Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Libel suits, however, were still absorbing Pauling's time and money. Two of the suits he had initiated against the Bellingham paper and the Hearst syndicate had been settled out of court for a fraction of what Pauling had sought—he received around thirty-five thousand dollars instead of more than $1 million. Two other papers, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the New York Daily News, decided to battle him in court. The cases, which took years to prepare, finally were argued in lengthy jury trials. Both were decided in the newspapers' favor.

  Pauling appealed both decisions, setting off more months of talking to lawyers, providing depositions, and rounding up character witnesses. The strain on Pauling, Ava Helen, and their friends—some of whom began to balk at the time and trouble it took to fly across the country to repeatedly testify that Pauling was a great scientist and no Communist as far as they could see—was considerable. The Daily News case did not end until 1965, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision against Pauling; the Globe-Democrat suit wound its agonizing way through the courts until 1966, when it was definitively settled in the newspaper's favor.

  But Pauling's suits—and threats of suits—had some effect. He often got corrections or retractions printed by simply holding the threat of a suit over the heads of publishers. Despite his failures in court, Pauling was now known to publishers and editors as someone who would spend a great deal of time and money pursuing them legally if they used the wrong words to describe him. As a result of his litigiousness the major media became slightly more careful in their descriptions of his political work.

  And Pauling kept on suing. In 1963 he engaged a Reno lawyer to sue Nevadans on Guard, a tiny anti-Communist newsletter, for raising the old Budenz accusations of being a concealed Communist in an article following his Nobel Peace Prize. And in 1966, after years of pretrial preparation, Pauling went to court with his smartest, toughest adversary yet: William F. Buckley.

  Buckley, Sullivan, and "The Collaborators "

  Buckley had made a career out of needling liberals and their policies. His upstart conservative journal of opinion, the National Review, showed that conservatism could be fun: It was witty, biting, and full of ideas. Although the magazine reached only a small readership (even in the mid-1960s it had a paid circulation base of about 100,000), Buckley's influence was far greater: His ability to handle himself in public, his Yale-influenced patrician acerbity, and his ability to demolish opponents in debates had by the early 1960s made him into a leading spokesman for the right.

  Pauling had been a favorite target of the National Review since 1957, when the editors termed him an "old-hand fellow traveler" for his activity in pulling together the first antitesting petition. At various times during the next five years, the journal lampooned Pauling's use of "genetic hocus-pocus" in arguing for a test ban, saying that his estimation of risk was "grotesquely exaggerated" and that he was a man "in the clutch of an irrational obsession" who was "the spokesman for a fraud and a lie."

  Pauling ignored it all, until he read a July 1962 National Review editorial entitled "The Collaborators." It lumped Pauling with other activists the editors considered to be espousing a pro-Communist line, calling him "a megaphone for Soviet policy" and someone who had for years "given his name, energy, voice and pen to one after another Soviet-serving enterprise."

  It was no worse than what the Review had been saying for years. But Pauling's reaction changed. During the summer of 1962, in the months following his picketing the White House, Pauling was being increasingly marginalized within the peace movement as an intemperate crusader whose zeal for a test ban had gone too far. His reaction to Buckley's needling may have arisen from a sense of frustration coupled with opportunity: In 1962, his other libel suits seemed to be going well, and going to the courts appeared to be an effective way of shutting up inaccurate reports about his activities.

  In August 1962, William F. Buckley received a letter from Michael Levi Matar, Pauling's lawyer in New York, informing him that if a correction and apology were not forthcoming for the statements in "The Collaborators," Pauling would bring suit for this "vicious libel." Buckley referred the letter to the magazine's publisher, William Rusher, who replied that "Dr. Pauling is in error if he believes that the National Review bears him malice. No one at the National Review knows Dr. Pauling or has even met him." The magazine would be happy, Rusher said, to correct any factual inaccuracy. A few weeks later the National Review published a short editorial, "Are You Being Sued by Linus Pauling?" noting that Pauling, "brandishing his lawyers . . . seems to be spending his time equally between pressing for a collaborationist foreign policy, and assailing those who oppose his views. . . ." Lest there be any doubt about the magazine's stand, the editorial ended by chastising those papers that had settled with Pauling out of court, saying they "may simply have been too pusillanimous to fight back against what some will view as brazen attempts at intimidation of the free press by one of the nation's leading fellow-travelers."

