by Thomas Hager
Schweitzer considered most visitors an exhausting imposition on his time; he would often pretend not to understand English to avoid conversations. But the Paulings were different. "Of all the visitors who came to Lambaréné, Linus Pauling was the most at home," Catchpool said. "He seemed unaffected by the noise, the filth, and the confusion of an African bush hospital." As a result, he soon found himself favored by the great man. They started by eating dinner with Schweitzer and his staff every afternoon—Ava Helen tartly noting that blacks and whites dined separately—and stayed afterward to hear him deliver lectures in French on religious topics. After a week, Pauling was asked to deliver an after-dinner talk on sickle-cell anemia, a disease endemic to the area but about which the staff knew surprisingly little. His forty-five minute speech in excellent German impressed the medical staff. Schweitzer, however, slept through most of it. He awoke at the end, in time to deliver a little sermon on the letters of the Apostle Paul.
Then Schweitzer began inviting Pauling to his house for an hour or so of private conversation every evening. They would talk in German about nuclear testing and the need to stop fallout, about the health effects of radiation or world politics. Schweitzer "impressed me very greatly," Pauling said, "and as I recall, we concurred on everything."
In other ways, however, the Paulings were less impressed. Ava Helen was never asked to Schweitzer's house; he spoke to her only at the dinner table. "In this respect he was more old-fashioned than Einstein," Pauling noted. And Schweitzer's attitude toward his patients was also a disappointment. "It was also clear that he did not think that they were his equals," Pauling said. "He made little effort to improve their education or to change their style of life." Later, they came to understand better how Schweitzer's medical approach grew out of and fit with the culture of Africa, but at the time they were disillusioned. Rather than a saint, the Great White Wizard appeared to them to be something of a segregationist who pontificated on obscure religious topics to his small European staff. If Pauling was looking for a replacement for the sort of father figure that Einstein had been, Schweitzer, it seemed, was not it.
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He and Ava Helen next traveled from Africa to the Fifth World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima, where Pauling delivered a keynote speech, "Our Choice: Atomic Death or World Law." Underlining his growing worldwide stature, Pauling led an effort to come up with a simple statement to encapsulate the conference's concerns and make them easier to publicize.
But his brand of scientific pacifism did not appeal to everyone. When the original draft of the Hiroshima Appeal, written largely by Pauling, was read aloud to the gathering, it was heckled by leftists in the audience as too mild. A prolonged and noisy debate ensued, with some activists calling for a document with sharper teeth, others supporting Pauling's reasoned approach. At one point, the radically activist representatives of Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament walked out of the proceedings. Pauling was taken aback by the rancor, but he helped forge a compromise that finally resulted in an appeal (including specific condemnation of the U.S.-Japan security treaty and opposition to placing any nuclear warheads in Japan) that was adopted unanimously. "We were very well pleased with this conference," Pauling wrote Bertrand Russell afterward.
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As DuBridge noted, Pauling seemed to have forgotten almost entirely about science. The only significant new research he had done in two years was linked to the fallout controversy: two journal articles on the health effects of carbon 14 and strontium 90 and an unusual piece on the relationship between longevity and obesity, written to answer Teller's comment that fallout was about as dangerous as being one ounce overweight. Everything else he wrote was summaries of old work, book reviews, and an increasing number of "popular" pieces for leftist magazines about the menace of atomic tests.
With the change in attitude in Washington, the mainstream press was finally printing some pro-ban articles. In late August, the Saturday Evening Post published a two-part feature, "Fallout: The Silent Killer," that for the first time in a mass-circulation magazine gave credence to the claims of Pauling and other antitesting scientists (although it also called Pauling's figures pessimistic and quoted critics as saying that his estimates of damage were higher than the evidence allowed). The consensus of the series, however, was that fallout was dangerous and that testing should be stopped. Pauling himself was able to at least get into print a steady stream of letters to the editors of popular magazines, as well as longer articles in liberal-thought magazines.
He worked tirelessly to keep the pro-ban momentum going. He and Ava Helen traveled to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the fall of 1959, giving scores of speeches to peace groups from Sydney to Saskatchewan. His voice was now often joined by Ava Helen's. She had started to make her own speeches, at first handling some of Pauling's overflow, then saying yes to an increasing number of requests by such women's groups as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a pacifist organization that had been started in 1915 by Jane Addams. By 1959 Ava Helen was making almost as many speeches as her husband, delivering more than thirty during the Australia and New Zealand trip alone. She was pleased to find that as one of the few women speaking publicly on political issues, she was warmly received.
Their schedules were sometimes arranged now by sponsoring groups like the American Friends Service Committee, which took full advantage of having two speakers in one package. But it could get frantic. At many stops the Paulings now found themselves working around each other's schedules, with Ava Helen lecturing at one site while Pauling made his way to another, the two of them seeing each other only in motel rooms, train compartments, or the backseats of cars between engagements. They flew to New York, where Pauling gave the keynote address at a huge SANE rally in Carnegie Hall. They drove to Hollywood for the all-star premiere of the movie On the Beach, followed by a klieg-lighted midnight press conference at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where Pauling, the English novelist Aldous Huxley, and ten other "assorted thinkers," as the newspapers called them, discussed the issue of disarmament.
