personal friend and professional critic, gave a characteristically ironic twist to his response. “I cannot but think of that legendary, restless figure, Dr. Faust, who in Goethe’s tragedy dies at the very moment when at last he declares he is content.”55
Szilard had told Trude he wanted no funeral service, but in her grief she needed to mark his loss somehow. Her sister, Frances Racker, and Bela flew in from New York and joined Trude for a private farewell on Monday morning, June 1. In a small, plain room at the La Jolla Mortuary, the three sat on a bench by a plain wooden coffin. Trude placed a single rose atop the long pine cover. There was no music. There were no tributes. Just a few quiet words whispered among the three. Then the coffin was taken to the Cypress View Mausoleum in San Diego, where, at 1:00 P.M., Szilard’s remains were cremated.56 Trude could not decide what to do with Leo’s ashes and left them in a copper urn at the mausoleum.57
Jonas Salk and the other resident fellows also defied Szilard’s wish and held a memorial service at the unfinished institute site, on Saturday, June 13, at 3:00 P.M. Participants clustered in rows of folding metal chairs in a surrealistic setting, among the concrete slabs and steel scaffolds of the new institute complex, overlooking the Pacific. A string quartet played Haydn. Ruth Adams, Szilard’s longtime friend from the Bulletin and the Pugwash conferences, gave a warm and friendly eulogy. Salk puzzled over Szilard’s creative spirit. “Some minds convert detail to principle quickly, while others move ponderously,” he said, “defending all the way what earlier was believed to be true. Szilard wanted merely to know the facts, which he then soon assembled into new forms of thought. This capacity to perceive the essence of things and to see and formulate fundamental principles was the nature of his wisdom.”
For Salk, the mental processes that animated Szilard also revealed a natural evolution to higher states of consciousness, an idea he pursued earnestly in later years. “There is much we need to learn about what it was that made him feel at peace and at one with himself here,” Salk said. At the time the institute began, Salk saw Szilard as a pillar on which the “humanistic” approach to science would be built; biological research, he knew, would advance on its own, as it always had. So with Szilard’s death, Salk feared—correctly, it turned out—that his institute’s special mission would be hard to achieve. “Leo cared not to carry the torch but simply to light it; and when there were not others to carry, he did so himself. . . .
“Of the torches he lighted, many have been carried far beyond his own visions.” Szilard’s one driving motive, Salk concluded, was “toward relief of human suffering. His interest in peace and in problems of disease were all of one piece. As we have said, he was a humanist with a powerful intellect, but he was also a man with a warm heart.”58
In his own eulogy, Lennox marveled at Szilard’s heroic and ingenious recovery from cancer, wondered why he had not been as successful with the fatal heart attack, and could only conclude: “God never would have got Leo if he had been awake!” After the service, Szilard’s friends chuckled again when they heard about his idea for scattering his ashes. “Put them into brightly colored balloons,” Szilard had instructed Orgel, “and release them over the ocean. That way, at least it will delight all the children.”59
Epilogue
“What would Leo think?” his many friends and colleagues ask today as they ponder the state of the world since his death. With a knowing and mysterious air, Leo Szilard was so farsighted and so certain about where this planet was headed that he gave us all a glimpse into the future, at least for a while. “I still miss his unusual intelligence and wit,” Szilard’s friend James D. Watson said more than two decades after his death. “He was irreplaceable in the truest sense.”
Szilard’s predictions in 1960 regarding the course of the nuclear arms race seemed right on schedule in 1988, for the United States and Soviet Union at last recognized that the stalemate they had reached with their arsenals left no alternative but to reduce weapons stockpiles drastically and to turn to domestic problems. Yet for all his fascination with the politics of Europe, Szilard nowhere in his writings foresaw the rapid and revolutionary sweep of democracy that followed the cold war’s thaw.
