Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  Flexner went on to ask Elsa to dissuade her husband from being featured at a scheduled musical recital in Manhattan, which he had already accepted, that was to raise money for Jewish refugees. But like her husband, Elsa was not totally averse to publicity, nor to helping Jewish causes, and she resented Flexner’s attempts at control. So she replied with a very frank refusal.

  That provoked Flexner to send an astonishingly blunt letter the next day, which he noted he had discussed with the president of Princeton University. Echoing the sentiments of some of Einstein’s European friends, including the Borns, Flexner warned Elsa that if Jews got too much publicity it would stoke anti-Semitism:

  It is perfectly possible to create anti-Semitic feeling in the United States. There is no danger that any such feeling would be created except by the Jews themselves. There are already signs which are unmistakable that anti-Semitism has increased in America. It is because I am myself a Jew and because I wish to help oppressed Jews in Germany that my efforts, though continuous and in a measure successful, are absolutely quiet and anonymous . . . The questions involved are the dignity of your husband and the Institute according to the highest American standards and the most effective way of helping the Jewish race in America and in Europe.15

  That same day, Flexner wrote Einstein directly to make the case that Jews like themselves should keep a low profile because a penchant for publicity could arouse anti-Semitism. “I have felt this from the moment that Hitler began his anti-Jewish policy, and I have acted accordingly,” he wrote.“There have been indications in American universities that Jewish students and Jewish professors will suffer unless the utmost caution is used.”16

  Not surprisingly, Einstein went ahead with his planned benefit recital in Manhattan, for which 264 guests paid $25 apiece to attend. It featured Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D-minor and Mozart’s G Major Quartet. It was even opened to the press. “He became so absorbed in the music,”Time magazine reported, “that with a far-away look he was still plucking at the strings when the performance was all over.”17

  In his attempt to prevent such events, Flexner had begun intercepting Einstein’s mail and declining invitations on his behalf. The stage was thus set for a showdown when Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York decided it would be a good idea to get Einstein invited to visit President Franklin Roosevelt, which Wise hoped would focus attention on Germany’s treatment of Jews. “F.D.R. has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany, and this would be little enough,” Wise wrote a friend.18

  The result was a telephone call from Roosevelt’s social secretary, Colonel Marvin MacIntyre, inviting Einstein to the White House. When Flexner found out, he was furious. He called the White House and gave a stern lecture to the somewhat surprised Colonel MacIntyre. All invitations must go through him, Flexner said, and on Einstein’s behalf he declined.

  For good measure, Flexner proceeded to write an official letter to the president. “I felt myself compelled this afternoon to explain to your secretary,” Flexner said, “that Professor Einstein had come to Princeton for the purpose of carrying out his scientific work in seclusion and that it was absolutely impossible to make any exception which would inevitably bring him into public notice.”

  Einstein knew none of this until Henry Morgenthau, a prominent Jewish leader who was about to become treasury secretary, inquired about the apparent snub. Dismayed to discover Flexner’s presumption, Einstein wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, his political soul mate. “You can hardly imagine of what great interest it would have been for me to meet the man who is tackling with gigantic energy the greatest and most difficult problem of our time,” he wrote. “However, as a matter of fact, no invitation whatever has reached me.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt answered personally and politely. The confusion came, she explained, because Flexner had been so adamant in his phone call to the White House. “I hope you and Mrs. Einstein will come sometime soon,” she added. Elsa responded graciously. “First excuse my poor English please,” she wrote. “Dr. Einstein and myself accept with feelings of gratitude your very kind invitation.”

