Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  The following week Szilárd came to see Einstein about the issue, and soon a bevy of peace-loving physicists was bombarding him with concerns. So Einstein read the script and agreed to join the campaign to stop the movie. “The presentation of facts was so utterly misleading that I declined any cooperation or permission of the use of my name,” he said.

  He also sent a spiky letter to the famed mogul that attacked the proposed movie and also, for good measure, the tone of previous ones that Mayer had made. “Although I am not much of a moviegoer, I do know from the tenor of earlier films that have come out of your studio that you will understand my reasons,” he wrote. “I find that the whole film is written too much from the point of view of the Army and the Army leader of the project, whose influence was not always in the direction which one would desire from the point of view of humanity.”12

  Mayer turned Einstein’s letter over to the film’s chief editor, who responded with a memo that Mayer sent back to Einstein. President Truman, it said, “was most anxious to have the picture made” and had personally read and approved the script, an argument not likely to reassure Einstein. “As American citizens we are bound to respect the viewpoint of our government.” That, too, was not the best argument to use on Einstein. There followed an even less persuasive argument: “It must be realized that dramatic truth is just as compelling a requirement to us as veritable truth is to a scientist.”

  The memo concluded by promising that the moral issues raised by the scientists would be given a proper airing through the character of a fictional young scientist played by an actor named Tom Drake. “We selected among our young male players the one who best typifies earnestness and a spiritual quality,” it said reassuringly. “You need only recall his performance in ‘The Green Years.’ ”13

  Not surprisingly, this did not turn Einstein around. When Sam Marx, the scriptwriter, wrote beseeching him to change his mind and allow himself to be portrayed, Einstein replied curtly: “I have explained my point of view in a letter to Mr. Louis Mayer.” Marx was persistent. “When the picture is complete,” he wrote back, “the audience will feel in greatest sympathy with the young scientist.” And from later the same day: “Here is a new and revised script.”14

  The ending was not that hard to predict. The new script was more pleasing to the scientists, and they were not immune to the lure of being glorified on the big screen. Szilárd sent Einstein a telegram saying, “Have received new script from MGM and am writing that I have no objection to use of my name in it.” Einstein relented. “Agree with use of my name on basis of the new script,” he scribbled in English on the back of the telegram. The only change he requested was in the scene of Szilárd’s 1939 visit to him on Long Island. The script said that he had not met Roosevelt before then, but he had.15

  The Beginning or the End, which was the name of the movie, opened to good reviews in February 1947. “A sober, intelligent account of the development and deployment of the Atom Bomb,” Bosley Crowther declared in the New York Times, “refreshingly free of propagandizing.” Einstein was played by a character actor named Ludwig Stossel, who had a small part in Casablanca as a German Jew trying to get to America and would later have a flicker of fame in Swiss Colony wine commercials in the 1960s in which he spoke the tagline “That little old winemaker, me.”16

  Einstein’s efforts on behalf of arms control and his advocacy of world government in the late 1940s got him tagged as woolly-headed and naïve. Woolly-headed he may have been, at least in appearance, but was it right to dismiss him as naïve?

  Most Truman administration officials, even those working on behalf of arms control, thought so. William Golden was an example. An Atomic Energy Commission staffer who was preparing a report for Secretary of State George Marshall, he went to Princeton to consult with Einstein. Washington needed to try harder to enlist Moscow in an arms control plan, Einstein argued. Golden felt he was speaking “with almost childlike hope for salvation and without appearing to have thought through the details of his solution.” He reported back to Marshall, “It was surprising, though perhaps it should not have been, that, out of his métier of mathematics, he seemed naïve in the field of international politics. The man who popularized the concept of a fourth dimension could think in only two of them in considerations of World Government.”17

  To the extent that Einstein was naïve, it was not because he had a benign view of human nature. Having lived in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, there was little chance of that. When the famed photographer Philippe Halsman, who had escaped the Nazis with Einstein’s help, asked whether he thought there would ever be lasting peace, Einstein answered, “No, as long as there will be man, there will be war.” At that moment Halsman clicked his shutter and captured Einstein’s sadly knowing eyes for what became a famous portrait (reproduced on page 487).18

  Einstein’s advocacy of an empowered world authority was based not on gooey sentiments but on this hardnosed assessment of human nature. “If the idea of world government is not realistic,” he said in 1948, “then there is only one realistic view of our future: wholesale destruction of man by man.”19

  Like some of his scientific breakthroughs, Einstein’s approach involved abandoning entrenched suppositions that others considered verities. National sovereignty and military autonomy had been an underpinning of the world order for centuries, just as absolute time and absolute space had been the underpinning of the cosmic order. To advocate transcending that approach was a radical idea, the product of a nonconformist thinker. But like many of Einstein’s ideas that at first seemed so radical, it may have looked less so had it come to be accepted.

