Before flying west I called Sylvia Bailey, the English-born secretary of Jacob Bronowski, the English polymath hired by the Salk Institute upon Leo Szilard's death, for advice about how Liz and I could best get wed in California. To my surprise, she called back the next day, saying that it would be faster to arrange a church ceremony than a civil ceremony before a justice of the peace. If I gave her the go-ahead, she would contact her friend the Reverend Forshaw, whose Mission-style church was in the center of La Jolla. In turn, Liz went with her mother back to Bonwit Teller's, this time no longer just looking but ready to bring home several outfits appropriate to the occasion and the many photographs we would take to send to relatives and friends by way of announcement.
At the ACS science writers’ gathering, I spoke at length to Bob Rein-hold, a former Crimson editor, now writing about science for the New York Times. In the article he soon wrote about my plans to turn Cold Spring Harbor toward cancer research, he remarked on the nervous way I held my can of Coke, having no way of knowing that this was no garden-variety tic but the anxious anticipation of my wedding the next evening. My nervousness disappeared as soon as Liz came off the plane. Her smile would always make me feel good. Shortly, we drove north of La Jolla to get a marriage license that would permit us at 9:00 P.M. on March 28 to be wed in the La Jolla Congregational Church. That I was not a churchgoer was of no concern to Reverend Forshaw, whose library prominently displayed one of Bertrand Russell's thicker tomes.
Upon our return to the La Valencia Hotel, we had an early supper at its Whaler's Bar before going on to Jacob and Rita Bronowski's one-story glass house in La Jolla Farms near the Salk Institute. Its stylish ambience was much better suited to wedding photos after sunset than was the church. Afterward, Liz met my small circle of La Jolla friends, who came to the La Valencia for a surprise party without knowing its purpose. We spent our first night as a married couple in one of the rooms looking out on the Pacific Ocean.
Liz and I on our wedding day, March 28,1968, in La Jolla, California
The next morning we telephoned my sister to tell her and Dad the news and to let them know that we would stop off in Washington on our way back to Harvard. I went to find postcards to let friends such as Seymour Benzer and Paul Doty know that “a nineteen-year-old was now mine.” After a leisurely lunch, we drove east to see the desert plants blooming around Borrego Springs. We spent the night at Casa del Zora before driving through the Anza Desert to the Imperial Valley and from there to the village of San Felipe, some seventy miles south of the Mexican border. There we spent two nights in a hotel catering to fishermen, taking care not to get sunburned while spending much of Sunday swimming in the already warm waters of the Gulf of California.
Unknown to us was Lyndon Johnson's sudden decision to make a major address to the nation that evening. Only after we were back on the U.S. side of the border, driving across southern Arizona, did we learn that the night before, Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection. We hoped he would get us out of the quagmire in Southeast Asia before his term ended, but it seemed a vain hope. Though Johnson then presented the Tet offensive as a big setback for the Viet Cong, he had to believe otherwise, else he would not be stepping down.
By nightfall we were outside Tucson. The next day we admired thousands of tall cacti on an early morning walk in the Saguaro National Park. Dropping off our rented Ford Mustang at the airport, we caught the plane for Washington. Spring was in full bloom, allowing everyone at Betty's house, next to Glover Archibald Park, to half ignore Dad's awful prognosis as Liz and I shared the details of our wedding and the days afterward. Unexpectedly on hand was a photographer sent by McGraw-Hill's new magazine Scientific Research. Its forte was fast-breaking stories about scientists as well as science itself. Word that I had just married was already about, and they wanted a picture of Liz and me. The resulting photos revealed Liz a photographer's dream, and we were to be seen together on the cover of the April 29 issue.
