Richards’ death was nevertheless “shocking” to Jim Conant and his wife, Patty. Richards had celebrated Christmas with them only a few weeks before and had stayed in the large brick mansion at 17 Quincy Street that was the official residence of the Harvard president. Although his psychological condition had always been precarious, he had seemed “to be making real progress,” his mother later lamented in a letter to a close family friend, so much so that “last summer and autumn he was so happy and well that for fun he wrote a detective story.” Richards had submitted the manuscript to Scribner’s, which “had at once accepted it.”
Just a few weeks after he took his own life, his book, Brain Waves and Death, was published under the pseudonym “Willard Rich.” It was, in most respects, a conventional murder mystery, with the added interest of being set in a sophisticated modern laboratory, where a group of eminent scientists are hard at work on an experiment designed to measure the electrical impulses sent out by the brain. In a twist on the standard “hermetically sealed room” problem, Richards staged the murder in a locked experimental chamber that is constantly monitored by highly sensitive listening devices and a camera. The book earned respectful reviews, with The New York Times describing the story as “ingeniously contrived and executed” and awarding Willard Rich “an honorable place in the ranks of mystery mongers.” None of the critics were apparently aware that the author was already dead or that he had rather morbidly foreshadowed his imminent demise in the book, in which the first victim is a tall, arrogant young chemist named Bill Roberts.
At the time, only a small group of elite scientists could have known that while the method Richards devised to kill off his literary alter ego was of his own invention—a lethal packet of poison gas that was frozen solid and released into the atmosphere when warmed to room temperature—the actual science and the laboratory itself were real. George Kistiakowsky, a Harvard chemistry professor and one of Richards’ closest friends and professional colleagues, guessed the truth immediately, “that it was a take-off on the Loomis Laboratory and the characters frequenting it.” Despite its contrived plot, the book was essentially a roman à clef. No one who had ever been there could fail to recognize that the “Howard M. Ward Laboratory” was in reality the Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park and that the charismatic figure of Ward himself was transparently based on Alfred Lee Loomis, the immensely wealthy Wall Street tycoon and amateur physicist who, among his myriad inventions, claimed a patent for the electroencephalograph, a device that measured brain waves.
The opening paragraphs of the book perfectly captured Loomis’ rarefied world, where scientists mingled with polite society and where intellectual problems in astronomy, biology, psychiatry, or physics could be discussed and pursued in a genteel and collegial atmosphere:
The Howard M. Ward Laboratory was not one of those hospital-like institutions where Pure Science is hounded grimly and humorlessly as if it were a venomous reptile; the grounds of the Laboratory included a tennis court, bridle paths, and a nine-hole golf course. Guests there did not have to confine themselves to science, they could live fully and graciously.
It was Richards who had first told Kistiakowsky about Loomis’ private scientific playground in Tuxedo Park, a guarded enclave of money and privilege nestled in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains. Tuxedo Park, forty miles northwest of New York City, had originally been developed in 1886 by Pierre Lorillard, the tobacco magnate, as a private lakefront resort where his wealthy friends could summer every year. The rustic retreat became the prime meeting ground of American society, what Ward McCallister famously called “the Four Hundred,” where wealthy moguls communed with nature in forty-room “cottages” with the required ten bedrooms, gardens, stables, and housing for the small army of servants required for entertaining in style. Leading members of the financial elite, such as Astors and Morgans, numbered among the Tuxedo Club’s first members, as did Averell Harriman, who occupied a vast neighboring estate known as Arden. Over the years, Tuxedo Park, with its exclusive clubhouse and fabled balls, had taken on all of the luster and lore of a royal court, and although it had dimmed somewhat since the First World War, it still regarded itself as the Versailles of the New York rich.
