by Thomas Hager
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The sputtering Geneva test-ban talks resumed again in late November, but without much optimism on either side.
Pauling continued to apply pressure for a test ban through an increasing series of public talks, undeterred even when he was denied a forum. Protests by the local American Legion led to the cancellation of one of his talks on science education in Cincinnati. When the Associated Students at the University of California's Riverside campus invited him to speak on nuclear issues in early 1962, the campus administration refused to allow the talk, arguing that it was "basically political in nature" and "outside the competence of a chemist." Pauling appealed to UC system president Clark Kerr, letting him know that unless the decision was reversed he would take legal action. The pressure worked: Kerr spoke to the Riverside chancellor and got Pauling reinvited.
But he was speaking to hundreds at a time in auditoriums while Teller and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) spoke to millions through the mass media. By early 1962 public opinion again began to shift toward the resumption of tests, which Kennedy, after his announcement a few months earlier, had so far delayed. Everything the Paulings had spent seven years fighting for appeared to be in jeopardy. "We feel rather depressed," Ava Helen wrote a friend in the peace movement in February. "Each day brings more backward steps. I try to think of a new approach or new words and it seems we have used them all and still events bring us closer and closer to the final agony."
On March 2, President Kennedy announced that he was approving the resumption of U.S. atmospheric bomb tests in late April—the first such American tests since 1958 and a great blow to Pauling, who had hoped Kennedy would hold firm.
This was a betrayal of Kennedy's promises during the election, Pauling thought, and proof that the president was ruled by his military advisers and political expediency rather than morality. It was a triumph of the military-industrial complex, of the egghead millionaires, of the members of the Democratic Party who thought Kennedy had to get tough. So much for the nation's great hope for peace. Pauling fired off a strident telegram to the White House—"Are you going to give an order that will cause you to go down in history as one of the most immoral men of all time and one of the greatest enemies of the human race? . . . Are you going to be guilty of this monstrous immorality, matching that of the Soviet leaders, for the political purpose of increasing the still-imposing lead of the U.S. over the Soviet Union in weapons technology?"—and followed it with a series of white-hot public speeches. "Anger and shame—anger with my government and shame for my country," Pauling cried to the crowds. "It is with shame that I now, for the first time, make the statement that it is not our government, but the Soviet that has led in striving for peace. . . . Not Khrushchev, but President Kennedy who is the most evil." The United States, he said, had been first to develop and explode the atomic bomb, first to test the hydrogen bomb, first with the superbombs. The United States had the greatest stockpile of nuclear weapons on earth and the most sophisticated systems for delivering them. Why in the name of humanity was it necessary to test again?
But he was now conspicuously out of step with public opinion. Most Americans thought that Kennedy had been admirably patient on the nuclear-testing issue, holding U.S. tests underground while the Russians exploded massive bombs in the atmosphere, refusing to go to above-ground tests even while the AEC cried loudly through the winter that the United States was falling behind. When he did announce the April resumption, the president pointed out that the American tests would be conducted high in the atmosphere, where less dust would be sucked up, lessening the resulting fallout. Despite all this, the Soviets were still delaying progress in the Geneva negotiations. Perhaps the resumption of atmospheric testing by the United States would get their attention.
Kennedy's decision was widely supported across the political spectrum. Even the Federation of Atomic Scientists, the old anti-A-bomb activists, came out publicly in favor, as did Hans Bethe, the respected physicist and government adviser who had previously been a staunch opponent of atmospheric tests. SANE was muted in its response, expressing more regret than protest, mirroring the general feeling among peace workers that the tests were an unfortunate necessity required to force the Soviets to engage more seriously in negotiations in Geneva.
Pauling stood alone, the only figure of national importance to vehemently and vocally oppose the president's decision. His month in the USSR and his immoderate telegram to Kennedy brought him a great deal of criticism from a wide spectrum of columnists and readers—"I suggest you inform yourself on more than chemistry before you attempt to dictate Presidential decisions" and "You should get down on your knees and crawl to Moscow" were typical of the letters sent to his office—and some scattered letters of support.
But he persevered. Through March and April he escalated his solo attack on the administration. Pauling and Ava Helen went on a whirlwind speaking tour arranged by the American Friends Service Committee, racing across the country by car, train, and plane on an intense schedule that left them both exhausted. They sent out scores of letters in an attempt to start a grassroots campaign to get Kennedy to rethink his decision but got little response. Pauling and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi lobbied the NAS unsuccessfully to take a stand in opposition to the new tests.
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Kennedy responded by inviting the Paulings to dinner as guests at an evening honoring the best and most creative minds in the nation. Scheduled for April 29—a few days after the planned resumption of American atmospheric tests—the dinner was to be the largest the Kennedys ever held, 175 guests, including forty-nine Nobel Prize winners, seven Pulitzer Prize winners, and a leavening of assorted writers, actors, university presidents, celebrities, and media bosses. The young president and his wife raised eyebrows in Washington not only by inviting notorious leftists like Oppenheimer and the Paulings but also by deciding to bar politicians from the event—with the exception of Robert Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and a few White House staffers. The Paulings, eager to take advantage of their first invitation to the White House, happily accepted.