  The gauntlet thrown, lawyers on both sides began preparing, and on January 17, 1963, Pauling's suit was filed: He sought $1 million for the reckless and malicious damage done to his good reputation by Buckley, Rusher, and the editorial's author, National Review senior editor James Burnham.

  In public, Buckley responded with bravado. "The National Review is prepared to defend its opinions, and its right to give them, against the harassments of any man," a National Review editorial read when the case became public. "It certainly will not be intimidated by a litigious publicist who, in the sober words of a Senate subcommittee, 'had over a period of many years, evinced a general readiness to collaborate with Communists.'"

  Internally, however, there was concern. At that point, Pauling's batting average on suits was good: He had settled out of court in two cases and had forced retractions and corrections in several others. He had not yet lost a case. And the National Review was operating on a shoestring. Anything approaching a million-dollar judgment would put the magazine out of business. The legal costs alone were problematic.

  But after careful reviewing what had been written about Pauling, the decision was made to tough it out. After meetings with Rusher and Burnham, Buckley felt reassured that calling Pauling a fellow traveler, based on his record, was "akin to identifying Harry Truman as a Democrat." If Pauling wanted to argue the point, he was in for a fight with a group of men adept at argument.

  The lawyers jockeyed over technicalities for months. By the time Pauling was finally to be deposed in the case, the Nobel Peace Prize had been announced—bad news for Buckley's side—and he delayed his appearance before the lawyers in New York until his return from Oslo in early 1964. Legal preparations continued for months more, with both sides becoming so frustrated in their attempts to obtain background documentation from the other that a referee was finally appointed in 1965 to sort it all out.

  The delay worked to the National Review's advantage. In 1964, a landmark libel case called New York Times v. Sullivan was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, setting into effect a fundamental shift in U.S. libel law. In order to protect robust public debate, the judges in the Sullivan case reasoned, politicians and other public figures should be subject to a different standard of libel than their private counterparts. It should no longer be considered libelous for a newspaper to call one candidate in an electoral race a "nincompoop," for instance—a statement that might be considered libelous if leveled at a private citizen— unless it could be shown that the paper did so with "actual malice," defined as knowledge of the falsity of the statement or reckless disregard of the truth.

  The Sullivan decision made it much more difficult for politicians to win libel cases. But it left open the question of how far it could be extended beyond the electoral realm, to public figures such as entertainers and lobbyists or activists like Pauling.

  Because of their timing and Pauling's stature, his libel suits—especially the National Review case—would help define the limits of the Sullivan ruling. After Sullivan wa
s decided, the National Review lawyers immediately began arguing that it dictated a dismissal of the Pauling suit. The judge was not sure that Pauling qualified as a public figure and denied their request. Then, in the fall of 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City, and the case was delayed again as he argued for a change of venue, saying that he could not get a fair trial in Manhattan because of the "invidious" press coverage of his campaign. More delay followed as the magazine tried to consolidate the Pauling case with another libel suit it was fighting. That, too, ended in failure.

  By the time the case came before a jury in March 1966, everyone involved was tired of it—a feeling that would intensify as the arguments dragged out over the next six weeks. Pauling's lawyers, led by Matar, were meticulous to a point that threatened to alienate the judge in the case, Samuel J. Silverman. They took days to establish that Pauling had a good reputation to start with, even calling Ava Helen to the stand with a suitcase full of scrolls and medals—including Pauling's Nobel medals—that Matar passed to the judge and jurors. Each and every one of his many accomplishments, including his twenty-five or so honorary degrees, was read into the record. Pauling himself took the stand for ten hours, always looking straight at the jury when testifying about his background, his achievements, and his politics. "I never associated with organizations that had members I knew or even suspected of being dedicated to Communism," he said. "I have no knowledge of or interest in Marxism myself." He testified that the National Review editorials might well have affected his income, as he received no raise at Caltech in 1962 and his book income had been down slightly. He testified that he had been given a cold shoulder by the president of Caltech and others on campus, and that the editorials had resulted in a loss of self-confidence.