Loomis, a prominent banker and socialite, was very much part of that world and owned several homes there. According to Richards, however, Loomis was also somewhat eccentric and disdained the glamorous swirl around him. He had developed a passion for science and for some time had been leading a sort of double life: as a partner in Bonbright & Co., the thriving bond investments subsidiary of J. P. Morgan, he had amassed a substantial fortune, which allowed him to act as a patron somewhat in the manner of the great nineteenth-century British scientists such as Charles Darwin and Lord Rayleigh. To that end, Loomis had purchased an enormous stone mansion in Tuxedo, known as the Tower House, and turned it into a private laboratory where he could give free rein to his avocation—primarily physics, but also chemistry, astronomy, and other ventures. He entertained lavishly at Tower House and invited eminent scientists to spend long weekends and holidays as his guests. More to the point, as Richards told Kistiakowsky, Loomis also extended his hospitality to “impecunious” young scientists, offering them stipends so they could enjoy elegant living conditions while laboring as skilled researchers in his laboratory.
Richards had seen to it that Kistiakowsky—“Kisty” to his pals—secured a generous grant from the Loomis Laboratory. The two had met and become fast friends at Princeton in the fall of 1926, when as new chemistry teachers they were assigned to share the same ground-floor laboratory. They were both tall, physically imposing men, with the same contradictory mixture of witty raconteur and reserved, introspective scientist. In no time they had discovered a mutual fondness for late night philosophizing and bathtub gin. As this was during Prohibition, the Chemistry Department had to sponsor its own drinking parties, and the two chemists “doctored” their own mixture of bootleg alcohol and ginger ale with varying degrees of success. Richards, who was subsidized by his well-heeled Brahmin family, had soon noticed that his Russian colleague, a recent émigré who sent money to his family in Europe, was having difficulty managing on the standard instructor’s salary of $160 a month. Knowing any extra source of funds would be welcome, Richards had put in a good word with Loomis, just as he had when recommending Kistiakowsky to his “uncle Lawrence”—A. Lawrence Lowell, who was then president of Harvard, and a close family friend. Grinning into the phone, he had provided assurances that Kistiakowsky was not some “wild and woolly Russian” and, despite being just off the boat, was “wholly a gentleman, had proper appearance and table manners, etc.”
Richards’ own introduction to Loomis had happened quite by accident a few months prior to his arrival at Princeton. While Richards was completing his postdoctoral studies at Göttingen, he had been sitting in the park one Sunday morning, idly reading Chemical Abstracts, when a paragraph briefly describing an experiment being carried on in the “Loomis Laboratory” had caught his eye. He had immediately sent off a letter to the laboratory, “suggesting that certain aspects of the experiment could be further developed,” and he had even outlined what the result of this development would probably be. Some months later, he received a response from the laboratory informing him that they had carried out his suggestions and the results were those he had anticipated. This had been followed by a formal invitation to work at the Loomis Laboratory.
Over the years, Richards and Kistiakowky had often commuted from Princeton to Tuxedo Park together on weekends and holidays and had conducted some of their research experiments jointly. Richards had arranged for them both to spend the summer of 1930 as research fellows at the Loomis Laboratory. What a grand time that had been. Not only was the room and board better than that of any resort hotel, but weekend recreation at Tower House—when the restriction against women was relaxed—included festive picnics, drinks, parties, and elaborate black-tie dinners. Back then, they had both been ambitious young chemists at t
he beginning of their careers and had reveled in the chance to work with such legendary figures as R. W. Wood, the brilliant American experimental physicist from Johns Hopkins, whom Loomis had lured to Tuxedo Park as director of his laboratory. Working alongside Loomis and a long list of distinguished collaborators, they had carried out series of original experiments, including some of the first with intense ultrasonic radiation, and had proudly seen their lines of investigation published in scientific journals and taken up by laboratories in America and Europe.
Kistiakowsky, who by then had joined Harvard’s Chemistry Department and become close friends with Conant, never publicly revealed that Richards’ book was based on Loomis and the brain wave experiments conducted at Tower House. In his carefully composed entry in Richards’ Harvard obituary, he made only a passing reference to a “Mr. A. L. Loomis of Tuxedo Park,” diplomatically noting that Richards’ work at the laboratory had afforded him “one of the keenest scientific pleasures of his career.” However, it is typical that he could not resist dropping one hint. Observing that very few physical chemists possessed his late friend’s keenness of mind, Kistiakowsky concluded that no one could ever match Richards’ own concise presentation of his work, “which was always done in the best literary form.”
