Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Once awakened from their political slumber, once aware that they shared a common set of beliefs, the scientists began to think they might be able to cultivate a set of ideas that would transform the world. It was as though the bomb, the ultimate symbol of technological evil, had given them an opportunity to show the other side, the ultimate good of technological thinking.

  They were, of course, hopelessly out of touch with the political realities of the day. While scientists talked of openly sharing atomic know-how with Russia, politicians and the military worried about Communist expansionism, a subject most scientists seemed strangely unconcerned about. Pauling again was typical. He was not a Popular Front type; he had not come through the Depression with the idea that Russia was a necessary first step in the salvation of the world's working class. Nor did he think that Communism was evil incarnate. He saw Russia as an important ally in defeating Hitler but also as a troubled and overly authoritarian nation. He thought that the best way to change Russia for the better was to shower it with new ideas. In the middle of the war he had joined—along with such luminaries as Albert Einstein, MIT President Karl Compton, and the Guggenheim Foundation's Frank Aydelotte—the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a group that promoted scientific exchanges between the nations. "Let us look forward to a future when American scientists in large numbers are lecturing and working in Soviet laboratories, American students are studying in Soviet universities, and Soviet scientists and students are in America in equal numbers, carrying the most inspired teachings of each country to the other," Pauling wrote in a 1943 letter to the group's science congress. His vision could be accomplished only in an atmosphere of peace—a rational peace based on worldwide cooperation and open communication—a scientists' peace.

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  But Pauling could be naive in his desire for peace. In early 1945 he had been named to the Research Board for National Security, a select group of twenty civilians and twenty high-ranking military men that was convened in Washington, D.C., to discuss the shape of the postwar world. Pauling considered this to be a great honor, and he eagerly attended his first meeting expecting that something truly important might happen, that the military brass and the brainiacs might actually learn something from one another.

  The meeting got off to a rocky start when the architect of the Caltech rocket program, Charles Lauritsen, suggested to the generals and admirals that perhaps the board should support investigations into the causes and elimination of war. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then a military representative pointed out that peace studies were not on the group's agenda. Pauling jumped in to second Lauritsen, saying, "Mr. Chairman, this is a matter of the greatest importance. It would be unwise for us to decide now that it is not in the province of this board's responsibilities." Pauling felt his words important enough to write down in his pocket notebook when the meeting ended.

  It was clear, however, that soldiers and scientists did not think alike, and nothing much resulted from the research board. Their approaches to the bomb exemplified the philosophical differences between the two groups. The military saw it as a weapon pure and simple, developed under military command, kept under military secrecy, and to be used for military purposes. The idea of sharing it with the world was impossible in the face of aggressive Russian actions in Eastern Europe, where the Red Army, the world's largest, seemed unlikely to give up the nations it had freed from the Germans. The world was probably headed for another war, this time between capitalism and communism, and anyone who did not see what the bomb meant in that scenario was a fool.

  The scientists saw atomic power as an application of a new technology developed by scientists, one that promised wonderful benefits if shared openly. One of the first concerns raised in the discussion groups was that the military would continue to exercise sole control over the bomb and all the science that went with it, clamping down a lid of secrecy on further research and killing any chance of sharing the technology for the good of all people.

  The stage was set for conflict. The prize would be the control of atomic energy.

  - - -

  While the nation was still celebrating its victory over Japan, the cantankerous general Leslie R. Groves—army chief of construction, builder of the Pentagon, and military overlord of the Manhattan Project—began pushing for legislation to keep the bomb under military control. To do that, he helped the War Department draft a bill that was designed to satisfy both scientists and the military, putting the development of atomic energy under the jurisdiction of a nine-member panel, including military men, which in turn would report to a permanent, full-time administrator. On the surface, it appeared to provide a shared civilian-military framework for controlling atomic energy, and it looked innocuous enough to earn the support of many influential scientists, including Oppenheimer, Vannevar Bush, and a number of other Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and Manhattan Project bigwigs. It was introduced in Congress on October 4, 1945, under the name of its cosponsors as the May-Johnson bill. Five days later, without advance notice, it was given a short, perfunctory, and uniformly positive hearing before the House Military Affairs Committee.

  The obvious haste of certain parties to pass May-Johnson set off a quick reaction in the scientific community. The discussion groups took up the issue, pointing out that the legislation was drafted in the War Department and was supported by the military. Despite its supporters' lip service to civilian control, under the bill it would be possible, even easy, for the army and navy to effectively control the proposed nine-member panel. It looked as though Groves himself were being groomed for the administrator's post. Within weeks, the discussion groups began rallying together against the May-Johnson bill.

  Typical was a group of Caltech students and postdoctoral fellows that had begun meeting in the basement of the Caltech faculty club, the Athenaeum, to discuss the impact and control of atomic energy.

