MARCH 17, 1971
On Monday there was an evening archaeology lecture at the institute given by Martin Biddle, who has directed the digging in Winchester for the last ten years. He gave a brilliant talk. The professional archaeologists were enthusiastic about the technical quality of his work. Our friend Homer Thompson, who has directed the American diggings in Athens for the last twenty-five years, said that the Winchester project is of comparable scope and quality. For Imme and me, it was exciting to see the beautifully clear slides of the places we know so well. There was a good one of the Barracks with [my parents’ home] 1 St. James Terrace clearly visible behind it. Unfortunately we could not see your faces at the windows. The Barracks are built on the site of a huge double-walled Norman castle which is not yet excavated. There was also a fine view of Oram’s Arbor which has underneath it the main western entrance to the pre-Roman city of 100 B.C. From the point of view of the historians, the most exciting discovery is a number of graves and personal belongings showing clearly that there was a considerable Saxon influence, and probably a Saxon population, in the city before the Romans left. It seems the Saxons did not originally come as invaders but were invited over by the Romans to help defend the city. Then, when the Romans were gone, the Saxons brought over more of their friends and relations. It all makes sense.
In school we had been taught that the Romans left a Celtic population in Britain that was afterwards overrun by hordes of invading Saxons. This version of history turned out to be wrong.
MAY 22, 1971
The big event this month was the talent show at Johnson Park School, organized by the new music teacher. Four days before the show he sent us a message saying that Emily must have a white dress, so Imme started furiously working at her sewing machine and got a very pretty dress finished in time. The show began with a science class, the teacher Mr. Twiddlewiddle being splendidly acted by one of the fifth-grade boys. He was telling the class in very dry language about the solar system. Then a bell rang, and Mr T. was called to the principal’s office. He said to the class, “You go on working at your science projects while I am away.” One of the boys brings in a space machine that he has built so that the class can tour around the solar system and investigate whatever forms of life exist there. They find on each planet a form of life that remarkably resembles some form of life on earth. On Mars there is a rock-and-roll band, on Venus a group of girls singing, “I got to wash that man out of my hair,” on Mercury a group of baton twirlers, and so on, each item done fast and well drilled. When it came to the moon, a silvery light filled the stage, and there was Emily alone with her white dress and her violin. She played “Moon River,” an old popular tune which I had worked hard at practicing with her. She looked lovely and also played well. The hall was packed and everybody praised her. After the tour was finished, the class came back to the classroom, and Mr. Twiddlewiddle returned. The class all began excitedly telling Mr. T. about the forms of life they had discovered. “Sorry, we have no time for that,” said Mr. T., and went on with his boring lecture.
JUNE 18, 1971
Helen Dukas had a delightful letter from Svetlana. Helen had said, if Svetlana will come to visit Princeton, Helen will be glad to baby-sit for her, having so much good experience as a baby-sitter with us. Svetlana replied that the one thing she does not need now is a baby-sitter. With her two babies in Russia, she always had so many nurses and maids that she hardly saw the children except for official occasions. With this last baby she is determined to do everything herself. She nurses it, has it with her twenty-four hours a day, and is blissfully happy. She said she is also glad to see the baby looks more like her father than her grandfather.
Stalin’s daughter Svetlana had stayed for a while in Princeton when she arrived in America in 1967. She married the American architect Wesley Peters and gave birth to her daughter Olga in 1971.
AUGUST 21, 1971
You ask what I think about the moon. I was glued to the television all the time the men were outside. This expedition was quite different from the earlier ones because this was the first time the astronauts were seriously doing science. They had absorbed a great deal of knowledge and were eager to understand the geology of the place rather than just collect trinkets. For the first time I had the feeling science was the honest purpose of their trip and not just window dressing. This place was far more beautiful and exciting to look at than the flat places the other astronauts had visited. I am sure they did so well this time because they know there will only be two more landings. It is a race against oblivion, to collect all the information they possibly can before the axe falls.
The mission that I was watching was Apollo 15, the first that carried a roving vehicle so that the astronauts could travel and explore over a considerable distance. The landing site was the Hadley Rille, a canyon with spectacular views of the surrounding mountains. The rover carried television cameras so that the worldwide audience could see the territory that the astronauts were exploring. For the first time we saw the lunar highlands, the unearthly landscape of mountains and valleys that cover most of the Moon.
NOVEMBER 13, 1971
The week has been full of Einstein. I have been reading the new Life of Einstein [1972] by Ronald Clark, an Englishman who was here last year. I think Clark’s book is good, but Helen Dukas is deeply angry at Clark because of what she considers betrayal of her confidence. Clark printed a number of stories about Einstein which Helen had vetoed. The book is already a best-seller here, but Helen and Otto Nathan, the trustees of the Einstein estate, have refused permission for all English and European publication. Their lawyers and Clark’s lawyers are now fighting it out.
