Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  This flirtation with eugenics was a reminder of what might happen if scientists really did run society. But it was a small side issue to Pauling, a subcategory of his greater interest in using molecules to track evolution.

  To Pauling, the idea of the "molecular clock" was simply more proof of what he had been saying for forty years: Everything grew out of molecular structure. Chemistry, medicine, evolution, and brain function were matters of molecular structure. "The appearance of the concept of good and evil that was interpreted by Man as his painful expulsion from Paradise probably was a molecular disease that turned out to be evolution," he said. There was no reason to invoke superstition or "élan vital" or religious dogma to explain life. "Life," he wrote in 1962, "is a relationship between molecules."

  Space Wars

  Pauling was operating on a level that Ernest Swift cared little about. What Swift cared about as director of the Caltech Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering was that Pauling was rarely there to teach his classes, take part in administrative duties, or oversee his laboratories. He was always off in another part of the world making trouble about nuclear testing and writing inflammatory telegrams to the president. Swift would walk the halls and peer into Pauling's research suites and raise an eyebrow at what he saw there: medical doctors running around with tubes of urine and gorilla blood, biochemists giving knockout drops to goldfish.

  Under Swift's guidance, the chemistry division was changing, and Pauling's people did not fit in. "Some of them," he suggested, "were not of the caliber and their projects were not of the nature that we would normally welcome." Corey was a good researcher, as were Schomaker and a few others from Pauling's earlier days. "But there were others," Swift said, "particularly those doing more medical or biochemical things, that were problems."

  Swift was hiring more orthodox chemists, and he was short on space. Pauling's labs in Church were the most likely target for expansion—some of them seemed half empty, after all—and there was agreement among most of the division members that some should be offered to more productive researchers. But Swift would not confront Pauling. Despite his feelings about what was right for the division, he had served under him for too many years and seen him achieve too much to reward him at the end of his career by stripping him of his laboratory facilities. "[Swift] was terribly distressed about it and hated to push Pauling around," DuBridge remembered. He retired in early 1963 and left the problem to his successor.

  Jack Roberts, a talented organic chemist, took the reins of the division. He was relatively young, did not much care about Pauling's political work one way or another, had a history of independent thinking, and, in his new role, was eager to prove himself to the Caltech president and board of trustees. If more space was needed, as Swift and DuBridge claimed, he would provide it. One of the first things Roberts did as chair was to meet with Pauling and explain to him the needs of the division. He remembered that Pauling, while not happy with the conversation, civilly agreed to reduce his space.

  Pauling's memories were more detailed. Roberts, he said, told him, "This medical stuff is out of place," demanded that he stop the mental disease project within two months, and insisted that he give up half his lab space. Pauling, unwilling to fire research people on such short notice, countered with a proposal to give up his own office and gradually phase out the anesthesia work. The dispute went to an appropriate chemistry division committee, which brokered a compromise in which Pauling gave up a smaller amount of space.

  It was a nasty incident and an indication of just how badly Pauling's relationship with his own division had deteriorated. "Pauling just choked at this," DuBridge remembered. "This, he thought was the ultimate insult—to ask him to give up his research space."

  It was a new era at Caltech, a time when the stars again were physicists, for example, Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, a period marked by a relative decline in chemistry. The men of Pauling's era were disappearing; an especially deep loss was that of his old friend and grand plan coconspirator George Beadle, who left in 1961 to become chancellor of the University of Chicago—a decision made easier, Beadle would later say, because of how badly Caltech treated Pauling. Although the division of biology, with Delbruck still around, remained close to and impressed by Pauling's research, it now seemed that the rest of Caltech had forgotten what he had done for it. But Pauling continued to hold his tongue about internal policy decisions at his school. He gave up the space he controlled in the lab he had built and did not say a negative word in public about any of it.

  Privately, he decided it was time to leave Caltech. This was not an entirely new notion; he had been thinking about it ever since DuBridge had bounced him out of the chairmanship five years earlier. In 1960 he had considered starting a private West Coast institute similar to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, even looked at sites for it near Monterey, but he had given up on the idea when it became clear how much money it would take. Early the next year he explored the idea of joining the staff of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station at Pacific Grove, then in the fall of 1961 seriously considered joining the University of California Medical School in San Francisco as a lecturer in the Department of Pharmacology. That, too, fell by the wayside as Pauling threw himself into peace work.