  He and Elsa arrived at the White House on January 24, 1934, had dinner, and spent the night. The president was able to converse with them in passable German. Among other things, they discussed Roosevelt’s marine prints and Einstein’s love for sailing. The next morning, Einstein wrote an eight-line piece of doggerel on a White House note card to Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians marking his visit, but he made no public statements.19

  Flexner’s interference infuriated Einstein. He complained about it in a letter to Rabbi Wise—on which he put as his return address “Concentration Camp, Princeton”—and he sent a five-page litany of Flexner’s meddling to the Institute’s trustees. Either they must assure him that there would be no more “constant interference of the type that no self-respecting person would tolerate,” Einstein threatened, or “I would propose that I discuss with you severing my relationship with your institute in a dignified manner.”20

  Einstein prevailed, and Flexner backed off. But as a result, he lost his influence with Flexner, whom he would later refer to as one of his “few enemies” in Princeton.21 When Erwin Schrödinger, Einstein’s fellow traveler in the minefields of quantum mechanics, arrived as a refugee in Princeton that March, he was offered a job at the university. But he wanted instead to be tapped for the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein lobbied Flexner on his behalf, but to no avail. Flexner was doing him no more favors, even if it meant depriving the Institute of Schrödinger.

  During his short stay in Princeton, Schrödinger asked Einstein if he was indeed going to come back to Oxford later that spring, as scheduled. He had called himself a “bird of passage” when heading off to Caltech in 1931, and it was unclear, perhaps even in his own mind, whether he saw this as a liberation or a lament. But now he found himself comfortable in Princeton, with no desire to take wing again.

  “Why should an old fellow like me not enjoy peace and quiet for once?” he asked his friend Max Born. So he told Schrödinger to pass along his sincere regrets. “I am sorry to say that he asked me to write you a definite no,” Schrödinger informed Lindemann. “The reason for his decision is really that he is frightened of all the ado and the fuss that would be laid upon him if he came to Europe.” Einstein also worried that he would be expected to go to Paris and Madrid if he went to Oxford, “and I lack the courage to undertake all this.”22

  The stars had aligned to create for Einstein a sense of inertia, or at least a weariness of further wandering. In addition, Princeton, which he called a “pipe as yet unsmoked” on his first visit in 1921, captured him with its leafy charm and its neo-Gothic echoes of a European university town. “A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods strutting on stiff legs,” he called it in a letter to Elisabeth, the queen mother of Belgium since the death of the king.“By ignoring certain social conventions, I have been able to create for myself an atmosphere conducive to study and free from distraction.”23

  Einstein particularly liked the fact that America, despite its inequalities of wealth and racial injustices, was more of a meritocracy than Europe. “What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people,” he marveled.“No one humbles himself before another person or class.”24

  This was a function of the right of individuals to say and think what they pleased, a trait that had always been important to Einstein. In addition, the lack of stifling traditions encouraged more creativity of the sort he had relished as a student. “American youth has the good fortune not to have its outlook troubled by outworn traditions,” he noted.25

  Elsa likewise loved Princeton, which was important to Einstein. She had taken such good care of him for so long that he had become more solicitous of her desires, particularly her nesting instinct. “The whole of Princeton is one great park with wonderful trees,” she wrote a friend. “We might almost believe that we are in Oxford.”The architecture and countryside reminded her o
f England, and she felt somewhat guilty that she was so comfortable while others back in Europe were suffering. “We are very happy here, perhaps too happy. Sometimes one has a bad conscience.”26

  So in April 1934, just six months after his arrival, Einstein announced that he was staying in Princeton indefinitely and assuming full-time status at the Institute. As it turned out, he would never live anywhere else for the remaining twenty-one years of his life. Nevertheless, he made appearances at the “farewell” parties that had been scheduled that month as fund-raisers for various of his favorite charities. These causes had become almost as important to him as his science. As he declared at one of the events, “Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.”27

  Sadly, just when they had decided to settle in, Elsa had to travel back to Europe to care for her spirited and adventurous elder daughter, Ilse, who had dallied with the romantic radical Georg Nicolai and married the literary journalist Rudolf Kayser. Ilse was afflicted with what they thought was tuberculosis but what turned out to be leukemia, and her condition had taken a turn for the worse. Now she had gone to Paris to be nursed by her sister, Margot.

