Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

  The Lion in Winter

  Mileva Mari, her health deteriorating due to a succession of minor strokes, was still living in Zurich and trying to take care of their institutionalized son, Eduard, whose behavior had become increasingly erratic and violent. Financial problems again plagued her and revived the tension with her former husband. The portion of the money that he had put into trust for her in America from the Nobel Prize had slipped away during the Depression, and two of her three apartment houses had been sold to help pay for Eduard’s care. By late 1946, Einstein was pushing to sell the remaining house and give control of the money to a legal guardian who would be appointed for Eduard. But Mari had the usufruct of the house and its proceeds, as well as power of attorney over it, and she was terrified of surrendering any control.25

  One cold day later that winter, she slipped on the ice on the way to see Eduard and ended up lying unconscious until strangers found her. She knew she was going to die soon, and she had recurring nightmares about struggling through the snow, unable to reach Eduard. She was panicked about what would happen to him, and wrote heart-wrenching letters to Hans Albert.26

  Einstein succeeded in selling her house by early 1948, but with her power of attorney she blocked the proceeds from being sent to him. He wrote to Hans Albert, giving him all the details and promising him that, whatever happened, he would take care of Eduard “even if it costs me all my savings.”27 That May, Mari had a stroke and lapsed into a trance in which she repeatedly muttered only “No, no!” until she died three months later. The money from the sale of her apartment, 85,000 Swiss francs, was found under her mattress.

  Eduard lapsed into a daze and never spoke of his mother again. Carl Seelig, a friend of Einstein’s who lived nearby, visited him frequently and sent back regular reports to Einstein. Seelig hoped to get him to make contact with his son, but he never did. “There is something blocking me that I am unable to analyze fully,” Einstein told Seelig. “I believe I would be arousing painful feelings of various kinds in him if I made an appearance in whatever form.”28

  Einstein’s own health began to decline in 1948 as well. For years he had been plagued by stomach ailments and anemia, and late that year, after an attack of sharp pains and vomiting, he checked into the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn. Exploratory surgery revealed an aneurysm in the abdominal aorta,* but doctors decided there was not much they could do about it. It was assumed, correctly, that it was likely to kill him one day, but in the meantime he could live on borrowed time and a healthy diet.29

  To recuperate, he went on the longest trip he would make during his twenty-two years as a Princeton resident: down to Sarasota, Florida. For once, he successfully avoided publicity. “Einstein Elusive Sarasota Visitor,” the local paper lamented.

  Helen Dukas accompanied him. After Elsa’s death, she had become even more of a loyal guardian, and she even shielded Einstein from letters written by Hans Albert’s daughter, Evelyn. Hans Albert suspected that Dukas may have had an affair with his father, and said so to others. “On many occasions, Hans Albert told me of his long-held suspicion,” family friend Peter Bucky later recalled. But others who knew Dukas found the suggestion to be implausible.30

  By then, Einstein had become much friendlier with his son, now a respected engineering professor at Berkeley. “Whenever we met,” Hans Albert later recalled of his trips east to see his father, “we mutually reported on all the interesting developments in our field and in our work.” Einstein particularly loved learning about new inventions and solutions to puzzles. “Maybe both, inventions and puzzles, reminded him of the happy, carefree, and successful days at the patent office in Bern,” said Hans Albert.31

  Einstein’s beloved sister, Maja, the closest intimate of his life, was also in declining health. She had come to Princeton when Mussolini enacted anti-Jewish laws, but her husband, Paul Winteler, from whom she had been drifting apart for many years,32 moved to Switzerland to be with his own sister and her husband, Michele Besso. They corresponded often, but never rejoined one another.

  Maja began, as Elsa had, to look more like Einstein, with radiating silver hair and a devilish smile. The inflection of her voice and the slightly skeptical wry tone she used when asking questions were similar to his. Although she was a vegetarian, she loved hot dogs, so Einstein decreed that they were a vegetable, and that satisfied her.33

  Maja had suffered a stroke and, by 1948, was confined to bed most of the time. Einstein doted on her as he did no other person. Every evening he read aloud to her. Sometimes the fare was heavy, such as the arguments of Ptolemy against Aristarchus’s opinion that the world rotates around the sun. “I could not help thinking of certain arguments of present-day physicists: learned and subtle, but without insight,” he wrote Solovine about that evening. Other times, the readings were lighter but perhaps just as revealing, such as the evenings he read from Don Quixote; he sometimes compared his own quixotic parries against the prevailing windmills of science with that of the old knight with a ready lance.34

  When Maja died in June 1951, Einstein was grief-stricken. “I miss her more than can be imagined,” he wrote a friend. He sat on the back porch of his Mercer Street home for hours, pale and tense, staring into space. When his stepdaughter Margot came to console him, he pointed to the sky and said, as if reassuring himself, “Look into nature, and then you will understand it better.”35

  Margot had likewise left her husband, who responded by writing, as he had long wanted to, an unauthorized biography of Einstein. She worshipped Einstein, and each year they grew closer. He found her presence charming. “When Margot speaks,” he said, “you see flowers growing.”36

  His ability to engender and feel such affection belied his reputation for being emotionally distant. Both Maja and Margot preferred living with him to living with their own husbands as they got older. He had been a difficult husband and father because he did not take well to any constricting bonds, but he could also be intense and passionate, both with family and friends, when he found himself engaged rather than confined.