Meanwhile Banesh Hoffmann, an old friend of Helen, is at the end of another biography of Einstein [1972]. Yesterday I spent the whole day with Hoffmann going over it. Hoffmann will print nothing that Helen does not agree to, and in return he gets a magnificent supply of illustrations and documents taken from Helen’s collection. It is now a race to see whether Hoffmann or Clark gets there first with the European public. The two books hardly overlap, and there is no reason why they should not both be successful. Clark’s book is fat, crowded with colour and detail, and gives the first honest account of Einstein’s many squabbles. He is on the whole fair to Einstein, but not every one of the stories he prints on the basis of other people’s memories need be totally correct. Hoffmann has two advantages. He worked with Einstein and knew him well, and he understands the physics. Hoffmann’s book gives a personal view of Einstein as a working scientist, something that is outside Clark’s compass. Also his book is about a quarter of the size of Clark’s, which I consider an advantage.
Into this tense and acrimonious situation walked a third character, an Indian friend of mine called Jagdish Mehra. Mehra is a historian of science who has one quality that both Clark and Hoffmann lack, a gift for languages. He has talked at length with European relatives of Einstein, some of whom talk only German and some only French. As a result, he discovered last year in an attic in Belgium the manuscript of Einstein’s first written work, an essay on electromagnetism which Einstein sent to an engineer uncle when he was sixteen years old. Nobody else had known that this existed. It was written in a difficult Gothic script which Mehra is able to read. Mehra was excited with his discovery. But from that moment his troubles began. He behaved carefully and correctly. He first copied the paper, sent the copy to Otto Nathan, and asked for permission to publish it in a scholarly journal. Nathan replied giving the permission. Then Mehra translated it into English and sent it with a commentary to the American Journal of Physics. There he ran foul of another historian of science called Gerald Holton. Holton advised the editor of the journal that Mehra’s paper was inadequate and ought not to be published. Holton also claimed that the translation was faulty. So the paper was rejected. At this point, Mehra decided to send the thing to Physikalische Blätter, the German magazine, and so avoided the problem of translation. Physikalische Blätter accepted it gladly. Mehra was
happy to have the thing finally settled when he suddenly got a brief note from Nathan saying, “Permission to publish withdrawn” without any explanation. Mehra sent this note to the editors of PB, but they decided it was too late to change their minds, and the Einstein paper appeared in September. Helen and Nathan regarded this as a direct defiance of their authority, and they have excommunicated Mehra from any further contact with any Einstein papers which they control.
Why did this happen? I think I know the true explanation. In Hoffmann’s book, which Mehra never saw, there is an episode in which Einstein said, “After the massacre of the Jews in Germany I will never allow my writings to be published in Germany again.” Such a statement would be for Nathan a command which he is pledged to carry out to the letter. Poor Mehra innocently committed the supreme sacrilege of publishing Einstein’s first paper in Germany. Now I am trying to straighten out this mess. At least I am happy about one thing, that I am not a historian. These historians are so jealous of each other, it is unbelievable. How Einstein would laugh if he could see them quarreling over his relics.
DECEMBER 9, 1971
The Einstein story had a surprising sequel. Imme and I were at supper at the Kaysens last week. I happened to mention that Mehra had been staying with us. Kaysen immediately looked startled. He said, “Do you mean the Mehra from Texas? Just a month ago I almost put that man in gaol,” and proceeded to tell us the details. Mehra came to Princeton in October and spent some time talking with Helen Dukas in the strong room where the Einstein papers are kept. Helen let Mehra look at the papers under her watchful eye. A few days later she came to Kaysen in terrible distress to tell him that one of the most precious manuscripts from the year 1914 was missing. She had seen the manuscript in its place only a week before. Kaysen went to a lawyer and got him to write a fierce letter to Mehra accusing him of the theft and threatening prosecution. Mehra wrote back nonchalantly denying any knowledge of the affair and protesting his complete innocence. A few days later Helen received a postal package containing the missing document, posted from Newark Airport. After that Kaysen decided he could not prosecute and wrote a personal letter to Mehra telling him that he should never again show his face at the institute. Kaysen put a detective on the job of tracing the origin of the package and determined that it had been brought from Texas to Newark by an Indian physicist who is a personal friend of Mehra. None of this could be proved in court, so Kaysen did not pursue the matter further.
Two weeks after this final letter from Kaysen, Mehra happily turned up at my office and stayed overnight at my house. He did not show a trace of nervousness when I took him to eat lunch and supper at the institute cafeteria. Helen must have been there at lunch at the same time but fortunately did not see us. The whole affair is to me completely baffling. There is no possibility that Mehra’s discovery of the first Einstein paper was fraudulent. Even his enemies do not deny that the paper is genuine and that Mehra found it honestly. What had he possibly to gain by stealing another well-known paper from Helen’s collection? The paper had been published long ago, so that the manuscript was not of historical importance. The thing seems to make no sense.