At the time of Richards’ death, Kistiakowsky was still working for Loomis on the side. But the stakes were much higher now, and the project he had undertaken was so secret, and of such fearful importance, that Richards’ parody of the Loomis Laboratory must have struck him as a wildly precipitous and ill-conceived prank. Richards had always thumbed his nose at authority and convention and had been disdainful of the narrow scope of his scientific colleagues, whom he once complained talked about “nothing but the facts, the fundamental tone of life, while I prefer the inferred third harmonic.” But for Kistiakowsky, a White Russian who at age seventeen had battled the advancing Germans at the tail end of World War I, and then fought the Bolsheviks before being wounded and forced to flee his country, the prospect of another European war took precedence over everything. While in the past he might have joined Richards in poking fun at Loomis and his collector’s attitude toward scientists, Kistiakowsky now appreciated him as a man who knew how to get things done. Loomis was a bit stiff, with the bearing of a four-star general in civilian clothes, but he was strong and decisive.
Kistiakowsky did not have to be told to be discreet, though he may have been. Loomis was furious about the book and threatened to sue for libel. He was an intensely private man and was horrified at the breach of trust from such an old friend. Richards had been a regular at the Tower House for more than ten years and was intimately acquainted with the goings-on there. In the months directly preceding his suicide, Loomis had plunged the laboratory into highly sensitive war-related research projects. Loomis wanted no part of the gossip and notoriety that might result either from Richards’ unfortunate death or his book.
Neither did Jim Conant, who regarded the book as a source of acute embarrassment. It was bad enough that his wife’s family continuously vexed him with their financial excesses and emotional crises, here was his brother-in-law stirring up trouble from the grave with this incriminating tale. Patty Conant was so distressed that she begged her brother, Thayer, to have the book recalled at once. But it was too late for that, and it was not long before Conant discovered that Brain Waves and Death was not Richards’ only legacy.
With his instinctive ability to home in on the latest developments on the frontiers of research, Richards had followed up his first book with something far more sensational. Among the papers collected from his apartment after his death was the draft of a short story entitled “The Uranium Bomb.” It was written once again under the pseudonym Willard Rich. The slim typed manuscript, bearing the name and address of his literary agent, Madeleine Boyd, on the front cover, was clearly intended for publication. Richards was an avid reader of Astounding Science Fiction and probably intended to place his story in the magazine, which regularly carried the futuristic visions of H. G. Wells and was a popular venue for the doomsday fantasies of scientists who were themselves good writers. Richards’ story opens with the meeting in March 1939 between a rather callow young chemist named Perkins (Richards) and a Russian physicist named Boris Zmenov, who tries to enlist the well-connected American to warn his influential friends, and ultimately the president, “to suppress a threat to humanity.” The Zmenov character, who is convinced the Nazis want to build a bomb, explains that there had been a breakthrough in atomic fission: the uranium nucleus had been split up, with the liberation of fifty million times as much energy as could be obtained from any other explosive. “A ton of uranium would make a bomb which could blow the end off Manhattan island.”
Richards outlined Zmenov’s theory, “tossed off with the breezy impudence of a theoretical physicist,” describing the principles of atomic fission and the chain reaction by which an explosion spreads from a few atoms to a large mass of material, thereby generating a colossal amount of power. When Perkins professes disbelief, Zmenov becomes furious: “I am on the verge of developing a weapon,” he declares, “which will be the greatest military discovery of all time. It will revolutionize war, and make the nation possessing it supreme. I wish that the United States should be this nation, but am I encouraged? Am I assisted with the most meager financial support? Bah.”
As Conant read the manuscript, he realized it was an accurate representation of the facts as far as they were known. While not exactly common knowledge, Conant was aware that a great deal of information about uranium had been leaking out in scientific conferences and journals over the past year. His brother-in-law could have easily picked up many of his ideas just from reading The New York Times, which had extensively covered the lecture appearances of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his outspoken remarks about the destructive potential for fission. Even Newsweek had reported that atomic energy might create “an explosion that would make the forces of TNT or high-power bombs seem like firecrackers.” For his part, Conant, an accomplished scientist who had been chairman of Harvard’s Chemistry Department before becoming president of the university, was far from convinced atomic fission was anywhere near to being used as a military weapon. He was still inclined to believe the only imminent danger from fission was to some university laboratories. But he was not ready to dismiss it, either.
