The Last Man Who Knew Everything

by David N. Schwartz

To Hitler’s increasing annoyance, Mussolini had done nothing of the sort. Though he remained a virulent and violent Italian nationalist, his views on the Jewish population in Italy were complex and not entirely negative. The beautiful Margherita Sarfatti, one of the ideological drivers of Italian fascism, was Jewish. She served as Mussolini’s confidante, biographer, muse, and mistress for well over a decade. Jewish families were considered in every sense Italian, as well they might have been, given that their presence in Rome predated the unification of the country by some two thousand years. Ironically, many Jews wholeheartedly supported the fascist regime. Many, like Laura Fermi’s family, hardly viewed themselves as Jewish in any but a remote ethnic sense of the term. They were Italians first and foremost. Laura had readily acceded to Enrico’s request to raise the children as Catholics.

  While he was the senior partner in the relationship, Mussolini was easily able to fend off Hitler’s demands for him to crack down on Italy’s Jews, but by 1938 il Duce realized this was no longer possible, or at least no longer worth the trouble. In July, the regime issued new racial policies, followed in September by promulgation of laws that began to restrict Jewish access to jobs and positions, to places at universities, and to the financial and real estate markets. The news came as a shock to the Fermi family, who followed these events by radio in the quiet of the Tuscan countryside. It was during discussions over the balance of this anxious summer that Laura finally gave way to Enrico’s persistent requests and agreed to move to the United States.

  They assumed, correctly as it turned out, that they were under surveillance by the fascist secret police. Fermi was one of the very few figures of international prominence in fascist Italy, and Mussolini would, Fermi knew, take extraordinary measures to keep him in Rome. Indeed, every time Fermi went abroad he had to apply for permission to do so, under the watchful eye of Mussolini’s domestic and foreign spies, and clearly his wife’s unwillingness to travel with him to the United States ensured his ultimate return to Rome. Fermi’s file with the fascist political police, though not very large, indicates that he had been under surveillance for some time, at least since 1932. Now Laura and the children were going to come with him. He would need to be discreet.

  Fermi drafted letters to several American universities, explaining that the circumstances that had held him in Italy no longer applied and inquiring whether a position might be available. Together, Laura and Enrico drove north from Tuscany into the Alps and dropped each letter in a different rural post box. They hoped that they would evade detection by the regime, and they were right. We do not know the names of all the universities queried, but we do know that George Pegram at Columbia, who had offered him a faculty position two years before, replied quickly and unreservedly. Given Fermi’s prior travels in the States, we might surmise that the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Berkeley were among the others. By this time, his good friend Hans Bethe had been at Cornell for three years, and it is certainly possible he also sent a letter there. In any event, Fermi decided to accept the offer from Columbia and began to plan for departure in the first quarter of 1939. This gave Fermi some time to quietly sort out his affairs at home and leave his research program in safe hands. The cover story would be that he was taking a six-month sabbatical. He hoped that the Italian authorities would believe him.

  It remains an open question as to whether the racial laws promulgated beginning in September 1938 would have affected Laura. In deference perhaps to his own ambivalence, Mussolini incorporated an opt-out provision in the racial laws. One could apply to the regime for exemption from the laws, a provision designed for Jewish families who had proven useful to the regime and upon whom the regime relied for prestige and legitimacy. Laura’s father, Admiral Capon, applied on behalf of his whole family and his application was accepted in early 1939, meaning that Laura could have returned to Italy at any time during the Mussolini years without endangering herself or her family. Things changed, however, when Mussolini fell in 1943 and the Germans effectively took direct control over much of Italy. Jews, including Laura’s father, were rounded up systematically and sent off to concentration camps, where many, including Admiral Capon, perished.

  Certainly, Italy’s increasing isolation and closer alignment with Germany troubled Fermi and constrained his work. Fermi was a vital part of an international community, but that community was vital for him as well, and he knew that isolation from this community would inevitably damage his ability to stay at the cutting edge of the field. He also was never able to obtain the funding he felt he needed and deserved for the experimental research program he envisioned in Rome. After Corbino’s sudden death, that funding became ever more problematic. These factors, as much as the racial laws, would have weighed on him. In short, there were, by mid-1938, many reasons for Fermi to leave Italy.

