This conviction that the United States alone could save the otherwise doomed European civilization from totalitarianism, whether the threat came from the right or the left, and avert the ushering in of a new Dark Ages stayed with my father throughout his life. Reinforced by the events of World War II and the Cold War that followed, it was a major motivation, along with a lively personal ambition, for his deep involvement in military matters. It also underlay his extremely hard-line ideas on US policy toward the Soviet Union, which included the possibility of preventive war on the latter. He made his feelings crystal clear in an interview with Life magazine: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?”11 This view sounds incredibly heartless and immoral today, but it should be judged in the context of the times: “It was widely held, especially by liberal intellectuals, that the French and British governments had behaved in a cowardly and immoral fashion when they failed to march into Germany in 1936 to stop Hitler from remilitarizing the Rhineland…To them, the idea of forestalling a terrible catastrophe by a bold preventive action was neither insane nor criminal.”12
Not long after my arrival, as Europe was descending into chaos, my parents' marriage also began to fall apart. Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him. My mother, accustomed to being the center of attention, didn't like playing second fiddle to anyone or anything, even when the competition was her spouse's supercreative mind. She began to pay more and more attention to a graduate student in physics who was a regular at the von Neumann soirees. His name was James Brown Horner Kuper, as befitted the scion of a well-to-do New York family of solid Dutch ancestry and impeccable social credentials. But she whimsically called him Desmond, after a favorite china dog, and the name stuck with him for the rest of his life.
The cracks began to show in the summer of 1936, when Mariette extended her visit with her parents in Budapest and Johnny returned to Princeton without her. In 1937 she spent much of a six-week Nevada residency, required for a divorce there, on horseback at The Ranch at Pyramid Lake, some thirty-five miles through the desert from Reno. The surprisingly intimate letters she wrote from the Riverside Hotel in that city to my father back in Princeton are remarkable partly for the vehemence of her negative reaction to the Reno of the 1930s: “I believe that hell is certainly very similar to this place. It is indescribable, everyone is constantly drunken and they lose their money like mad 5–6 hundred dollars a day, the roulette table stands in the hall just as a spittoon some other place.”
Aside from the availability of horses, the Ranch was apparently no better: “The place itself is terribly primitive…There is no telephone or telegraph,…mail once a day…[I]t is entirely crazy here…I believe I won't survive. I live in the midst of an Indian reservation there is a beautiful lake and the country is so divine that it is difficult to imagine. But these horrible females it is impossible that there are so many kinds of women in the world…Riding is very beautiful but the evenings are deadly, imagine dinner at six and night goes until ten o'clock.”
Even more revealing is the fact that she addresses the husband she is in the process of divorcing as “Johnny Sweetheart,” and entreats him, “[D]o you love me a bit” and “If you have time love me a bit.” She ends one letter with “I have the howling blues” and signs the other “Million kisses.”13
The ambivalence reflected in these letters persisted throughout Johnny and Mariette's lives, creating puzzlement and pain for the spouses they subsequently married. Desmond pretended not to notice, but my father's second wife, Klari, was haunted by the lively ghost of a legally terminated relationship. In her unpublished autobiography, she wrote, “This [a meeting of the two couples at a party] was definitely a crisis—a crisis which was followed by many other similar ones for many, many years. Gradually I did get used to them and learned how to handle the situation, but Johnny and Marietta never ceased playing the game of detached attachment or vice versa, which ever fit best.”14
I don't believe my father ever really understood why my mother left him for an unremarkable graduate student, and neither did anyone else. In her manuscript, Klari vividly described the paradox of Johnny and Mariette: “They were a perfectly matched pair; gay and gregarious, intelligent and witty—frankly and openly enjoying all the luxuries they could easily afford—but, above all, both of them being intensely ambitious. It is a pity that these two, who remained deeply attached to each other many years beyond their divorce and their respective marriages—it is a pity that they could not overcome their difficulties and stay together. Even separately, they went a long way towards their clearly pinpointed goals, but heaven only knows what further heights they could have attained if they had only stuck it out together—and so speaks the second wife, the successor of Marietta.”15
As for my father, he wrote in a letter to his close friend, the Polish physicist Stan Ulam, “I am sorry that things went this way—but at least I am not particularly responsible for it. I hope that your optimism is well founded—but since happiness is an eminently empyrical [sic] proposition, the only thing I can do, is to wait and see.”16 Actually, he did nothing of the sort; by the time the divorce was final, he was already writing intimate letters to Klara Dan, who became Mariette's successor. Klari, a noted beauty from the same Budapest Jewish haute bourgeoisie as my parents, hid a first-class brain behind her flirtatious manner. Though not yet thirty, she had already been married twice before, once to a dashing young man who was “an incurable gambler” and then to a banker eighteen years her senior, a “kind, gentle, attentive husband” who bored her to tears, she wrote. I have always felt certain that my father married her on the rebound, both to assuage the hurt caused by Mariette's desertion and to provide himself with a helpmeet who could manage the everyday details of life that eluded him.