The Cliff
In the fall of 1959, the Geneva test-ban talks started breaking down. The culprit again was Edward Teller—at least in the minds of Pauling and a number of other observers. Just as everything seemed to be moving smoothly toward a comprehensive ban on all bomb tests, in the air, on the sea, and under the ground, the father of the H-bomb came out with a critical flaw: Bomb tests underground could be hidden by conducting them in huge underground caverns. According to a theory by a researcher named Albert Latter, the blast energy would be masked by caves of the appropriate size, making tests up to three hundred times more difficult to detect with seismographs. This "Big Hole" theory, as the press called it, was given serious consideration thanks to Teller's support. When the theory turned out to be correct—theoretically feasible although unlikely due to the enormous expense of excavating a cave large enough to mask a test—Teller magnified it into a serious impediment to further negotiations. The issue of inspection for violations of a test ban was always a sensitive one, and Teller emphasized that the Big Hole theory offered a new way for the Soviets to get around any sort of inspection or detection. It made the cost of installing a foolproof system of seismographs astronomical. The Soviets, already balking over the number of Western observers and seismograph stations that would be allowed in their territory, were now being asked to approve many more.
Once off track, the test-ban negotiations stalled. While the Russians and Americans argued, the one-year moratorium that had gone into effect when the talks had started expired. Although all sides agreed to extend it for another two months while the talks limped on, the extra time did no good. At the end of 1959, the Eisenhower administration announced that the voluntary test moratorium was over.
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It was an unhappy New Year for Pauling. Although the Geneva talks were slated to resume in mid-January, they would be crippled; Teller's Big Hole
theory had effectively stopped talk of a comprehensive ban on all nuclear weapons testing. The discussion in 1960 would turn to a partial test ban, one that would stop tests in the atmosphere or under the sea but allow underground tests to continue. This was still a step in the right direction—underground tests would release little or no fallout—but it would allow the continued development of nuclear weaponry. This was, to Pauling and many other anti-bomb activists, the second time they had seen the goal of a full test ban within their reach, only to have it pulled away.
Pauling suffered a personal blow as well at the end of the year when Richard Lippman died. In the last few years, after Pauling had rescued the young M.D. from the blacklist by hiring him as a research assistant and giving him oversight of the mental-deficiency project, the two men had grown close, sharing political passions and scientific interests. By 1959, Lippman had become the best friend Pauling had since the death of Lloyd Jeffress a decade before. The physician was only forty-three years old when he died suddenly at Christmastime, a loss that devastated Pauling, although, as usual, he hid his feelings.
The twin disappointments of the test-ban negotiations and his friend’s death left Pauling in an uncharacteristically dark frame of mind. When he and Ava Helen retreated to their Big Sur ranch in January 1960, he spent a lot of time alone, thinking by the kitchen table next to the big wood stove or walking by himself along the seashore.
On Saturday morning, the thirtieth, Pauling told Ava Helen that he was going to go for a walk to check their fence lines; she watched him hiking with his long stride toward the hills that rose sheer from the ocean's edge south of the cabin. When he did not return for lunch, Ava Helen began to worry, but figured he might have lost track of time. As dusk fell, she started calling for him. By six o'clock she was frantic. It was now dark and Pauling was not answering her; she thought he must have slipped somewhere, was injured, perhaps had fallen into the ocean. There was no telephone in the house. So she drove to the local forest ranger's office—the nearest link to the outside world—and reported her husband missing.
Within an hour, a handful of rangers and volunteers were scattered through the hills, picking their way across the steep terrain with flashlights. At midnight they called off the impromptu search. There was no sign of Pauling. The first light the next morning, a larger search started. A helicopter was called in. A few reporters, hearing that a search had been mounted for the controversial Nobelist, arrived from San Francisco. After more hours passed without any sign, the rangers began to talk of searching the rocks at the foot of the sea cliffs. Overhearing their talk, an overeager reporter called in a story saying that Pauling's body had been sighted at the foot of a precipice and he was presumed dead. The news was broadcast on at least one San Francisco radio station; both Linda and Crellin were told by someone who heard it that their father was dead.
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Pauling could hear the searchers above him in the darkness and tried to call out to them, but the wind carried his voice out to sea. He tried to move toward them, but when he did, some more of the loose rock around him skittered down the slope and disappeared over a cliff. He stopped moving. He was "ledged," as climbers call it, stuck on a steep hillside three hundred feet above the surf line.
He had gotten there by following a deer trail across a seaside hill. The trail petered out, then dead-ended below an overhanging outcropping of rock. He was turning around when the rock and gravel started to give away. He was in a section of loose blue shale, a slick, slippery rock—climbers call rock like that "greasy"—that suddenly, sickeningly, started sliding toward the edge. Remembering a climbing trick he had learned in Germany in the twenties, he sat down and jammed his walking stick into the scree. The rocks stopped moving.