And they took advantage of the situation. The day before the dinner, Pauling joined three thousand picketers organized by Women Strike for Peace and circled the White House several times. A reporter snapped a photo that was sent over the wire and appeared in papers from New York to Los Angeles: Pauling in shirtsleeves, grinning that trademark grin, holding aloft a placard he had been handed by one of the marching women: "Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Macmillan, We Have No Right To Test." It would turn out later to be an unfortunate choice of sentiment.
The next morning, he picketed the White House again, then went to his hotel, rested, changed into evening clothes, and returned for dinner.
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If there was ever an event in the Kennedy White House that approximated the myth of Camelot, it was this sparkling evening.
The Paulings first met the Kennedys in the reception line. "I'm pleased to see you," Kennedy said to Pauling, smiling, then quipped, "I understand you've been around the White House a couple of days already." Pauling grinned and answered yes. Then Kennedy added gracefully, "I hope you will continue to express your feelings." The two men shook hands. Pauling took the hand of Jackie Kennedy, who impressed all the guests with her off-the-shoulder Oleg Cassini gown and long white gloves. She gave him one of her dazzling smiles and asked, "Dr. Pauling, do you think it's right to march back and forth out there in front of the White House carrying a sign?" Silence fell over that part of the line; for a moment Pauling did not know what to answer. Then she added, "Caroline could see you, and she asked, 'Mummy, what has Daddy done now?'" Everyone laughed.
The Paulings knew almost everyone there and were friends with many. Everyone was ushered into the State Dining Room for a sumptuous feast with plenty of wine. Couples were seated separately to ensure maximum conversation. Whether by accident or design, Ava Helen was seated near the AEC's Bill Libby—both of them managing to avoid talk of fallout during the course of
the dinner—and Pauling sat near Mitzi Newhouse, wife of the publisher of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which Pauling was suing for libel. According to one gossip columnist the next day, "Pauling admired Mrs. Newhouse's chic attire, particularly her jewels. He studied her necklace, then turned to Mrs. Pauling and said, 'I'll get one of these for you, dear—as soon as I win my million-dollar libel suit.' " Pauling insisted the story was apocryphal.
Kennedy rose at the end of dinner to make a few remarks. One reporter, he said, had termed this dinner "the President's Easter egghead roll." When the laughter subsided, Kennedy said, "I deny that. I regard this as the most distinguished and significant dinner we have had in the White House since I have been here, and I think in many, many years . . . the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House— with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
After dinner, the guests were on their way to the East Room for a reading of Hemingway's work when they passed through the entrance hallway where the air force's strolling strings orchestra was playing dinner music. Ava Helen asked Jackie if it was proper to dance and was told no, but Eleanor Piel, an attorney and wife of Scientific American publisher Gerard Piel, took Pauling by the arm and began waltzing him around the marble-floored hall. Several other couples joined in the impromptu dance, a scene immortalized by a photographer from Life magazine. Talent, beauty, grace, and a breaking of old barriers—the Kennedy White House shone that night.
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And Pauling got much of the attention. "This action of demonstrating outside the White House and then on the same day attending a dinner inside the White House attracted much attention," Pauling wrote Schweitzer. "I think that probably every newspaper in the United States made some mention of it, almost always favorable."
He was right about the attention he received but off-base about its nature. A number of commentators found it unseemly to break bread with the president after protesting his policies as harshly as Pauling had. One columnist called Pauling's actions "loony."
Even the sign Pauling carried when he picketed the White House led to a misunderstanding. The geneticist Hermann J. Muller, who had won the Nobel Prize for showing that x-rays increased the rate of genetic mutations—research essential to Pauling's arguments about the deleterious effects of bomb-test radiation—had been an important early backer of a test ban but more recently had joined Bethe and many others in moving to a regretful acceptance of the need to test. Muller made his pro-test views public in several magazine articles in May and June, telling readers that while radiation was dangerous, the threat of war with the USSR if the United States did not prove its toughness was far more so. Muller positioned himself as a moderate, criticizing Teller for underestimating the dangers of fallout and Pauling for advocating that the United States stop testing unilaterally. "Fortunately for America," he wrote, "President Kennedy doesn't lean toward either the Teller or Pauling sides."
Pauling was outraged. He wrote Muller, pointing out that he had never advocated unilateral U.S. action and had always promoted international treaties. He demanded an apology. Muller replied that he inferred Pauling's position based on the wire photo he'd seen in which Pauling's sign said that only Western leaders had no right to test. Correspondence between the two scientists continued in private and through the letters to the editors of the magazines where Muller's articles had appeared, until Muller, concluding, "Certainly, I think it would be foolish to continue this argument in public," publicly apologized.
Pauling had straightened the record, but again at a price. Muller was America's most respected geneticist; his careful work had demonstrated to a generation of followers that radiation causes mutations. Geneticists, in turn, had been among Pauling's strongest and most effective supporters in the fight against testing. Pauling's public argument with the even-tempered and thoughtful Muller—even though it was over politics, not science—eroded some of that support and added to the growing impression that Pauling was a crusader who had lost the ability to compromise.