I have a theory which perhaps does make sense of it. The year 1914 was a crucial year in Einstein’s personal life, when his first marriage broke up, and in spite of strong political misgivings he moved from Zürich to Berlin. Helen has often told me that there are personal papers in her collection which she will not allow to be published under any circumstances. It is very likely that such papers might date from 1914. My theory is that Mehra had reason to believe that he could uncover some startling new information about Einstein if he could get a glimpse of some of these personal papers which Helen will not publish. He had only a few seconds to act while Helen’s back was turned, so he grabbed into the 1914 drawer and pulled out the wrong paper. Having pulled it out, he was unable to slip it back without being seen. This is an intelligible interpretation of the facts. There are then still two possibilities open. One possibility is that Mehra actually grabbed only the scientific manuscript which Helen reported to Kaysen. The other possibility is that he succeeded in grabbing what he was looking for, in addition to the scientific manuscript, but Helen did not mention the more personal items when reporting the loss to Kaysen. In the second case, Mehra will have kept copies of whatever it was he wanted before sending the package back to Helen. Perhaps someday we shall learn what it was he was after.
The affair is a tragedy for Mehra no matter how it ends. Kaysen has talked about it freely, and it must become common knowledge among historians of science. Mehra’s career as a member of the community of scholars is irretrievably ruined. I am very sorry for him. What he did was crazy, but he had been badly treated. I assume he expected that he could slip the papers out of Helen’s drawer, and then on a later visit slip them back in again, without being caught. I wish he had succeeded. But he underrated our Helen. Helen is over seventy, but she is no fool, and she will keep watch over the Einstein papers until her dying breath.
I never succeeded in solving the mystery or straightening out the mess. Mehra continued to be an enemy of Otto Nathan and continued to be my friend. He was never given any further access to the Einstein papers. He continued to work productively as a historian of science. I never found out whether he stole any scandalous document from the Einstein archive. If he did, he carried the secret with him to the grave. He died in 2008. The next letter describes my biggest failure as a psychiatric nurse.
AUGUST 5, 1972, TOKYO
In September 1971 there arrived in Princeton a Japanese couple called Taro and Sachiko Asano. Taro was one of the most brilliant of the young Japanese physicists. He had done one outstanding piece of work, and I invited him to Princeton. He came with his bride Sachiko, whom he had married two years before. She is very small. Both of them were quiet and withdrawn. Nobody knew them well. I was the only person to whom Taro came regularly to talk about his work. Sachiko kept herself separated even from the other Japanese people at the institute. They were devoted to each other, and they loved to go touring around America in their blue Ford car. They went on some long trips together.
Taro’s work did not go well at Princeton. He failed to repeat his great work of the year before. And I failed to give him the attention he needed. I was busy with one distraction after another. I listened to Taro politely but I did not join in his efforts. I was certainly a disappointment to him. In June and July he got a chronic cough, probably caused by a pollen allergy, and this made him even more depressed. He stopped coming to the institute and stayed shut up in the flat where they lived. All this time I did not see them and thought they were away touring the West. Sachiko did not tell anybody how worried she was. Imme’s mother and nephew were to fly from Germany on Sunday, July 29, and we had to be at Kennedy airport to meet them at five-thirty. On Saturday Sachiko telephoned to tell us that Taro was seriously sick. Imme and I went down to talk to Sachiko. Taro was asleep and we did not see him. Sachiko spoke only about his bronchitis but it was clear that some mental trouble was involved.
At nine on Sunday morning Sachiko called desperately worried, and this time we found Taro awake and could see how bad he was. He talked incoherently and had some kind of persecution mania. He said again and again, “Do not underestimate the power of the high society in Japan.” He said that they had hypnotized Sachiko and could make her do anything they wanted. Imme and I brought them to our house and sat in the garden for an hour trying to calm him down. It was clear that we would have to get Taro to return to Japan to find any adequate medical treatment. But there did not seem to be anything useful to do on a Sunday morning. Taro refused vehemently to see a doctor, and we did not pursue the effort to find one. I walked down to the Asano house with them and said good-bye to them there. I said Sachiko should call us if she needed help. I ought to have stayed with them, but it was difficult to sit around all day knowing that Frau Jung was already on her way. Imme wanted me to stay at the Asanos but instead I walked home. A f
ew minutes later Sachiko called to say that Taro had grabbed the car keys and driven off in his car. We rushed down to her and called the police to stop the car on the road. But the police already had reports of a crash on Springdale Road nearby. I went to the scene and found a head-on collision of two cars, with Taro dead behind the wheel of one of them. He must have died instantly, and his face looked more peaceful than I had ever seen it. Luckily the other car was a heavy one and the eight people in it were all alive and on their way to the hospital. I went back to Sachiko and told her of Taro’s death while Imme sat with her crying. We stayed there till we had to drive away to the airport, and some Japanese neighbours took Sachiko to their house.
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