A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  The von, meaning “of,” the German designation of aristocratic status, was an indication of the wealth and prominence of the family in which von Neumann had grown up. His father, Max Neumann, was a banker. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, which was to begin the destruction of their shining but fragile universe, Max had been granted a Hungarian title of nobility by Franz Josef, the Austro-Hungarian emperor. He became Max Neumann of Margitta. When the eldest son of this newly ennobled family began teaching mathematics at the University of Berlin in 1926 he had accordingly styled himself Johann Neumann von Margitta. The American consul to whom he applied for an immigrant identification card three years later trimmed it to Johann von Neumann, and von Neumann Anglicized the Johann to John after he settled in the United States.

  The von Neumann family lived in a capacious apartment in Budapest in a building constructed by von Neumann’s maternal grandfather, Jacob Kann, who had gained his fortune in the agricultural equipment business. Max had made a good match for himself by successfully courting Margaret, one of Jacob’s younger daughters. Von Neumann was the first of the three sons born to them, three days after Christmas 1903, and was named Janos, Hungarian for John. Hungarians customarily do not address a person by his formal first name. He was thus always called Jancsi, the diminutive of Janos, which is why he quickly turned the John to Johnny after immigrating.

  There was a cook and other household servants. Johnny and his two younger brothers, Michael and Nicholas, who eventually followed him to the United States, had nursemaids to care for them when they were toddlers. When they grew older a German governess was hired to teach them German, the second language of their parents and the language in which they were to be educated, and an Alsatian governess to teach them French. They learned English from two Englishmen interned during the First World War who preferred quarters in the family apartment to enforced residence in a camp. In addition, Johnny learned on his own to read Italian.

  This tranquil world to which wealth and culture gave a seeming sense of permanence had arisen out of a compromise political settlement in 1867 whereby Hungary acquired self-government and became the equal of Austria in the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire. Casting about for allies to buttress their position, the Magyar nobility set aside the previously official anti-Semitism and encouraged Jewish immigration into the country as well as Jewish participation in Hungary’s business and professional life. The change coincided with an era of unparalleled growth, industrialization, and prosperity in Hungary’s larger towns and cities, especially in the capital. Budapest burgeoned from a city of 280,000 in 1867 to 800,000, the sixth largest in Europe after London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, by the time von Neumann was born in 1903.

  As agents for capitalist growth, Jews contributed enormously to this transformation and benefited enormously from it. Although a mere 5 percent of the population as a whole, by 1910 Jews comprised approximately half of Hungary’s lawyers, journalists, and commercial businessmen, nearly 60 percent of its doctors, and 80 percent of its financiers. The Jews of this golden age who managed the climb into the middle and upper-middle classes tended to leave the religious observance of their forebears behind them. By the second or third generation, as was the case with the von Neumann family, they became secularized and casually ecumenical in their customs. At Christmas the family put up a tree and exchanged gifts, and the boys sang Christmas carols with their German and Alsatian governesses.

  Perhaps the finest accomplishment of the period was the educational system and perhaps the finest institutions within the system were the secondary schools. They were not public schools. They were elite schools, designed to educate the sons of the middle and upper-middle classes who could afford the high tuition fees. The secular Jewish bourgeoisie contributed to the excellence of these schools as well, out of their inherited love of learning that derives from the rabbinical system and its reliance on study of the Torah. Again, they were ecumenical in their choices. Max sent his boys to the Lutheran Gymnasium (the word is a German one for an academic high school that prepares its students for university). The school was nondenominational in its admissions policy. Its course was rigorous and included eight years of Latin, four of classical Greek, history, physics, and the full range of mathematics through calculus and analytical geometry.

  Of all the students who ever attended Lutheran, John von Neumann was by far the most brilliant in the estimation of his peers. When he was six, his parents would amuse visitors and show off their Johnny by having him read a page in the telephone book, then take it back while he reeled off the names and numbers from his photographic memory for the astonished guests. Near the end of his life, as he lay dying of cancer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, his brother Michael came to see him and, to distract him from the pain, sat beside the bed and read Goethe’s Faust in the original German of their school days. As Michael reached the bottom of a page, von Neumann would start reciting the first lines of the next one.