  The National Review lawyers were equally painstaking in their presentation, taking days to review in numbing detail Pauling's history of left-wing associations and the results of various congressional inquiries. They showed that Pauling's overall income had not decreased in the past few years; including his prize money, it had increased. Pauling's attorneys bogged down the testimony with so many objections that Silverman lost patience. "If the jury should happen to hear both sides say they rest," the weary judge said after four weeks of testimony, "remember it's April first."

  Two more weeks went by before Judge Silverman had had enough. When the National Review team made a new motion for dismissal based on the Sullivan ruling, Silverman shocked the Pauling side by ruling in their favor. He had now heard enough, he said, to decide both that Pauling was a public figure who fell within the Sullivan ruling and that the National Review had not acted in reckless disregard of the truth. Under Sullivan, without actual malice there could be no libel ruling in Pauling's favor. "Dr. Pauling has added the prestige of his reputation to aid the causes in which he believes," Silverman told the jury. "I merely hold that by so doing he also limited his legal remedies for any claimed libel of his reputation. Perhaps this can be deemed another sacrifice that he is making for the things he believes in."

  Pauling was ordered to pay just over one thousand dollars to the National Review for legal costs (the journal's attorneys' fees totaled more than fifty thousand dollars). The jury was dismissed.

  Pauling, commenting only that he was "disappointed," let his lawyer go and found a better one to mount his appeal: superattorney Louis Nizer. Nizer's group was pessimistic from the start, but with Pauling's strong encouragement and the chance that the extension of the Sullivan decision to those who were not public officials might be overturned, they agreed to take the case.

  Silverman's ruling in the Pauling case, however, was soon confirmed by rulings from other courts in other cases where the public figures involved were not politicians. In 1967, the broader interpretation of Sullivan was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and by the time Nizer finally brought Pauling's appeal to court in the spring of 1968, it was a lost cause. Sullivan was also a determining factor in Pauling's libel losses against the Globe-Democrat and the New York Daily News.

  The National Review celebrated Silverman's decision by running a savagely mocking seven-page rehash of the trial for their readers. William F. Buckley's magazine not only survived the Pauling scare; it thrived.

  Linus Pauling, disarmed by Sullivan, never mounted another libel case.

  The Orthomolecular Shift

  The failure of his libel suits, with the attendant drain on his time, energy, and money, left Pauling depressed. So he worked harder.

  By the end of 1966, Pauling and Ava Helen were now spending half their time in their house on Hot Springs Road, the other half at their beautiful, newly finished house at Big Sur. Isolated, with plenty of time to work on whatever new ideas caught his attention, Pauling was ready to give up on the CSDI and spend his time working on theoretical science. He published papers on the structure of graphite and boron nitride, examined baryon resonances as rotational states and electron transfer in intermetallic compounds, and surveyed yet again the necessity of a scientific approach to world problems. For a few days he toyed with the idea of making a thorough study of the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, with a critical analysis of everything from the credibility of observers to the possibility of the extraterrestrial origin of humankind.

  And out of this intellectual roaming came a new unifying idea.

  It started in late 1965, during a visit with some friends, one of them a psychiatrist, in Carmel. During some spare time before dinner, Pauling, searching for something interesting to read in the guest room, settled on a book that had been written about treating schizophrenia. The title, Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry, interested him because he had not heard much about using vitamins (niacin is one of the B vitamins) to treat mental disease. The author was a Canadian researcher, Abram Hoffer, director of psychiatric research for the province of Saskatchewan, and the book summarized years of experiments done by Hoffer and a colleague, Humphry Osmond, that appeared to show clearly that very high doses of niacin and related compounds could have a significant positive effect on the mental functioning of schizophrenics. The doses the Canadians gave were astonishing—in some cases more than a thousandfold higher than the recommended daily allowance. But there seemed to be no significant negative side-effects, and there was marked improvement in symptoms and readmittance rates. Abram and Hoffer called their treatment "megavitamin therapy."

