by Thomas Hager
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By DuBridge's definition, Pauling seemed incapable of proper restraint. And DuBridge began to hear about it. As early as 1946, Reese Taylor, the conservatively inclined executive vice president of Consolidated Steel and an important Caltech trustee, began complaining about Pauling. One month after DuBridge started his presidency, Taylor sent him a clip of a newspaper ad signed by supporters of Henry Wallace. He highlighted Pauling's name and noted, "I do question the propriety of prominent members of the faculty of a privately endowed institution participating publicly in politics on any side." DuBridge replied that while it would be wrong for him as Caltech's president to participate in any way directly in political activities, "I cannot in conscience deny this privilege to members of the faculty serving in their private capacity as citizens." He then assured Taylor, "I do not, myself, at all agree with the statement which Dr. Pauling signed."
As Pauling became increasingly visible off campus, a group of trustees, most prominently Taylor, Herbert Hoover, Jr., and John McCone, became increasingly angered by his political statements and concerned about what they thought these statements meant for Caltech. There was talk of disciplining Pauling, perhaps firing him. But DuBridge, supported by the head of the board, Jim Page, cautioned patience. Right now Pauling might seem a bit off-track, they said, but give him time to come around. DuBridge called Pauling to his office and spoke to him privately, asking him to be more moderate in his public pronouncements and cautioning him to leave the institute's name out of it when he spoke politically. It was a chilly meeting. Pauling thought DuBridge was using euphemisms to mask the real issue, which was Pauling's right to speak as he saw fit. DuBridge saw Pauling as an inflexible character with a rigid political agenda and a love of seeing his name in print.
Within Caltech, Pauling scrupulously divided his roles as teacher and activist, making certain that he never mentioned politics in class and asking that his Caltech affiliation not be used in publicity for his political talks. But inevitably there were problems. When invited by a Caltech student group to give a talk on world government, Pauling accepted, reasoning that it was on his own time and constituted an extracurricular activity, although it obviously mixed politics and academia. Occasionally, an endorsement of, or advertisement for, one of his political speeches would slip by with his Caltech title on it.
Increasingly, it was becoming impossible for Pauling to keep his political and professional lives completely separate. In the late 1940s the press learned that he was a good story and began covering him in earnest. Whenever the reporters mentioned one of Pauling's talks, he was always identified as a Caltech professor and head of the chemistry division.
That was true of the coverage of his 1949 speech in Mexico City. When Reese Taylor heard a conservative radio commentator ranting about Pauling's attendance, he wrote Page and DuBridge demanding to know why, if Pauling was not a Communist, he was speaking at such a gathering. Page and DuBridge tried to calm Taylor again, but they, too, were growing uncomfortable with Pauling's outspokenness. DuBridge was now being peppered with letters complaining about Pauling. When the president of a local sash-and-balance company asked why Caltech had this Communist on the faculty, DuBridge tried a new tack, sending Pauling out to dine with him and demonstrate firsthand that he was not a dangerous radical. Pauling tried to keep the luncheon conversation apolitical, turning it to his ideas about medical research and lobbying for a donation. Pauling thought it had gone well. Then the businessman wrote him a note: "Remember my friendly warning: Don't get too far out on a limb with some of these 'questionable' groups. Some of us have saws and can use them."
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In 1950 things only got worse. A string of revelations shocked the public and intensified the Cold War: the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss on January 21; the public disclosure of British physicist Klaus Fuchs's atomic spying on February 3; and Joe McCarthy's waving of a list of 205 alleged Communists in the State Department a few days later, a publicity stunt that gave the junior senator from Wisconsin his first national headlines. In April, the National Security Council recommended a massive military buildup to contain communism and counter the growing threat of atomic espionage.
