by George Dyson
On the seventeenth of August they said good-bye at Kelenföld railway station, from where Johnny left for Vienna, Cologne, Paris, and Southampton, sailing from there on the twentieth aboard the Cunard liner Georgic for New York. Johnny arrived back in New York on August 29, and Mariette (who had also spent the summer in Europe) arrived with the Queen Mary on September 7. A flurry of letters and telegrams followed, relayed through intermediaries in both Princeton and Budapest. “It became perfectly clear that we were just made for each other,” says Klári. “Our letters became longer and longer. The inevitable of course happened. I told my kind and understanding daddy-husband quite frankly, that nothing that he or anybody would do could be a substitution for Johnny’s brains.”10
Mariette, with two-year-old Marina, now underwent the peculiarly American ritual of spending six weeks in the Nevada desert to obtain a divorce. “I believe that Hell is certainly very similar to this place,” she wrote from the Riverside Hotel in Reno on September 22. “It is undescribable, everybody is constantly drunken and they lose their money like mad 5–6 hundred dollars a day, the roulette table stands in the hall just as a spittoon some other place.… How are you sweetheart how is the apartment how do you live and do you love me a bit write about all these at length. I have the howling blues.”11
The next day, Mariette traveled the thirty-five miles to a guest ranch at Pyramid Lake, where the divorce season was winding down. “Johnny Sweetheart,” she wrote, “it is entirely crazy here and I would not feel so miserable if I were not meant to stay here for 6 weeks I believe I won’t survive. I live in the midst of an Indian reservation … and the country is so divine that it is difficult to imagine.… Riding is very beautiful but the evenings are deadly, imagine dinner at six and night goes until 10 o’clock.”12
With a divorce decree granted by Washoe County, Mariette returned from Nevada in early November, and on November 25, at the Municipal Court in Washington, D.C., married experimental physicist J. B. Horner (Desmond) Kuper, a former Princeton graduate student of Eugene Wigner’s who had made important contributions to radar during the war. Both Mariette and Desmond Kuper later held positions at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island—the new East Coast nuclear laboratory that Frank Aydelotte had once suggested might be located in the Institute Woods. Johnny and Mariette remained on good terms, and their daughter, Marina, divided her time between the two families as she grew up.
On November 11, Klári cabled, “Three cheers guess why” from Budapest.13 Johnny, now single, suggested he visit Europe over Christmas, and on November 17, Klári cabled her approval. Meanwhile, Johnny sent a series of formal proposals by mail. On November 9 he made a “direct offer,” and on November 12 requested permission to inform his mother. On November 16 he sent a “direct offer, detailed,” which he repeated on November 19. On November 30 he mailed a fourth proposal, received by Klári on December 9, who cabled back, on December 13, “Don’t worry darling firm as a rock proposal enthusiastically accepted.” On December 23 she cabled, “Merry Xmas happy sailing your loving future.”
Telling everyone, even his brothers, that he was sailing for Southampton aboard the Aquitania on December 23, von Neumann instead boarded the Normandie, sailing for Le Havre on December 26. “What one realizes when once really and truly one is governed by one’s emotions,” he begins a 2,400-word letter (mostly in Hungarian) penned aboard ship. “Hardly 475,200 seconds!” he notes on December 28, his thirty-fourth birthday, estimating the time that remains until arrival in Budapest. The Normandie, after stopping briefly in Southampton, arrived at Le Havre on December 31. Von Neumann took the direct train to Paris on New Year’s Eve and, on New Year’s Day 1938, left Paris for Budapest aboard the Orient Express.
On January 24, Johnny was again in Paris, on his way back to the United States. Klári was on her way to the Italian Riviera, staying at the Savoy in San Remo, and cabling on February 2, from Monte Carlo: “told father with best result.” Johnny intended to return to Budapest as soon as possible to retrieve Klári from the gathering storm in Europe, and reported to Stan Ulam on April 22 that “my ‘future plans’ are now known to everybody who is concerned in this matter, here and in Budapest.”14 Austria had been absorbed into the German Reich by the Anschluss of March 12, and all bets were off as to what would happen next.