  The world federalism that Einstein—and indeed many sober and established political leaders—advocated during the early years of America’s atomic monopoly was not unthinkable. To the extent that he was naïve, it was because he put forth his idea in a simple fashion and did not consider complex compromises. Physicists are not used to trimming or compromising their equations in order to get them accepted. Which is why they do not make good politicians.

  At the end of the 1940s, when it was becoming clear to him that the effort to control nuclear weaponry would fail, Einstein was asked what the next war would look like.“I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he answered, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.”20

  Russia

  Those who wanted international control of the bomb had one big issue to confront: how to deal with Russia. A growing number of Americans, along with their elected leaders, came to view Moscow’s communists as dangerously expansionist and deceitful. The Russians, for their part, did not seem all that eager for arms control or world governance either. They had deeply ingrained fears about their security, a desire for a bomb of their own, and leaders who recoiled at any hint of outside meddling in their nation’s internal affairs.

  There was a typical nonconformity in Einstein’s attitudes toward Russia. He did not swing as far as many others did toward glorifying the Russians when they became allies during the war, nor did he swing as far toward demonizing them when the cold war began. But by the late 1940s, this put him increasingly outside mainstream American sentiments.

  He disliked communist authoritarianism, but he did not see it as an imminent danger to American liberty. The greater danger, he felt, was rising hysteria about the supposed Red menace. When Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review and the journalistic patron of America’s internationalist intelligentsia, wrote a piece calling for international arms control, Einstein responded with a fan letter but added a caveat. “What I object to in your article is that you not only fail to oppose the widespread hysterical fear in our country of Russian aggression but actually encourage it,” he said. “All of us should ask ourselves which of the two countries is objectively more justified in fearing the aggressive intentions of the other.”21

  As for the repression inside Russia, Einstein tended to offer only mild condemnations diluted by ex
cuses. “It is undeniable that a policy of severe coercion exists in the political sphere,” he said in one talk. “This may, in part, be due to the need to break the power of the former ruling class and to convert a politically inexperienced, culturally backward people into a nation well organized for productive work. I do not presume to pass judgment in these difficult matters.”22

  Einstein consequently became the target of critics who saw him as a Soviet sympathizer. Mississippi Congressman John Rankin said that Einstein’s world government plan was “simply carrying out the Communist line.” Speaking on the House floor, Rankin also denounced Einstein’s science: “Ever since he published his book on relativity to try to convince the world that light had weight, he has capitalized on his reputation as a scientist . . . and has been engaged in communistic activities.”23

  Einstein continued his long-running exchanges on Russia with Sidney Hook, the social philosopher who had once been a communist and then become strongly anticommunist. These were not as exalted as his exchanges with Bohr, on either side, but they got as intense. “I am not blind to the serious weakness of the Russian system of government,” Einstein replied to one of Hook’s missives. “But it has, on the other side, great merits and it is difficult to decide whether it would have been possible for the Russians to survive by following softer methods.”24

  Hook took it upon himself to convince Einstein of the error of his ways and sent him long and rather frequent letters, most of which Einstein ignored. On the occasions he did answer, Einstein generally agreed that Russia’s oppression was wrong, but he tended to balance such judgments by adding that it was also somewhat understandable. As he juggled it in one 1950 response:

  I do not approve of the interference by the Soviet government in intellectual and artistic matters. Such interference seems to me objectionable, harmful, and even ridiculous. Regarding the centralization of political power and the limitations of the freedom of action for the individual, I think that these restrictions should not exceed the limit demanded by security, stability, and the necessities resulting from a planned economy. An outsider is hardly able to judge the facts and possibilities. In any case it cannot be doubted that the achievements of the Soviet regime are considerable in the fields of education, public health, social welfare, and economics, and that the people as a whole have greatly gained by these achievements.25

  Despite these qualified excuses for some of Moscow’s behavior, Einstein was not the Soviet supporter that some tried to paint him. He had always rejected invitations to Moscow and rebuffed attempts by friends on the left to embrace him as a comrade. He denounced Moscow’s repeated use of the veto at the United Nations and its resistance to the idea of world government, and he became even more critical when the Soviets made it clear that they had no appetite for arms control.

  This was evident when an official group of Russian scientists attacked Einstein in a 1947 Moscow newspaper article, “Dr. Einstein’s Mistaken Notions.” His vision for a world government, they declared, was a plot by capitalists. “The proponents of a world super-state are asking us voluntarily to surrender independence for the sake of world government, which is nothing but a flamboyant signboard for the supremacy of capitalist monopolies,” they wrote. They denounced Einstein for recommending a directly elected supranational parliament. “He has gone so far as to declare that if the Soviet Union refuses to join this new-fangled organization, other countries would have every right to go ahead without it. Einstein is supporting a political fad which plays into the hands of the sworn enemies of sincere international cooperation and enduring peace.”26

  Soviet sympathizers at the time were willing to follow almost any party line that Moscow dictated. Such conformity was not in Einstein’s nature. When he disagreed with someone, he merrily said so. He was happy to take on the Russian scientists.

