Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  In the South Pacific, the “Navy’s War” was running into trouble: the intense Japanese resistance to the taking of Saipan on July 6, 1944, signaled a change of strategy on Japan’s part: there would be no fall-back-and-regroup strategy as the Allied forces moved from island to island in the South Pacific. They were now intent on making the home islands too expensive for the Allies to consider taking them—buying time to rebuild.

  In the United States, the parties’ nominating conventions came around in the summer of 1944, and Franklin Roosevelt was renominated for an unprecedented fourth term. Roosevelt’s fragile health was no secret in the high levels of the Democratic National Committee; Roosevelt would probably not live to see the end of his fourth term. The short list for the “replacement” President, who would be running as Vice President, had several candidates, but Roosevelt went outside the list and browbeat Harry Truman into accepting the nomination. Truman was considered a lightweight by the party regulars, though Roosevelt knew he was a very loyal New Dealer.

  Somehow Heinlein had never connected with Truman in Kansas City politics (though they were at some of the same functions at the same time when Heinlein was a boy), but he looked up the Senator’s record and was generally pleased.11 Despite coming to Congress as the “Senator from Pendergast,” he had done solid work investigating corruption in war industries; he had made speeches trying to alert people to the genocide of the Jews going on in Germany. And he had personal qualities Heinlein liked—particularly his personal loyalty: He had stood by Tom Pendergast during his tax evasion scandal and imprisonment in 1939, not ducking out on the public association: “As for his K.C. origin, I, too, got my start in the Pendergast machine; it didn’t ruin me, I don’t think it has ruined Truman.”12

  But the vice presidency would probably saddle Truman with the problem of the peace—an unsolvable morass, if Woodrow Wilson’s experience meant anything. Looking to the long term, he suggested to John Arwine in April 1944 that the party might be better off to “trap pass” the Republicans and throw the 1944 election:

  Then we’ll be the critics and they will be the ones who have got to satisfy the public … If they have the responsibility they may find themselves forced to indulge in a little constructive statesmanship, because we will be sitting on the sidelines, jumping up and down and screaming our heads off about the sell out. I really suspect that the results might be better than those which would result from a vengeful Senate working over Roosevelt’s efforts.13

  This was a kind of long-range strategic thinking on Heinlein’s part that was much too far outside the automatic grab-it-and-keep-it party mentality. When he later suggested the idea to Susie Clifton, to be passed on to Helen Gahagan Douglas,14 Mrs. Douglas praised the idea as “objective, far-sighted, and sensitive to public thinking”15—but not within “the art of the possible.”

  In August, Heinlein was transferred from the Naval Aircraft Factory Engineering Division to the NAES Materials Laboratory, Plastics & Adhesives section, to work on the mechanical problems of Plexiglas aircraft canopies. He might (there are no records on the point) have instituted this lateral transfer himself, to break a political impasse where he was. He had incurred the wrath of a superior because he refused direct orders to hide from the Navy the falsification of test results from the Naval Air Materials Center (under pressure to get war matériel into the field)—facts embarrassing to the head of the AML. “He considered me a disloyal sonuvabitch and never forgave me for … such narrow loyalty-of-organization was a prime reason why NAMC was so scandalously inefficient in helping to win the war.”16

  Other departments, and even other facilities, wanted his services: John Campbell was maneuvering to get him assigned to the National Defense Research Committee’s new technologies section in New York, where Campbell was working on a hush-hush project set up by the University of California and occupying an entire floor of the Empire State Building.17

  There had been a request for him to switch over to technical writing for electronics, for which he wrote a carefully noncommittal letter saying that he was ready to go where assigned but that he thought he could best serve his country where he was, concluding, “I have no special training, other than the usual Naval Academy engineering courses, for the work I am now doing, but I have spent fifteen months learning its details.” The head of NAES would not release him.18

  By the time BuShips [Bureau of Ships] got around to requesting my services from BuAero [Bureau of Aeronautics] I was doing urgent engineering work which would have suffered if I had left and which appeared to be a good deal more important than the work BuShips had for me.19

  Heinlein was—finally—able to derive satisfaction from his job:

  This dear old place is just as offensive as ever but I find it a little more bearable because I am now so busy and have the warm and comforting feeling that my work is effective in the combat areas within a very few weeks after I finish it.20

  The lateral transfer into the Materials Section at NAES appears to have been a “book” transfer that did not affect Heinlein’s actual day-to-day working arrangements. He stayed second in charge of the section, Henry Sang his immediate superior.

  Sang was single, and there are subtle indications, in a casual comment made by another close friend, that Leslyn might have been interested in him.21 Robert and Leslyn’s marriage commitment was still strong, but Leslyn, too, was free to pursue her own sexual liaisons.22 Robert was still hors de combat, living too quietly to get himself into many interesting situations.