  In mid-October 1938, however, a conversation in Copenhagen changed his carefully laid plans.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE NOBEL PRIZE

  IN OCTOBER 1938, FERMI WAS IN COPENHAGEN FOR A CONFERENCE hosted by Niels Bohr. At one point during the conference, Bohr asked Fermi whether they might have a private word. Pulling him aside, Bohr asked Fermi an astonishing question: If Fermi were to be awarded a Nobel Prize, would he be in a position to accept?

  THE STORY OF FERMI’S NOBEL PRIZE IS ONE OF THE MORE FASCINATING tales of intrigue surrounding the world’s most prestigious scientific award. It begins, however, not in October 1938 but in 1936 and involves not the physics prize but the more controversial peace prize.

  In 1936, the peace prize was awarded retroactively to a German peace activist named Carl von Ossietzky, who in 1935 revealed the secret of German rearmament to a stunned world. For this act the Nazi government charged him with high treason and sent him to a concentration camp, where he ultimately died. In the meantime, to garner support for his release, the Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded him the 1936 prize. Predictably, Hitler flew into a rage and decreed that no German national would ever again be allowed to receive the Nobel Prize in any field. The whole episode was a public relations catastrophe, one the Nobel Foundation determined not to repeat.

  The Nobel Foundation delegates the task of naming the winners in physics and chemistry to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a small committee that decides in strict secrecy on the basis of recommendations from a select group who are canvassed confidentially for their views. Only recently have files been opened to scholars interested in the nomination process and even then only in instances when the winners have passed away. Anyone can submit a Nobel Prize nomination—nominators need not have won to be invited to submit nominations. For example, Fermi nominated Heisenberg several times before Heisenberg won the prize in 1932, prior to Fermi’s award. Dirac and Schrödinger shared the prize the following year. Records show the surprising fact that Dirac had received only three nominations prior to the award, whereas Schrödinger had received forty-one, including two from Einstein and three from Bohr. The award is not, and never has been, simply a popularity contest. The great German theoretician Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated over eighty times but never won.

  None of this, of course, would have been known to Fermi at the time. He is the first and, as far as records go, only person to have been approached beforehand to see whether he would be able to accept the award.

  The concern of the Swedish Academy was that, with Italy growing ever closer to Germany, Mussolini might feel compelled to follow Hitler’s lead and prevent Fermi from attending the ceremony and accepting the prize. However, they need not have worried. Fermi may not have known Mussolini well at all—he met him once and, like many Italians, he came away more impressed than he had anticipated—but he knew enough about the fascist regime’s need for international acceptance that he could say with confidence that it would not be a problem. Bohr dutifully reported back to the academy.

  Fermi received thirty-six nominations over the course of his career, of which three were in chemistry and the rest in physics. Heisenberg
nominated Fermi in 1936 and 1937. The de Broglie brothers, Louis and Maurice, nominated Fermi repeatedly. His old friend Persico, though never a laureate himself, was actually the first to nominate him. James Franck from Germany and Arthur Compton from the University of Chicago also nominated him. Max Planck was another supporter. Absent from the list, ironically, given the sequence of events, was Bohr himself. In 1938, Bohr nominated no one. In previous years, he nominated Schrödinger and Heisenberg as well as Franck and Otto Stern. Bohr had enormous respect for Fermi, but perhaps he limited his nominations to those with whom he had worked directly. For all their interactions at conferences and meetings and the visits Fermi made to Copenhagen, the two never actually worked together. In addition, they had very different approaches to physics: Fermi utterly disinterested in anything other than physics itself; Bohr almost mystically fascinated by what physics revealed about the nature of underlying reality.

