NOVEMBER 1960, PRINCETON
On Tuesday I voted for Kennedy. That night we went to a neighbour’s house to watch the election results on television. Everybody among our friends was on the Kennedy side. Hardly a single word in favor of Nixon had been heard in our house. So I was surprised when I asked Esther and George, and they said they would both vote for Nixon. When I asked them why, Esther said, “Because he has been vice president and so he has had more practice.” George said, “Kennedy is against science fiction movies.” We are happy this election went to Kennedy. There seems to be a chance he will put an end to the penny-pinching which has paralysed a lot of things here in the last few years.
JANUARY 4, 1961
Imme and I became good friends with Helen Dukas, Einstein’s longtime secretary and executor. As a result I have been reading the volume Einstein on Peace, which was just published. I find it impressive. It is a collection of his political writings since 1914. What is remarkable is that he wrote so much and so well about political matters, even at a time (1914–18) when he was prolifically creative in physics. He was as outspokenly opposed to Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 as he was to President Eisenhower in 1954.
Helen Dukas lived with Einstein’s stepdaughter Margot in the Einstein house in Princeton. After Einstein’s death she continued to work every day in the Einstein archive on the top floor of the institute. She loved children, having grown up in a big family and never having children of her own. Imme invited her to our home, and she quickly became a substitute grandmother for our children. She was their favorite baby-sitter and remained a close friend until her death in 1982.
JANUARY 20, 1961
I made an expedition, technically known as a junket, a pleasure trip disguised under a serious purpose. The JASON group, the group concerned with scientific military problems, spent three days at Key West, to see submarines and submarine chasers and to learn about their practical difficulties. The navy staged a day of submarine hunting for our benefit. I was on the destroyer Huntington. We watched the sailors busy with their radars and navigation charts. It betrays no military secrets to say that the submarines did better than we did.
FEBRUARY 12, 1961
On Saturday, February 4, we had our big blizzard. I had two meetings in New York that day. In the morning I was chairman of a session of the American Physical Society. In the afternoon we had a council meeting of the Federation of American Scientists, the political organization which tries to push the gevernment into doing reasonable things where nuclear weapons are concerned. At seven a.m. I stepped out into deep untrodden snowdrifts and trudged the one and a half miles to the station. Luckily the trains were running and I arrived in New York in time for the nine-thirty meeting. In the afternoon we had the federation meeting which was much more interesting.
They are a pleasant group of people, a bit leftish in politics and intensely well-meaning. The one subject on which I disagree with them is the test ban, which I oppose and they have made a prime objective of their campaign. The meeting started predictably with a discussion of the test ban. Many of them spoke suggesting ways of getting the public more enthusiastic about the test ban. Then it was decided to delegate to the executive committee the job of making some more vigorous test ban propaganda. At this point I decided to speak up. I said they could do whatever they liked about the test ban but that I considered they were wasting a disproportionate amount of effort on it. I said that to me the general problems of disarmament and the use of the existing weapons seemed hundreds of times more important than any test ban. So they did move on to talk about disarmament. They talked a long time and agreed to pass a long resolution pointing out the desirability of general disarmament. It was a fine resolution except that it didn’t say anything specific. At this point I again made a speech saying that I was unsatisfied with vague generalities, and the federation ought to be discussing some real proposal to change drastically the existing international dangers. They replied, “What do you have in mind for us to do?” And I said, on the spur of the moment, not having anything prepared, “Let us see first of all whether this council can agree or disagree with the following statement:”
We urge the government to decide and publicly declare as its permanent policy that the U.S. shall not use nuclear weapons of any kind under any circumstances except in response to the use of nuclear weapons by others. We urge that the military plans and deployments of the U.S. and its allies be brought as rapidly as possible into a condition consistent with the over-all policy of not using nuclear weapons first.
I was rather taken aback by the response to this. It was overwhelming. I had myself been feeling for some time that our greatest danger comes not from having nuclear weapons but from being committed to using them in stupid and disastrous ways. To most of the council, this seemed to be quite a new idea. Not one of them spoke seriously against my proposal. In the end it was voted on and carried unanimously. So at one stroke my reputation as a reactionary war-monger was destroyed, and I became a shining champion of peace.
It remains to be seen what impression this action of the federation will make upon the public. It could conceivably be important. The federation is not as influential as it would wish to be. But we have good connections with people in high places. Our meeting went on till midnight. All the time the snow was swirling past the windows. I took the 12:05 train to Princeton Junction. In return for helping to dig somebody’s car out of a snowdrift, I was driven back to Princeton. I arrived home weatherbeaten but exhilarated at three a.m.
I wrote a longer statement for the federation, explaining the arguments for and against the No First Use policy. Our statement, in both the short and the long versions, was distributed to the newspapers and news agencies. On the following day the newspapers were still filled with stories and pictures of the great blizzard. There was nowhere any mention of No First Use.
