by Peter Byrne
Nancy is considering going all the way with “L,” but only if his wife, one of her best friends, consents.
One culmination of such a situation could be to give oneself personally. On one level it seems harmless and also beneficial to all involved. On another level it seems entirely outside confines of convention and full of danger! (possibility of changing status quo). The fact that everyone just seemed to have been expecting this to occur months ago, when we finally did lay down our hands, makes me now wonder whether I have been untruthful to myself about my personal feelings. Are they just altruistic?
She ended the letter reminding Everett that the diaper service came on Monday and that he should clean the cat litter box. The next day, Nancy wrote to her husband,
When I awoke this am it all seemed quite clear to me that we both had indeed gone off the track somewhere. We seemed to become almost obsessed with the subject of sex, etc. rather than following your recent advice of moderation in all things….
I’m a thwarted out-door-type girl especially noticeable when I visit my father’s camp every summer without you. They think: what have we in common? And I think we have all the important things in common—philosophy of life, completely satisfactory sex life, sense of balance, humor, philosophicalness about life, easy understanding of each other.
But I always regret that it is a little lopsided in that I always take my problems to you, but somehow you never admit to having any.
The next day, she asked,
Do you suppose everyone can forgive and forget? I’ll try if you all will (no more affairs with friends—just other types!)
I really can’t conceive of someone being unable to entertain the possibility of one’s spouse straying for just a mere fling…. So, everyone involved seems to have goofed a little. So a major goof has been averted—for the present! I’m not going to feel like the guiltiest or the goofiest party to the ‘crime’ (if it is a crime to love life, then I’m guilty) and I’ll try not to blame you or anyone else either. You would probably say my only goof was in talking to [L’s wife] – but I never could do otherwise in this case. (Unless it was dreadfully casual and open and aboveboard and everyone else would be doing same thing (orgy?!) Oh my.
She asked Everett to drop a card to Liz at the Gore’s summer camp. “She said last year she wrote you, but you didn’t even get it out of the mail.”
Liz was having a hard time. She did not want to participate in camper activities; (although she liked to kiss boys). Nancy wrote that Liz was afraid of “showing how bad she is at whatever, (damn PopPop!)”.
It appears that Everett’s father had teased Liz, as he had teased Pudge.
Liz wrote to her father:
I miss you very much. I want you to right to me soon…. How are you and the cats. Lots of times I forget about you and the cats. But you are stil my boy frend. and the cats are too.
On August 5, Nancy wrote that she had watched CBS’s special report on Vietnam. The special featured Oregon Senator Wayne Morse’s fierce criticism of the war as illegal and unwarranted. “What did you think of maverick Morse’s criticism—sounded similar to what you had said—but I guess he exaggerated a little.”
Regarding the almost sexual love affair with “L,” she added,
I think it was most remiss of me to get so involved with an employee of yours! … I imagine that he had as weird psychological reasons for involvement with me as I did.
She enclosed receipts for a dress and a purse that she had purchased on sale. And added that she agreed with
what [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk said about how impossible it is to even convey your meaning to a Red Chinese (because their conception of reality is not the same as ours)…. They simply want war—need it for good of their country—it’s the only way they know—so I guess we can oblige if they insist. (But shouldn’t U.N. be settling it, not us?) (Rah, rah maverick Morse). More anon LOVE (more) Nancy!
In her last letter from Amherst before returning home, she worried that birth control pills were not good for her health, but, “what if I talk to the o.b. and he says to stop taking them? How will I stand it?”
Everett family on patio, circa 1969.
She apologized for running off with Everett’s paperback Catch-22, which he had not yet finished reading (and he was mad). But, “the only love that is real to me, is the love I feel for you!” As an afterthought: “Do get ‘your’ computer working on giving the Greeks and the Turks all the rights they want.”
The family was soon reunited, and the marriage became increasingly “open,” and centered around Everett’s romantic needs more than Nancy’s (she really desired only him). Years after Everett’s death, she explained to herself in her diary,
In the past people had called me because they knew what Hugh was up to (fine reason)…. and that he wouldn’t object or couldn’t (blackmail fear – but he wouldn’t care) and that I would be amenable. So I chose people I wouldn’t feel that I must have – could take or leave – so from that I felt I knew what was going on, that I could handle relationships. Those I could, but not others later [after Everett’s death] with no one there to p.u. pieces.
No calls going to come now.
BOOK 9
BELTWAY BANDIT
29 Weaponeering
In modern war, one individual can cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. He could do so by pushing a button; he may not feel the emotional impact of what he is doing, since he does not see, does not know the people whom he kills; it is almost as if his act of pushing the button and their death had no real connection. The same man would probably be incapable of even slapping, not to speak of killing, a helpless person.
