by Thomas Hager
DuBridge replaced Pauling with Ernest Swift, a stern and courtly Virginian, a low-profile veteran chemist who had idolized Noyes and suffered quietly under Pauling. Swift viewed Pauling's brand of biological and medical chemistry as something that "just insidiously grew," shadowing the older emphases in the division. He saw his job as restoring balance. He quickly reinstated the Chemistry Division Council that Noyes had first proposed back in the 1930s, giving representation to all the chemical subdisciplines, including those like physical and inorganic chemistry, which Pauling had long ignored. A review of laboratory space was started with an eye toward reducing the substantial square footage controlled by Pauling's people. Pauling himself was moved out of his large administrative office to smaller faculty quarters, and his salary was cut from a chairman's eighteen thousand dollars to a standard professor's fifteen thousand dollars.
That was a slap in the face. The money was not so important— Pauling's rising book royalties exceeded his salary—but the way in which it was done, Pauling thought, was purposefully humiliating. It seemed to him that DuBridge, instead of holding to the free-speech ideals he mouthed on public occasions, was buckling under pressure. He was punishing Pauling for his political views. As a result, after his resignation, Pauling and DuBridge would have little to do with one another, limiting their interaction to the minimum required on social occasions. Typically, however, Pauling did not make his feelings of resentment and abandonment public. He presented an outer facade of control, making it appear that the things that were happening were the result of his choices. He did this because he was still a good Caltech soldier and because he still believed something he had learned as a child in Oregon: Real men did not complain.
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Pauling did not miss a beat in his peace work. He still spoke widely, giving two or three peace talks each week at high schools and on local talk shows, at Jewish community centers, and to local antibomb organizations. He also continued speaking to a wide variety of medical and psychological groups about his idea of molecular psychiatry, although his own research had so far yielded little of note. He was now so well known that he got mail from strangers wanting to help him stop the bomb tests, high school students looking for words of wisdom on how to conduct their lives, and the needy asking for medical advice on rickets, epilepsy, smoking, and fluoridation. Autograph hounds began asking for his signature. The makers of television's Ellery Queen show wrote asking if they could use some of his molecular models in a scene. A worried mother wrote that she was afraid to bear more children because of fallout and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Pauling replied that he was optimistic there would not be another war. Publishers wrote asking him to write an autobiography. Pauling said that he might if he ever found the time. The only letters he left unanswered were the nut mail, the cramped, single-spaced, multipage missives with key phrases highlighted in red, the wild rantings about cancer cures and special clays that promote long life, a fellow with a scheme for breeding cows to give milk with more unsaturated fat, a visionary who had invented something called "the science of connexionology" that would unite religion, atomic physics, and the study of human behavior.
Pauling also received a steady stream of offers to speak, everywhere from Lompoc and Portland to Bulgaria, Brazil, and Africa. It seemed that every peace and scientific and medical group wanted him as an honorary member.
Pauling was so busy, he generally said no to everything, pleading a lack of time. He was no longer a joiner, especially of political groups. Even SANE, a group designed to be a mainstream voice for antinuclear concerns (and which achieved wild success in the late 1950s), could not get him to join. Pauling spoke at the group's meetings but told a recruiter that he preferred to carry out his actions as an "independent human being without the aid of any organization."
Sometimes honors were thrust upon him. In late June, Pauling received word that he was one of the first two Americans, along with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) head Detlev Bronk, ever elected to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Pauling was well aware that there were few higher honors in the USSR than the title of "Academician," and he told the press that he was "pleased and honored." In turn, the press noted that "it is impossible in today's world position simply and naively to ignore the political implications" of such an honor.
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The world position, however, was changing in a fundamental way. Despite Teller's influence and the hard-line stance of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) against all talk of a test ban, Eisenhower was warming to the idea of a ban. Part of the reason was the influence of moderate advisers; part was his sensitivity to the ongoing public outcry against fallout, which, thanks in part to Pauling's publicity campaign, remained strong. The president was also looking at the last eighteen months of his administration. He wanted to do something substantive to promote world peace before he left office.
In the summer of 1958 the U.S. government began talking in a positive way about a nuclear test ban. In July 1958 a conference of scientific experts was convened in Geneva to study the technical feasibility of detecting violations—a first step toward assuring both sides that if an agreement was put in place, a nation cheating on it would be caught. Bomb tests continued as the experts talked.
In late August Pauling heard good news: The Geneva conference of experts had decided that it was technically possible to detect an illicit nuclear explosion, even underground. The door was now open to serious negotiations for a test ban, and with their own most recent test series complete, the United States and Great Britain immediately announced that pending such negotiations, they were prepared to stop tests for one year if the Soviets would do the same.
Six months earlier, promoting the idea of a test ban would have been considered evidence of Communist subversion. Now it was official government policy.