  In any case, Bohr’s question posed a dilemma for Fermi. The prize came with a twenty-three-karat gold medal weighing a bit more than six ounces and a significant cash award, some 155,000 Swedish kroner in 1938, worth more than $500,000 in today’s money. Italy had imposed currency restrictions that would prevent Fermi from taking the money with him if he brought it back to Rome and then left when he had originally planned, in the first quarter of 1939. Upon his return to Rome from Copenhagen, he discussed this with Laura and they quickly changed their plans. They would take with them to Stockholm as many of their belongings as they could discreetly manage, receive the prize, and go directly to their new home in New York, bringing the medal and prize money with them.

  So, when the call came from Sweden to the Fermi household, on November 10, 1938, it was not entirely a surprise. As Laura describes the events of the day, an initial call came through from an international operator early that morning before Enrico left for work informing them that they would be receiving a call from Stockholm at six o’clock that evening. Laura took the call, woke Enrico, and they realized immediately what the afternoon call would be about. When Laura proposed that Enrico should skip work and spend the day with her to celebrate, he demurred. He understood that it was quite likely that the call would deliver the news he had anticipated after his conversation with Bohr in Copenhagen, but as someone who always calculated the odds, he also understood that he might be sharing the prize with another scientist. Dirac shared it with Schrödinger in 1933 and the prize was split again in 1936 and 1937. Fermi was not willing to go on a spending spree to celebrate without further information, and he also worried that buying too many transportable objects of value might give away their plans to leave permanently. In the end, Laura persuaded him to join her on a shopping trip, but he limited himself to purchasing a watch—“inconspicuous and useful” as he described it.

  Laura spent the day with her husband, absorbing the sights and sounds of the Rome she loved, the Rome that had been her home since birth. As she later described:

  I was determined to be of good cheer and to chase away the nostalgia that came over me at the familiar sight of the Roman streets; of the old, faded buildings that had preserved their full charm; of the clumps of ancients trees that everywhere disrupted the monotony of the streets, rising above a discolored wall or behind an iron fence, silent and monumental witnesses to human restlessness; of the numberless fountains of Rome, which indulged the opulence of water, shot it toward the sky, and let it come back in cascades of diamond-like droplets, in rainbow patterns. I was going to enjoy these sights and give thanks to God for thirty years of life in Rome.

  It would be hard to find a more wistful, elegiac tribute to Rome, what it meant to her, what she would lose by leaving it behind.

  Later that afternoon, they sat by the phone anxiously awaiting the call. Several times an impatient Ginestra Amaldi phoned to see whether they had heard from Stockholm yet, but six o’clock came and went without the call they were expecting. Enrico turned on the radio to provide a distraction, only to find the airwaves filled with news of yet another wave of anti-Semitic laws promulgated by the increasingly desperate regime, laws with real bite: prohibiting Jews from attending public schools, firing Jewish teachers, restricting the practices of Jewish professionals to Jewish clients only, withdrawing passports, and even dissolving firms and commercial enterprises owned by Jews. By the time the call came, the Fermis were in need of some good news. They got it.

  Fermi had been awarded the Nobel Prize on his own. He would share the prize money with no one. The award would cite Fermi “for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.” Within the Fermi circle of friends, the good news traveled fast, and soon a crowd descended on the apartment at Via Magalotti, Ginestra leading the way, organizing an impromptu celebratory dinner. For the time being at least, Fermi set aside his reservations about the discovery of transuranic elements and joined in the festivities. Even little Giulio and Nella participated, two-year-old Giulio climbing impishly on the legs of the men who towered over him and seven-year-old Nella trying with little success to keep him in line.

  THE ORIGINAL PLAN DID NOT INCLUDE A STOPOVER IN STOCKHOLM. The new plan did, and unfortunately that meant traveling by train through Germany. Although there was no other sensible way to get to Stockholm, a trip through Germany posed a problem. Enrico and the children would carry passports that indicated they were Roman Catholic, but Laura’s would identify her as a Jew—that is, if Italian authorities decided not to revoke her passport as part of the new racial laws. A passport with a stamp indicating Laura was a Jew could cause serious problems at the German border. As a practical step, the solution was clear. Laura had to convert. In the modest San Roberto Bellarmino church on Via dei Parioli, the Monsignor Ernesto Ruffini, who was later elevated to cardinal and who became an ardent opponent of church reform in the early 1960s, baptized Laura into the Catholic faith and conducted a quiet religious marriage between Laura and Enrico to seal the deal. Only the Amaldis were in attendance. Laura never mentioned her baptism or second marriage ceremony in her memoir, suggesting a certain discomfort with this aspect of their departure. Yet one can understand her actions, even though, like her husband, religion played no part in her life. This act of apparent hypocrisy enabled her passport to read the same as her husband’s and her children’s. There would, presumably, be no problems at the border with Germany.