Matters grew increasingly complicated, first of all by Klári’s divorce, with a scheduled court decision postponed until September 23. Klári and Johnny would then have to be married, swiftly, in Budapest in order for Klári to obtain U.S. immigration papers, but the Hungarian authorities refused to recognize the validity of Johnny’s Reno divorce, which required yet another appeal to a different court. And to obtain Klári’s visa, Johnny had to renounce his Hungarian citizenship, which required first a petition to the Hungarian government and then certification of this fact to the United States.
Von Neumann pulled all available strings—in New York, Washington, London, and Budapest—while Abraham Flexner did everything he could to help. “In his vast experience of helping people to get in and out of countries he had learned that the more important the person, the more the twists and twirls of red tape grew,” says Klári, “and never had he seen such a mess.”15 Johnny began to lose his otherwise even temper, and Klári began to have second thoughts. She withdrew to Abbazia, the luxurious Austro-Hungarian resort on the Adriatic, and after chasing after her through Southern Europe, aboard trains whose schedules were beginning to be disrupted by troop movements, he retreated from the mainland to Stockholm and Copenhagen, where, as a guest of Niels and Harald Bohr, he attempted to prove to Klári, in writing and with his characteristic, persistent logic, that they should go through with their intended plans, and be free to go “away from this infernal pesthole of Europe, very far away.”16
Johnny had difficulty paying attention to his work, and alternated between monitoring the international news, hour by hour, and trying to reassure Klári not only of his fitness as a husband, but about practical concerns, such as her fear of anti-Semitism in the United States. He explained how the United States had to maintain quotas against immigrants, effectively excluding Jews, in order to placate “the ordinary American” and avoid “dangerous reactions,” while “inside the quota they are quite liberal.” In his assessment the immigration authorities “behaved philosemitically as this administration is exactly that.”17
The year 1938 was not yet 1939, but was getting close. “The German trains from Dresden are full of soldiers,” von Neumann had noted on his way north, through the Berlin where ten years earlier he had begun his mathematical career. “The mobilization does not ruin the timetable. The trains are fast and punctual so far. I looked at Berlin very seriously. It may be for the last time.” He then visited Lund and Stockholm, intending to proceed directly from Sweden to Cambridge, to meet with P. A. M. Dirac, when Niels Bohr invited him back to Copenhagen to stay at his private estate—formerly the residence of J. C. Jacobsen, founder of the Carlsberg brewery. “It seems that he wants to talk about some connections between quantum theory and biology,” Johnny reported to Klári. “Why exactly with me I can not say, but probably because I am not a biologist.”18
“In Copenhagen again!” he reported on September 18. “The brothers Bohr fetched me at the pier, and now I’m established in Niels Bohr’s private palace. I had numerous conversations with the Bohrs and Mrs. Bohr, of course mostly political—but we even managed to talk an hour and a half on ‘the interpretation of quantum mechanics.’ I’m sure we were showing off, the both of us: giving an exhibition, that we can worry about physics in September 1938. It’s all like a dream, a dream of a peculiarly mad quality … the Bohrs quarreling, whether Tcheckoslovakia ought to give in—and whether there is any hope for causality in quantum theory.”19
Klári’s divorce was postponed yet again, into late October, while the war was postponed by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler in Munich on September 29. Klári and Johnny were married
in Budapest on November 18, and were able to secure Klári’s visa to leave for the United States—after a last-minute crisis, when the Hungarians withdrew her passport upon her marriage to an American, and the Americans could not issue the visa without a passport to stamp the visa in. The horrors of Kristallnacht on November 9 were a glimpse of the fate that awaited those unable to escape.
They left Budapest for Paris on the Orient Express, transferring to Le Havre to board the Normandie, scheduled to sail for New York on December 6. Le Havre, however, was crippled by a dockyard strike, so von Neumann made arrangements to cross the Channel and sail on the Queen Mary from Southampton instead. “With a farewell blast from the funnel of that floating palace, I left Europe for ever,” writes Klári, “at least the Europe that I had known.”