After he caught his breath, he tried to crawl off the shale, but any movement sent a new batch of gravel skittering downward. All he could do was maneuver himself slowly to a small level area where he felt a little more secure. Every movement threatened to start another slide. His heart was drumming—he "got the jitters," as he put it afterward—and it took time for him to regain his calm. Then he assessed the situation. He was on a very steep slope, an angle, he figured, of around eighty degrees. There was no place he could go without starting another slide. There was nothing below him for thirty stories but loose rock and the ocean.
He decided to wait.
How long, he wondered, would it take Ava Helen to call in the searchers? As evening approached, he used his walking stick to dig a small depression in the gravel, eight inches or so deep and large enough to lie down in. He pushed his stick into the scree on the ocean side to keep from rolling over and out if he fell asleep. He had had nothing to eat since breakfast. It was getting cold, and Pauling had only a light jacket; he opened a map he had in his pocket and tucked it around himself to conserve warmth. And he waited. When the searchers passed by above him a few hours after dark, he was elated; he thought he would soon have some hot dinner and be in a warm bed. But the rangers could neither see him nor hear his calls under the overhanging rock, and they went away.
Pauling's jitters came back. He decided that he had better not fall asleep, after all—too much danger of moving in his sleep—and he started performing mental exercises to stay awake. He counted as high as he could go in as many languages as he could remember. He gave a lecture to the surf on chemical bonds. He moved his limbs to keep warm, first one arm, then the other, then one leg and the other. He reviewed the periodic table of the elements. He listened to the waves pounding below him. He was more frightened than he had ever been in his life.
When they found him at noon the next day, Pauling was physically exhausted and emotionally shaken. But he swallowed it—almost as a matter of habit, without thinking about it, internalizing and hiding away this and any other disturbing experience, any sign of weakness—and put up a good front for his rescuers when they pulled him off the shale. He walked out of the hills under his own power, joking with the rangers. "Unharmed and in high spirits," the reporters said. After drinking some coffee, eating lunch, and explaining what had happened, he seemed himself again, even deciding that he felt well enough to drive back to Pasadena to teach the class he was scheduled to give the next day. Ava Helen, who had been put through her own kind of hell by the ordeal—"but no one thought of me," she said—thanked the searchers, shooed the reporters away, radioed her children to tell them Linus was safe, and helped him pack up the car. Her husband was, she thought, remarkably strong.
On Monday morning, less than twenty-four hours after his rescue, Pauling walked across the Caltech campus. The news of his disappearance had been carried nationwide on the news wires, and everyone in his research group had been worried. Now they festooned his office door with a large "Welcome Back, Dr. Pauling" banner; one of the secretaries had baked a cake decorated with a little toy man on a cliff and a mermaid in the water below. There was a small cheer when he arrived. Pauling looked at the cake, then, without a word to anyone, walked into his private office and shut the door. The little crowd that had gathered to greet him was stunned. A moment later, a sheet of notepaper was pushed under the door; it was a request from Pauling to cancel his class and all other appointments.
No one knew quite what to do. Pauling's son-in-law, Barclay Kamb, was as close to him as anyone; he was called in, and the situation was explained to him. Kamb knocked softly on Pauling's door, then went inside to talk with him. Something was seriously wrong. Pauling seemed aware of his surroundings but unable to say a word. Kamb decided to take him home.
Pauling did not say a word all the way back to his house and remained mute as Ava Helen put him to bed. The trauma of the cliff episode had put him in a state of shock, his physician said after examining him, but it was nothing too serious, and a few days of bed rest should bring him around.
Those few days were among the strangest in Pauling's life. He was silent most of the time, lying in bed, letting Ava Helen tend him. When Linda visited with his new grandchildren, he be
gan to cry. It was the first time anyone had seen him emotionally vulnerable, in anything less than full control.
The night on the cliff seemed to have cracked open a tightly sealed place inside. It was a place where he had hidden everything painful, his feelings of hurt and humiliation, his father's death, his mother’s madness, the ignominy of being forced out of his chairmanship at Caltech, every insult, every political attack, every barb that had been absorbed and buried. He had refused to be hurt. He did not—seemingly could not—deal with these emotions once they were released. He was, above all, through decades of training and practice, a rationalist, and he would not allow himself to get trapped in the quicksand of his irrational feelings. He pulled back from strong emotions almost instinctively, as a measure of self-preservation, as a way to avoid pain. Now the shock of the incident on the cliff brought it all to light.
Pauling found himself, for the first time in his life, at the mercy of something he could not rationalize.
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When it was over, he regained a kind of balance. The episode functioned as a kind of therapy, giving him a badly needed rest, releasing enough psychological pressure to allow him to regain control. Over the next two weeks, he began to talk, got out of bed, read a newspaper, did a little work on the new edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and wrote a few letters. He began thinking about honoring some of his many outstanding speaking engagements. He was getting back to normal.
On February 13 he made his first public appearance since the night on the cliff, speaking about fallout and international agreements to a small Hollywood gathering. Earlier that day, France tested its first atomic bomb in the Sahara, becoming the fourth nation to join the atomic club and sending the first fallout into the atmosphere since the test moratorium started in late 1958. At this provocation, the Soviets immediately announced that they were now free to test.