Worst of all, to Pauling and the remaining FAS scientists—the group's membership had shrunk to half its level of four years before—was Truman's announcement in January that the United States was going to develop a "super bomb" to maintain the American weapons advantage. It was top secret, but Pauling quickly put together enough information to learn that its energy would come not from tearing atoms apart, as in an old-style atomic bomb, but from fusing light atoms together. Hydrogen was the likeliest energy source, and the new weapon was quickly dubbed the hydrogen bomb. "An H-bomb consists of an old-fashioned atomic bomb surrounded by a ton, or perhaps ten tons or more, of hydrogen or other light elements, the nuclei of which can fuse together to form heavier nuclei, with the liberation of around five times as much energy, on a weight basis, as in a fission bomb," Pauling told a radio audience in May. There was, he told his listeners, no theoretical limit to its power.
To Pauling, Einstein, and most of the members of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, the development of the H-bomb did not change the basic rules of the atomic war game —it was still irrational and unthinkable—but it needlessly upped the stakes. There was to be more money thrown away on killing more people. By now, however, even the emergency committee was splitting apart. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist and staunch liberal Harold Urey broke ranks, unhappily concluding that the Russians would build the H-bomb if the United States did not. "We should not intentionally lose the armaments race," he concluded. Pauling's reply was simple—"Harold— you're wrong," he was quoted as saying in the Daily Worker—but the damage had been done. Pauling and Leo Szilard considered forming a new committee without Urey, but it looked like too much work, too much time for members already tired after years of fighting. Einstein wanted to keep the committee going, but the other members were ready to drop it. What good was it doing? The information and warnings they had been issuing were doing little good. Donations were drying up. In the end, the emergency committee voted to disband.
Others might become discouraged, but the threat of the new bomb seemed only to energize Pauling. Public discussion of the enormous destructive capabilities of the H-bomb had led to a new concern about a senseless arms race with Russia, and new audiences began listening to Pauling's message of peace and international cooperation. On February 13, 1950, he gave one of his finest political speeches to a packed Carnegie Hall peace rally, calling for negotiations with the USSR and advising Congress to appropriate millions of dollars to the National Science Foundation for studies into the causes and prevention of war. "The problem of an atomic war must not be confused by minor problems such as Communism versus capitalism," he said. "An atomic war would kill everyone, left, right, or center." His voice gaining strength, he exhorted the thousands of activists: "The world has finally come to the critical point in time at which the ultimate, irrevocable decision has to be made. This is the decision between, on the one hand, a glorious future for all humanity, and, on the other, death, devastation, and the complete destruction of civilization." At the end, he looked over the hall, drinking in the thunderous applause that rolled over him. He was not alone, after all.
Through the spring of 1950 he spoke to group after group about the arms race, the need for peace, and the new bomb and what it meant to the world. He always ended with a call for negotiations with the USSR and the need for world government.
Every talk was monitored by reporters for the anti-Communist press, by local informants for the California Committee on Un-American Activities (still called the Tenney Committee, although Tenney had given up its chairmanship to an equally fervent anti-Communist legislator) or by the FBI. The FBI's interest in Pauling had been piqued again in February, when naval intelligence sent them an anonymous note from an informant—perhaps one of Pauling's neighbors—who claimed to have s
een "high-powered radio equipment" filling one wall of the Paulings' garage. "Maybe some of these proffessors [sic] could stand a little secret investigation," the informant suggested. Although the spy equipment turned out to be a ham-radio outfit, a hobby of one of Pauling's sons, the FBI was back on his case. Hoover was especially interested in a talk Pauling gave to a small audience organized by the Pasadena Non-Partisan Committee for Peace on May 18. A reporter for the right-wing publication Alert sent the FBI's Los Angeles office a memo noting that Pauling "went into extensive details as to how the atomic bomb was made and later described how the H-bomb was made." An FBI agent was dispatched to his Caltech office to quiz him about the sources of his information. Pauling told the truth: He had read enough in public documents and published scientific reports to figure it out on his own. Hoover then suggested to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that Pauling may have violated national security. AEC representatives looked over the notes of the speech and were not worried. The estimates had been so vague, they told Hoover, that it did not appear that any security restrictions had been violated.