  Insisting that her problems were mainly psychosomatic, Ilse resisted medications and turned instead to prolonged psychotherapy. Early during her illness, Einstein had tried to persuade her to go to a regular doctor, but she had refused. Now there was little that could be done as the whole family, absent Einstein himself, gathered by her bed in Margot’s Paris apartment.

  Ilse’s death devastated Elsa. She “changed and aged,” Margot’s husband recalled, “almost beyond recognition.” Instead of having Ilse’s ashes deposited in a crypt, Elsa had them put in a sealed bag for her. “I cannot be separated,” she said. “I have to have them.” She then sewed the bag inside a pillow so that she could have them close to her on the trip home to America.28

  Elsa also carried back cases of her husband’s papers, which Margot had earlier smuggled from Berlin to Paris using French diplomatic channels and the anti-Nazi underground. To help get them into America, Elsa enlisted the help of a kindly neighbor from Princeton, Caroline Blackwood, who was on the same ship home.

  Elsa had met the Blackwoods a few months earlier in Princeton, and they mentioned that they were going to Palestine and Europe and wished to meet some Zionist leaders.

  “I didn’t know you were Jews,” Elsa said.

  Mrs. Blackwood said that they actually were Presbyterian, but there was a deep connection between the Jewish heritage and the Christian, “and besides, Jesus was a Jew.”

  Elsa hugged her. “No Christian has ever said that to me in my life.” She also asked for help in getting a German-language Bible, as they had lost theirs in the move from Berlin. Mrs. Blackwood found her a copy of Martin Luther’s translation, which Elsa clasped to her heart. “I wish I had more faith,” she told Mrs. Blackwood.

  Elsa had taken note of what liner the Blackwoods were traveling on, and she purposely booked passage on it when she returned to America. One morning she brought Mrs. Blackwood into the ship’s deserted lounge to ask a favor. Because she was not a citizen, she was afraid that her husband’s papers might be held at the border. Would the Blackwoods bring them in?

  They agreed, although Mr. Blackwood was careful not to lie on his customs declaration. “Material acquired in Europe for scholarly purposes,” he wrote. Later, Einstein came over in the rain to the Black-woods’ shed to collect his papers. “Did I write this drivel?” he joked as he looked at one journal. But the Blackwoods’ son, who was there, recalled that Einstein “was obviously deeply moved to have his books and papers in his hands.”29

  Ilse’s death, accompanied in the summer of 1934 by Hitler’s consolidation of power during the “Night of the Long Knives,” severed the Einsteins’ remaining bonds with Europe. Margot immigrated that year to Princeton, after she and her odd Russian husband separated. Hans Albert soon followed. She was “not longing for Europe at all,” Elsa wrote Caroline Blackwood soon after returning. “I feel such a homelike feeling for this country.”30

  Recreations

  When Elsa returned from Europe, she joined Einstein at a summer cottage he had rented in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, a quiet enclave on a peninsula near where Long Island Sound meets the Atlantic. It was perfect for sailing, which is why Einstein, at Elsa’s urging, decided to summer there with his friend Gustav Bucky and his family.

  Bucky was a physician, engineer, inventor, and pioneer of X-ray technology. A German who had gained American citizenship during the 1920s, he had met the Einsteins in Berlin. When Einstein came to America, his friendship with Bucky deepened; they even took out a joint patent on a device they came up with to control a photographic diaphragm, and Einstein testified as an expert witness for Bucky in a dispute over another invention.31

  His son Peter Bucky happily spent time driving Einstein around, and he later wrote down some of his recollections in extensive notebooks. They provide a delightful picture of the mildly eccentric but deeply unaffected Einstein in his later years. Peter tells, for example, of driving in his convertible with Einstein when it suddenly started to rain. Einstein pulled off his hat and put it under his coat. When Peter looked quizzical, Einstein explained: “You see, my hair has withstood water many times before, but I don’t know how many times my hat can.”32

  Einstein relished the simplicity of life in Watch Hill. He puttered around its lanes and even shopped for groceries with Mrs. Bucky. Most of all, he loved sailing his seventeen-foot wooden boat Tinef, which is Yiddish for a piece of junk. He usually went out on his own, aimlessly and often carelessly. “Frequently he would go all day long, just drifting around,” remembered a member of the local yacht club who went to retrieve him on more than one occasion. “He apparently was just out there meditating.”