The next morning we drove north for four hours to Cold Spring Harbor to see our eventual home. From Washington, I had let John Cairns know of our impending day trip, and the Lab arranged a special welcome dinner prepared by Francoise Spahr. Her husband, Pierre-Francois, was over from Geneva for six months to work with my former Harvard student Ray Gesteland, whom John Cairns had recruited to the lab staff a year earlier. But by the time we gathered in the main room of the big Victorian house at the Lab's entryway, the news of our marriage was eclipsed by horrid events elsewhere. In Memphis, an unknown assassin had just killed Martin Luther King Jr. Before driving off to Providence the next afternoon, Liz and I were interviewed separately by a reporter from Long Island's leading newspaper, Newsday. To her dismay, he wound up suggesting in the article about us that her Radcliffe education would effectively lead her to a life of darning my socks.
Liz and I graced the cover of Scientific Research on April 29,1968.
At Liz's home, I met her father, a physician, whom I discovered to be, like my father, a keen reader and skeptic. In this important way, Liz and I had similar upbringings. Though her parents sent her to Central Baptist Church, its chief attraction to them was the music—Providence's best. That evening, my eyes kept drifting to the TV set and its images of the widespread race riots in the wake of the King assassination. The assailant was still unknown.
The next morning, April 6, was my fortieth birthday, and were it not for Liz by my side I would have been feeling sadly old. We pushed on toward Cambridge just before noon to give Liz time for a Saturday afternoon of housewares shopping in Harvard Square. Her first big purchase was an ironing board that I carried back from Dixon's Hardware. Later enriching our Appian Way flat was a second silver candlestick, a gift from the Society of Fellows to complement the one given to me upon my becoming a senior fellow. Another early purchase was a big cookbook by Julia Child, a local resident, which Liz bought upon the suggestion of the woman at the Radcliffe registrar's office who recorded the change of Liz's name from Lewis to Watson. Its recipes proved much more satisfying to Liz to master than those in her organic chemistry class. Inevitably my days as a beanpole were soon to end.
The Newsday article, April 6,1968
As soon as Liz had taken her final exams, we made the five-hour drive down to Cold Spring Harbor, where the Lab had rented a house on Shore Road to let Dad live with us over the summer. He had been hospitalized several times while with Betty but now was pain-free enough to move in and out of our rented four-door Dodge. The new car spared Liz having to master jump-starting my MG TE The day after we arrived, another multicourse meal, this time featuring lobster américaine, was cooked by Francoise. While eating it, we were horrified to learn that Robert Kennedy had just been shot dead in Los Angeles. I had pinned my hopes on him to win the Democratic nomination for president. Not since World War II had daily life been so frequently overshadowed by such a string of woeful events.
Nancy and Brook Hopkins began coming over to our Shore Road home to keep Dad company. Nancy was down for the summer with more than a dozen graduate students from MIT and Harvard, all focused on phage λ, working together in the vacant lab space underneath that of AI Hershey. Also about were Max and Manny Delbrück, back for Max's fourth consecutive year of teaching a course in the Animal House on the photosensitivity of the mold Phycorny ces. Instantly I sensed their approval of Liz, and relief that I no longer would suffer from chronic restlessness. Over July, Dad's condition worsened to require a twenty-four-hour home nurse. The chemotherapy he was receiving from the Lab's local doctor, Reese Alsop, was mainly palliative. By month's end, however, the pain proved too great to treat at home, and he was admitted to Huntington Hospital before being settled in a nearby nursing home. He would pass only a night there before pneumonia mercifully ended his agony.
Two days later, Betty joined me in Indianapolis and together we drove north some one hundred miles to the small town of Chesterton, near Lake Michigan, where our mother had been buried eleven years before. We would have met at
the Chicago airport, but the Democratic convention was in progress and the city was full of antiwar protesters tangling with unsympathetic policemen. That day we wanted to think about Dad and Mother, not Vietnam. Meeting us the next morning at the cemetery were Mother's nearby Olvaney cousins, whom we'd seen much of in Michigan City before our university studies. After lunch we set off to see the little bungalow on Chicago's South Shore in which we had grown up. The drive later through Grant Park was eerily peaceful. The night before, Mayor Daley's police had violently dispersed protesters attempting to camp out in its open spaces, onto which looked the windows of rooms in the tall hotels where the convention delegates were staying.