Richards’ story was disturbing, and if it cut as close to the bone as his novel had, it was potentially dangerous. There were too many familiar names for comfort, including an acquaintance “prominent in education circles” by the name of “Jim,” which Conant must have read as a sly reference to himself. More troubling still, the physical description of Zmenov—very short, round, and excitable—matched that of the Hungarian refugee scientist Leo Szilard, who was known to be experimenting with uranium fission at Columbia University in New York. Szilard was always agitating within the scientific community about the importance of fission and had even formed his own association to solicit funds for his work. In a scene that rang especially true, Perkins arranges for Zmenov to meet a wealthy banker, and Zmenov is crestfallen when he does not pull out his checkbook. “Perhaps Zmenov thought all bankers were crazy to find something to sling their money into,” Richards wrote in yet another thinly disguised account of Loomis’ exploits. This time, Harvard’s cautious president did not wait for Loomis to tell him that the story revealed too great a knowledge of high-level developments in the scientific world, and at the very moment external pressures were coming to a peak. Conant made sure the story was suppressed.
Conant was too guarded to ever fully confide his doubts in anyone, but he expressed some of his reservations to his son, Ted, who was thirteen years old at the time. The boy had come across the story when going through the boxes of books and radio equipment Richards had left to him and insisted that it ought to be published according to the wishes of his beloved uncle. Anything short of that, he argued, “was censorship.” The fierce row between father and son that
followed was memorable because it was so rare. Conant was a calm, controlled man who rarely lost his temper. He was also coldly practical and not given to old-fashioned sentiment. His angry retort that Richards’ story was “outlandish” and “unworthy of him,” coupled with his uncharacteristic claim that “the family honor was at stake,” suggested there was something more to his opposition than he was letting on. His son reluctantly let the matter drop.
By the time Conant discovered Richards’ manuscript, many of the events described in the story, although slightly distorted, had in fact already transpired. Szilard had befriended Richards and was regularly updating him on the work he was carrying on with the Italian émigré physicist Enrico Fermi, who had won a Nobel Prize and had recently joined the staff of Columbia University. After the French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie published his findings on uranium fission, Fermi lost patience with Szilard’s passion for secrecy and insisted that their recent experiments be published. In a hasty note to Richards on April 18, 1939, Szilard broke the news:
Dear Richards:—
It has now been decided to let the papers come out in the next issue of Physical Review, and I wanted you to be informed of this fact.
With kind regards,
yours,
[Leo Szilard]
As Richards cynically noted in his story, Szilard’s interest in him was primarily as a link to private investors like Loomis, whom Szilard desperately wanted to bankroll the costly experiments he planned to do at Columbia University. At the same time, Szilard had been busy wooing other Wall Street investors, enticing them with the promise of cheap energy. In a letter to Lewis L. Strauss, a New York businessman interested in the atom’s commercial potential, Szilard wrote tantalizingly of “a very sensational new development in nuclear physics” and predicted that fission “might make it possible to produce power by means of nuclear energy.” At one point, Szilard arranged for himself and Fermi to have drinks at Strauss’ apartment and asked Strauss to invite his wealthy acquaintance Lord Rothschild, but the two physicists could not persuade the English financier to underwrite their chain reaction research. Part of the problem was that while Szilard needed backers, he was desperately afraid Germany would realize fission’s military potential first. He was obsessed with secrecy. He was determined to protect his discoveries and cloaked his project in so much mystery that he often appeared as “paranoid” as Richards portrayed him in his sharp caricature. After all his efforts to find private investors had met with failure, Szilard wrote to Richards on July 9, 1939, pleading for money to prove “once and for all if a chain reaction can be made to work.” His tone was urgent:
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