  Pauling's decade-long concern with the biochemistry of mental disease gave him an appreciation for the arguments in the book, but there was something about it that bothered him as well.

  After a week of thinking it over, the answer hit him. Most drugs, he knew, are safe and effective in only a very limited range of concentrations; even with aspirin, too much is fatal. In Hoffer and Osmond's work, niacin was being used like a drug, but it appeared to be both safe and increasingly effective over an enormous range of doses, orders of magnitude greater than anything recommended by physicians. It was surprising to Pauling, and he began to wonder if other vitamins might act the same way.

  A few months later, his interest was reinforced by a personal experience with megavitamin therapy. In a speech he gave after receiving the Carl Neuberg Medal—awarded for his work in integrating new medical and biological knowledge—in March 1966, Pauling mentioned that he wanted to live another fifteen or twenty years in order to see the wonderful new medical advances that would surely come. A few days later, he received a letter from Irwin Stone, a gregarious Staten Island biochemist he had met briefly at the Neuberg dinner.

  Stone told him how much he appreciated his talk and then wrote that asking for twenty more years of life was asking for too little. Why not live another fifty years? It was possible, if Pauling listened to his advice.

  He then told him the story of vitamin C.

  - - -

  Irwin Stone had been interested in vitamin C since 1935, when he began publishing papers and taking out patents on the use of ascorbic acid, or ascorbate (both synonyms for vitamin C), as a food preservative. Over th
e years his interest grew as he read a series of scattered reports from around the world indicating that ascorbate in large doses might have some effect on treating a variety of viral diseases as well as heart disease and cancer. Convinced of its health-giving power, Stone and his wife started taking up to 3 grams of the vitamin per day— many times the daily dose recommended by the government.

  Stone felt better as a result, but it took a car crash to make him a true believer. In 1960 Stone and his wife, driving in South Dakota, both nearly died when they were hit head-on by a drunk driver. They not only survived the crash, however, Stone told Pauling, but healed with miraculous rapidity. This he attributed to the massive doses of vitamin C they took while in recovery.

  He emerged from the hospital ready to convince others about the value of ascorbate. He began to read widely, noting that among mammals, only man, closely related primates, and guinea pigs were unable to synthesize their own vitamin C internally because they lacked an enzyme critical in producing the vitamin. As a result, humans had to obtain it through their diet. If there was none available, the result was scurvy, the dreaded ailment that had killed thousands of sailors before a British physician discovered it could be prevented by providing lime juice or fresh oranges. The U.S. government had duly set the minimum daily requirement for vitamin C at a level just sufficient to prevent scurvy.

  But Stone believed that it was not enough. Scurvy was not a simple nutritional deficiency, it was a genetic disease, the lethal end point of an inborn error of metabolism, the loss of an enzyme that robbed humans of the ability to produce a needed substance. And it appeared from animal studies that simply preventing scurvy might not be enough to ensure optimal health. Only one good biochemical assessment of ascorbic acid production in another mammal had been done, on rats, and it indicated that on a weight-adjusted basis, a 150-pound adult human would need between 1.4 and 4 grams of vitamin C per day to match what rats produced to keep themselves healthy. Stone was convinced that taking less than this amount could cause what he called "chronic subclinical scurvy," a weakened state in which people were more susceptible to a variety of diseases. In a paper he had written—and which had already been rejected by six medical journals— he concluded, "This genetic-disease concept provides the necessary rationale for the use of large doses of ascorbic acid in diseases other than scurvy and opens wide areas of clinical research, previously inadequately explored, for the therapeutic use of high levels of ascorbic acid in infectious diseases, collagen diseases, cardiovascular conditions, cancer and the aging process."