MARCH 1, 1961
My next-door neighbor George Kennan is now preparing his departure. He will go in April to be ambassador in Belgrade. In the meantime he has been to see Kennedy and talk over with him the general problems of dealing with Russia. Kennan is full of enthusiasm. He is happy that he is again back at the job for which he was trained. Also he found Kennedy personally electrifying. It seems Kennedy has this effect on many of the people who meet him. We were lucky to have voted him in.
I never had any direct contact with Kennedy. Besides being a friend of George Kennan, I also got to know Arthur Schlesinger, who came as a visiting member to the institute in 1966. He had been personal assistant to Kennedy from 1961 to 1963 and wrote many of Kennedy’s speeches. He published a book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, with vivid accounts of Kennedy’s electrifying effect on people who came to see him.
Kennan had been declared persona non grata by the Soviet government when he was ambassador in Moscow in 1952. He then came to the institute to start his career as a historian. He took a leave of absence from the institute to be ambassador in Belgrade, hoping to improve relations between Yugoslavia and America and incidentally strengthen the independence of Yugoslavia. For various reasons these hopes failed, and in 1963 Kennan came back to Princeton and the institute permanently, saying he was glad his days as a diplomat were over.
APRIL 29, 1961
A hectic week in Washington. Four days of physics meetings, three days of JASON meetings, and two night meetings of the federation. The federation meetings were the most interesting. There were people there who are working in the president’s staff on disarmament proposals. They said my memorandum on No First Use has reached the desks of important people and is being used as a working paper. The time I spent in writing and arguing for it was not wasted. The council did not take any important new action. We are waiting to see what Kennedy will do when the big disarmament negotiations begin again in September. His staff is preparing positions for these negotiations. It seems there is a chance something solid may come out of these efforts.
People in Washington are all excite
d about the Cuba fiasco. It seems to me not so tragic. I never believed the invaders could succeed, and I am glad the affair was over quickly. I think the effect on Castro has been good, he is now more sure of himself and can afford to be somewhat relaxed.
The Cuba fiasco of 1961 was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, not the missile crisis which happened a year later. The Bay of Pigs invasion by a small army of Cuban exiles was a dismal failure. Kennedy gave the invaders moral support but wisely refused to reinforce the invasion with American troops when it got into trouble. I misjudged the effect of the invasion on Castro. Instead of becoming more relaxed, he became more bitterly hostile to the United States and invited Nikita Khrushchev to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. The resulting missile crisis ended peacefully, with both Khrushchev and Kennedy acting with remarkable restraint. The missile crisis is not mentioned in the letters. Everyone was scared to death when it began and hugely relieved when it ended. The narrow escape from disaster helped both sides to accept the Test Ban Treaty that was negotiated in 1963.
MAY 25, 1961
You ask what I have been calculating so industriously for the last three months. I will try to explain what it is about. The idea is to work out a new kind of statistical theory which will apply to the dynamics of heavy nuclei.
I neglected to mention in this letter that the new kind of statistical theory was invented by Eugene Wigner at Princeton University ten years earlier. What I did was to take Wigner’s physical idea and work out the mathematical consequences in detail. As a result of my work, the theory became more precise and also more general. It could be directly compared with experimental data and extended to other physical systems besides heavy nuclei.
You may know that the statistical method has been successful as applied to ordinary gases. Since it is impossible to predict the motions of the molecules in detail, one goes to the opposite extreme and assumes complete ignorance of the state of the molecules. This assumption of maximum ignorance leads to definite laws of behavior for gases, which are in agreement with observation. The theory was worked out by James Clerk Maxwell and Willard Gibbs about a hundred years ago. Now my idea is to carry this method to a deeper level. In the nuclear problem one is ignorant not only of the state of the particles in the nucleus but also of the laws of force under which they move. So I developed a new statistical mechanics in which all possible laws of force are regarded as equally probable. The main problem was to make this notion mathematically precise. After that it was a job of calculating various quantities that could be compared with the properties of actual nuclei. The calculations are tough, but this is just the kind of thing I know how to do. The agreement between theory and observation is close but not perfect. There is a lot still to be done. The observations which I explain are done at the big research reactors at Brookhaven, at Chalk River in Canada, and at Harwell. There is a lot of beautiful data, and the experimenters are happy that someone is at last taking some interest in it.
The initial step in this work was taken by a young Indian student called Mehta working in France. We have invited him to Princeton, and he will be here in December. It was after reading his papers that I started thinking and was able to carry his methods much further.
Madan Lal Mehta came to the institute several times and became my chief collaborator for many years. We published papers together, and he wrote the classic book, Random Matrices (1967), summarizing my work as well as his own. He was a great traveler. His last adventure, an overland trip from Beijing through China and Tibet to his home in India, was undertaken after his retirement from his job in France. The trip included a week in jail in Tibet and a walk over the Himalayas. He wrote a graphic account of his journey, which remains unpublished because it might endanger some of the people who helped him.
