Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Later that month, Oppenheimer was stripped of his clearance.

  The case served as another example to scientists that they had better stay in line. But Pauling paid no attention. "For a couple of years I have greatly restrained myself with respect to political action," he wrote a friend who complimented him on his piece in the Nation. "I have decided that not only is it wrong to permit oneself to be stifled, but it isn't worthwhile."

  - - -

  Pauling launched himself back into the political fray. The new "superbomb" and its attendant fallout became the primary theme of a series of talks he gave, with the Oppenheimer case and its meaning for scientific freedom a close second. In a commencement speech at Reed College in Oregon in June—his daughter, Linda, was graduating— Pauling lambasted Washington for its "inability to think clearly" in the Oppenheimer case. Science cannot flourish when scientists are punished for saying what they believe, Pauling told the students and their parents. "You must always search for truth. Truth does not depend upon the point of view. If your neighbor does not see things as you do, then you must search for the truth. If a statement is made in one country but not another, then you must search for the truth."

  The truth seemed increasingly hard to find in the growing national debate over radioactive fallout. The AEC, under its new head, Lewis Strauss, exacerbated the problem by deciding to hold back most of the relevant data on the extent and effects of fallout, choosing instead to issue vague, reassuring, and occasionally misleading statements about the importance and safety of the bomb-test program. Through the spring and summer of 1954, it was almost impossible to find out anything definitive about fallout, and in the absence of hard data, supposition became popular. Pauling started his usual process of reading widely and putting together what facts he could find. The picture he formed about fallout was frightening. The additional load of atmospheric radiation released by bomb tests added only a fraction to the "background" radiation from natural and medical sources—radioactive elements in the earth, X-rays, and cosmic radiation. But radiation damages DNA, and even a slight increase in total radiation exposure could be enough, Pauling figured, to increase the mutation rate in humans a small but significant amount. He began to speak and write about the link between fallout and mutations and continued to read more about low-level radiation and its effects, especially on genes.

  In June, Pauling made another passport request for his around-the-world trip scheduled for that winter, this time asking for a precise, written list of the reasons his passport had been denied. He wanted to leave plenty of time for an appeal. When he received from Shipley a list of twenty-four allegations pulled from his FBI file, Pauling and his lawyers prepared a new affidavit answering each one. His response was sent to the passport office with a letter noting, "Most of the allegations . . . are trivial." The only one Pauling considered serious was the first on the list, that he was a concealed member of the Communist Party. "I find it hard to believe that the Department of State of the United States of America should make such an allegation," he wrote. "The slightest serious investigation of such a charge . . . would surely have shown that there is no truth behind it." Shipley knew that already. In the most recent FBI reports on Pauling that she had reviewed, the agency had noted that it had found no evidence after two years of searching to corroborate Budenz's charge that Pauling was a Party member.

  On October 1, after reviewing Pauling's affidavit, Shipley wrote back: "The Department. . . has concluded on the basis of evidence at hand that your activities during the years following World War II have demonstrated a consistent and prolonged adherence to the Communist Party line." Pauling might not be a Communist, but he was certainly a fellow traveler, a subversive type, a pinko. His passport was refused. She sent him the form for an appeal.

  Pauling had no intention of mounting an appeal. He did not feel that he should have to plead his case before a panel of strangers, to endure again the humiliating trial by character assassination that had happened with the IERB. He wrote the secretary of state a few days later, "I have decided, after consideration of my experience with the Department of State last year, not to attempt to make the trip." Citing the expense and personal embarrassment of his last try for a passport, Pauling wrote: "I feel that I cannot take the chance of a repetition of this experience." He withdrew his application.

  By then he was working on another plan.

  The Road to Stockholm

  It had been twenty-three years since A. C. Langmuir said that Pauling "may yet win the Nobel Prize," and during that time his colleagues and students had increasingly wondered when he would receive the highest honor bestowed in science. As time went by and other, less prolific researchers won the Nobel Prize for chemistry—including Edwin McMillan, who did research as a student under Pauling at Caltech— Pauling began to think he might never get one. This was a disappointment, a sore point. Many people considered Pauling one of the century's most important chemists; he was fifty-three years old, and recognition of his scientific achievements seemed overdue. He reasoned that he had been ignored by the committee in Stockholm because Nobel's will said specifically that the science prizes were to be given not for a body of work but for a single discovery made during the preceding year. Pauling's achievement was a body of work, an edifice of structural chemistry made of many parts. "That was the trouble," Pauling said. "What was the single great discovery that I had made?"

  At the end of 1952, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a biologist who had won his own Nobel Prize for his work with vitamin C, wrote Pauling that he was planning to nominate him for the 1953 Nobel Prize in chemistry. "In my opinion you should have had it long ago, but better late than never," he said. The only problem was, what single discovery should he list on the nomination? Pauling replied, "I think that my own most important work was done during the period 1928 to 1932. It involved the discovery of fundamental principles about the nature of the chemical bond and the configuration of molecules." To be helpful, he also sent a short biography and a newly written eight-page summary of his scientific work that emphasized his discovery of the hybridization of bond orbitals, the theory of directed valence, and the relation between structure and magnetic properties—all of this leading to his work with hemoglobin, antibodies, and the structure of proteins.