  He was a genuine mathematical prodigy. His mathematics teacher at Lutheran had to devise special advanced courses for him because he quickly worked his way through the school’s regular math curriculum. The proofs he wrote in subsequent years for publication in journals of higher mathematical studies resemble Mozart’s musical scores. The original drafts, written with a fountain pen in von Neumann’s firm, clear hand, go on for twenty to thirty pages with hardly anything ever crossed out. As Mozart could hear the music in his head while he composed his scores, so von Neumann could see in his mind the steps leading to the solution of the mathematical challenge. “He wrote last drafts first,” his daughter and only child, Marina von Neumann Whitman, who became a prominent economist, remarked. At Los Alamos during the making of the atomic bomb he was renowned for solving in a few minutes in his head defiant equations that took other physicists and mathematicians nights of toil with slide rule and mechanical calculator.

  The first cataclysm struck in 1918 with the defeat of Austria-Hungary and Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany by the Allies. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell and the empire disintegrated. The second cataclysm occurred in March 1919 when Johnny was fifteen and still attending the Lutheran Gymnasium. Béla Kun, a Hungarian socialist who had absorbed Bolshevik ideas while a prisoner of war in Russia, staged a Communist revolt with the support of Hungarian soldiers home from Russian prison camps, who had been similarly radicalized by the success of Vladimir Lenin’s revolution there. Kun’s regime was marked by a utopian ineptness at governing and a Red Terror in which about 500 opponents were executed. The chaos ended after 133 days when Admiral Miklós Horthy, who was to become the right-wing dictator of Hungary, enlisted Romanian troops to oust Kun and launched a White Terror in which as many as 5,000 may have died. And the Jews got the blame.

  The von Neumann family fled to Austria about a month into the revolt, when Max saw that it was too dangerous to stay. The Hungary to which they returned was a different land. Eight of Kun’s eleven senior commissars had been Jews and so had a goodly number of lesser figures in his regime. The backlash was a powerful resurgence of traditional anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitic laws that had been in abeyance since the grant of self-government and the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867 were reenacted. One struck at education for Jews at the University of Budapest and other higher schools. Henceforth, they were to be restricted in admission to the 5 percent Jews represented of the population as a whole. But the worst consequence of the backlash was the loss of the secure place Jews had known in Hungarian society. Even families like that of Max von Neumann, who had plotted with the right-wing Magyars to rid the country of Kun’s regime, were now outsiders with an uncertain future.

  John von Neumann had imbibed Russophobia in his Hungarian culture. It was as much a part of his heritage as paprika goulash, inculcated by generations of confronting the Bear along the eastern frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The upheaval of Béla Kun’s revolution and its aftermath immensely reinforced that attitude with
in him. He saw Russia as the font of this menacing new radicalism and became, in his words, “violently anti-Communist.”

  Von Neumann wanted to take his university degree in mathematics in Budapest (he would obviously have no trouble qualifying no matter how high the bar was set) and to teach the subject, but Max was convinced he could not earn a decent living that way. There was virtually no chance of gaining a post in mathematics at the university level in Hungary. They settled on chemical engineering as a compromise. Von Neumann obeyed his father, but had his own way too by designing a unique higher education career for himself. He went off to Germany in 1921 to study chemistry at the University of Berlin, moving on two years later to the prestigious Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he took a chemical engineering degree in 1925. All the while, at both institutions, he continued his studies in mathematics and physics. Then he came home and enrolled in the University of Budapest. In a single academic year he whizzed through the remaining courses required, wrote his doctoral thesis in mathematics, and in 1926, at the unprecedented age of twenty-two, was awarded his Ph.D. with highest honors.