Upon my return to Long Island, the three-week-long course on animal cells and viruses had started. There I first met the Liverpool-born, twenty-eight-year-old Joe Sambrook. He had flown east to lecture on pox viruses, the subject of his Ph.D. thesis at the Australian National University. Over the past two years at the Salk Institute, he had shown SV40 viral DNA integrated into the chromosomes of cancerous SV40-transformed cells. His work had been the heart of Dulbecco's recent June symposium talk, leading John Cairns to suggest I approach Joe about leading our DNA tumor virus effort. Quickly sensing Joe's high intelligence and ambition, I offered him a position starting the following summer. He quickly accepted and wrote up a big grant proposal to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which would guarantee the Lab an infusion of $1.6 million over the proposed five years. Obtaining this money was virtually a foregone conclusion, as there then existed more cancer research money than good applicants to use it.
In fact, the only reviewer with any misgivings about the NCI grant was Harvard's Charlie Thomas. He wondered about the risk to humans from working with tumor viruses at the molecular level. Could exposure to the monkey virus SV40 cause cancer in humans? We replied that we would follow the same procedures used in the Salk lab of Renato Dulbecco, who'd apparently worked safely with SV40. Furthermore, we knew that fifteen years earlier, SV40 had been an inadvertent contaminant of early batches of the polio vaccine with which several million individuals had been vaccinated, with no elevated incidence of cancer.
Over the February 1969 Washington's Birthday weekend, we stayed at Redcote, the home of Edward Pulling, the newly elected president of the Long Island Biological Association. Though raised in Baltimore and educated at Princeton, Ed had been born in England and served as a British naval officer during World War I. Upon his recent retirement as founding headmaster of the Milbrook School, north of New York City, he and his wife, Lucy, moved to the estate she had inherited from her father, the J. P. Morgan banker Russell Leffingwell. When Liz and I had first visited their eighty acres of fields and woods the previous summer, Ed pointed out the hidden ditch called a “ha-ha.” It kept Lucy's horses from coming too close to the patio where we had cocktails before supper. Then also present was the journalist turned canny investor Franz Schneider, almost eighty, and his wife, Betty, twenty-five years his junior. Earlier in life, Betty regularly flew their seaplane from the dock by their house to and from New York City. Later they had us meet Ferdinand Eberstadt, who owned a large estate on Lloyd Neck that he would soon give to the Fish and Wildlife Service as a nature preserve to prevent the building of a nuclear power plant on adjacent land.
On each such visit down from Harvard, we eagerly followed the building of the new house we were to occupy upon Liz's graduation from Radcliffe. Initially we had planned to renovate the 175-year-old Osterhout Cottage, next to Blackford Hall at the heart of campus. The necessary alterations would require that I put up $30,000, then the value of my shares of the fast-growing pharmaceutical company Syn-tex, acquired after meeting the company's founder, Carl Djerassi, a chemist and the inventor of the birth control pill. At a Cleveland gathering of the American Chemical Society in May 1960 we had each received a $1,000 award. Upon returning to Harvard, I invested my prize money in Syntex shares, later using another $1,000 from my salary to buy more. Soon after the renovation of Osterhout started, however, the local contractor told us the deterioration was beyond repair. He offered to build for the same sum a new house almost identical to the one that was meant to emerge after the extensive renovation. We would get higher ceilings and central air-conditioning to boot. Our architect, Harold Edelman, saw only value in a brand-new home, and never would we regret the decision.
Over the spring break, Liz and I escaped the nationwide student unrest over Vietnam by going to the Caribbean, where my world renown paid off. Some ten years before, the wealthy European industrialist Axel Faber had set up a foundation to benefit Nobel laureates by subsidizing stays at exclusive hotels and resorts. For $10 per night, I had stayed at Le Richemond and the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva. Having found the Dorado Beach outside San Juan more geared to golf than swimming, we moved first to St. Thomas and from there to St. John's to stay at the Caneel Bay Resort, where we sipped peach daiquiris with Abby Rockefeller's brother David and his new wife, Sydney.