Klari was trapped in Budapest for much of 1938 by an inconsistency between Hungarian and American law that threatened to leave her stateless, and therefore unable to leave Hungary, as war appeared imminent. Tensions between the couple ran high as the distance between Princeton and Budapest appeared insurmountable. They were finally able to marry and leave Europe together just before war broke out. But her profound insecurity and the constant demands for expressions of devotion that his letters were trying to respond to would haunt their relationship throughout their marriage. In one, he pleads, “Darling, we will win…and I will make you very, very, very happy! It will be a happy marriage,…and I will be able to reconquer you.”17 In another he tries to reassure her and apologize at the same time: “You are frightened of life that has maltreated you,…you are terrified even of the breeze because you sense the storm behind it…I seared you, I bullied you, I hurt you!”18 And, finally, his cry to her: “Please, please, give me a bit of faith…or at least ‘benevolent neutrality.’”19
My father's lifelong desire to impose order and rationality on an inherently disorderly and irrational world was reflected in many of his handwritten letters to family and close friends. It was also, in the view of science historian Robert Leonard, one of the major motivators of von Neumann's return, after more than a decade, to the development of the theory of games. After publishing the paper containing the central tenet of game theory, the minimax theorem, in 1928, he had dropped the subject entirely until he began to discuss jointly developing the theory and its applications to economics with his friend the Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern in 1940. Their collaboration over numerous breakfasts at the gentlemen-only Nassau Club in Princeton during the years 1940–43, while my father was deeply involved in military consulting and the development of the atomic bomb, culminated in the publication of the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
Even in the midst of this enormous project, squeezed into spare moments snatched from the frenetic pace of his secret a
nd often hair-raising wartime missions, my father's puckish sense of humor didn't desert him. Klari collected elephants, and she had hundreds of them, from one hewn out of a solid chunk of pink alabaster to the one I carved for her in a bar of Ivory soap. She insisted that she would have nothing to do with the Theory of Games unless it tipped its hat to her with a drawing of an elephant somewhere in its pages. So there, on page 64, illustrating an abstruse proof in set theory, is a collection of dots and curved lines that clearly traces out an elephant in full pursuit, trunk aloft and ears and tail flying.
One reason for my father's dogged commitment to getting the book done was his (and his coauthor's) profound dissatisfaction with the standard assumption of neoclassical economics, the dominant school of thought at the time, that individuals make “rational” economic decisions without taking into account what other people's responses are likely to be. This totally contradicted reality as he saw it. His own emphasis on social context and the characteristics of the multiple possible outcomes of the strategic “games” played by individuals, businesses, or nation-states in a wide range of human interactions is reflected in the title of John McDonald's book on game theory written for a general audience: Strategy in Poker, Business, and War (1950).
The first applications of game theory, in fact, came not in economics but in simulations of possible scenarios of future military conflicts, strategic analyses conducted by the Rand Corporation for the US Air Force—a use entirely consistent with my father's ultrahawkish view of the world. It was decades before this theory became integrated into mainstream economics, but today political scientists use it to analyze countries' relationships in peace as well as war, anthropologists call on it to ferret out patterns of interaction among neighboring cultures, and biologists employ it to examine the effects living cells have on each other.