  He never worked a day as a chemical engineer. Rather, he returned to the University of Berlin as an assistant professor of mathematics soon after gaining his Ph.D. Germany’s economic troubles and the shortage of funds at all institutions prevented him from turning the Berlin post into something permanent. In 1929, the year his father died, Princeton offered him a visiting lectureship for the following year. He accepted it, to begin with less out of apprehension over the growth of Nazism in Germany and the drift from old-fashioned authoritarianism toward Nazi-style Fascism in Hungary, than out of simple lack of opportunity there. He was still bound to Europe, but the ever more looming menace of Nazism gave him pause. When Princeton held out a visiting professorship in mathematics and mathematical physics at the end of his initial lectureship, he responded and kept renewing it until Hitler made up von Neumann’s mind for him by rising to chancellor of Germany in January 1933, quickly establishing an absolute and stridently racist dictatorship. There was no alternative now but America.

  In a letter to a friend around this time, von Neumann predicted that if the Nazis managed to hold on to power they would destroy creative science in Germany. German science and technology remained formidable until the ruination of defeat in 1945, but von Neumann was essentially right about the creative aspect. The 1928 volume of the German edition of the Annals of Mathematics, found among his papers at the Library of Congress, provides a sampling of the scientific talent that the Nazis hounded out of Germany to inadvertently enrich science in the United States. Theodore von Kármán is listed as one of the editors. Albert Einstein is among the contributors. Another is John von Neumann, with a paper on a mathematical model of economics he had just devised. He elaborated the theory in his new home and, in collaboration with a colleague at Princeton, Oscar Morgenstern, published it as a book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The theory became widely influential on everything from nuclear strategy and arms control negotiations to economic analysis and race relations. In 1933, von Neumann was also made an offer he could hardly refuse. The Institute for Advanced Study, independent of the university, had been founded at Princeton. He was appointed its first research professor of mathematics at the then generous salary of $10,000 a year. The post was ideal for a man of von Neumann’s temperament. While he could and did accept protégés in mathematics as temporary fellows at the institute, he had no classes to teach, indeed no fixed duties at all. He was expected simply to follow his bent and break new ground in his field.

  31.

  A FASCINATION WITH EXPLOSIONS

  It was hardly surprising that a man of von Neumann’s background and experience would be afflicted with a profound sense of insecurity, which sometimes manifested itself in comic ways. One was his obsession with proper attire. A unique photograph exists of him walking down a sidewalk in Santa Fe in 1949 with his daughter, Marina, then fourteen, in business suit but with his shirt collar open and no tie. It seems to have been a singular occasion, for no friend’s camera appears to have caught him ever again in such disarray. More typical of the lengths to which he would go to maintain sartorial decorum is a photograph taken in the late 1940s of a group on a break from work at Los Alamos for an excursion into the Grand Canyon. They are about to start the descent, astride the mules that will carry them down. All, including von Neumann’s second wife, Klara Dan, who was called Klari, are wearing casual clothes and some have broad-brimmed hats to protect them from the sun. Von Neumann brings up the rear. His balding head is exposed to the sun and he sits astride his mule in business suit and tie with white handkerchief tucked into his lapel pocket. For some reason, his mule is also headed in the wrong direction.

  The insecurity manifested itself as well in his concern for money. There was no need for it. His salary at the institute was ample. He also held a couple of civilian consultantships, one with IBM, which paid him thousands more. He lived in the manner of the wealthy European he had been born, sailing the Atlantic in first-class cabins each summer for international mathematical conferences in Europe, and seeking out the best hotels. He drove the best of American cars, a snappy Cadillac coupé. Yet this willingness to treat himself to luxury never stopped him from chasing down the last penny to which he felt he might be entitled. In 1955, while a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, he dictated a letter to his secretary for the management of the Nassau Tavern in Princeton. It was typed on official stationery and dispatched by government postage. Enclosed were unused vouchers for the restaurant’s parking lot. Von Neumann requested reimbursement, by check or credit. The total amounted to seventy-five cents.