Liz's last two months at Radcliffe took a direction we never expected. Less than a week after our return, University Hall was occupied by some three hundred students protesting the war. Many were members of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, red and black banners hung from a second-floor window after the building's occupants, largely administrators, including Franklin Ford, were roughed up by the students protesting their earlier unlawful expulsion. SDS had been threatening violence for some time, no doubt encouraged by the effects of similar student uprisings elsewhere. Intending their actions to stop a war, those occupying University Hall saw no reason for their conduct to be governed by codes observed in times of peace.
That afternoon they proclaimed their occupation would end only if the university acceded to several demands, chief among them the expulsion of ROTC from Harvard. In fact, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences two months before had voted to deny credit for ROTC courses and not to give academic appointments to the military officers teaching them. ROTC's presence, commonly supposed to be the root of the trouble, by itself never would have led to the occupation of University Hall. The unstoppable chain reaction began when Richard Nixon became president and Harvard lent him Henry Kissinger as national security advisor. The student protesters had reached the limit of their patience with Nathan Pusey, who had failed to address the moral quandary in which the university found itself, and who two years earlier had branded the campus's self-proclaimed student revolutionaries as “Walter Mittys of the left.”
Despite repeated warnings to leave University Hall and Franklin Ford's closing off Harvard Yard to all except its freshmen inhabitants, the SDS-led students gave no sign of budging. Though a lightning police raid had been talked about earlier as the best way to deal with building takeovers, no one was prepared for what happened next. At five o'clock the following morning, four hundred blue-helmeted, shield-carrying Cambridge policemen entered Harvard Yard and with tear gas and clubs forcibly removed the students, then barely awake, many banded together arm in arm. After less than fifteen minutes of this mayhem, University Hall was cleared. Most of the students were herded into paddy wagons and carted off to the Cambridge city jail to be charged with trespassing.
The rest of the Harvard student body, until then largely unsympathetic to the SDS gang, instantly ignited with indignation against the administration and, in particular, President Pusey Police brutality had made martyrs of the student protestors. Fifteen hundred students gathered that afternoon in Memorial Hall calling for a three-day boycott of classes. Even angrier crowds formed later in Soldiers Field across the Charles River. More than five hundred law students, from a school never before known for radicalism, voted for Pusey to resign. As I walked that day into the Faculty Club for lunch, Liz was among the students lining the path to its front entrance to protest the raid. I had never before seen her make a display of political opinions.
Though the police raid's impact upon students lasted only until commencement, schisms
developed within the faculty that would last for years. A liberal caucus was formed soon after the event. The group believed that without Nathan Pusey as president, the whole ugly affair would not have happened. By reacting so insensitively to student concerns about Vietnam, he stood out as a naked proponent first of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy and later of Richard Nixon's. In contrast, a conservative caucus of roughly the same size assigned all blame to the student activists. How the offending students would be disciplined was not initially clear. Just before commencement, the liberal caucus felt semivictorious when a broadly constituted committee, including several students, voted for the temporary expulsion of only ten students, those known to have manhandled administrators during the April 9 takeover. Those in the conservative caucus had wanted many more students held accountable and for the sanction to be severe, ideally permanent expulsion.
Exacerbating the spring tensions was an emerging political activism among many of Harvard's black students. Two months before, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had voted to set up an undergraduate degree program in Afro-American studies. Emboldened by the chaos following the raid, the more militant black students demanded Harvard go further and create a separate department whose faculty they could help choose. Outside the April 22 faculty meeting held at the Loeb Drama Center to consider this matter, one black student stood holding a meat cleaver. Inside, to my subsequent regret, I joined the many liberal caucus members favoring student input in faculty choices. I then realized that letting Harvard science students help choose future science faculty would have been nonsense. Subcon-ciously I must have believed this proposed Department of Afro-American studies would not long stand the test of time. Its offerings would not give black students the hard facts that would let them thrive in competition with students of other colors.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 28