  The final preparations were fraught. How much to bring with them was an issue—they told Italian officials that they were taking a six-month sabbatical, so bringing the entire contents of the apartment at Via Magalotti was out of the question. In fact, bringing any furnishings at all would have tipped off the government to their real plans. In the end they decided to bring a minimum of clothing and only one of their household help. Laura would shoulder most of the burden of child care herself, at least until they had settled sufficiently and could make new arrangements in New York. The situation was especially tense for the small group of intimates who knew the full plan; for obvious reasons they could say nothing to anyone else. Of all their close friends, it was Ginestra who was most critical of their decision to leave. She believed Fermi was abandoning students and colleagues who had no choice but to stay and cope with increasingly difficult circumstances. On the platform at Rome’s Termini station, where they gathered to say goodbye on December 6, 1938, Ginestra gave voice to bitterness and resentment. Laura recalled the moment vividly some fifteen years later. “Enrico’s departure,” Ginestra said, “is a betrayal of the young people who have come to study with him and who have trusted him for guidance and help.” Ginestra’s husband was quick to defend his mentor and friend: “Fascism is to be blamed, not Fermi.” Laura, for her part, was stung by Ginestra’s words, even as she tried to find some enthusiasm for the onward journey. She felt a host of moral contradictions, reflecting her closest friend’s rebuke. Her particular concern was what she perceived to be her responsibil
ity as a daughter: “And, perhaps the most perturbing of all moral contradictions, should a woman forget her responsibilities as a daughter to follow the call of those as wife and mother?… questions that have not found an answer over the centuries cannot be settled in the few minutes before a train departs.” She was thinking of her sisters and most especially her father, who remained convinced that the regime would not target him. She was not so sure, perhaps because the option to opt out of the racial laws had not yet been formulated. In the end, however, there was no question what Laura would do.

  Even the normally talkative Rasetti seemed downcast. “I hope I’ll see you soon” was all he could muster.

  The train departed. The greatest Italian scientist since Galileo was on his way into self-imposed exile. He would return only twice after the war, never for more than a few weeks.

  THE TRAIN RIDE WAS STRESSFUL, PARTICULARLY WHEN A GERMAN border official had trouble finding the transit visas that Enrico had obtained for the whole family, but the confusion was settled quickly and the family passed through Germany without any further problems. In Stockholm they were put up at the Grand Hotel, which richly merits its name, and were received by the Italian ambassador, a sophisticated man from an aristocratic family. Laura liked him.

  The ceremony, on Saturday, December 10, 1938, followed roughly the same format as all Nobel ceremonies before or since. It started at the Royal Opera House, where Enrico Fermi and Pearl S. Buck, the American author and only other recipient that year, sat on stage waiting to be introduced to the king. We don’t know what Buck was thinking. Perhaps, as Laura Fermi suggests, she was still wondering why she had been selected for this honor. We know from Laura that Enrico was obsessing about his evening wear. He may have been familiar with the elaborately ridiculous uniform of the Reale Accademia, but he was not used to wearing white tie and tails. The vest of the outfit was, as is traditional, highly starched and prone to popping up into the face of the person wearing it. He was also a bit worried about standing up to receive the award itself. As newsreels show, recipients in those days were required to approach the king and return to their seat facing the king at all times. Turning one’s back on the Swedish sovereign was simply not done. In any case, in later years Fermi would proudly boast about how he counted out the steps carefully as he approached the king, who shook hands with him and handed him the medal and the diploma that accompanies it, following which Fermi executed a backward return to his seat without a hitch.