  They organized themselves as the Association of Pasadena Scientists (APS), their purpose "to meet the increasingly apparent responsibility of scientists in promoting the welfare of mankind and the achievement of a stable world peace." The APS chairman, vice chairman, and a number of other founding members were all from Pauling's laboratory, and they were all opposed to May-Johnson.

  Fuel for their cause came in late November 1945, when American military forces descended on laboratories in occupied Japan, tore apart five research cyclotrons, and threw the pieces into the sea. Upon learning that the atom smashers were being used strictly for nonmilitary purposes, Groves quickly issued an apology, but the anguished cries from Japanese scientists echoed through the U.S. scientific community. The military clearly did not understand the first thing about pure research. They obviously should not be allowed to control atomic research in the United States.

  So the scientists came to Washington in the fall of 1945, dozens of young, energetic men like Pauling's former student Charles Coryell, who left his job at the Oak Ridge atomic laboratory to fight May-Johnson. The discussion groups formed themselves into a national organization, the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS), rented a one-room walk-up near the Capitol and equipped it with a single typewriter. The researchers buttonholed congressmen, sent mimeographed fact sheets to committees, and got into the newspapers by heating up the rhetoric. One of the most vocal leaders of the anti-May-Johnson forces, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Harold Urey, called May-Johnson "the first totalitarian bill ever written by Congress. You can call it a Communist bill or a Nazi bill, whichever you think is worse." Then they put forward an alternative. In December 1945, Democratic senator Brien McMahon sponsored a bill with FAS input that called for the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) headed by a full-time panel of civilian scientists appointed by the president, with safeguards for independent research and a civilian administrator. There were to be no military men.

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  The debate over the May-Johnson and McMahon bills brought to light deep divisions within the scientific co
mmunity. On one side were higher-level administrators who had been involved in coordinating military and scientific projects during the war and who felt that sharing responsibility for atomic decisions with the military was simply realistic, men like Vannevar Bush and Harvard president James B. Conant, who predicted that the majority of scientists would fall in line behind the bill. They were joined by hundreds of supporters around the nation who felt that May-Johnson would give adequate representation to civilians while still ensuring atomic primacy for the United States. Robert Millikan, for instance, joined some two hundred other "private citizens" in and around Caltech in signing an open letter to Congress urging the passage of May-Johnson.

  The anti-May-Johnson ranks included, in addition to the young FAS firebrands, respected figures like Bell Telephone Laboratories head and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) president Frank Jewett, bomb developers Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, and Pauling, who joined both the APS and the FAS and wrote his own letter in support of the McMahon bill.

  And the debate began to swing their way. In the spring of 1946 the FAS's membership, in part because of its opposition to May-Johnson, swelled to thousands, enhancing its standing as a lobbying force in Congress. By then the McMahon supporters had influenced a number of politicians, including President Harry Truman, who, after listening to their concerns—and sensing the postwar mood of the electorate— came down squarely in favor of civilian control of atomic energy. He was quickly followed by his secretary of war. In July, after softening its language to give the military some input into the proposed AEC, Congress passed the McMahon bill.

  It was a great and surprising victory. To Pauling and the other FAS scientists, it was a triumph of reason, a sign that the military would not run the show in peacetime. Truman and his administrators started talking about the possibility of sharing atomic secrets with Russia and the rest of the world. There was a warming of international relations. There was a hope that the world might emerge from the war with a fighting chance at long-term peace.

  Hollywood

  After the McMahon bill passed and the shock of Hiroshima began to wear off, many scientists turned their energies back to career and family. But Pauling stayed politically active. The public was still hungry for information about the bomb, and he received a steady stream of invitations to explain it. He now peppered his speeches on the technology of the bomb with quotes from Einstein and others about the importance of civilian control, open scientific communication, and world government. The only problem was that the more he talked about social and political issues, the less effective his speeches became.

  Ava Helen saw it happening. She accompanied Pauling to almost all of his talks, sat in the front row, and listened carefully to his delivery. She also kept an eye on the room, saw what worked and what did not, and, on their way home, critiqued his performance. His problem, she thought, was one of conviction. Pauling did not feel confident enough about his own knowledge of politics to make pronouncements on his own authority; instead, when he talked about the control of atomic energy, he would defer to higher authorities, quoting things written by or about other scientists and politicians. His political comments had none of the humor and firsthand immediacy of his scientific talks. "You're not convincing," Ava Helen told him after one particularly dismal performance. "You give the audience the impression that you are not sure about what you are saying."