  When, in November 1953, the Nobel winners for that year were announced, however, the chemistry winner was not Pauling but Hermann Staudinger, an elderly German chemist whose research on polymers had influenced Pauling’s ideas about long-chain structures. Pauling shrugged off his disappointment. But now, as Pauling planned his around-the-world trip, there were rumors in the air. A visiting chemist, a member of the Swedish Academy of Science, told Pauling that Staudinger had gotten the nod only because he was twenty years older than Pauling and the committee felt he might not last another year. He then hinted that Pauling might look for good news in a few months. The buzz increased when a Swedish television team visiting Caltech—to take footage, they said, of notable scientists—spent most of their time with Pauling. In October 1954, around the time Pauling withdrew his passport application, the Caltech News Bureau sent out a packet on Pauling with the news that he was expected to win the Prize.

  Pauling tried to put it out of his mind when he left on a lecture tour to Cornell and Princeton in early November 1954. But he was hoping. The prizes were always announced at the beginning of November. He would know soon.

  A few minutes before Pauling was to deliver a lecture at Cornell on the afternoon of November 3, a reporter tracked him down by phone. "What is your reaction to winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry?" he asked. Pauling took a deep breath. Then he asked the reporter what he had won it for. "Chemistry," the reporter replied. "No, what does the citation say?" Pauling wanted to know which of his discoveries was being honored. The reporter read his wire copy: ". . . for research into the nature of the chemical bond . . . and its application to the elucidation of complex substances." Pauling gave a wide grin, told the reporter something about how
proud he was to have won, and rang off.

  He was elated. The prize was being given in recognition of everything he had done with the chemical bond from 1928 to the alpha helix. The Nobel officials had given him a lifetime award. Cornell professors were slapping him on the back and offering congratulations, but Pauling was so excited he hardly noticed it. He walked in a happy daze to the classroom to give his scheduled lecture—"I had a little difficulty calming down enough to enter," he remembered—where the students and professors greeted him with a standing ovation.

  Calls started coming in immediately from reporters and well-wishers who heard the news on the radio. Pauling told the New York Times how appreciative he was of the honor and "appreciative also of the contributions made by my outstandingly able collaborators. I have been fortunate in having been for thirty-two years a member of the staff of the Institute, where there are unusually favorable conditions for carrying on scientific research." He used his new bully pulpit as a Nobelist to assail the government's policy in the Oppenheimer case. And he sent Ruth Shipley a thinly disguised message. When asked if he thought he would have any trouble getting a passport to attend the ceremonies in Stockholm, he told reporters, "I don't think there will be any trouble. Nazi Germany once caused trouble for its Nobel Prize winners, but I would not expect the United States to do so."

  He was back in full voice. He was having fun again.

  Keeping to his schedule despite being dogged by reporters, Pauling traveled to Princeton to deliver the Vanuxem Lectures on the structure and biological properties of molecules. While there he paid one last visit to Einstein. The old physicist was frail now and easily tired, but he was happy to see Pauling and was especially pleased to see that his younger friend was using his newfound fame to speak out about the Oppenheimer case. They discussed the new superbombs, their mutual regret that the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists had fallen apart, their perplexity at the spectacle of current American foreign policy. Einstein told Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made." The only excuse, he said, was that he thought the Germans were doing the same thing. There was a silence. Then Einstein told Pauling an anecdote about Count Oxenstierna, a seventeenth-century chancellor of Sweden. "As Oxenstierna said to his son," Einstein said, " 'You would be astonished to know with how little wisdom the world is governed.' " How little wisdom. But not in that room in Princeton. Pauling was happy to see that the two of them still thought the same way.

  Einstein died five months later.

  - - -

  The day Pauling's Nobel Prize was announced, his irrepressible former student Charles Coryell circulated around the MIT chemistry department a congratulatory letter, asking for signatures. The entire department signed with enthusiasm. "I doubt that many Nobel Prizes have been so popular with the masses in science," Coryell wrote Pauling. "Out of 86 approached, 86 signed without hesitation, and almost all are delighted that the Nobel Prize embarrasses the State Department." The MIT letter was one of more than one hundred telegrams and letters Pauling received from around the world. He answered each one when he returned to Caltech.

  There, too, he found almost universal jubilation. Everyone, from DuBridge to the division janitor, offered their congratulations. Ava Helen invited his staff and close friends to their hillside house for a celebration. Many toasts were drunk, and Carl Niemann's wife read a poem in Pauling's honor. "Everybody was just elated," one attendee remembered. On December 3 was another, bigger party on campus, with the entire Caltech community honoring Pauling. More than 350 faculty, trustees, and friends of the Institute ate a catered dinner, heard DuBridge outline Pauling's accomplishments, and laughed uproariously at a musical skit lampooning Pauling and Caltech, presented by the "Chemistry and Biology Stock Company."

