by Thomas Hager
Power was shifting to Pauling's generation. As Caltech searched for someone to succeed Millikan in early 1946, his name was put forward by at least one supporter, Ava Helen, who talked to anyone who would listen about what a great institute president Pauling would make. Pauling, however, had no desire to administrate his life away and did not lobby for the position. The trustees eventually hired the physicist Lee DuBridge, a contemporary of Pauling's and a skilled administrator who had overseen the Rad Lab at MIT.
Well established, well respected, and well off, Pauling began to enjoy the life of a top scientist, spending more time traveling, giving lectures, receiving awards, and directing the research of others in those areas that interested him. Immunochemistry was still one of his favorite programs, and he lavished money and attention on the work that Dan Campbell, now assisted by a brilliant postdoctoral fellow named David Pressman, was doing pinning down the final details on the interactions of antibodies and antigens. He also started Harvey Itano, a newly minted M.D. who wanted to add a Ph.D. under Pauling's direction, to work on the sickle-cell hemoglobin project. Pauling made it known that he was looking for other young physicians who were interested in trying their hand at basic research. He put Corey back to work on the structure of amino acids and small peptides.
Pauling loved to be on the road, and he had plenty of opportunity. Chemists were beginning to understand how Pauling had changed their lives for the better, and the accolades were starting. In the years just following the war he was given the profession's most prestigious honors: the Richards Medal from the northeastern section of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Gibbs Medal from the Chicago Section, and the Davy Medal from the Royal Society in London.
The Davy was especially important to Pauling as a recognition that he had arrived not only nationally but internationally. His reputation in England after the war was "very high," he remembered, in part because of his well-known besting of Bragg—now directing the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge—on the question of the structure of silicates and in part because of the support of Nevil Sidgwick, a respected Oxford chemist who had been mightily impressed by Pauling on a visit to the United States in 1931 and whose influential British texts had popularized Pauling's valence-bond approach.
In 1947, Sidgwick was instrumental in awarding Pauling another great recognition from Britain: appointment to the Eastman Professorship, a year-long teaching stint at Oxford, all expenses paid. His family was invited to accompany him. Pauling was pleased but did not see how it would be possible to relocate for an entire year. He told Sidgwick and the Oxford administration that he would be happy to come for the second and third terms of the academic year, between January and June 1948. There was only one hitch: Eastman professors had to hold a master's from Oxford. The technicality was quickly taken care of by awarding Pauling an honorary degree—the only master's degree he would ever hold.
More honors came. In April 1947 he was nominated for president of the National Academy of Sciences—an office he would have loved to hold—but Pauling was forced to withdraw his name because of the interference of his upcoming stay in England. Soon after, the same nomination was made by members of the American Chemical Society; this time he let it go forward because there would be few duties during a year as president-elect before his actual presidency started in 1949, well after his return.
The presidency of the ACS was not something that Pauling had aspired to, but being put forward for the position was welcome affirmation of his high standing in the field. Over the course of twenty years his brand of chemistry had moved from the fringes of the discipline to the mainstream, pushed there in large part by Pauling's abilities as a theorist, writer, and lecturer. He was now one of America's and the world's best-known and best-respected chemists, a man at the peak of his professional powers. When the votes were tallied in the ACS presidential election at the end of December 1947, he was put into office by a handy margin.
The only dissent came from a small group of anti-Pauling members who protested his election for what was, in this strictly professional science society, an unusual reason: They did not like his politics.
CHAPTER 13
Political Science
The Jap Lover
Through the war years, except for a modicum of time spent with his family, science was the sole focus of Pauling's life. In the postwar years, however, as his financial situation improved and his professional reputation reached its zenith, he found time for other things—and Ava Helen would help determine what they were.
Her own activities had grown increasingly political during the war. After Pearl Harbor she had watched, appalled, as anti-Japanese hysteria took a virulent form in California. She read of Japanese-American families threatened, children spat upon, windows broken, and graffiti scrawled on homes. When the government made plans to send all coastal Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans to inland concentration camps without any evidence of espionage or wrongdoing, Ava Helen saw the policy as sheer racism. The proposed internment of Japanese Americans became a topic around the dinner table, with Ava Helen explaining to the children how repressive governments could become in wartime. At first, Pauling took little interest—"He had been so busy that he just wasn't aware of what was going on," Ava Helen said—but her passion for the cause was infectious. Soon he, too, saw through the government argument that internment would protect both sensitive areas from Japanese sabotage and loyal Japanese Americans from angry white neighbors. Instead, Pauling saw internment as Ava Helen did: the imprisonment of a group of Americans simply because their skin was a different color. "We couldn't believe that all these things were happening in the United States," Ava Helen said. "They were very unconstitutional."
Ava Helen threw herself into the fight to prevent the internment, volunteering at the local American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to type letters and stuff envelopes, speaking to friends, doing anything she could to raise the public's awareness. The efforts were fruitless. In 1942, the internment order was issued, and West Coast Japanese Americans were herded together and shipped to the camps.