This shift elated Pauling, and it happened just when No More War! hit the bookshelves. Hoping for a strong public response, Pauling began a whirlwind promotion tour. But the change in U.S. policy may have robbed the book of some of its punch. While it was widely reviewed, with most critics commending Pauling for his courage in taking a stand against testing and his "simply stated, forceful presentation," sales were disappointingly slow. Pauling ended up buying several hundred copies himself and distributing them to anyone he thought might have some influence on the test-ban issue, sending copies to national leaders around the world, presenting one to each member of the U.S. Senate, even leaving copies on colleagues' desks at Caltech.
His new status as a proponent of Ike's policies did not, however, mean that Pauling was no longer controversial. At the end of August, when he arrived in England to attend scientific meetings, make appearances to support the British publication of No More War!, and address the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the activist peace group headed by Bertrand Russell, immigration officials forced him to cut his visit short enough to prevent his appearance at the antibomb rally. Pauling and Russell made certain the incident received wide coverage as an example of Cold War hysteria. The publicity had its desired effect: The British government backed down and allowed Pauling to return and address the rally. As a result of all the noise, Pauling's appearance became a sensation, helping him make, as one newspaper put it, "the most profound impression of all the notables who have spoken to British anti-H-bomb campaigners."
By now Pauling had perfected a standard and very effective hour-long anti-bomb stump speech. The beginning was always the same: "We live in a wonderful world," he told his audience, "a beautiful world! I like this world. I like everything in it: the stars, the mountains, the seas, lakes and rivers, the forests, the minerals, the molecules— and especially the human beings. Scientists have discovered many wonderful things about the world during recent centuries. . . ." After a brief mention of some recent discovery that had caught his interest, the molecular structure of myoglobin or how neutrinos behaved like little propellers, he would emphasize how science had helped improve human life thr
ough advances in medicine, transportation, and communications.
But other scientific advances, he went on, had thrown the world into unprecedented danger. Pauling would then launch into the meat of his talk, a discussion of how "the two great discontinuities" of the atom bomb in 1945 and the U-bomb in 1954 had made war unthinkable. He would horrify his audiences with descriptions of the damage caused by fallout and the catastrophe of an all-out nuclear war, then enrage them with figures on how much the United States was spending to achieve this holocaust, with the latest news on weapons development and proliferation. "Why are more weapons of destruction being made?" he would ask. "Are these weapons going to be used? Are the leaders of the great nations of the world going to sacrifice all of the people in the world because they are not willing to negotiate in a rational way with one another to solve world problems by the application of man's power of reason? I think that the politicians and diplomats are still living in the world of the nineteenth century. They do not know how greatly the world has changed. They are still living in the old world of power politics rather than in the real world of today."
These new science-based advances in warfare, he insisted, demanded a new approach to politics. "We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs," he would say, "to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, the just solution, of international problems, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible. I believe in morality, in justice, in humanitarianism. . . . The time has now come for morality to take its proper place in the conduct of world affairs; the time has now come for the nations of the world to submit to the just regulation of their conduct by international law." Finally, if his audience was American, he would wave the flag. "I am an American," he would conclude, "born in Oregon, resident in California for many years. I am proud of our great country. I hope that the United States of America will take the lead in bringing morality into its proper place of prime importance in the conduct of world affairs."
This basic stump speech worked wonderfully around the world. Everywhere he went, in England, Germany, Scandinavia, Austria, France, he was greeted enthusiastically by growing groups of anti-bomb protesters. He became a counterweight to the standard caricatures of Yankees: the imperialistic Washington bureaucrat or a fat, loud, ugly American tourist. He was the tall, intelligent, plain-spoken westerner who would not be silenced, the man who was not afraid to speak the truth despite what his government did to him.
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The incident with British immigration marked the last public harassment Pauling would suffer for a while. With the new tilt in official U.S. policy in favor of a test ban, only the press of the far right continued to attack anti-bomb activists. Privately, Pauling was still tracked by the FBI, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee continued building a file on his activities. But the worst that the FBI could conclude after its twelve years of investigation was that "for years Pauling has been an intense publicity seeker. . . . He is a highly individualistic, egotistical personality." A self-centered maverick was not the same thing as a traitor. Pauling was quietly removed from the agency's Security Index.
The Geneva test-ban talks were slated to start on the last day of October 1958—a date when it was expected that an informal halt in testing would begin as well. In preparation, all parties concerned rushed to test more bombs. The United States called its series "Operation Deadline." In the first three weeks of October alone, the Soviets set off fourteen bombs, spewing clouds of fallout that sent radiation readings in Los Angeles soaring to 120 times normal rates, the highest ever recorded outside of nuclear test ranges. By the time Halloween arrived, the three nuclear powers had tested sixty-three bombs in 1958—one-third of the total number tested since World War II—all in the space of ten months.
At the same time, a United Nations expert committee, after reviewing all the evidence, concluded that bomb tests probably caused between four hundred and two thousand cases of leukemia per year and that "even the smallest amounts of radiation are likely to cause deleterious genetic . . . effects." This was what Pauling had been saying for years.