  Although he reiterated his support for democratic socialist ideals, he rebutted the Russians’ faith in communist dogma. “We should not make the mistake of blaming capitalism for all existing social and political evils, nor of assuming that the very establishment of socialism would be sufficient to cure the social and political ills of humanity,” he wrote. Such thinking led to the “fanatical intolerance” that infected the Communist Party faithful, and it opened the way to tyranny.

  Despite his criticisms of untrammeled capitalism, what repelled him more—and had repelled him his entire life—was repression of free thought and individuality. “Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny,” he warned the Russian scientists. “The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen.”27

  Just as his dispute with the Russian scientists was breaking, Einstein was working with Raymond Gram Swing to update the article in the Atlantic that they had done two years earlier. This time Einstein attacked Russia’s rulers. Their reasons for not supporting a world government, he said, “quite obviously are pretexts.”Their real fear was that their repressive communist command system might not survive in such an environment. “The Russians may be partly right about the difficulty of retaining their present social structure in a supranational regime, though in time they may be brought to see that this is a far lesser loss than remaining isolated from a world of law.”28

  The West should proceed with creating a world government without Russia, he said. They would eventually come around, he thought: “I believe that if this were done intelligently (rather than in clumsy Truman style!) Russia would cooperate once she realized that she was no longer able to prevent world government anyhow.”29

  From then on, Einstein seemed to take a perverse pride in disputing those who blamed the Russians for everything, and those who blamed them for nothing. When a left-leaning pacifist he knew sent him a book he had written on arms control, expecting Einstein’s endorsement, he got instead a rebuff. “You have presented the whole problem as an advocate of the Soviet point of view,” Einstein wrote, “but you have kept silent about everything which is not favorable for the Soviets (and this is not little).”30

  Even his longtime pacifism developed a hard, realistic edge when it came to dealing with Russia, just as it had after the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Pacifists liked to think that Einstein’s break with their philosophy in the 1930s was an aberration caused by the unique threat posed by the Nazis, and some biographers likewise treat it as a temporary anomaly.31 But that minimizes the shift in Einstein’s thinking. He was never again a pure pacifist.

  When he was asked, for example, to join a campaign to persuade American scientists to refuse to work on atomic weapons, he not only declined but berated the organizers for advocating unilateral disarmament. “Disarmament cannot be effective unless all countries participate,” he lectured. “If even one nation continues to arm, openly or secretly, the disarmament of the others will involve disastrous consequences.”

  Pacifists like himself had made a mistake in the 1920s by encouraging Germany’s neighbors not to rearm, he explained. “This merely served to encourage the arrogance of the Germans.” There were parallels now with Russia. “Similarly, your proposition would, if effective, surely lead to a serious weakening of the democracies,” he wrote those pushing the antimilitary petition. “For we must realize that we are probably not able to exert any significant influence on the attitude of our Russian colleagues.”32

  He took a similar stance when his former colleagues in the War Resisters’ League asked him to rejoin in 1948. They flattered him by quoting one of his old pacifist proclamations, but Einstein rebuffed them. “That statement accurately expresses the views I held on war resistance in the period from 1918 to the early thirties,” he replied. “Now, however, I feel that policy, which involves the refusal of individuals to participate in military activities, is too primitive.”

  Simplistic pacifism could be dangerous
, he warned, especially given the internal policies and external attitude of Russia. “The war resistance movement actually serves to weaken the nations with a more liberal type of government and, indirectly, to support the policies of the existing tyrannical governments,” he argued. “Antimilitaristic activities, through refusal of military service, are wise only if they are feasible everywhere throughout the world. Individual antimilitarism is impossible in Russia.”33

  Some pacifists argued that world socialism, rather than world government, would be the best foundation for lasting peace. Einstein disagreed. “You say that socialism by its very nature rejects the remedy of war,” Einstein replied to one such advocate. “I do not believe that. I can easily imagine that two socialist states might fight a war against each other.”34

  One of the early flashpoints of the cold war was Poland, where the occupying Red Army had installed a pro-Soviet regime without the open elections that Moscow had promised. When that new Polish government invited Einstein to a conference, they got a taste of his independence from party dogma. He politely explained that he no longer traveled overseas, and he sent a careful message that offered encouragement but also stressed his call for a world government.

  The Poles decided to delete the parts about world government, which Moscow opposed. Einstein was furious, and he released his un-delivered full message to the New York Times. “Mankind can gain protection against the danger of unimaginable destruction and wanton annihilation only if a supranational organization has alone the authority to produce or possess these weapons,” it said. He also complained to the British pacifist who presided over the meeting that the communists were trying to enforce conformity to a party line: “I am convinced that our colleagues on the other side of the fence are completely unable to express their real opinions.”35