Erich Fromm, 1955.1
Son of WSEG
Lambda Corporation was founded on Everett’s brainstorm, the magic multipliers, and it was tailored to suit his desire for independence. WSEG’s mental cream, including its secretary, who was cleared to do top secret work, hastened to follow Everett when he moved into a glass office building in downtown Arlington not far from the Pentagon. Aside from support staff, Lambda hired only people with doctorates in physics or mathematics. It offered great benefits and profit sharing to young PhDs coming out of Ivy League schools, as well as to ex-CIA officers and RAND veterans.
Start-up capital of $60,000 was provided by a California-based defense contractor, Defense Research Corporation, in return for a 50 percent ownership stake. As chairman of the board, Everett held the second largest block of stock; Larry Dean, Robert Galiano, and other WSEG alumni held significant chunks. To interface with the Pentagon’s war gaming computers, Lambda bought a used IBM 1604: it was the new company’s pride and joy.
Thanks to Everett’s connections to McNamara’s inner circle, the firm sprang into being blessed with a million dollars in sole sourced contracts to continue projects that Everett had been doing at WSEG. Lambda also contracted with IDA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Sandia Corporation, and the National Security Agency. The tie to the NSA stemmed from Everett’s work with IDA’s Communications Research Division at Princeton University. His later work for the NSA was probably on associative memory and pattern recognition programs that would have interested code-breakers and electronic surveillance experts.2
One of Lambda’s prime contracts was with the Office of Civil Defense to operate the BRISK/FRISK II Damage Assessment System. This computer program projected the lethal effects of fallout under various war scenarios. But Lambda’s pièce de résistance was a contract from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis to operate a top secret program to shadow the SIOP. Called QUICK, it allowed Pentagon war-gamers to keep tabs on the Strategic Air Command by running their own simulations of nuclear wars. In essence, QUICK mirrored the SIOP, and, when set in motion, it automatically generated nuclear attack plans down to the smallest targeting details.
Mid-day cocktails
Physicist Ken Willis, was one of Lambda’s first hires. He had studied phys
ics at the University of North Carolina with Bryce DeWitt, who had already played a significant role in Everett’s life, (and was soon to play an even bigger role). At Lambda, Willis ran QUICK simulations of the SIOP. Despite the flexibility that advanced software supposedly brought to nuclear war planning, he recalled, “When they ripped open the envelope there would only be one of four basic plans to execute.”3
When Lambda set up shop in Arlington in 1964, local restaurants did not serve cocktails. Everett regularly drove across the Memorial Bridge to Washington D.C. for his liquor-soaked lunch. Pugh and others were not big drinkers, but Willis was happy to join him, especially after Virginia’s Blue Laws were rescinded and they could eat across the street. Everett usually drank three Perfect Jack Daniels Manhattans with lunch; they packed a wallop and opened him up.
“We talked a lot about physics and multiple universes,” Willis says.
Hugh was disenchanted with the academic community and its protection of the status quo. I tended to stick to the Einstein school that something was missing from quantum mechanics in terms of causality. We just bullshitted about it, but he viewed it as a joke that the mathematics takes you to multiple universes if you take quantum mechanics at face value.
We talked a lot about girls. Hugh was definitely a swinger. But, you know, people often thought that he was impersonal and insensitive and did not care much for people. But I was in San Francisco with him on business and we were walking out of the hotel and this woman came up to him and kissed him. He told me the story later: She was a prostitute and he had hired her one night. The next day he walked out of the hotel and she ran up and gave him a hug and a policeman arrested her for soliciting. Hugh said ‘Hey, wait a damn minute, she is not soliciting, she is a friend of mine!’ And the cop arrested her anyway. So Hugh hired a lawyer and flew back to testify on her behalf. So, that was rather caring!
Liz and Mark, circa 1969.
Everett was a right-of-center Cold War liberal with a libertarian streak. And he loved to argue for the sheer fun of taking a contrary position. Says Willis,
He looked at life as a game, and his object was to optimize fun. He thought physics was fun. He thought nuclear war was fun. Well, not so much the idea of experiencing it in any universe. But he was amused by the fact that the world had come to the point where we were boxed into such an irrational confrontation. We both viewed it as crazy that this business we were in even existed, and that it should not be possible to find some mutual agreement where you could reduce the number of nuclear weapons.
Disarmament, of course, was not on Everett’s business agenda.
Willis continues,
We visited Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute several times. Herman was a big, fat guy and he and Hugh liked each other a lot. We had good fun at the institute’s catered lunches, lots of wine and beer.
I remember Kahn complaining about environmentalists who were beefing about drilling in Alaska for oil. He said, ‘For God’s sake, if there is anyplace you are going to have to despoil, that should be Alaska!’
I never met Hugh’s kids, and he never talked about them.