  Einstein was human, and thus both good and flawed, and the greatest of his failings came in the realm of the personal. He had lifelong friends who were devoted to him, and he had family members who doted on him, but there were also those few—Mileva and Eduard foremost among them—whom he simply walled out when the relationship became too painful.

  As for his colleagues, they saw his kindly side. He was gentle and generous with partners and subordinates, both those who agreed with him and those who didn’t. He had deep friendships lasting for decades. He was unfailingly benevolent to his assistants. His warmth, sometimes missing at home, radiated on the rest of humanity. So as he grew old, he was not only respected and revered by his colleagues, he was loved.

  They honored him, with the blend of scientific and personal camaraderie he had enjoyed since his student days, at a seventieth birthday convocation upon his return from his Florida recuperation. Although the talks were supposed to focus on Einstein’s science, most dwelled on his sweetness and humanity. When he walked in, there was a hush, then thunderous applause. “Einstein just had no sense at all about what absolute reverence there was for him,” one of his assistants recalled.37

  His closest friends at the Institute bought him a present, an advanced AM-FM radio and high-fidelity record player, which they installed in his home secretly when he was at work one day. Einstein was thrilled and used it not only for music but for news. In particular, he liked to catch Howard K. Smith’s commentaries.

  He had pretty much given up the violin by then. It was too hard on his aging fingers. Instead, he focused on the piano, which he was not quite as good at playing. Once, after repeatedly stumbling on a passage, he turned to Margot and smiled. “Mozart wrote such nonsense here,” he said.38

  He came to look even more like a prophet, with his hair getting longer, his eyes a bit sadder and more weary. His face grew more deeply etched yet somehow more delicate. It showed wisdom and wear but still a v
itality. He was dreamy, as he was when a child, but also now serene.

  “I am generally regarded as sort of a petrified object,” he noted to Max Born, then a professor in Edinburgh, one of those friends whose affection had lasted so long. “I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds very well with my temperament ...I simply enjoy giving more than receiving in every respect, do not take myself nor the doings of the masses seriously, am not ashamed of my weaknesses and vices, and naturally take things as they come with equanimity and humor.”39

  Israel’s Presidency

  Before the Second World War, Einstein had stated his opposition to a Jewish state when speaking to three thousand celebrants at a Manhattan hotel seder. “My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power,” he said. “I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our ranks. We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee period.”40

  After the war, he took the same stance. When he testified in Washington in 1946 to an international committee looking into the situation in Palestine, he denounced the British for pitting Jews against Arabs, called for more Jewish immigration, but rejected the idea that the Jews should be nationalistic. “The State idea is not in my heart,” he said in a quiet whisper that reverberated through the shocked audience of ardent Zionists. “I cannot understand why it is needed.”41 Rabbi Stephen Wise was flabbergasted that Einstein would break ranks with true Zionists at such a public hearing, and he got him to sign a clarifying statement that was, in fact, not clarifying at all.

  Einstein was especially dismayed by the militaristic methods used by Menachem Begin and other Jewish militia leaders, and he joined with his occasional antagonist Sidney Hook to sign a petition in the New York Times denouncing Begin as a “terrorist” and “closely akin” to the fascists.42 The violence was contrary to Jewish heritage. “We imitate the stupid nationalism and racial nonsense of the goyim,” he wrote a friend in 1947.

  But when the State of Israel was declared in 1948, Einstein wrote the same friend to say that his attitude had changed. “I have never considered the idea of a state a good one, for economic, political and military reasons,” he conceded. “But now, there is no going back, and one has to fight it out.”43

  The creation of Israel caused him, yet again, to back away from the pure pacifism he had once embraced. “We may regret that we have to use methods that are repulsive and stupid to us,” he wrote to a Jewish group in Uruguay, “but to bring about better conditions in the international sphere, we must first of all maintain our experience by all means at our disposal.”44

  Chaim Weizmann, the indefatigable Zionist who brought Einstein to America in 1921, had become Israel’s first president, a prestigious but generally ceremonial post in a system that vested most power in the prime minister and cabinet. When he died in November 1952, a Jerusalem newspaper began urging that Einstein be tapped to replace him. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion bowed to the pressure, and word quickly spread that Einstein would be asked.

  It was an idea that was at once both astonishing and obvious—and also impractical. Einstein first learned of it from a small article in the New York Times a week after Weizmann’s death. At first he and the women in his house laughed it off, but then reporters started to call. “This is very awkward, very awkward,” he told a visitor. A few hours later, a telegram arrived from Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban. Could the embassy, it asked, send someone the next day to see him officially?

  “Why should that man come all that way,” Einstein lamented, “when I only will have to say no?”