Von Neumann left Europe with an unforgiving hatred for the Nazis, a growing distrust of the Russians, and a determination never again to let the free world fall into a position of military weakness that would force the compromises that had been made with Hitler while the German war machine was gaining strength. He replaced the loss with a passion for America and everything that its open frontiers came to represent. “He loved the wide-open spaces,” Oskar Morgenstern says.20
“As soon as we got through the channel and the choppy Irish Sea into the open waters, Johnny became an utterly changed man,” Klári writes. “For the first time since he left America, he was fit, willing and able to work on his mathematics. He would participate enthusiastically in the various events, then when he seemed to be most engrossed in the horse races, or bingo, or chatting with a surviving fellow-passenger, he would surreptitiously grab a piece of paper—anything handy, from a paper napkin to the back of a magazine or the edge of a newspaper, and jot down a few lines.”21 Early in the morning, before anyone else was awake, he would write up his notes in final form.
The newlyweds arrived in New York City on December 18, where Klári was surprised to find that “even the customs official said a few Hungarian words.” Johnny booked a suite on the “twenty-something floor” of the Essex House and Casino-on-the-Park at 160 Central Park South, where they ran up enough of a bill that the credit manager was prompted to write to the Institute in Princeton, provided as a credit reference, to confirm their “knowledge of this individual’s financial standing and credit responsibility, which, of course, will be held in strict confidence.”22
“It was not until I saw from the windows of our tower apartment both downtown and Central Park with the lights going on in the wintery dusk over Manhattan,” Klári writes, “that I realized that indeed I had arrived at a different Land.” The following afternoon she took the train to Princeton, whose rigid social protocols she found a far cry from carefree Budapest. Johnny disappeared on a detour to attend to “important business” in Trenton—which Klári later learned was a court appearance “to show cause why his driving license should not be revoked.”
The Institute was on winter break until February 1, leaving von Neumann with no responsibilities except a talk to the American Mathematical Society winter meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia. He purchased a new car—a Cadillac V-8 coupe—so they could drive to the meeting and then continue south, through the Everglades, to Key West. Their first stop was Washington, D.C., where they stayed at the Shoreham Hotel, while von Neumann attended to secretive government business, including an unsuccessful attempt to appeal his rejection by the Army Reserve. “Johnny was a strange man, incongruous and contradictory,” notes Klári of this episode, “with as many facets to his personality as the number of people who thought that they knew and understood him.” The von Neumanns also called socially on Mariette and her new husband, precipitating, in Klári’s words, “a crisis which was followed by many other similar ones for many, many years.” Klári’s insecurity was never far below the surface, and was easily provoked. Johnny and his ex-wife “never ceased playing the game of detached attachment or vice versa, whichever fits best.”23
Upon their return from Florida, the von Neumanns settled into a house about two miles from the Institute, on Westcott Road. Klári’s parties became legendary, especially once the engineers from the computer project arrived to liven things up. “Klári von Neumann would make up fish house punch, which was very potent, so the parties got very relaxed and uh … joyful, as the evening wore on,” remembers Willis Ware. “It was after one of those parties that James Pomerene and Nick Metropolis from Los Alamos drove their car backward through Princeton. But the Princeton cops were so accustomed to dealing with students that they just took things like that in their stride.”24
Princeton was hard on Klári, who balked at the role of academic wife. She made one last visit to Europe, to retrieve her parents, resolve what she could of family affairs, and drive Johnny crazy as she skated on ever-thinning ice. “For God’s sake do not go to Pest,” he wrote from Montreal on August 10, 1939, “and get out of Europe by the beginning of Sept! I mean it!”25 Klári’s parents escaped to Princeton with the opening of the war, but her father, despondent, threw himself under a train over Christmas 1939. Klári’s bouts of depression grew more severe, and she later confided to the Rosenbergs that she believed she was destined to commit suicide herself. “She said it must be congenital,” Jack Rosenberg says.26
Von Neumann was sociable, but in a superficial way. “I wonder how Klári managed to live with him,” Robert Richtmyer asks. “Some people, especially women, found him lacking in curiosity about subjective or personal feelings and perhaps deficient in emotional development,” says Stan Ulam. “To be sure, he was interested in women, outwardly, in a peculiar way.… About women in general he once said to me, ‘They don’t do anything very much.’ ” Klári, adds Ulam, “was a very intelligent, very nervous woman who had a deep complex that people paid attention to her only because she was the wife of the great von Neumann, which was not true of course.”27
Klári found Johnny’s level-headedness exasperating, and took to addressing him, in her letters, as “Sir.” They seemed to orbit around each other, and were rarely in the same place for any length of time. “She was a very friendly, outgoing girl, but Johnny was not easy to reach,” says Rosenberg. “I never saw him lose his temper,” says Marina, “except maybe two or three times. Klári knew how to push him far enough so finally he would explode.”28 Klári increasingly sought time alone. “The letter was beautiful as only your letters can be—but why is it that it always has to be in letters,” she wrote during an attempt to reconcile after an argument in 1949. “Perhaps you are just as much of a dreamer as I am, and when I am not present you still see me as you imagined me to be in 1937 when you returned to the States.”29
These tensions were exacerbated by von Neumann’s increasing absences from home. When he and Klári did travel together, things went better, and their happiest times were on the road—the American version of shipboard life. Von Neumann’s reputation for not wanting to fly was more about his love of driving and train travel than about fear of being in the air. In 1940 he was invited to give the John Danz memorial lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. Having never been west of Chicago, he decided to drive, taking Klári—and Route 66.