Trouble in paradise
In 1965, the Everetts sold their Alexandria town house and built a home in the newly developed suburb of McLean, Virginia for $54,500. The two-storey house was not a mansion, but it included all of the modern conveniences: air conditioning, dishwasher, garbage disposal, and to Everett’s delight, the developer allowed him the choice of a small ballroom or indoor swimming pool. He ordered the pool. It was tiny and divided from the living room by sliding glass doors. For a few years, he swam laps in it almost every night.
Downstairs in the basement he made a small home office and stored doomsday supplies on shelves in another room, (it was not a real fallout shelter and later served as a wine cellar for Everett’s homemade brew). In third grade, Mark settled into the basement bedroom, which he later painted black. When Liz was a teenager, a grateful boy friend built a wooden deck off her upstairs bedroom, down the hall from her parent’s second floor bedroom. The spacious homes and kid-friendly neighborhood were typical features of the upper-middle-class, white suburbs ringing the nation’s capital city and prospering in the Cold War economy. But the children born into this culture of privilege were not guaranteed happiness.
Signs that Liz, known to her friends as “Lizard,” was in trouble appeared in early adolescence. The principal of her elementary school wrote a note to Nancy complaining that Liz, “was running around the building and playing among the cars,” when she was supposed to be watching a “Drama Performance.” The Everetts were not disciplinarians: they believed, along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, that children should be allowed to express themselves freely. They basically put no boundaries on the behavior of their children. Testing social limits in her own way, Liz enjoyed grossing out her friends. The parents of one of her girlfriends became incensed when they discovered a couple of mildly scatological drawings Liz mailed to their daughter. One was of a boy tooting a horn while emitting a musical fart; another was of a wickedly grinning lad shooting a marble between a girl’s spread legs. But there is an edge to these drawings—almost like she was saying, “I dare you to stop me!” Before long, Liz was smoking pot, drinking, and going through boyfriends like Kleenex as she ran with rougher and rougher crowds.
QUICK and the dead
In 1966, Everett attended a NATO operations research conference in The Hague, Netherlands. He talked about the latest in operations research by day, and sampled the rich cuisine and other delicacies of Dutch life by night.4
At the meeting, one of McNamara’s “Whiz Kids,” Alain Enthoven, claimed that increasing the American defense budget by $27 billion would reduce American lives lost from a Soviet first strike to 80 million from 115 million, (which was, not to be too-editorial, bad news for the 80 million, but good news for American weapon makers). He explained that the job of operations research was to “illuminate the alternatives” for decision-makers according to “the economist’s theory of consumer choice.”5
It turned out that traditional game theory did not effectively model nuclear war, because, for one thing, there was almost no information about the practice of nuclear war to include in a game set-up. And in a real life conflict, the players do not possess the error-free information required by game theory, nor are they guaranteed to act rationally. Political life is woven from complexities and uncertainties that defy capture by standard game theory techniques. But—and here is where Everett’s magic multipliers were so vital to war planning—game playing computers could reduce hideously complex problems to sets of manageable options. QUICK could not tell you whether or not you should push the button, but it could tell you what was likely to occur if you did. Everett’s multipliers were vital to determining the shape of wars to come, and he was much appreciated at the conference.
Shopping for nukes
For its non-expert customers, Lambda described the magic multiplier method by analogizing it to how a housewife shopping for groceries maximizes the overall utility of the items she picks from the shelves as limited by her household budget. While shopping she assigns a utility value—a generalized Lagrange multiplier, or λ—to each item in the store, a kind of utility price. The sum of all the utility values in a shopping cart full of goods should not exceed the housewife’s budget. This
technique allows the shopper to make decisions on an item by item basis, rather than considering the whole store at once. The question of whether to buy eggs is separate from whether to buy peas, and this separation makes the procedure easier. However, not all items are independent, for certainly the 17th can of peas has lost considerable value to us if we have 16 cans in our cart.6
The canny shopper learns through experience how to assign the λ values to maximize the synergy between utility benefit and monetary cost each time she fills her cart. Otherwise, she will return again and again to the check stand with a cart full of items she either cannot afford, or that are not very useful. Subs
titute “hydrogen bombs” for “cans of peas” and you get the idea.
Like the grocery shopping housewife, QUICK estimated the cost-benefit of destroying a target with aircraft or ballistic missiles or cruise missiles by inserting λ variables that reflected bomb yield, delivery vehicle range, velocity, weapon reliability, circular error probability, penetration probability, and probability of destruction before launch. And there were other variables reflecting weather factors, defender systems to circumnavigate, the effects of bad intelligence, etc.
QUICK used 500 λ multipliers to calculate the utilities and costs of achieving quantifiable amounts of destruction using a range of weapons systems. For example, to destroy 40 percent of Soviet industrial floor space in Kiev on a first or second strike, QUICK looked for the most effective, least expensive mix of gravity bombs, submarine-launched warheads, and land-based missiles.7 It accomplished this by using Everett’s non-linear multiplier method, which broke down complex problems into manageable pieces and made appropriate trade-offs between cost and utility.