The seriousness of the issue was driven home for Pauling by one of his graduate students, a Japanese American named Ikeda, an expert at preparing artificial antigens for his immunological studies and one of the most talented men in his laboratory. Ikeda did not want to waste years in a barracks behind barbed wire, and he asked Pauling's help in getting out of the coastal restricted zone so that he could continue to work and study. Through 1942 Pauling helped him search for a position in the East. "Ikeda is a pleasant fellow, just like an American," he pleaded in a reference letter to a colleague at Columbia. "I have as little doubt of his loyalty as that of any other American born Japanese." With the nation at war against the Japanese, finding a school that would take Ikeda was harder than it should have been, but Pauling finally arranged a job on the East Coast that kept him out of the camps, although Pauling had to pay the young man's salary out of Caltech funds to do it.
Pauling judged people by their intelligence and ability, not their skin color, and it was disturbing to him to see evidence of racism, especially at the government level. But while Ava Helen continued to do volunteer work for the ACLU during the war, Pauling turned his mind to research. It was not until March 1945 that the Japanese-American issue came up again, this time with a vengeance. Ava Helen was asked by a Los Angeles organization if she could provide a job for a few days for a Japanese-American man newly released from camp and on his way to Camp Shelby for induction into the army. Ava Helen was happy to help and offered to take him on as a gardener. Young, shy, and very thankful, the fellow worked on a Friday and Saturday pruning and cleaning the yard around their Sierra Madre home. Then he left for the army.
On Monday morning, Pauling's fourteen-year-old son Peter ran into the house yelling for his parents. "You've got to come out here and look," he said breathlessly. "Somebody's painted stuff on the garage." Pauling could hardly believe what he saw. On the door was sme
ared: "AMERICANS DIE BUT WE LOVE JAPS. JAPS WORK HERE. PAULING," with a crude Japanese flag drawn above it. "JAP" was scrawled on their mailbox.
He made a quick check for other damage, called the police, then called the newspapers. "I do not know who is responsible for this unAmerican act," Pauling told a reporter. "I suspect, however, that this trespass on our home was carried out by one or more of those misguided people who believe that American citizens should be persecuted in the same way that the Nazis have persecuted the Jewish citizens of Germany."
After the paper printed his comparison of Pasadenans to Nazis, the Paulings began to receive hate mail and short, whispered phone calls advising them to "get rid of that Jap." Pauling tried to ignore it. Then a crudely typewritten note appeared in his Caltech office mail: "We happen to be one of a groups who fully intend to burn your home, tire [sic] and feather your body unless you get rid of that jap . . . Japs killed my own Father. It's too bad that some jap does not rape someone near and dear to you. well we will see that you get plenty and the more publicity you give this matter the sooner we'll take care of you just like Al Capone did some years ago." It was signed "A neighbor."
Pauling was just getting ready to take one of his many trips to Washington, D.C. When Ava Helen heard about the letter, she decided she did not want the family left unprotected while he was gone and called the local sheriff's office to find out what could be done. "Well," said the man at the other end of the line, "that's what you get for hiring a Japanese worker."
Furious, she immediately called her friends at the ACLU. The lawyers put pressure on the sheriff, got an armed guard assigned to the Pauling house, and made sure that the threatening letter was forwarded to the FBI. Federal agents arrived at the house as Pauling was preparing to leave and found Ava Helen in high dudgeon. When they asked who she thought might have written the threat, Ava Helen gave them a long harangue about the entire internment program and the threat to liberty that it represented. The agents listened patiently and noted her conclusion that "the fabric of law and order was quite flimsy." When Pauling's turn came, he calmly listed everyone who had any way of knowing they had hired the gardener.
There were no more incidents. After two weeks, the armed guard was removed. The FBI never succeeded in finding the author of the note, and the police did not track down whoever had defaced Pauling's property.
But the experience had a profound effect. During the time Pauling was in the East he worried constantly about the safety of his wife and children. An armed guard in the driveway was not the way America was supposed to operate. The response of the local sheriff had also been unnerving: Pauling had been taught to believe that figures of authority would do the right thing, but here was a lawman who had to be forced to uphold the law. And it was an important lesson, too, that an activist organization like the ACLU, applying pressure from the outside, could make things happen.
Most important, if it had ever seemed to him that Ava Helen's political enthusiasms tended to be a bit extreme, he now had proof that they were not. The real extremists were those whose intolerance and prejudice had threatened his family.
It was, to use a phrase from later years, a radicalizing experience. And it was just the beginning.
The Children's Crusade
Five months later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized, Pauling's understanding of social justice took another step forward. The advent of the atomic bomb interested him in two ways. He immediately wanted to know the physics and mechanics of how the bomb worked, and he used some general reading, his own intuition, and an unusually informative government report, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, to put together an accurate picture. He was surprised to find out how relatively simple the bomb was, at least in theory.