FEBRUARY 12, 1962
Yesterday I got a sudden phone call asking me to stand for election as chairman of the Federation of American Scientists. This is the political organization which I joined two years ago. And now they want me to be chairman. I am astonished, so many of the others have been working hard in the organization for fifteen years, and I have never done anything substantial in the two years I have been with them. It is an opportunity to make my opinions heard and to start things moving in new directions. I have no doubt I ought to accept the chance. It will mean a lot more responsibility than I ever took on before. More trips to Washington, more long-distance telephone calls, all the things I dislike most. But this time it is in a good cause.
APRIL 10, 1962
Today a telegram came from Washington: “Congratulations on your election as chairman of the Federation of American Scientists.” Now I must start thinking seriously about what to do with my year of prominence.
APRIL 18, 1962
I am flying home from Notre Dame University. The Notre Dame mathematicians organized a small conference to discuss problems on the periphery between mathematics and physics. It happens that there are several Polish mathematicians at Notre Dame, and they invited all the Poles within sight, so there was a grand reunion of Poles who had emigrated at various times with others who are visiting from Poland. The Polish mathematical school has a special flavour, which has survived remarkably well the vicissitudes of the last thirty years. There was a great deal of talk about Infinite Games, which are the latest fashion in Poland, and which clarify in a remarkable way some of the deep questions in the foundations of mathematics. I found myself happily arguing about these questions, which I had last thought about seriously when I was a student in Cambridge twenty years ago.
The city of Lwow was the most vibrant center of the Jewish community in prewar Poland, including writers and rabbis as well as mathematicians. Those who did not emigrate in time were almost all massacred by Soviet, German, and Ukrainian occupiers. The city is now called Lviv and belongs to Ukraine.
My friend Stanislaus Ulam came to the meeting from Los Alamos. He had been one of the most brilliant young men in the golden age of the Polish School (1930–39). During the war he went to Los Alamos to work on bombs and he has stayed there ever since. He is one of those people who pour out wild and original ideas and leave it to others to fill in the details. One of his ideas was the starting point which led Teller to invent the hydrogen bomb. Another of his ideas was the bomb-propelled spaceship which later grew into our project Orion in La Jolla.
Ulam told me that it happens to him from time to time, when he is out of doors in the evening and the light is of a particular quality, that he suddenly begins thinking about problems in the foundations of mathematics. This happens because the evening light used to be just like that in Lwow when he wandered through the streets as a boy, before bombs and spaceships came to distract his attention into more mundane directions. For me the foundations of mathematics have the same sort of nostalgic associations. So we lived at Notre Dame for these four days in a continuous conversation, half in Polish and half in English, drinking immense quantities of black coffee. Stimulated by the atmosphere, I gave one of the best talks I have ever given. Several people came to me afterwards and said that Ulam and I were the high points of the meeting. Notre Dame University is a Catholic foundation, and most of the senior administrative jobs are held by priests. One of my mathematician friends [Paul Erdos] said, “Notre Dame is a very good place, only there are too many plus signs.”
APRIL 26, 1962
It has been a remarkable experience to be the chairman of the Federation of American Scientists. We are such a small group of people (two thousand members all together) and we are mostly concerned with FAS only in our spare moments. So it is astonishing to discover how seriously the people high in the government take our opinions. My office seems to be a key to open all doors. In three days I have been in turn to talk with (1) the second-in-command of the Space Agency, (2) the second-in-command of the Disarmament Agency, and (3) Walter Reuther, the boss of the United Automobile Workers. All these interviews were arranged by our man in Washington, Daniel Singer, who is the organizer of our activ
ities. Chairmen come and go, but Dan Singer remains. The reason why we have such an influence is mainly that we have used our influence wisely in the past. For example, last year the FAS put effective pressure on Congress by convincing a number of congressmen to establish the Disarmament Agency. Naturally the people who are now running the Disarmament Agency are grateful to us.
I saw the Space Agency people mainly to appeal to them to put more money and effort into university research and student fellowships. In particular, I want them to build several big telescopes of the Palomar type. One such telescope costs only about as much as two of their big rockets. They replied that they do as much of this kind of thing as they dare, but Congress does not understand it and cuts their supply of money if they try to use it for general educational purposes. This is partly true, but they are much too timid in dealing with Congress. We agreed that they shall push their university program harder while we meanwhile try to educate the congressmen.
With the Disarmament Agency man (Frank Long) I talked mainly in my private capacity, in order to arrange to work in his organization during the summer in the most effective way. It looks as if I can spend two months in his office in Washington, where I am also in a good position to carry on FAS activities.
The most impressive by far of these important gentlemen is Walter Reuther. He is a successful union leader (with 1.25 million men in his union) and at the same time an intellectual and a social philosopher with all kinds of ideas for the reform of society. Roughly he is a combination of Ernest Bevin with Aneurin Bevan. [Bevin was a British union leader, Bevan a left-wing politician.] He had a big part in getting Kennedy elected president (the UAW put all its muscle behind Kennedy’s campaign), and he now is able to talk to Kennedy with great freedom. He also spent two years in his youth building a car factory in Russia. (The Russians bought the tools from the Ford company and Reuther went over to teach the Russians how to operate them.) He has strong views about Russia and gave Khruschchev a bad time when K. was invited to supper with the union leaders in 1960.
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