  As he did with most of Ava Helen’s comments, Pauling took her observations seriously. He decided that he needed to make himself into an authority on political issues, international affairs, atomic policy, and peace efforts. So, just as he did when he entered any new field, he began to absorb facts. This time, instead of immunology or quantum mechanics, he studied history, economics, and international relations. He read books; government reports; newspapers from the LA Times to the New York Times; magazines, including the Nation, the New Yorker, Time, and a valuable new publication that the FAS was putting out called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

  He found that compared to quantum mechanics, the politics of atomic energy was relatively simple. A rather small group of players determined policy: politicians, industrialists, military leaders, scientists, the public. Each had its own agenda to push; each had its own concerns. It all was fairly easy to put into order. He found that once he felt he understood the players' motivations and modes of action, he was rarely surprised by the statements of those who were deciding what to do with the bomb. After a few months, he said, "I felt I could speak on my own authority." His talks caught fire.

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  One of the first groups that invited Pauling to speak was a political action organization called the Independent Citizen's Committee for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP), which had started after the war to serve as an artists' and intellectuals' lobby, agitating for legislation in the same way that labor unions or manufacturers' associations did for their members. Its leanings were leftist; the Hollywood chapter was composed mainly of liberal Democrats with a sprinkling of socialists and Communists, many from the film community. Lionel Trilling could have been speaking of ICCASP members when he described postwar New Dealers, with their "ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, and a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation, perhaps especially where Russia is in question."

  Pauling's first ICCASP talk was well received. During the question period afterward, someone asked how many atomic bombs were in the U.S. stockpile, and Pauling hazarded a guess: perhaps one or two hundred, he said, with the potential to make five hundred within the next year. His estimate was far off the mark—there were fewer than ten usable bombs in the U.S. arsenal at the time—but a reporter picked up the figures, and they were reprinted widely. General Groves, then still embroiled in the fight to pass May-Johnson, was not amused and let Pauling know it. "I was, as you might suspect, misquoted on the atomic bomb matter," Pauling wrote a friend in February 1946. "Some rough estimates that I was making got misinterpreted by the press representative and spread all over the country. The General didn't think it was very funny." But Pauling didn't let the military's attempt at censure bother him. "You probably know that I have never had any connection with the atomic bomb project," he wrote. "I am just an outsider, relatively free to make guesses."

  The ICCASP connection introduced the Paulings to a group of exciting, glamorous, socially concerned activists who appeared to believe in what Pauling called "just the rather liberal sort of politics that appeals to me." The Paulings went Hollywood. Rubbing shoulders with film celebrities was a thrill for a small-town couple who had always loved going to movies. The local chapter was headed by John Cromwell, director of Abe Lincoln in Illinois and The Prisoner of Zenda, and members included James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Olivia de Havilland, Orson Welles, and Fredric March. The Paulings, through their ICCASP connections, soon found themselves visiting studios, watching films being shot, drinking cocktails in producers' mansions, and watching sneak previews in private screening rooms. They chatted with Charlie Chaplin, traded jokes over dinner at Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester's Hollywood cottage, and hammered out ICCASP policy at the Brown Derby with the then-liberal actor Ronald Reagan.

  It was all a bit dazzling. Pauling took his ICCASP duties seriously (as opposed to the FAS, to which he devoted little time) regularly attending meetings and helping draft goals and policies. He was quickly named vice president for science of the Hollywood chapter, then was put on the group's national board of directors, along with Frank Sinatra, Thomas Mann, Duke Ellington, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Ava Helen loved hobnobbing with this glittering crowd, so much more interesting than Caltech professors and their dowdy wives. Pauling, on the other hand, after a brief period of enchantment, found most Hollywood people rather low on significant ideas and certainly uninterested in anything related to science. Despite the "Sciences" in its title, ICCASP never succeeded in attracting many researchers, perhaps because it was soon labeled
as a Communist front, perhaps because the FAS was available for political action. Pauling was the only Caltech member. One ICCASP member remembered a patio party at a director’s house where Ava Helen gaily chatted with people by the buffet, while Pauling sat alone at the other end of the swimming pool. The partygoers seemed intimidated by the thought of trying to talk with the great scientist. The only animated discussion the observer remembered Pauling having was with the teenage son of another guest. The topic was high school chemistry.

  To the Village Square

  At the beginning of October 1946, Pauling's political activities took another step forward when he received a phone call from Harold Urey asking him if he would consider joining the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. This, Pauling knew, was a select group, the crème de la crème of those associated with the FAS, including Szilard and Urey and headed by Einstein himself, whose eloquent public pronouncements in favor of the open sharing of bomb technology had helped convince the public to support the McMahon bill. The committee's purpose was not to make public policy but to inform people of the new realities brought about by the bomb. As the first statement of the emergency committee put it, "Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing the power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. ... A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels."