Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  In many of these letters, my father included tidbits of information that he thought would interest me. In one, for example, he enclosed several samples of the paper money, with its endless strings of zeroes, issued by the Hungarian government during the postwar hyperinflation, explaining carefully the denomination of each. He took for granted that I would understand his precise, complex explanations: “Actually, the dollar went to something like a septillion pengos [the Hungarian currency]. Towards the end of the inflation the price of fat was over one pengo per molecule.”15

  In return, I wrote him affectionate letters telling him how much I missed him and, in one, describing my fascination, which I knew would please him, with a science assembly at school that had explained the workings of radar and the cathode ray tube and demonstrated the effects of fluorescent and incandescent light on various crystals.16 In another, which Klari and I wrote jointly during one of his many wartime absences, every other sentence was signed “your neglected family (Klari); the slap-happy females (Marina).”17 My ten-year-old view of the war's end is reflected in a letter I wrote to Klari a few days after Japan's surrender: “Isn't it wonderful that the war is over?…Is Daddy still going to travel so much now that the war is over? I hope not.”18

  During the summer of my eleventh year, my father and I drove alone across the country in one of his substitutes for a tank—in this case, a large Buick. Our ultimate destination was Santa Barbara, California, where Klari would join us and she and I would enjoy life on the beach while he went off on a secret trip somewhere in the Pacific, a “somewhere” that was later revealed as Bikini, a tiny atoll in the Marshall Islands group that had been captured from the Japanese. There, in the summer of 1946, the United States, having more or less forcibly removed the 167 residents to another island, conducted the first of a series of atomic bomb, and later hydrogen bomb, tests code-named Operation Crossroads. As one of the creators of these weapons, my father was there to observe the results.

  Our cross-country trip was uneventful, miraculously unmarred by any of my father's notorious car accidents. We stayed in a series of prewar motels, unprepossessing strings of small cottages, a few of them still with outdoor plumbing, which we both regarded as a hilarious adventure. When we stopped in Santa Fe, he bought me two silver and turquoise belts made by local Indians. They would be worth a minor fortune today, if only I had managed to keep track of them. I felt snugly enveloped in a leisurely span of time that existed just for the two of us, in contrast to the hectic encounters, marked by hurried arrivals and departures, I had grown used to.

  Once we reached Los Alamos, my father exuded boyish enthusiasm as he showed me around those areas I was allowed to enter—all the buildings where bomb-related work was conducted remained strictly off-limits—and introduced me to some of his colleagues from the Manhattan Project. Chief among them were Stan and Françoise Ulam. Ulam, a Polish-born mathematician who had arrived in the United States in 1935 and quickly become one of my father's closest friends, had stayed on to work in Los Alamos after the war was over. The secret city, whose existence had been revealed less than a year before, looked amazingly primitive to my citified eyes, with muddy paths instead of sidewalks and open stairs leading up to second-floor apartments in flimsy wooden buildings. I now began to understand where my father had been and what he had been doing during the war years, and the intensity of the residents' commitment to an Allied victory was brought home to me when I saw the physical discomfort his colleagues had been willing to put up with.

  Not long after that trip, about the time Brookhaven Laboratory actually began to function on Long Island and the Kuper household moved from New York to the small town of Bayport on the island's Great South Bay, my twelfth birthday arrived. With it came the long-planned move from my mother's household to my father's during the school year. My parents, concerned about my likely reaction and perhaps each hoping that the other would break the news, had delayed telling me about this long-standing agreement until the move was nearly upon me. I had always handled the shuttling between two households with aplomb, but I was shaken on learning that my base would now shift from one to the other, and furious that no one had consulted me or even told me about it far enough in advance to allow me to get my mind around the idea.

  Although I acquiesced without outward objection, not wanting to hurt or alienate any of the adults involved, the shift in households was an emotional wrench. Soon after moving to Princeton, I wrote nostalgically, in a school assignment, about the Long Island family I had just left: “The commander-in-chief is Mother. Good-looking, and with a wonderful flair for clothes, she seems to have energy enough for three, managing to hold down a full-time-job, run a household and, in her spare time, lead a dazzling social life…Her nature is a wonderful mixture of contradictions; her unreasonable temper is as terrifying as her warm-hearted generosity is gratifying.”

  “My stepfather…is quite different from Mother, quiet and cautious, seeming to take a very serious view of life but often bursting forth with something really funny when we least expect it…Although usually quiet and undemanding, he really comes into his own on the boat, where he is complete master and a stern tyrant. It is there, watching the delighted little boy playing with his marvelous toy, that we love him the most.”