In this use of game theory to uncover previously hidden patterns, scientists in a wide variety of fields are spurred by motives not unlike those of the theory's progenitor. In Leonard's words, “It is difficult not to see in his [von Neumann's] efforts an element of perhaps subconscious resistance to the conditions of the time; an almost defiant willingness to see order beyond the disorder, equilibrium beyond the confusion, to seek an inevitable return to normality once the present transition, with its ‘abnormal spiritual tensions,’ was over.”20
In the event, my father's domestic life would reach a new, if somewhat shaky, equilibrium long before his wider world returned to some semblance of normalcy. Indeed, near the end of his life, he seems to have concluded that such normalcy, like the Holy Grail, would remain forever beyond reach. That pessimism is certainly implied in an article he wrote for Fortune magazine in 1955, the year he was found to have the cancer that would kill him. Asked to give his views on America in 1980, he titled his response “Can We Survive Technology?” In it he predicted, “Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more awful…In the years between now and 1980 the (global) crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say.”21
Despite the ambiguous wording, this last sentence reflected his fear that mankind might not survive another twenty-five years but instead would become the victim of its own self-destructive inclinations. He had quantified this fear in a letter to Klari in 1946 regarding the probable date of the next war: “I don't think this is less than two years and I do think it is less than ten.”22 It was not technology itself that my father feared but human nature: “It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electrical field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.”23
My father's belief in a coming Armageddon, and his firm conviction that the only hope for civilization lay in American victories over both nazism and communism, was born as the storm clouds gathered over Europe in the mid-1930s and lasted until his death. The result was a clear line of demarcation between the two halves of his life as a scientist. During the first half, which spanned his youth in Europe and his early days in the United States, he made fundamental contributions in the realm of pure mathematics and mathematical physics, involving himself in some of the major scientific issues that roiled European intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1935, though, he symbolically put Europe behind him by resigning from the German Mathematical Society, writing, “I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to remain a member of the the German Mathematical Society any longer…”24 He was equally emphatic twenty years later in explaining his reasons for coming to America: “I expected World War II, and I was apprehensive that Hungary would be on the Nazi side, and I didn't want to be caught dead on that side.”25
As soon as he obtained American citizenship in 1937, von Neumann embarked on a collaboration with the US military that lasted the rest of his life, first with the Ballistics Research Laboratory of the Army Ordnance Department in Aberdeen, Maryland, then with the Manhattan Project and, after World War II, all three branches of the armed forces, the Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission. His work in such disparate areas as game theory, digital computers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, meteorology, and other kinds of mathematical modeling was united by their relevance to real-world problems, including military, economic, and political applications. Although he remained on the faculty of the IAS until 1955, the contemplation of pure mathematics in its tranquil surroundings was pushed aside by his involvement in crucial issues relating to the security of the United States, to the dismay of his mathematics colleagues. It was this second John von Neumann, a man of affairs in the most fundamental sense, that I knew as my father.
Saving Civilization
I am American born and bred, yet my earliest memories are of Budapest. My recollections are typical: sharp, concrete, disconnected images of particular objects—a bed and bedside lamp in the room where I slept and a very large, rough-hewn amethyst that stood by a decorative pool in the garden of my great-aunt's house. Of people and relationships I remember nothing, although, according to my mother, I learned during the course of that year to speak “perfect German to the family and perfect Hungarian to the servants.”
These memories were formed because my mother, occupied during 1937–38 with divorce and remarriage, left me in the care of my grandparents and a nanny in the home where she herself had grown up. She brought her new husband, now permanently christened Desmond, to Budapest shortly after their marriage, partly to introduce him to her parents and partly to take me home to their new household in the United States. There was no question about which parent I would live with. After their separation but before their divorce became final, my parents had drawn up a carefully constructed document regarding my care. It provided not only that my father would contribute 10 percent of his income to my support, but also for an unusual form of joint custody. Until I was twelve, I would live during the school year with my mother and spend vacations with my father; after that, the situation would be reversed until I reached the age of eighteen, when the decision about how my time would be divided between the two households passed to me.
As my mother explained it to me, this arrangement was made with my intellectual and emotional welfare in mind. She felt that the child of a man as remarkable as John von Neumann should have the opportunity to live with him and get to know him well. At the same time, she believed that he would be better suited to parental interaction with his daughter once she had reached something approaching the age of reason and no longer needed physical care. It was a thoughtful and well-intentioned agreement, but they were too inexperienced to realize that adolescence is often the stage of life farthest removed from of the age of reason.
Because I had no memory of living with my parents together as a single family, I accepted the new household arrangements with equanimity as a natural state of affairs. In fact, I quickly came to regard Desmond as a loving parental figure, with
out his displacing my actual father in my affections—I just basked in being loved by both of them. But the emotional fallout of the arrangement on some of the adults involved turned out to be more painful than anyone could have anticipated.
By the time he and my mother were married, my stepfather had completed his PhD in physics at Princeton and had a job with the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. It was there that we settled into a rented house and I started nursery school, an environment that erased my multilingual abilities in short order. As rapidly as I had substituted Hungarian and German for English when I lived in Budapest, I now reversed the process. My desire to fit in, to be “just like everyone else,” led me to insist, even at home, that the only language I would speak or understand was English.
Within a very few weeks, apparently, my stubborn insistence had become reality. When, some twenty years later, I tried to learn enough German to pass an exam in the language for my PhD, my mother was amazed to discover that I “couldn't even make the sounds correctly.” My Hungarian vocabulary now consists of one sentence taught me by my grandmother, “I would like to speak Hungarian, but I don't know much,” and a few stray bits of profanity.
Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Page 4