They left Princeton in May for the American grand tour. Europe was falling day by day to the Nazi advance, and their trip west alternated between exploring the back roads of pre-interstate America and trying to find towns with newspapers or radio stations to catch up on the day’s events. “Johnny insisted on listening to pretty nearly all the news broadcasts that came over the air,” Klári notes. “He would spend hours sitting in the car.” Their trajectory was determined partly by the events in Europe and partly by the landscape of the American West. “Holland was being invaded the day after we arrived in Denver and we just had to stay in a city which had extra editions of papers and continuous broadcasts so that we could follow the course of the depressing events,” Klári explains. “By the time the negotiations for the surrender of Belgium had started, we had made it to Nevada.” Johnny
was captivated. “If he had not been so preoccupied with steadily worsening news, this trip would have turned him into a geologist,” Klári says.
The gloom was occasionally dispelled. Somewhere in Nevada, “a man with a nice long beard, wearing well-used denims, tied his pack-mule to the hitching-post, then rode the other one, his mount, into the bar where we were consoling ourselves,” Klári writes. “Nobody blinked an eye, the bartender handed the man a glass of beer and a bucket of the same brew was placed in front of the mule. The whole scene was a mute play; it seemed completely routine, the man paid, he and his beast drank up and quietly left the place.”30
After visiting Las Vegas, where there were only “a few dingy gambling joints catering mostly to the workers who were there to build Boulder Dam,” they “meandered about in the Southwest visiting national parks and national monuments,” passing through Santa Fe, New Mexico, without stopping (“Johnny was suddenly in a great hurry to see the Grand Canyon”) and without any premonitions of how profoundly the nearby Los Alamos mesa would affect their lives in the years ahead.31 In the spring of 1940 only the first hints of nuclear weapons were in the air. News of the discovery of fission in late 1938 had arrived in Princeton with Niels Bohr in early 1939, raising for the first time the real possibility, already a subject of speculation, of an atomic bomb.
Fearing that the warning communicated to President Roosevelt in August 1939 by Albert Einstein and Léo Szilárd (who had applied for a patent on nuclear explosives in 1934) was not being taken seriously, von Neumann elevated the alarm. “The Dutch physicist, P. Debye, who has been Director of the Physics Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation), has been sent abroad by the German authorities in order to free his Institute for secret war work,” he wrote to Frank Aydelotte in March of 1940, in a letter that Veblen also signed. “When one of us met him at dinner the other evening, he made no secret of the fact that this work is essentially a study of the fission of uranium. This is an explosive nuclear process which is theoretically capable of generating 10,000 to 2,000,000 times more energy than the same weight of any known fuel or explosive.” Noting that there were considerable deposits of uranium in Bohemia and Canada, von Neumann and Veblen warned “that the Nazi authorities hope to produce either a terrible explosive or a very compact and efficient source of power,” adding that leading German nuclear and theoretical physicists were being assembled under Werner Heisenberg in Berlin, “in spite of the fact that nuclear and theoretical physics in general and Heisenberg in particular were under a cloud, nuclear physics being considered to be ‘Jewish physics’ and Heisenberg a ‘White Jew.’ ”32