Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Apart from occasional statements on the dangers of the arms race and the need for international agreements on atomic control—which, thanks to Einstein's name, received considerable media coverage—the committee's main work was fund-raising, with the money to be given to vehicles for public education, such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

  Pauling thought the invitation was a great honor, and he was delighted to join. He greatly admired Einstein, and the idea of working with a select group rather than a large organization appealed to him. Nor would the emergency committee distract him too much from his research. Urey assured him that there would not be much to do; only a few meetings each year in Princeton, near Einstein's home, to agree on public statements and strategies for raising and distributing money.

  Pauling, as it turned out, would attend almost none of them. His distance from California, his increasingly busy schedule, and perhaps his natural tendency to work by himself kept him away from the gatherings. He occasionally traveled as a committee spokesman on the West Coast—once, he remembered, he and Szilard braved a bumpy ride in a small plane up the Columbia River Gorge to address a Spokane electrical worker's convention—but time and again, even at major press conferences, he was the only committee board member absent from their meetings. Years later, other members would have trouble recalling ever seeing him.

  Far more important to Pauling than meetings was the chance to talk privately with Einstein, a man he ranked with Newton and Darwin as one of history's greatest scientists. Einstein was a one-of-a-kind thinker, a man light-years beyond his contemporaries in devising original physical theories. His work for peace, too, Pauling found more eloquent and stirring than any other scientist's.

  "Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking," Einstein told the New York Times a few weeks before Pauling was asked to join the emergency committee. "There is no foreseeable defense against atomic bombs. . . . America has a temporary superiority in armaments, but it is certain that we have no lasting secret. What nature tells one group of men, she will tell in time to any group interested and patient enough in asking the questions." Einstein, like Pauling, believed in the creation of a world government capable of punishing anyone who made ready for war. And he agreed that scientists had a special responsibility in educating the public to the danger. "America's decisions will not be made over a table in the United Nations. Our representatives in New York, Paris, and Moscow depend ultimately on decisions made in the village square," he said. "To the village squares we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come America's voice."

  Before joining the committee, Pauling had passed no more than a few words with Einstein at social occasions; afterward, he called on him whenever he was in Princeton. Ava Helen usually accompanied him. Einstein would meet them at the door of his old frame house on Mercer Street and escort them upstairs to the second-floor study. The three of them would spend an hour or so talking, rarely about science, mostly about world affairs, public opinion, the insanity of the bomb, and the politics of war and peace. Einstein and Ava Helen got along especially well; her energy and wit sparkled when they were together. Einstein had a good sense of humor, Pauling remembered, and the three of them often traded jokes and stories.

  These private talks with the great man had a profound effect on Pauling, helping him to deepen and clarify his own thinking about political issues. Einstein had encouraged Roosevelt to develop the bomb—anything to defeat Hitler—and now that the genie was out of the bottle he felt a keen responsibility to encourage its rational use. He saw the atomic policy of the United States in a broader context than most scientists, blaming the current misuse of this fantastic power on surrounding economic and political conditions. The real evil was nationalism, with its irrational pride, competitiveness, and war lust. The only way to get beyond it was through the activism of an informed populace that believed in the need for world government. This was now possible, Einstein told Pauling, because creation of the bomb had opened a new age, a unique moment in world history when an awful technology might compel some form of global cooperation. It was imperative that scientists help that transition take place.

  Most scientists felt they should limit their analyses of atomic policy to what they knew to be fact, to effects that could be known and measured. It would be folly for a physicist to tell an anthropologist how to do his job, much less a politician. There was a different expertise required there. But Einstein felt no such constraint. He had seen the devil firsthand in Germany in the 1930s, and he wasn't afraid to call it by name. When Einstein spoke, he spoke not of kilotonnage and inspection verification systems but of the "poison of militarism and imperialism," of officials who would "compel us to live in a universal atmosphere of fear," of a United States "drunk on victory." He said, "It is easier to denature plutonium than it is to denature the evil spirit of man." He spoke freely, from the heart.

  And Pauling began speaking from the heart as well. Einstein became his model for the way a scientist could act morally in the postwar world. "It was Einstein's example," he later said, "that caused my wife and me to decide to devote much energy and effort to this activity."

  The Smell of Smoke

  The efforts of the emergency committee and the FAS to rationalize atomic policy were doomed, however, by a combination of Soviet aggression and American politics.

  Soon after the war, Stalin sealed off the nations Russia had "liberated" in Eastern Europe, leading Winston Churchill to make his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in the fall of 1946 and thus providing anti-Communists with a catchphrase that would become part of the national lexicon for the next four decades. In the world's most populous nation, Chinese Communist rebels were threatening the government. The issue of Communist world domination, a potent red flag used by some U.S. politicians to attract votes ever since the Russian Revolution, was again waved in front of the public.