  Helen Dukas came up with the idea of simply giving Ambassador Eban a phone call. In those days, impromptu long-distance calls were somewhat novel. To her surprise, she was able to track Eban down in Washington and put him on the line with Einstein.

  “I am not the person for that and I cannot possibly do it,” Einstein said.

  “I cannot tell my government that you phoned me and said no,” Eban replied. “I have to go through the motions and present the offer officially.”

  Eban ended up sending a deputy, who handed Einstein a formal letter asking if he would take on the presidency. “Acceptance would entail moving to Israel and taking its citizenship,” Eban’s letter noted (presumably in case Einstein harbored any fantasy that he could preside over Israel from Princeton). Eban hastened to reassure Einstein, however: “Freedom to pursue your great scientific work would be afforded by a government and people who are fully conscious of the supreme significance of your labors.” In other words, it was a job that would require his presence, but not much else.

  Even though the offer seemed somewhat strange, it was a powerful testament to Einstein’s unsurpassed standing as a hero of world Jewry. It “embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons,” Eban said.

  Einstein had already prepared his note of rejection, which he handed to Eban’s envoy as soon as he arrived. “I have been a lawyer all my life,” the visitor joked, “and I have never gotten a rebuttal before I have stated my case.”

  He was “deeply moved” by the offer, Einstein said in his prepared response, and “at once saddened and ashamed” that he would not accept it. “All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official function,” he explained. “I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations of the world.”45

  Offering Einstein the presidency of Israel was a clever idea, but Einstein was right to realize that sometimes a brilliant idea is also a very bad one. As he noted with his usual wry self-awareness, he did not have the natural aptitude to deal with people in the way the role would require, nor did he have the temperament to be an official functionary. He was not cut out to be either a statesman or a figurehead.

  He liked to speak his mind, and he had no patience for the compromises necessary to manage, or even symbolically lead, complex organizations. Back when he was involved as a figurehead leader in the establishing of Hebrew University, he had not possessed the talent to handle, nor the temperament to ignore, all of the maneuverings involved. Likewise, he had more recently had the same unpleasant experiences with a group creating Brandeis University near Boston, which caused him to resign from that endeavor.46

  In addition, he had never displayed a discernible ability to run anything. The only formal administrative duty he had ever undertaken was to head a new physics institute at the University of Berlin. He did little other than hire his stepdaughter to handle some clerical tasks and give a job to the astronomer trying to confirm his theories.

  Einstein’s brilliance sprang from being a rebel and nonconformist who recoiled at any attempt to restrain his free expression. Are there any worse traits for someone who is supposed to be a political conciliator? As he explained in a polite letter to the Jerusalem newspaper that had been campaigning for him, he did not want to face the chance that he would have to go along with a government decision that “might create a conflict with my conscience.”

  In society as in science, he was better off remaining a nonconformist. “It is true that many a rebel has in the end become a figure of responsibility,” Einstein conceded to a friend that week, “but I cannot bring myself to do so.”47

  Ben-Gurion was secretly relieved. He had begun to realize that the idea was a bad one. “Tell me what to do if he says yes!” he joked to his assistant. “I’ve had to offer the post to him because it’s impossible not to. But if he accepts, we are in for trouble.” Two days later, when Ambassador Eban ran into Einstein at a black-tie reception in New York, he was happy that the issue was behind them. Einstein was not wearing socks.48

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

&n
bsp; RED SCARE

  1951–1954

  With J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1947

  The Rosenbergs

  The rush to build the H-Bomb, rising anticommunist fervor, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s increasingly untethered security investigations unnerved Einstein. The atmosphere reminded him of the rising Nazism and anti-Semitism of the 1930s. “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself,” he lamented to the queen mother of Belgium in early 1951. “People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces for evil.”1

  He tried to maintain a middle ground between those who were reflexively anti-American and those who were reflexively anti-Soviet. On the one hand, he rebuked his collaborator Leopold Infeld, who wanted him to support statements by the World Peace Council, which Einstein rightly suspected was Soviet-influenced. “In my view they are more or less propaganda,” he said. He did the same to a group of Russian students who pressed him to join a protest against what they alleged was America’s use of biological weapons during the Korean War. “You cannot expect me to protest against incidents which possibly, and very probably, have never taken place,” he replied.2

  On the other hand, Einstein refrained from signing a petition circulated by Sidney Hook denouncing the perfidy of those who made such charges against America. He was enamored of neither extreme. As he put it, “Every reasonable person must strive to promote moderation and a more objective judgment.”3

  In what he presumed would be a quiet effort at promoting such moderation, Einstein wrote a private letter asking that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of turning over atomic secrets to the Soviets, be spared the death penalty. He had avoided making any statements about the case, which had divided the nation with a frenzy seldom seen before the advent of the cable-TV age. Instead, he sent the letter to the judge, Irving Kaufman, with a promise not to publicize it. Einstein did not contend that the Rosenbergs were innocent. He merely argued that a death penalty was too harsh in a case where the facts were murky and the outcome was driven more by popular hysteria than objectivity.4