  As he had at Caputh, Einstein would drift with the breeze and sometimes scribble equations in his notebook when becalmed. “Once we all waited with growing concern for his return from an afternoon sail,” Bucky recalls. “Finally, at 11 pm, we decided to send the Coast Guard out to search for him. The guardsmen found him in the Bay, not in the least concerned about his situation.”

  At one point a friend gave him an expensive outboard motor for emergency use. Einstein declined. He had a childlike delight about taking small risks—he still never took a life jacket even though he could not swim—and escaping to where he could be by himself. “To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” said Bucky. “To Einstein, this could simply have provided more time to think.”33

  The sailing rescue sagas continued the following summer, when the Einsteins began renting in Old Lyme, Connecticut, also on Long Island Sound. One such tale even made the New York Times. “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein,” read the headline. The young boys who saved him were invited to the house for raspberry juice.34

  Elsa loved the Old Lyme house, although both she and her family found it a bit too imposing. It was set on twenty acres, with a tennis court and swimming pool, and the dining room was so large that they initially were afraid to use it. “Everything is so luxurious here that the first ten days—I swear to you—we ate in the pantry,” Elsa wrote a friend. “The dining room was too magnificent for us.”35

  When the summers were over, the Einsteins would visit the Bucky family at their Manhattan home once or twice a month. Einstein would also stay, especially when he was by himself, at the home of the widower Leon Watters, the pharmaceutical company owner he had met in Pasadena. He once surprised Watters by arriving without a dressing gown or pajamas. “When I retire, I sleep as nature made me,” he said. Watters recalled that he did, however, ask to borrow a pencil and notepad for his bedside.

  Out of both politeness and his touch of vanity, Einstein found it hard to decline requests from artists and photographers who wanted him to pose. One weekend in April 1935, when he was staying with Watters, Einstein sat for two artists in one day. His first session was with the wife of R
abbi Stephen Wise, not known for her artistic ability. Why was he doing it? “Because she’s a nice woman,” he answered.

  Later that day, Watters picked Einstein up to ferry him to Greenwich Village for a session with the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov, a practitioner of Soviet realism, who was producing what would be a distinguished bust of Einstein that is now at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein had been introduced to Konenkov through Margot, who was also a sculptor. Soon, all of them became friends with his wife, Margarita Konenkova, who, unbeknown to Einstein, was a Soviet spy. In fact, Einstein would later become, after Elsa’s death, romantically involved with her, which would end up creating, as we shall see, more complexities than he ever knew.36

  Now that they had decided to stay in the United States, it made sense for Einstein to seek citizenship. When Einstein visited the White House, President Roosevelt had suggested that he should accept the offer of some congressmen to have a special bill passed on his behalf, but Einstein instead decided to go through the normal procedures. That meant leaving the country, so that he—and Elsa, Margot, and Helen Dukas—could come in not as visitors but as people seeking citizenship.

  So in May 1935 they all sailed on the Queen Mary to Bermuda for a few days to satisfy these formalities. The royal governor was there to greet them when they arrived in Hamilton, and he recommended the island’s two best hotels. Einstein found them stuffy and pretentious. As they walked through town, he saw a modest guest cottage, and that is where they ended up.

  Einstein declined all official invitations from the Bermuda gentry and socialized instead with a German cook he met at a restaurant, who invited him to come sailing on his little boat. They were away for seven hours, and Elsa feared that Nazi agents may have nabbed her husband. But she found him at the cook’s home, where he had gone to enjoy a dinner of German dishes.37