  Although my mother's dominating personality and my stepfather's response through what would today be termed passive aggression were creating tensions in this marriage even as I wrote, they did not come to the surface until much later. My view at the time, doubtless heightened by the fact that blessings brighten as they take flight, was that “as a unit, they are one of the happiest, most closely-knit families I know.” I was both angry and apprehensive at the thought of leaving this comfortable nest for one less familiar and, I already foresaw, more complicated.

  Walking on Eggs

  “How do you like your eggs cooked, Daddy?” I asked on one of the first mornings of my new life at 26 Westcott Road, the big white colonial house in the elegant western section of Princeton that was now my home during the school year. This homely question about his breakfast was my awkward attempt to start building a normal father-daughter relationship with a parent who had so far moved in and out of my life with unsettling frequency. Neither one of us knew exactly how to go about it, but we were both determined to try. I sensed that every aspect of our relationship—his genuine affection for me and his yearning for it to be returned, his stratospheric expectations for my academic achievement, his treatment of me as an intellectual equal even as he played the role of an old-fashioned father in matters relating to my behavior, my social life, and even my allowance—were going to be at the center of my life for the next few years. On his side, my father wanted desperately to make up for lost time in creating the emotional bond that should have been building gradually over the years.

  It didn't take me long to figure out that I had walked into an emotional minefield. Despite his brilliance and outward sociability, my father was both inept and insecure in handling the intimacies of marriage. I couldn't ignore the tensions in his relationship with Klari, tensions that leaped from every page of the letters he wrote almost daily, throughout their nearly twenty-year marriage, whenever they were apart.

  A painful theme ran through nearly all these letters, which I read only long after they were both dead: his despair over the fact that they seemed to quarrel whenever they were together, his assurances that he adored her, and his vacillation between self-defense and self-flagellation for whatever sin of commission or omission she had most recently taxed him with. In her eyes, it seemed, he could do nothing right. Yet he worked constantly to bolster her fragile ego: “You are nice and clever and intelligent, believe in yourself.” Beset by the chronic depression and profound insecurity that would haunt her for the rest of her life, she could not be reassured. Once I had intruded on this already fragile relationship, both Klari and I found ourselves competing for my father's attention not only with each other but with what remained throughout his
life his central preoccupation: the output of his brilliant mind.

  As the threat to American security shifted from the defeated Axis powers to the increasingly menacing Soviet Union, my father's focus shifted as well. As he described it to his friend and colleague, physicist Freeman Dyson, “I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.”1 He had first become seriously involved with computers when he was introduced to an early electronic version, the ENIAC, being built at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania under contract with the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

  The original goal was to use the machine for the incredibly complex calculations required to develop mathematical tables to guide the trajectories of guns and bombs, but it was eventually enlisted to study the feasibility of a variety of ideas generated at Los Alamos, including the development of an effective trigger for the hydrogen bomb. The ENIAC could perform in hours or days calculations that required hundreds or thousands of person-hours when performed by hand by the large group of women, actually called “calculators,” whom the army had recruited as civilian employees.

  The ENIAC was a huge advance, but it still couldn't keep up with the computational demands placed on it, primarily because it had to be physically rewired, a time-consuming process, every time a new problem came along. In a 1945 paper, a group led by my father proposed changes in the logical design of the computer's memory to turn it into an “electronic brain” that could store not only data but instructions (programs, later called software) to perform different kinds of logical functions. This design, known ever since as the “von Neumann architecture,” was used to retrofit the ENIAC into a primitive version of the modern stored-program computer. Computer-related conversations filled the adults' dinnertime conversations at home, and Klari even named her Irish setter puppy Inverse, after one of the computational problems that weighed on my father and some of his close colleagues.

  Now my father was determined to build a machine embodying the von Neumann architecture from scratch, and to do it on his own home ground, the Institute for Advanced Study. It was not an easy battle. Money had to be found, a team assembled, and above all, he had to overcome the determined opposition of his colleagues on the IAS's Mathematics Faculty. They regarded his dream as an engineering project, totally inappropriate in an institution devoted to abstract thought. And once he was able to get the project under way, the practical obstacles were formidable. The transistor that made miniaturization possible had not yet been invented, so the machine had to be constructed from bulky vacuum tubes. The result was that the completed computer, with only a millionth of the computing power of the flash drive we hang on our keychain, filled a brick building of its own. It overheated at the slightest provocation and quit functioning for a thousand different reasons—once because a mouse had gotten inside and chewed on some wires. My usually irrepressible father often came home for dinner tired and discouraged, but as determined as ever to see the project through.

  Although my father had hoped that his computer could be built in three years, it actually took six, from 1946 until 1952, before a celebratory cocktail party was in order. The party at our house had as its centerpiece an ice-carved model of the computer, which my father dubbed the MANIAC but later was given a less playful designation as the IAS machine. The vacuum tubes were represented by silver thumbtacks, which of course started falling out as the ice melted. Margaret Rabi and I kept busy for a while replacing the fallen tacks, but eventually entropy defeated us and the computer became a formless puddle.