His technical interest was shared by many Americans. The new weapon, millions of times more powerful than anything seen before, set off a fireball of public interest. Everyone wanted to know how the scientists had done it. A few weeks after Hiroshima, someone who knew of Pauling's interest suggested that he might be a good speaker for a Rotary Club after-dinner talk on the bomb, a place to explain in layman's terms how the device worked. Pauling—somewhat surprised at being asked, because he was neither an atomic physicist nor one of the hundreds who had actually worked on the Manhattan Project— thought he knew enough to be helpful and agreed to speak. Other than his Union Now talks, he had rarely spoken before nonscientists. He thought he had better take along a prop.
In his garage he sawed a wooden sphere in two and hollowed the halves, then smacked them together with a satisfying loud crack. That should work. During his lecture he used a blackboard to show how atomic fission worked: large, unstable atoms like uranium and plutonium, he explained, had a great many protons and neutrons in their nucleus. When hit by neutrons, these unstable atoms could be split, releasing the enormous energy involved in holding the nucleus together and at the same time loosing more neutrons. These new neutrons in turn would split more atoms, setting off a chain reaction. If the chain reaction was controlled and slowed, atomic power could be used to make heat to drive turbines, he told his audience; this was the basis of all the talk about cheap, unlimited power from the atom.
When the reaction was much faster and less controlled, the result was a bomb, the core of which consisted of a few pounds of a special isotope of uranium or plutonium formed into the shape of a hollow sphere, like the wooden model he had made. The trick was to create a fission chain reaction that would split almost all of the atoms simultaneously. And this, the Manhattan Project engineers had figured out, was possible by surrounding the core with standard explosives and setting them off, rapidly compressing the core from all sides. He smacked his wooden hemispheres into each other. This started the chain reaction. There was a huge, sudden energy release. Boom!
The Rotarians were impressed. Word got around that there was an egghead who could speak English, and Pauling quickly found himself one of Southern California's most requested speakers on atomic energy.
But his initial technical interest was soon outweighed by larger concerns. Even before Hiroshima, researchers working on bomb projects at laboratories in Chicago, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, began forming discussion groups to talk over the social and political implications of what they were doing. These atomic scientists understood better than anyone else the actual power of the bomb, and it was clear to them that U.S. control of this overwhelming weapon would alter the balance of world geopolitics. After Hiroshima, the discussion groups spread to other universities and government laboratories, where the images of mass destruction and incinerated women and children led to twin feelings of revulsion and moral outrage. Scientists felt a special sense of responsibility for creating "the Bomb."
They gathered to talk about that and about how this new source of power should be handled in the coming years.
The more Pauling read about their concerns, the more convinced he became that the new atomic age presented scientists with unprecedented social and political responsibilities. "The problem presented to the world by the destructive power of atomic energy overshadows, of course, any other problem," he wrote a friend less than two months after Hiroshima. "I feel that, in addition to our professional activities in the nuclear field, we should make our voices known with respect to the political significance of science."
In Pasadena a small group of faculty members from Caltech, the Huntington Library, and the Mount Wilson Observatory began meeting to discuss the implications of the bomb. Pauling was among them; so was Oppenheimer, newly returned to Caltech after Millikan's retirement and increasingly concerned about control of the weapon he had brought to life. Everyone in the discussion group agreed that the atomic bomb had changed the nature of warfare and made it unthinkable; most of them also agreed that the only realistic way to control it was through the institution of some form of global government. The protection of the world against "the unimaginable devastation of an atomic war," Pauling wrote University of Chicago head Rober
t Hutchins soon after Hiroshima, "depends upon the institution of a democratic worldwide government—a government of the people themselves, like the government of the United States of America."
These sentiments were shared to a remarkable degree by dozens of other scientists' discussion groups that sprang up spontaneously across the nation to talk over the same issues. There had never been anything like it in this traditionally apolitical profession. Suddenly, small knots of scientists and apprentice scientists were coming together in living rooms and faculty clubs, around conference tables and in taverns, sorting out the meaning of what their colleagues had done in making the bomb, working through their feelings of guilt, trying to figure out ways to ensure that what they had created was now used for the good of humankind rather than its destruction. Almost overnight, these mostly young, mostly idealistic scientists discovered a shared sense of social purpose that they had never possessed before. They also discovered a common set of solutions to the problems posed by the bomb. Scientists were children of the Enlightenment. Almost to a person, they believed, as Pauling did, in rationality, progress, the innate goodness of man, the value of the scientific method, and democracy. Their own lives were proof of those values. The unanimity of their views on dealing with the atomic bomb in the early postwar years suggested that given proper education, all rational people would come to the same conclusions they had.
The important task, then, was to educate non-scientists about the new atomic realities, to show the public how the proper application of rational thought was the best way to deal with atomic problems. The Pasadena discussion group planned to write a book "to instruct the intelligent layman on the present situation, to explain how it came about and to suggest a way out." The importance of the scientific approach would be emphasized, with its ability to "fortify the mind against the assaults of dishonest propaganda" and free people from the "intolerances and prejudices, sham ideals and false hopes" that lead to war. The desirability of international control of atomic energy was to be stressed. Pauling was put in charge of a section of the book in which writers would outline the benefits of a world at peace, a place where researchers would be free to create a cornucopia of new medicines and labor-saving devices. After the book was released, the faculty planned a series of symposia and speeches to "spread the gospel of peace."