This lessened appreciation among his peers was not pleasant, but to Pauling it was irrelevant. Instead of moderating his position, he helped organize another lawsuit against both the Soviet and U.S. governments to halt testing and began trying to build a coordinated world peace organization that would include both Communist and non-Communist activists. His one bow to public opinion was to make certain that he criticized the Soviet Union at least as much as he did the United States.
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But none of his efforts seemed to work. At the end of 1962 America was testing in the atmosphere again; the amount of radioactive pollution on earth according to Pauling's calculations had doubled in just over a year; Kennedy had risked nuclear war with his brinksmanship in the Cuban Missile Crisis; Pauling's most recent suit against the Department of Defense had been thrown out of court; he was squabbling with other peace workers; his libel cases were getting nowhere; his work for peace and an end to testing was marginalized, ignored, derided.
How had it all gone wrong?
The Molecular Clock
Pauling's work with the genetic effects of radiation had increased his interest in the whole process of mutation, especially given Teller's assertion that a little extra mutation might be good for evolution. The majority of mutations were, of course, deleterious—this was the basis of his argument against nuclear testing and fallout—but they also formed the steps through which organisms changed over time to adapt to their environment. How could negative mutations add up to positive evolution? Pauling thought about that. Many lower organisms, like bacteria, for instance, could live on the simplest of foodstuffs, synthesizing everything they needed from a single food source as simple as gelatin. Humans, however, had lost the ability to make everything they needed; they required a diet that provided a variety of vitamins and amino acids they could no longer synthesize. Somehow along the evolutionary track mutations had occurred that altered the enzymes needed to synthesize these substances. That would be deadly if there was no other option for getting the needed nutrients but was all right as long as the nutrients could be found in other foods.
And there was a positive side to the equation. The energy freed by no longer having to synthesize certain substances could be used for other metabolic reactions, thus making possible more complex organisms. What seemed at first like a "metabolic disease"—losing the ability to make a vitamin—could turn out to be a positive evolutionary move.
Evolution, then, could be seen as a molecular process, and Pauling put Emile Zuckerkandl, a French postdoctoral fellow, to work investigating it. The test molecule was to be Pauling's old favorite, hemoglobin. Zuckerkandl went to the San Diego Zoo and got blood from gorillas, chimpanzees, and rhesus monkeys. Then he collected more from horses, cows, cats, dogs, and fish. The idea was to track the evolution not of a species but of a molecule by comparing its size and structure in various animals.
The most striking discovery that resulted from this work, published in 1962, was that hemoglobin could be used as an evolutionary clock. A detailed study of horse hemoglobin, for instance, showed that it differed from the human form by about eighteen amino-acid substitutions in one of its four chains. When this was correlated with what paleontologists knew about the time when the human and horse lines diverged, it offered an average baseline value of about one evolutionarily effective mutation every 14.5 million years. Using that as a yardstick and comparing the hemoglobins of other animals, Pauling and Zuckerkandl estimated that man and gorillas—whose hemoglobins were much more similar—diverged over 11 million years ago, an estimate of divergence millions of years more recent than most researchers thought. Although Pauling recognized that important mutations might occur not at a steady state but in clusters, he concluded that "it will be possible, through the detailed determination of amino-acid sequences of hemoglobin molecules and of other molecules, to obtain much information about the course of the evolutionary process, an
d to illuminate the question of the origin of species."
Pauling and Zuckerkandl's basic idea of molecular evolution and the use of a biomolecule to track events in the past—a concept that now forms its own research subspecialty, with DNA replacing hemoglobin as the molecule of choice—was groundbreaking. As Alex Rich, Pauling's former student and nucleic-acid expert, put it, "At one stroke he united the fields of paleontology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology."
It also put him briefly at the forefront of the debate over eugenics. Pauling and Zuckerkandl's notions of molecular evolution, combined with Pauling's long history of research into such heritable diseases as sickle-cell anemia, led Pauling naturally to the question of eliminating harmful genes from the world population. In a number of speeches and several papers between 1959 and 1962, he strongly advocated preventing the passage of congenital abnormalities from one generation to the next. While he and Zuckerkandl opposed directed eugenics, in which people would use sperm banks to create children of whatever personality types were in vogue at the moment, they were in favor of another approach.
"The human race is deteriorating," he told one crowd. "We need to do something about it." That "something" involved the identification and control of carriers of defective genes. "No objection can be legitimately raised, it seems to us, against the ambition to eliminate from human heredity those genes that lead to clearly pathological manifestations and great human suffering," he and Zuckerkandl wrote. Carriers of the sickle-cell gene, for example, should be discouraged from marrying each other, and if only one partner carried it, they should have fewer children than average. The same went for PKU carriers and those of other molecular diseases. "Enterprise in love combined with blind ignorance," they wrote, should not be allowed to lead to a polluted gene pool. If voluntary action did not work, Pauling said, legal rules might have to be put in place.