  The Heinleins’ open marriage was a direct reflection of their liberal political philosophy, an extreme liberalism of a type that nevertheless cannot be exactly characterized as “left wing”—and that cannot so much be called a “political” philosophy as a philosophy of life, extending to all aspects of their life. Most of their friends and acquaintances saw them as “ultra-liberal,”23 without, apparently, having any exact or nuanced comprehension of their liberalism. In their days of political activism, they had learned to avoid engendering or participating in controversies by getting the other person to talk about himself, finding areas of agreement or commonality, nodding and appearing to agree with whatever was said (within reason). They learned to speak the proper shibboleths, and work out their opinions and strategies only when talking with people they could trust to understand the nuances of their social evaluations. Outsiders saw them only as “like me, one of us”—or “not one of us.”

  In Heinlein’s case, it is possible to see that he did fit into a “labeled” political philosophy. His lifelong preoccupations with marriage reform, combined with sound-money matters, mark him as a Freethinker, the radical wing of the Democratic Party at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1940 this political platform had all but disappeared from American political life, and Freethinkers wound up going into either Republican or Democratic parties, depending on how they felt about what was to become conventional left-wing liberalism.

  But in 1944 and 1945, it was possible to remain a Freethinker and regard the left-wing tolerance of totalitarians—particularly the United States’ Soviet ally—as an aberration, to be corrected after the war, after the more immediate problems were resolved.

  On the whole, Heinlein considered himself a very lucky man to have found Leslyn, and his sense of personal loyalty to her was very strong, coloring even the way he looked at her.

  She is a damn smart looking wench when she gets her war paint on and her Sunday clothes. But I also see her in dungarees, after a night sleepless, heading for the factory, maybe no make up yet. She still looks good then, because it’s not her clothes or her makeup I am looking at.24

  The occasional bouts of instability, which had been growing more frequent, were simply something to be coped with for the duration—an aberration.

  When the Paris uprising started on August 22, 1944, the war in Europe could clearly be seen to be winding down. Leslyn received another promotion—which meant more responsibility—and began managing a number of
shops instead of just the one. Her hands-on work with personnel was being noticed.

  In September, they got a new chemist for the Adhesives projects, fresh out of BuAer in D.C.—Lieutenant Virginia Gerstenfeld. On her first day, she was taken to her new billet in the Plastics & Adhesive section during a general staff meeting. Only Heinlein was on the floor. When her supervisor left,

  he looked me up and down and said “Lieutenant, your slip is showing.” That was my introduction to Robert. He had a laugh in his voice as he said that. I ducked into a ladies’ room and pinned up the offending strap which had broken .25

  She had the desk just behind his. Heinlein showed her around the laboratories and took her down to the coffee mess in the Adhesives lab, then over to Ulcer Gulch for lunch and introduced her around the section. That evening, he and Leslyn took her to dinner, and afterward he walked her over to the YWCA, where she was staying, a few blocks from the Heinleins’ apartment. The Y was in a bad district. Heinlein offered to find her a place downtown—a minor miracle, considering the housing shortage (the Navy couldn’t even provide housing for its staff), but a routine act (for him, she found) of helpfulness. 26

  Lieutenant Gerstenfeld was somewhat distracted at the time: she had put in for transfer to San Francisco to be able to see her fiancé, George,27 when he periodically rotated stateside from the South Pacific. But the Navy’s “Practical Joke” department was handling her career,28 and she had wound up in Philadelphia by mischance.29 She threw herself into the job, learning the plastics and adhesives field. “The Navy has its own way of doing things,” Lieutenant Gerstenfeld later remarked:

  They put you into a job, and it is either sink or swim—you do it, or you are moved elsewhere. So I learned something about plastics (I already knew a bit about them) and adhesives. But now and then I would need some help with something, and Robert was always handy—and helpful.30

  Lieutenant Gerstenfeld—“Ginny,” as she preferred to be called, having been put off her given names, Virginia and Doris, by her mother31—was thrown together with Heinlein as they worked on the Plexiglas canopies for the B-29 bomber, trying to find a way to prevent them from spontaneously exploding outward.

  It rapidly became evident that Ginny Gerstenfeld was something unusual as government engineers went: she was not “going through the motions” on the civil service plan; she was actually paying attention to her work. She found an anomaly in the standard “drop test” used to measure the tensile strength of the batches of Plexiglas—dropping a ball bearing of known weight from a known height onto the plastic to see whether it would shatter. They had been using incorrect measurements: every tensile strength test the laboratory had done for the last two years was off and needed to be done over.

  Heinlein was almost—but not quite—inured to that kind of thing by now: that was why NAES was “Snafu Manor.” There had been hundreds of engineers working with those tests: only Gerstenfeld had caught the discrepancy.

  Always on the lookout for competent help, Heinlein had his eye on her thereafter, and turned to her when he needed something done right. He was also approvingly impressed that she paid no attention to the Navy officer’s ethos. Navy officers did not get their hands dirty, but Lieutenant Gerstenfeld would routinely change into dungarees and perform whatever tests she could do herself, on “C” and “D” priority work—things that would never get done at all if she didn’t do them.