  But after the raid on his lab space, Pauling began looking in earnest. He wrote Warren Weaver, now head of the Sloan Foundation, asking if there was any chance of grant money to pay his salary for five years so he could relocate. (There was not.) He talked with Chester Carlson, the Xerox inventor who had given money for the Oslo Conference, and asked for private support. He hoped to arrange things so that he could leave Caltech by the summer of 1964 and pursue his research independently.

  It was not easy to think of leaving the place in which he had spent his entire professional life, to consider ending a relationship that had spanned more than forty years. But it was something he now felt he had to do.

  - - -

  Then came great and unexpected news on the test-ban front. The United States and the USSR, both sobered by the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, began talking seriously. On June 10, 1963, Kennedy announced that the United States would stop conducting atmospheric tests as a sign of support for the ongoing Geneva talks. A few weeks later, Khrushchev sent a countersignal, announcing Soviet approval of the idea of a partial test ban, one that would get around the thorny issue of detecting underground blasts by exempting them from the ban.

  Suddenly, in the summer of 1963, everything began moving quickly. By allowing underground tests, a number of Soviet objections were removed at a stroke. Both sides would have the option of continuing to develop nuclear weapons while at the same time preventing fallout.

  On August 5, after five years of negotiation, the United States and the USSR signed a treaty to ban all tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under the sea. This first significant weapons-limitation treaty of the Cold War period was "a shaft of light," as Kennedy put it, an end to the era of bomb-test fallout and a good omen for future negotiations. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate on September 24 and signed by the president on October 7.

  Everyone was in favor—even, with some reservations, Pauling. "We are very happy about the ratification of the bomb-test treaty by the United States Senate," Pauling wrote Schweitzer. It was not perfect— underground testing allowed the arms race to continue—but it did stop the dangers of fallout. It would not end war, but it was a step, an important first step, in the right direction.

  - - -

  In early October the Paulings returned home from a long South American trip: they had been greeted like foreign diplomats by the presidents of several nations. Clifford and Virginia Durr, peace and civil rights activists from Virginia, were visiting and giving lectures and talks in California, and the Paulings invited them to their Deer Flat Ranch in Big Sur for a short visit. In the small cabin, sitting around a rough table in front of the stove, the four raised their glasses in a dinner toast: Th
e bomb-test treaty had gone into effect that day, October 10.

  The next morning, as they were eating breakfast, they were surprised by a knock at the door. It wasn't often that anyone made it to the ranch, especially that early in the morning. It was a forest ranger from the nearby Salmon Creek station, who said that the Paulings' daughter had called—the ranch still had no telephone—and asked that he fetch Pauling to call her back. Pauling, thinking there was some sort of emergency, was ready to leave without finishing his meal, but the ranger assured him that it wasn't that serious. After the Paulings and Durrs finished their breakfast, Linus and Ava Helen walked the mile up the hill and down the road to the ranger station.

  When they finally got Linda on the line, she said, "Daddy, have you heard the news?"

  "No," Pauling said. "What news?"

  Linda's voice rose on the other end of the line. "You've been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!"

  Pauling held the receiver in his hand without saying anything. Then he handed it to his wife.

  For perhaps the first time in his life, he was speechless.

  CHAPTER 22

  Nomads

  The Peacenik Prize

  Pauling found his voice. As media calls inundated the tiny ranger station, he was told what had happened: The Norwegian Parliament's Nobel Prize Committee had made an unprecedented announcement the day the limited-test-ban treaty went into effect. Two Nobel Peace Prizes were being awarded: one to Linus Pauling, for the previous year, 1962—a year in which, without explanation, the committee awarded no Peace Prize—and the 1963 prize to the International Red Cross.

  The news caught Pauling completely off guard. He spent four hours expressing amazement to the reporters from around the world who managed to get through to the station. He was pleased, he said again and again, that his work for peace had been so honored. During one interview, a strange voice broke in and exclaimed, "God bless you, Dr. Pauling!" The abashed ranger explained that they were on a party line and that people up and down that stretch of coast were probably sharing vicariously in the excitement.