News reports of the clouds of fallout from the 1958 tests kept public anxiety high as the Geneva talks started, and Pauling kept up his pressure. He knew that talks had broken down before and that Teller and the new AEC chairman, John McCone, were still pushing hard to resume testing. He realized more keenly than anyone that continued public pressure was needed to keep the negotiations on track. His speaking schedule remained full, and he continued skirmishing with AEC-funded researchers who questioned his numbers on the health effects of fallout. Dozens of letters went back and forth that fall between Pauling and those who still thought his estimates were far-fetched or politically motivated; in each case Pauling backed up his thinking with published figures from carefully run studies, reports like the United Nation's or the AEC's own published figures. The outcome of these debates was always the same: In the absence of better data, Pauling's figures were as solid as anyone else's. The arguments and facts that he put forward in No More War! were still valid. "I am pleased to say that none of my statements has been disproved by any new information that has been published since the publication of the book," he wrote in January 1959.
As the Geneva talks continued through the spring, Pauling stumped the country, speaking to peace groups, church groups, student groups, labor groups, any group. His words were given added immediacy by the fallout drifting down from the previous fall's frenzied bomb testing. The headlines brought the issue into people's homes almost daily: "Jetliner Found Coated with Radioactivity After U.S. Flight"; "Strontium 90 in Minnesota Wheat Beyond Permissible Levels"; "Strontium 90 Levels Rise Sharply in Milk and Children's Bones"; "Strontium 90 Levels in New York Double in Four Years." The AEC, now launching a new effort to encourage people to build bomb shelters, could not send out reassuring press releases fast enough. The agency itself now was under attack for a conflict of interest. How could the same agency both develop nuclear weapons and be responsible for monitoring their health effects, critics asked. Political pressure grew to strip the AEC of its health-related responsibilities, which Pauling recommended be given to the U.S. Public Health Service.
Anti-bomb audiences were growing in size and enthusiasm. In the spring, a Brooklyn SANE rally drew an audience of 2,400 at a local auditorium to hear Pauling's dire message: The United States had stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to kill everybody in the world twenty times over; all the talk of bomb shelters and civil defense was "just silly"; the AEC was a "schizophrenic" agency; "the only safe amount of strontium 90 in the bones of our children is zero."
Perhaps, Pauling thought, resigning as chairman of the division had not been such a bad thing. He was free to speak his mind, to work as hard as he liked against the bomb and for peace. Real progress was being made. "I have felt pretty pleased with my changed situation," he wrote in April. By June, he sounded positively optimistic. "There has been a great change from a year ago," he said. "A year ago I was making recommendations that were running counter to government policy. My feelings haven't changed at all, but they have now become a part of government policy."
Lambaréné
Pauling had met presidents and prime ministers, philosophers and kings. But he had yet to meet the man he considered the world's most potent force for peace and morality: Albert Schweitzer. He intended to correct that in the summer of 1959.
Schweitzer was a strange and driven man. A French-born paradigm of Western culture—scholar of Bach and the historical Jesus, author of books on Kant and the Apostle Paul, holder of earned doctorates in theology, music, philosophy, and medicine—Schweitzer gave up Europe and all its glories to work in the wilderness, treating natives at a primitive hospital in the jungles of French Equatorial Africa. For thirty-five years he disappeared from sight, until the story of his self-sacrifice hit the press and made him a post-WWII hero. Schweitzer became a symbol
, the "Great White Wizard" who helped those most in need, a secular saint who gave up the trappings of academic success for a life of Christian service. After winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, Schweitzer was universally admired as the greatest living European. Schweitzer's endorsement of an idea gave it unmatched moral power. Schweitzer's name on a document—such as his signature on Pauling's petition to end nuclear testing—was worth a thousand others.
Schweitzer and Pauling had been exchanging letters about nuclear testing and appeals for a ban since Pauling approached him to sign his petition in 1957. Schweitzer had invited Pauling to visit Africa. The death of Einstein had left Pauling without an older mentor to provide advice and guidance on moral issues; who better than a secular saint to take that role?
In July 1959, the Paulings flew from Germany to the small central African village of Lambaréné, then traveled by jeep to the banks of a nearby river, where they boarded a dugout canoe and, paddled by chanting boatmen, floated the last few miles to Schweitzer's hospital.
The Paulings were immediately struck by the primitiveness of the place: a series of huts along dirt paths in the forest, the smell of cooking, the sound of pigs grunting, parrots screaming, and the wailing of children. There were tame toucans and monkeys, a large vegetable garden, and everywhere, just at the edge, the enveloping, impenetrable jungle, raucous with birdcalls. "It is beautiful here, and chaotic," Ava Helen noted in her diary.
After a brief hello from Schweitzer and his staff, they settled into accommodations in one of the huts that had been given over to house the stream of visitors who seemed to come and go daily. The Paulings stayed longer than most. Over the next week, guided often by Schweitzer's charming, handsome young chief medical officer, Frank Catchpool, they toured the hospital and the huts where the native patients stayed, talked with the staff, chatted with the newsmen, writers and photographers, heads of state, movie stars, and the wealthy who made the canoe trip in search of stories or inspiration.