  The fate of the celebratory ice carving was, in a way, emblematic of the fate of the IAS machine itself. Opposition on the part of much of the institute's faculty never really faded, and, once my father had gone to Washington in 1955 to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, some members of his team departed and the ones that remained were poorly treated. At his death, in 1957, the computer project was closed, and the institute's faculty passed a motion decreeing that henceforth no experimental science would be conducted there.

  The machine itself, superseded by newer and faster models with the same basic von Neumann architecture, was dismantled and the brick building in which it was housed became a storage unit for cleaning and maintenance materials. Today it is shared by a fitness facility and a preschool for the offspring of visiting members at the institute. Until recently, a segment of the machine, which had been donated to the Smithsonian, was on display in one of its buildings, the National Museum of American History. With the latest remodeling, that, too, has been consigned to attic storage. But its millions, nay billions, of progeny shape nearly every moment of our waking lives.

  My father had no inkling of the ways in which his invention would revolutionize our world. He expected that the whole world wouldn't need more than a few, perhaps a dozen, computers, since their purpose was cutting-edge research with huge computational requirements. His immediate goal was more accurate weather forecasting; he saw it as the first step toward control of the weather, which, he believed, would become a more effective weapon than bombs in future conflicts. But the notion that computers would sit on millions of desktops and in millions of pockets, would be used to transmit business documents, love letters, and pornography instantaneously across the miles, and would set adults to fulminating about the time their children waste on computer games—all this was beyond his wildest imagining, although the ubiquity of computer games might have appealed to the childlike, playful side of his nature.

  When he was at home, the main private time my father and I had together was in the morning, before his workday and my school day began. Klari generally slept late in her own bedroom; she was so grouchy in the morning that waking her up before I left for school was a task I dreaded. So I would fix breakfast for both of us, and we would talk as we ate. My father enjoyed teasing me, and he fell into the habit of calling it “a dying father's last request” when he asked me to fetch him the newspaper or toast him a second English muffin. When he really was dying, and the requests he made of me took on a new urgency, he never used this phrase, but the memory of its use in happier times sharpened my pain and, very possibly, his.

  It wasn't easy to penetrate the surface cheerfulness and bonhomie with which my father armed himself against the world, to reach the deeply cynical and pessimistic core of his being. Indeed, I was frequently confused when he shifted, without warning, from one of these personas to the other—one minute he would have me laughing at his latest outrageous pun and the next he would be telling me, quite seriously, why all-out atomic war was almost certainly unavoidable. But I enjoyed being talked to as an equal and cherished the glimpses he gave me into the complex, fascinating world in which he lived. I could not, and still cannot, begin to penetrate the realms of higher mathematics that occupied so much of his thoughts, and to which he made such major contributions. But I could follow and relish his humor-laced accounts of his dealings with a wide range of people and institutions, and his opinions on world affairs.

  Just in time for these breakfasts, my father would change from his striped pajamas into the three-piece banker's suit, complete with watch chain across the vest, that he habitually wore, no matter what the occasion. In all our years together, I never saw him wear anything else. There is even a famous photograph of him—first published in a Life magazine article just after his death—in a train of people descending the Grand Canyon on mules. Whereas everyone else is wearing blue jeans and sitting on a downward-facing mule, my father, dressed in his usual three-piece suit and necktie, is perched on a mule facing in the opposite direction.

  His mode of dress, however incongruous at times, suited him well and lent dignity to his rotund frame, which Klari described in her autobiography as “roly-poly…babyishly plump and round, like a child's drawing of the man in the moon.”2 Sometimes, at a particularly lively party, he would top the outfit with some sort of funny hat. Especially memora
ble was the half pineapple, immortalized in a photograph, that sat comically atop his round face and balding curly head.

  That picture reflects yet another aspect of my father's complex personality: his love of children's toys. Three of his particular favorites sat on his desk, and he often studied them intensely for long periods of time. These were a bird perched upright on a metal stand that would lean over to drink from a water glass and then right itself on a precise schedule; a handblown glass tube filled with soap bubbles; and a wooden disc with everyday objects (a heart and a four-leaf clover, for example) painted on its face and a metal pointer that, when spun, would land on one or another of them.

  When I asked him why he found these toys so fascinating, he explained that each embodied some principle of mathematics or physics. Watching the changing pattern of the soap bubbles after he shook the glass tube, he contemplated the effect of surface tension in making them obey the law of entropy; noting where the pointer on the wooden disc landed on spin after spin stimulated his ideas about the laws of probability. Had LEGOs been available at the time, he might have built a model of his computer from them.