  Republicans used the issue to hammer the Democrats. The only thing standing between the Russians and the world was a U.S. armed with atomic bombs, the Republicans said. The Democratic Party was full of Communist sympathizers and appeasers, one-worlders and bomb sharers. The Democratic regime in Washington was lax on security. The nation's choice, said the 1946 Republican National Committee chairman, was between communism and Republicanism.

  Many voters believed it. In that year's midterm elections the Republicans grabbed scores of new congressional seats, underlining an anti-Communist shift in public opinion and giving Harry Truman and his Democrats a wake-up call.

  Truman, a consummate politician, saw which way things were going. All talk of sharing atomic technology with Russia ceased. His rhetoric swerved to the right, and he began taking steps to make sure the Democratic Party was seen as just as anti-Communist as the Republicans. One result was Executive Order 9835, establishing in March 1947 a loyalty and security program that prohibited federal workers from belonging to or having a "sympathetic association" with any one of a number of groups deemed by the attorney general to be Fascist, totalitarian, Communist, or subversive. The real intent was to weed out government employees who were Communists or Communist sympathizers. Truman's "loyalty program," as it became known, was a model for the states, which began initiating their own loyalty checks and oath systems for teachers, policemen, and other local government employees. The appearance of a group on the attorney general's blacklist (or others like it soon prepared by eager state commissions and committees) usually marked the end of its effectiveness. Anyone who was a member of such a group was suspect.

  The loyalty program system would mushroom over the next five years, providing an extralegal mechanism for investigating federal and state employees whose political activities were deemed questionable. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the FBI, and various state committees began keeping files on millions of Americans whose only crime may have been to join
a particular political group.

  - - -

  Pauling watched with growing alarm as the national political debate after the 1946 election moved away from the control of atomic energy and toward the hunting of Communists. Nowhere did the anti-Communist fever rise faster or higher than in California, where as early as 1947 Los Angeles officials ordered all Communist books removed from the county library. The leading figure in hunting Reds in the Golden State was state senator Jack Tenney, a former songwriter who stayed in the headlines by keeping his California Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities—or as it soon became known, the Tenney Committee—one step ahead of HUAC in the race to see who could be most fervently anti-Communist. Tenney's group went the federal government one better by publishing its own list of California "Communist fronts"—groups defined as doing the work of Moscow without any official connection—which included the Hollywood chapter of ICCASP and a number of other organizations too mild to make it onto the U.S. attorney general's blacklist.

  One of Tenney's early targets was the Hollywood Community Radio Group, an offshoot of ICCASP designed to provide left-oriented "grassroots community programming" on the local airwaves. Pauling was on the group's board of directors. When the group's license request came up before the Federal Communications Commission in late 1946, Tenney turned the hearing into a political circus. He called the proposed station "Joe Stalin's Charlie McCarthy" and testified that many of the station's organizers were affiliated with Communist-front groups, especially the ICCASP. Pauling testified on behalf of the radio station and later, when the Hearst papers "mistakenly" called it the Hollywood Communist Radio Group, succeeded in getting a correction published.

  Tenney's committee, in turn, began gathering a file on Linus Pauling.

  Even among scientists the focus of public debate had now been effectively shifted from atomic policy to anti-communism. The ICCASP, which, with Pauling's help, was trying to recruit more scientist members, became the target of an anti-ICCASP article in the Chemical Bulletin referring to the group's "Communist-like leadership." Pauling responded with an outline of his personal view of the ICCASP's motivations: "The one general characteristic which I have observed in the officers of the [Hollywood chapter of the] ICCASP," he wrote, "is a deep personal concern about the future of the United States and of the world, a sincere interest in the welfare of the human being, 'irrespective of race, color or creed,'—the possession of a social conscience." He was, of course, describing himself. Although Pauling thought some ICCASP members were not critical enough of the "ruthless policy of the Russian leaders, with its suppression of personal liberty," he reassured his fellow researchers, "I know that the organization is not dominated by Communists."

  Other chemists were not so sure. Chemical and Engineering News, the official organ of the American Chemical Society, also editorialized against the ICCASP, prompting a flood of letters pro and con. While some readers railed against "the encroachment of Communism on our Society," Pauling harkened back to his collegiate belief in the noblesse oblige of the educated in a letter to the editor. "The problems that the world faces are great, serious and difficult. Chemists and other scientists have a social obligation which is greater than that of the ordinary citizen," he wrote. "I hope that more and more chemists, in addition to carrying on their professional activities as members of the American Chemical Society, will also devote time and effort toward the solution of social and political problems."