In death, as in life, Szilard remained something of a mystery. His wife, Trude, lived on in La Jolla after his death, collecting and editing his papers from the jumble of bags and suitcases in which they were stored, producing the three volumes published by the MIT Press. When she died of cancer in 1981 (from the heavy smoking that Leo had long warned was unhealthy), she was buried at her mother’s plot in Ithaca, New York. The tombstone there listed Trude as “the wife of Leo Szilard,” with the years and places of birth and death for both. But while Trude’s remains were actually in Ithaca, Leo’s were not. They stayed in San Diego, in a setting he would probably detest. After his remains were cremated in 1964, the ashes were placed in an annex to the Cypress View Mortuary in San Diego, in a cigar-box-sized plastic container that was stacked on a rack also used to store corpses before their cremation. Trude never could decide what to do with the ashes, so they remained there, in what Cypress View called “permanent storage.”
In 1986, Bela Silard decided that his brother’s ashes should at least be on public view and arranged for them to be moved into the Cypress View Mausoleum, a garish marble extravaganza complete with doleful Muzak, inspirational religious paintings, and gauche art reproductions. The ashes were placed in a smaller, Styrofoam box and slipped into a marked niche in the main section of the sprawling and gaudy mausoleum, in the “Columbarium” in the “Court of Apostles,” his resting place until 1998. With keen eyesight or a pair of binoculars you could just make out LEO SZILARD 1898–1964 on the four-by-eight-inch brass plate on the niche, a few inches below the fourteen-foot-high ceiling.
In his instructions to Trude, Szilard said there was no need to retain his ashes, as there is no difference between them and anyone else’s “except perhaps slight variations in calcium content, which are of no interest.” As “an innovation,” he suggested that she may wish to spread the ashes using balloons because “it is more pleasing for people to look up rather than to look down,” and in the Columbarium, at least, visitors could “look up,” although not in the way Szilard had intended.1
As to the other earthly reminders of Szilard, before his death he did not receive the AEC’s Enrico Fermi Award or any f
urther compensation for his chain-reaction patents. Nor did he ever receive a Nobel Prize, as so many of his colleagues and collaborators did. He was nominated once for his work in physics, however, and was mentioned by others in their Nobel lectures both for biology and for peace. Szilard’s determination in pressing a theory to explain human immune systems was praised by biologist Jacques Monod, who pursued the idea that won him and others the 1965 prize for physiology or medicine. And, in 1985, the Soviet doctor Evgeni Chazov, when accepting the Peace Prize for the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, said that Szilard’s science-fiction view of uranium had dramatized the stupidity of the nuclear arms race and that his social conscience had driven him to undo the peril his scientific discoveries had created.2
The American Physical Society established a Leo Szilard Award for science and public policy, and when Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov received it in 1983, he said that Szilard’s devotion to public service “sprang from his innate, acute feeling of personal responsibility for the fate of mankind on our planet, and for the possible consequences of science’s great victories.”3 The American physicist John H. Gibbons, director of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), said when he received the award in 1991 that “Szilard should be the Patron Saint of OTA!” because of his many efforts to “clarify what the real issues were” just as the “Voice of the Dolphins” program did. “OTA’s mission is akin to Szilard’s fervent hopes for better communication between science and society.”
In the same spirit, Szilard would have been pleased with Science magazine’s early assessment of the Salk Institute in 1972, when it praised an “Elite Pursuit of Biology with a Conscience”—just the qualities he had sought when devising the Bund half a century earlier.4 On the other hand, Szilard would not have been so pleased with the way the institute’s dual science-and-society approach has since fared. Szilard personified that fusion, and with his death the social aspects of science lost out to the practical. “Leo was the balancing influence between myself and others,” Salk later reflected. “I insisted that our research be broad, while others wanted it to be very narrow, very focused.”5 After Szilard’s death in 1964, Jacob Bronowski inherited the leadership role for the social sciences but did little with it, and after his death in 1974, the institute focused increasingly on applied research.6 By the 1980s it was the center of a developing biotechnology industry in San Diego County, and in 1990 Science concluded that while Salk “wanted an ivory-tower sanctuary,” he “got a high-powered research lab” instead.7
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