  That was also the start of what came to be a close friendship between the two of them. Heinlein found her “gung-ho but non-reg”32—independent in a way that was highly entertaining, even (or perhaps especially) when it involved differences of opinion he could not quite go along with. She wore a navy blue ribbon in her hair one day, because there was nothing in the regulations that forbade it, and she stuck to her guns, even though it scandalized Heinlein and the regular Navy types.33

  Gerstenfeld had lost her brother in submarine warfare the year before, and for a very long time Heinlein thought she had joined up to “replace him,”34 though she straightened him out one day: she had simply joined up the first moment the Navy would take her after the enabling act set up WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in 1943. She was disappointed that the statute specifically forbade women in combat and restricted them to shore duty, but if that was what she could do for the war effort, that was what she would do.35

  She was also a thoroughgoing Republican—an example of liberal freethought attitudes that took the less customary route into the Republican Party. She agreed with him—and H. G. Wells—for example, that a world sovereignty with its own international police force was a necessary part of postwar peacekeeping.

  Hang it all, why don’t the powers that be realize that the only way we’ll attain a lasting peace is to have every nation give up some of its sovereign power and have a world federation of countries with an international police force to back it up? Not another League … 36

  Heinlein had recently learned to live with a close friend who was a Republican (though he was somewhat jaundiced about Campbell’s “slightly open-mouthed adoration for ‘big businessmen’”).37 But the bottom line was, Campbell was there when it counted, and so was Gerstenfeld. She was a more liberal conservative than Campbell.

  Heinlein really began paying attention to her as a person, she later said, when she mentioned she had walked the precincts in New York.38 Anyone who had his—or her—hands on the levers of democracy was a comrade, so far as he was concerned, and that by itself made Ginny Gerstenfeld an order of magnitude more important, in the greater scheme of things, than John Campbell.39

  Heinlein always sought out and valued acquaintances who had their own minds, who were their own persons. Ginny Gerstenfeld was not an ordinary or conventional person. She was both intelligent and also stimulatingly different. They were very compatible, Heinlein found, but she was an “exception that proves the rule,” since she didn’t much care for General Semantics or James Branch Cabell—or one of his important touchstones, Caleb Catlum’s America—but did love Kipling. She was a law unto herself—an individual.

  Most important, she was capable of surprising him with a refreshingly direct and sensible approach to obstacles she encountered. That made her an exceptionally valuable coworker and friend.

  Gerstenfeld was interested when Heinlein told her about his own political background, and the writing, even though she had never been particularly interested in science fiction. She asked to read something he had written, and he gave her what he had on hand—which was fortuitously the issues of Astounding in which his “Beyond This Horizon” serial appeared since he had been in Philadelphia. She found it thought-provoking, though she didn’t warm to the Social Credit ideas in the book (Heinlein himself had begun to drift from the strict SoCred line by that time).40 Most important: it didn’t convert her into a fan—and particularly not a fan of his writing.41 That made her even more valuable as a friend, since he could get from her what every writer needs and few can get, honest criticism. 42

  Gerstenfeld’s living arrangements precluded much socializing after work: she moved out of the downtown apartment Heinlein had found her—she couldn’t keep her uniform clean because of the soot and cinders from the nearby 30th Street Railyard—and found a place in the Main Line suburb of Merion. She commuted to the Navy Yard by carpool, which took her out of the Heinleins’ NAES social circle, except for lunches in Ulcer Gulch. As winter came on, her own social circle revolved around the local skating club. She had been a fanatic ice-skater and ice-dancer since she saw Sonja Henie’s review in 1938. Her fiancé, George Harris, was her dancing partner. She was invited to join the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society (so called because the members carried rescue equipment for people in danger on the iced-up Schuylkill River).

  When President Roosevelt visited the Philadelphia Navy Yard just before the elections—one of the few appearances Roosevelt made during that campaign—NAES emptied out, except for Gerstenfeld, who did not think much of his dome
stic policies or the New Deal. “But he’s your commander-in-chief,” Heinlein admonished her. She continued stubborn and refused to go.43 Heinlein did go.

  He had last seen Roosevelt in 1940, at the third-term nominating convention. Heinlein was aware of Roosevelt’s faults as a politician and as a man; even John Campbell’s complaint that he chose people badly had some merit. But Heinlein thought if anyone else had taken the presidency in 1933, there might have been a bloody revolution in this country.44 Roosevelt’s willingness to experiment socially and economically had let some of the head of steam out of the boiler that was America in the Depression years, and so he was owed a debt of gratitude by all patriots.45 Heinlein was shocked, therefore, by the President’s appearance and came back to NAES pale and worried: President Roosevelt looked sick—dying, in fact.46

  The war was again brought home to him personally when Cal Laning was involved in the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea (also called the Battle for Leyte Gulf) on October 23–26, 1944. This, the largest naval battle in history, was the Navy’s part in General MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. Laning was then commanding the destroyer USS Hutchins in Surigao Strait, between the islands of Mindinao and Leyte, and ordered his ship in closer, attacking a force of enemy battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, inflicting on them numerous torpedo and gunfire hits. These hits damaged the enemy to such extent that his eventual destruction followed. Commander Laning’s gallant fortitude and conscientious devotion to duty contributed materially to the victorious outcome of the engagement and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Navy of the United States. Hutchins’ courageous behavior on this occasion earned Laning a Navy Cross and Legion of Merit citation—and the nickname “Killer Laning” in press photos.