  Despite Pauling's attempts at persuasion, few scientists would join the group. The ICCASP did not have long to live in any case. In the spring of 1947 the staff of HUAC rented a hotel suite in Los Angeles to conduct "a secret investigation of Communism in motion pictures." Fascinated by the spectacle of Hollywood on trial, Americans paid close attention in October 1947 as a string of stars, producers, writers, and directors were grilled by the HUAC committee. Dalton Trumbo, a committed pacifist and ICCASP friend of Pauling's—Pauling thought he was "one of the most gifted writers in Hollywood"—decided not to cooperate with what he considered a witch hunt. In preparation for his appearance before the committee, Trumbo wrote an eloquent opening statement describing the atmosphere the politicians had created with their anti-Communist inquisition. Washington, D.C., he wrote, was "acrid with fear and suppression ... a city in which old friends hesitate to recognize each other in public places; a city in which men and women who dissent even slightly from the orthodoxy you seek to impose, speak with confidence only in moving cars and the open air. You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire. For those who remember German history in the autumn of 1932 there is the smell of smoke in this very room."

  When Trumbo tried to read his statement, he was gaveled down. He and nine other noncooperators were set aside for further legal action. They would become known as the Hollywood Ten.

  - - -

  The film-industry hearings had been great theater and a publicity boon for HUAC. Anticommunism, as HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas and a number of other ambitious politicians were discovering, was a terrific way to get your name in the paper in the role of patriotic defender of America. And movie stars and federal employees were not the only targets. "Our scientists, it seems, are well-schooled in their specialties, but not in the history of Communist tactics and designs," Thomas wrote. "They have a weakness for attending meetings, signing petitions, sponsoring committees and joining organizations labeled 'liberal' and 'progressive,' but which are actually Communist fronts."

  HUAC investigators began looking closely at America's researchers. Scientists, after all, were privy to atomic secrets that, if passed to the Russians, would change the balance of world power. It did not matter that most scientists agreed that it was only a matter of time until the Russians figured out how to make their own atomic bomb, spies or not—the secrets nature tells one group of men, she will not long keep from others, as Einstein said. In Thomas's view it was vital for national security to ensure the loyalty of scientists, and Executive Order 9835 offered a mechanism. The ongoing shift to federal funding for science—with growing numbers of scientists receiving paychecks either as employees of government labs and agencies or through grants from the Atomic Energy Commission and the military—made tens of thousands of scientists into temporary government employees, subject to Truman's loyalty program. Hundreds of them ended up undergoing security checks and FBI field investigations.

  Edward U. Condon was the first public casualty. The respected physicist, former president of the American Physical Society and current head of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), seemed an unlikely target. He was cheerful, witty, and well liked, and his record at the NBS was good. But he had publicly helped to lead the opposition to the May-Johnson bill, which to some right-wing politicians identified him as a troublemaker. In 1947, HUAC leaked information to the press that amounted to a smear attack on Condon. It was all circumstantial facts and associations—Condon had quit the Manhattan Project because of what he called "morbidly depressing" security restrictions at Los Alamos, had proposed the international sharing of atomic technology, had been recommended for his federal job by the left-wing former vice president Henry Wallace—but it was enough to brand him "one of the weakest links in our security system." Condon's private life was dragged through the press, his associations publicized, his reputation sullied. But he refused to step down. And the scientific community, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the FAS, and a number of influential individuals, Pauling among them, rallied to Condon's defense. The following year, a hastily organized federal inquiry cleared him of any wrongdoing.

  Still, a tremor ran through scientific circles. If Condon, a man whose only crime had been to speak out, was a target, who was next?

  CHAPTER 14

  England

  A Hole in the Seeing

  Pauling and Ava Helen embarked on a two-month trip to England and Scandinavia in the summer of 1947, happy to escape the darkening political climate. The trip was
a mixture of vacation and business. Again they left the children at home with Arletta Townsend. The couple stopped first in New York, where Pauling participated in a conference on the foundation of quantum mechanics, then caught one of the new transatlantic air clippers to England. Despite the still-evident ravages of wartime bombing and continued shortages of goods, they had a wonderful time in London, where Pauling was inducted as an honorary fellow of the Royal Society. The high point of the trip came on June 12, when Pauling was granted an honorary doctorate from Cambridge in an all-afternoon ceremony in the university's ornate Senate House. Pauling, in full academic regalia, joined a former viceroy of India, the Portuguese ambassador, and eight other dignitaries in a long procession through the packed hall. Once seated, they listened as the university orator praised the honorees in Latin, noting Pauling's success in "scratching . . . the perplexities of atomic structure." It was grand.

  Later, he and Ava Helen traveled to Scandinavia for a scientific congress and a long vacation along the fjords. They flew back to California in August refreshed, pleased by their reception in Europe and eager to get their affairs in order to return to England that winter for Pauling's six-month stay as Oxford's Eastman Professor.

  The children were happy to have them back, and especially happy that on this next trip they were to accompany their parents. The family needed time together. Peter was continuing to have trouble at school. Linda, bright, lovely, poised, and at age fifteen desperate to please her father, never felt as if she had the chance. Crellie, still the baby of the family at age ten, was growing resentful of his parents' frequent absences.