  "The Road to Stockholm," as they titled it, managed to capture the lighter side of the school's attitude toward Pauling: a mixture of admiration, love, and complete irreverence. There were radio announcers making fun of Pauling's loose lecturing style and bebopping students comparing Pauling's idea of resonating molecules to jazz. ("Boy, you ought to hear how a hydrocarbon molecule operates. Man, it's solid murder. It's the end.") But the high points were a series of song satires sung to popular tunes of the day, such as "Tavern in the Town."

  Pauling's courses can't be beat, can't be beat.

  Pauling's courses are a treat, are a treat.

  They will teach you all the facts you need to know,

  And maybe some that are not so.

  Ava Helen was portrayed as a lovesick student singing to her teacher (to the tune of "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey"):

  Dr. Linus Pauling is the man for me.

  He makes violent changes in my chemistry.

  Oh fie, when he rolls his eyes

  All my atoms ionize.

  When he's near, blood molecules rush to my face,

  And I couldn't tell an acid from first base.

  Oh joy, you’ll never see

  Such affinity.

  Dr. Pauling lectures with such piquancy

  He disturbs my resonating frequency.

  All my valences are changed,

  All my orbits rearranged.

  When he smiles I only want to clutch and cling,

  Sharing two electrons in his outer ring.

  Oh joy, you'll never see

  Such affinity.

  Finally, there was a reading of imaginary telegrams from well-wishers: "reactionary capitalistic dog: i have told you fifty times already that resonance does not fit with quantum mechanics. fui. Signed Vladimir Ivanovich Lubeschevsky." Pauling laughed especially hard at "dear doctor pauling: you have been cleared to accept the nobel prize, we're not mad if you're not. Signed Oveta Culp Hobby and Ruth Shipley."

  It was a joyous evening, full of warmth and laughter and generous high spirits. There had been few nights like it in the school's history.

  - - -

  The Ruth Shipley joke was especially funny given recent circumstances. The day after his prize was announced, while traveling from Cornell to Princeton, Pauling wrote a number of influential people, including Senators Wayne Morse and Paul Douglas and former Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts, asking for their help in restoring his right to travel. He wrote a similar letter to Herbert Hoover, Jr., a longtime Caltech trustee who had just been named undersecretary of state. Hoover, however, had been highly critical of Pauling and would do nothing to help him.

  Once again, publicity worked in Pauling's favor. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden warned Secretary of State Dulles soon after the awards had been announced that Pauling's passport difficulties were already a topic of discussion in Stockholm. "While we have no information here regarding Pauling's political sympathies or past activities, I must emphasize that if passport is refused effect on Swedish public opinion of all shades will be catastrophic," he wrote. "Hope I may receive assurances promptly that passport will be issued."

  Assurances would be a while coming. The FBI ordered another investigation, uncovering the unsavory fact that Pauling was back in the business of giving speeches, in one of which he had advocated creating a "Department of Peace" in the cabinet. The results were shipped to Shipley. For a week, as Pauling's passport difficulties became a popular topic of discussion in the Scandinavian press, the State Department did nothing, hoping that Pauling would make the first move by initiating a formal appeal. Once he appealed, the process could be delayed for months, using the excuse that Pauling was being given the same attention as any other American and that everything was going through proper channels.

  Pauling knew better. Letters from his supporters began arriving, along with a wire from a U.S. Information Agency official in Europe "urgently recommending" that Pauling be allowed to travel in order to counter negative publicity. Pauling-related memos ricocheted around the State Department, with some staff advocating the minimization of damage by giving Pauling his passport—"Being a sarcastic and peculi
ar kind of person, Pauling has once refused to go before an Appeals Board and may prefer an attempt to embarrass the Department," one staffer noted—while others, especially Shipley and security head McLeod, advocated holding out. The department's legal adviser concluded that a strong case could not be made for withholding Pauling's passport under current regulations, which indicated that he would have to be shown to be under the direction of the Communist Party—something the FBI had been unable to do after six years of trying. In an attempt to close the issue, an emergency meeting was held on November 15 attended by McLeod, Shipley, and three more moderate State Department officials. When the suggestion was made to bypass the appeals process, Shipley came out of her seat. "The passport division has had long experience in dealing with Communist cases," she said, "and we know the pitfalls inherent in any departure from established policy and procedure." A departure from procedure two years earlier had given Pauling his passport over her objections. She would not have it happen again. What about writing something into the passport, one attendee suggested, so that Pauling could travel to Stockholm but was limited to doing nothing more than accepting the prize? That can't be done, Shipley said flatly. The meeting ended without consensus, McLeod and Shipley strongly recommending denying the passport, the three other officials—categorizing Pauling as more of an "imprudent and foggyminded left-winger" than a threat to national security—recommending issuance to avoid adverse publicity.