  He also had an identity problem. He couldn’t seem to decide whether he was a Christian or a Jew. His first wife, the daughter of a Budapest physician, was a Gentile and a Roman Catholic. The child of that marriage, Marina, was by prior agreement raised in the Roman Catholic faith. Three days before she was baptized in 1935 at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Trenton, New Jersey, von Neumann had himself baptized at the same place. He never practiced Roman Catholicism in subsequent years, however, and his Jewish friends assumed he considered himself a secular Jew because he acted like one when he was with them. One of his closest Jewish friends, the highly talented Polish-born mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, recalled in his memoirs how von Neumann liked to tell a joke mocking the “goyim,” a derogatory Yiddish term for Gentiles. (Ulam, who also immigrated to the United States during the 1930s, was in 1951 to make the hydrogen bomb feasible by coming up with a new idea for detonating the thermonuclear core. Teller would never subsequently acknowledge the contribution because it detracted from his claim to sole parentage.) Not until death confronted him would von Neumann make up his mind.

  Von Neumann displayed the same sort of intensely emotional patriotism Schriever did, the patriotism of the immigrant who is deeply grateful to a land that has been good to him. He had a fierce desire to defend this society that had given him shelter and that embodied values he cherished in the rule of law and the freedom of scholarly inquiry. The traits also made him eager to cooperate with the U.S. military. He found the relationship fulfilling, a measure of his acceptance by American society. Systematic mobilization of scientific talent then got under way at the outset of 1941. Roosevelt recruited Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer and mathematician who was president of the Carnegie Institution and one of the country’s most eminent scientific figures, to oversee the effort as his science czar. Bush established the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), with himself as chairman. That February 26, he wrote von Neumann notifying him that he was being made a consultant to a section of the committee under Bush’s friend James Conant, a chemist who was president of Harvard.

  By now von Neumann was eager to give the slip to his scholar’s tower at the institute. His was not the contemplative genius of Einstein. His mind was quick and restless and this was an opportunity to dedicate his extraordinary talent for m
athematics and mathematical physics to a cause that had such intense and personal meaning for him. He quickly developed a fascination with explosions. The subject is called hydrodynamics because of the similarity between the expanding waves of an explosion and fluids in motion. The section of the National Defense Research Committee to which he had been assigned was focused on the subject, using a laboratory at Princeton. Soon his correspondence was filled with such terms as “gas dynamics,” “shock collisions,” “shock waves in several dimensions,” and “oblique shock reflection.” He studied explosions through every technique available, including flash photography with high-speed film, and composed mathematical models for the various types, phases, and effects. By the spring of 1942 he had begun to make himself an authority on the subject, evolving a theory on explosions that he laid out in a secret report entitled “Detonation Waves.” Unaware as he sometimes was that lesser mortals had difficulty keeping pace with his mind, his initial report was composed almost entirely of mathematical models and equations. At the request of some of his colleagues, he wrote a second report, “a more ‘popular’ version,” as he called it, which contained enough of the English language so a technically qualified person could comprehend his mathematics.

  His reputation for expertise on explosives became sufficiently widespread within the military and scientific communities that the Navy sent him to England for six months to advise on the effects of detonations underwater, apparently for use in antisubmarine warfare. After his return from England in the summer of 1943, Robert Oppenheimer summoned him out to Los Alamos. He wanted von Neumann’s advice on the implosion method the laboratory was attempting to develop to set off the Fat Man plutonium bomb that was to be dropped on Nagasaki. The two men had been acquainted since the late 1920s, when they had met while Oppenheimer was studying in Germany. Von Neumann endorsed the implosion concept and provided some ideas for it, but Oppenheimer then made the mistake of assigning to an American physicist from Caltech the task of perfecting it. The job was light-years beyond the man. Even Hans Bethe, the gifted German Jewish physicist who was to win a Nobel for his research on the energy production of stars, at the time chief of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, tried and failed to design a workable method.