Rabid
The FBI could not nail Pauling, but they were about to make a case against someone close to him. Sidney Weinbaum, a Pauling research assistant for fifteen years, was, as it turned out, a Communist. Pauling had hired him in the late 1920s to make the complex mathematical calculations needed to solve crystal structures, and Weinbaum was good at it, a meticulous "human computer," as they were later called. He was interesting, besides, an accomplished pianist and two-time chess champion of Los Angeles, yet happy to work in Pauling's shadow, carefully filling research books with his neat, spidery computations. Pauling was always friendly, in a boss-worker sort of way, inviting Weinbaum and his wife over to the house for parties. But according to Weinbaum, they never talked politics.
That, it turned out, was a good thing. The son of Russian Jews who had fled the Revolution, Weinbaum became a leftist radical in the 1930s, joining a "Communist club" at Caltech, where he had plenty of opportunity to talk politics with other students and young faculty. He quit the group in 1941, then two years later quit Pauling's lab to work in the aviation industry. After the war he found a job at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
In 1949, Weinbaum's past caught up with him. He had held a security clearance for classified work ever since the war, but now his clearance was denied when it was discovered that he had had questionable contacts in his youth. The JPL immediately dropped him. Pauling took him back into his lab to work on unclassified material while Caltech appealed the case to a military review board. Weinbaum testified that he had never been a Communist. The FBI knew better and pressured him to name names, hoping to uncover a Caltech spy ring. When he refused, he was arrested on perjury charges in the spring of 1950.
The case created a small sensation in Southern California. Although no espionage was ever proved, Weinbaum, because of his work at the top-secret JPL, was the closest thing Southern California had to a Communist spy, and his case made local headlines almost daily.
Out on bail awaiting trial, Weinbaum came to Pauling for help, "distraught," Pauling remembered, with very little money to support his wife and young daughter. Weinbaum told Pauling that his wife, Lena, whom Pauling and Ava Helen knew was high-strung, was not taking the strain well. Pauling promised that he would help raise money to cover legal costs and began working with other faculty members to build a legal defense fund.
The Weinbaum-Pauling link was all that some of the more conservative members of the Caltech Board needed to convince them that Pauling himself was a Communist. They went to DuBridge and insisted that something be done about him before more bad publicity hit the school. "What the Institute had at that time were some people who were just so opposed to Communism that they were almost rabid on it," remembered Arnold Beckman, a trustee at the time. "And Linus's behavior bothered them a great deal, particularly when Sidney Weinbaum was accused and then convicted of being a Communist, and he was one of Linus's close friends. So many people thought Linus was a Communist. And Linus, being the independent character he is, didn't do anything to mollify them." Jim Page and DuBridge continued to advise moderation and patience, asking that the board wait for proof. DuBridge told the board that if it was ever proven that any Caltech faculty member was a Communist Party member, he would fire him on the spot—party members, after all, were under discipline and could not be expected to tell the truth to their students—but that the case had not been proven against Pauling. The issue split the board between those who wanted Pauling fired and those who wanted to wait. "I don't know of any issue that divided them quite as strongly as that," Beckman recalled.
It was a disaster for DuBridge no matter how it turned out. On one hand, Pauling's recent work, especially the sickle-cell hemoglobin results and the whole idea of molecular disease, was bringing his scientific reputation—and, by association, that of Caltech—to new heights. Getting rid of junior faculty was one thing, but no American scientist of Pauling's stature had ever been fired because of politics; any public move against him would certainly raise a storm of criticism within the international scientific community. On the other hand, doing nothing would enrage some important trustees and make it appear that DuBridge was soft on Communists. He placated the trustees and bought some time by monitoring the Weinbaum trial through the spring for any hints that Pauling might have been involved with the Communist Party. There were none.
Then, on June 25, 1950, Weinbaum was pushed off the front pages when Communist North Korea invaded the south. Two days later, Harry Truman announced that the United States would send in troops to repel the Reds, setting off a new round of anti-Communist fervor. The Cold War had turned hot. This was no time to coddle possible traitors.
Two days after Truman committed U.S. troops to Korea, the Caltech board of trustees moved in private to appoint a committee "to investigate and report to the board whether Dr. Pauling's services are detrimental to the Institute, and whether his appointment should be terminated." Concerned that a committee comprised solely of businessmen might be seen as one-sided, DuBridge set up a parallel committee of faculty members to provide an independent check. It was all to be done secretly and quickly. It was a way, DuBridge hoped, to close the issue without any publicity. It was the first time Caltech had ever run an internal political investigation.
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The same day, a secret panel met in a nondescript room in Washington, D.C. Before them sat a pale, nervous white-haired man in a dark suit. He was a paid FBI informer named Louis Budenz. He was naming names.
Budenz, a former Communist Party member and managing editor of the Daily Worker, had already earned national fame and a fair amount of money testifying against his old comrades. After opening his heart to HUAC in 1946, Budenz spent three thousand hours "consulting" with the FBI, then went on the "I was a former Communist" lecture circuit and began writing books about the internal Red threat. It was a decent living, but one that required coming up with new revelations every once in a while. And Budenz, like many caught up in the anti-Communist craze, had a habit of taking things a little too far. In one of his books, Men Without Faces, he had claimed to know the identities of four hundred "concealed Communists" in high places in American society. The panel he faced in Washington, D.C., on that June day in 1950 wanted all four hundred names. After running through all of the real Communists he knew, Budenz began listing anyone he could think of who might possibly be a Communist. Among the names was Linus Pauling.
J. Edgar Hoover ran checks on the named individuals. The FBI found Budenz's testimony about Pauling particularly satisfying; with a sworn statement like this, the FBI was now free to work outside of the loyalty program restrictions. Hoover ordered another full-scale investigation of Pauling. For three months, through the summer and early fall of 1950, agents attended Pauling's speeches; grilled his associates; combed through his Caltech personnel file; photocopied his Tenney Committee file; checked with HUAC, where the researcher
s had thickened their own Pauling dossier with thirty-five recent clips from the Daily People's World; took another look at their files on the Red Dean of Canterbury visit; reviewed his support of Weinbaum; and cross-checked every group he had joined against "known Communist fronts."
They could find no evidence of membership in the Communist Party. Hoover again could not take any legal action, but when the twenty-seven-page FBI report was completed on October 17, he recommended that Pauling's name be placed on the agency's Security Index, the newly created list of America's highest-profile "fellow travelers," people whom Hoover deemed dangerous to national security. The index had been created in response to the recently passed Internal Security Act, legislation that gave the government unprecedented peacetime powers to control internal political activities. Those on the FBI's index would be monitored constantly, and their files would be updated every six months.
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A week after the FBI report was completed, Pauling got a call from a wire-service reporter. "Are the charges true that Senator McCarthy leveled at you?" the reporter asked. Pauling had heard nothing of any charges. "He called you a security risk, along with six other Communist-linked atomic scientists," the reporter said. "He said you had a 'well nigh incredible record' of membership in Communist-front organizations. Is that true?" Pauling had been watching the meteoric rise of McCarthy, an ascent fueled by flimsy and outrageous accusations eagerly spread by the press. He had not heard of any charges, he repeated. "I have been working in support of the international policy that would lead to peace and avert an atomic war, and I assume that that is what Senator McCarthy is referring to."
The next day Pauling’s name was in every major paper in the nation. "McCarthy Says Reds Infiltrate Atom Projects," blared the New York Herald Tribune. This was a random shot by McCarthy, with Pauling's name pulled from the Budenz testimony and inserted among the names of researchers who were actually working on bomb projects. The charges were vague, no evidence was presented, and nothing more would come of it; after the headlines were made, the senator swiveled his sights to other targets.