  An American winning the Nobel Peace Prize was not unheard of— George C. Marshall and Ralph Bunche had won during the fifties— but it was rare enough to make big news, and by the time Pauling had hung up the phone and returned to his cabin, the media circus had started in earnest. Reporters and photographers, flying into small airstrips in Monterey and at the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, descended on the remote ranch in rented cars. The Paulings decided that they had better drive back to Pasadena.

  They arrived to find reporters setting up camp in Ava Helen's garden, television cameras whirring and flashbulbs popping, telegrams arriving by the score, the phone ringing nonstop. Pauling held a short news conference in which he thanked the Nobel Committee and offered his opinion that the award might now make it respectable to work for peace in the United States. Then they pushed out the reporters and tried to come back to earth.

  Pauling was jubilant. For years he had been snubbed, maligned, and pressured because of his peace work. Now he was vindicated. How could anyone say he had been misguided when the world recognized the value of his efforts in this way? As he and Ava Helen talked about it, he realized something else: No one in history had ever won two unshared Nobel Prizes. Ava Helen was quick to point out that Marie Curie had also won two, but Pauling noted that she had shared one of hers. His were solo.

  At least they were solo technically. Pauling certainly agreed with a number of congratulatory notes that mentioned that Ava Helen should have been a cowinner, and she herself was not shy about sharing in the glory. "We think of this honor as an indication of the Tightness of our position during these many years," Ava Helen wrote a friend, gently alluding to her own role in Pauling's political activism. "You know, of course, my husband would have preferred to have remained quietly in his laboratory thinking about his scientific problems. However, people are more important than scientific truths. . . ." In every public statement Pauling made about the prize, he was also careful to say that it should be seen as recognition of the work of Bertrand Russell and the efforts of antibomb peace workers throughout the world.

  But when all was said and done, the prize was his, and it meant more to Pauling than any of the many other awards he had ever won. "I got the Nobel Prize in chemistry just because I had been doing something that I liked to do and could do pretty effectively . . . and having a good time. I was doing what I would have preferred to do if I could have done anything at all in the whole world, and to get the Nobel Prize for doing something you like to do, well, it's nice, but as I say, I would have done it anyway," he told an interviewer. On the other hand, "I gave over 500 public lectures about radioactive fallout and nuclear war and the need for stopping the bomb tests in the atmosphere and the need for eliminating war ultimately. You know, I didn't enjoy giving these lectures. ... I was doing something that I didn't care to do very much, except for reasons of morality and conviction. I sort of got pushed into this. ... So when I received word in 1963 that I had been given the Nobel Prize, I felt that that showed that the sacrifice that I had made was worthwhile."

  - - -

  The Nobel Peace Prize expanded Pauling's options. The monetary award was fifty thousand dollars—three years' worth of Caltech salary—and he and Ava Helen immediately started planning how it could be used to build a new, modern home to replace the old cabin at Deer Flat Ranch.

  It also solidified his decision to leave Caltech.

  The morning Pauling returned to Pasadena, the local paper carried DuBridge's reaction to the latest honor for his brilliant and troublesome professor: "The Nobel Peace Prize is a spectacular recognition of Dr. Pauling's long and strenuous efforts to bring before the people of the world the dangers of nuclear war and the importance of a test ban agreement," the Caltech president said. But then he made the mistake of adding, "Though many people have disapproved of some of his methods and activities, he has, nevertheless, made a substantial impact on world opinion, as this award clearly proves."

  Pauling was looking for reasons to leave Caltech, and DuBridge's statement provided him with a decisive one. In Pauling's mind, he had just lifted Caltech to a new height of international fame by making it home to the only living double Nobelist. DuBridge's response was to emphasize that many people thought his "methods and activities" were wrong. There was no word of personal congratulations, no indication of institutional pride. When Ava Helen read the statement, she was furious, and Linda phoned the president's office "in high dudgeon," to excoriate DuBridge for his treatment of her father.

  Elsewhere at Caltech the response was mixed. Pauling's research group was overjoyed, decorating his office with placards—"Pauling Puts Pace in the Peace Race"—and crowding around with champagne, cake, and congratulations. An especially poignant moment came when Corey, who knew better than anyone what Pauling's commitment to peace had cost him in scientific terms, walked into Pauling's office and gave him a silent embrace.

  But the rest of the chemistry division and the Caltech administration were strangely quiet. Congratulations were few and perfunctory, and there was no indication of any plan for a celebration of any sort.

  The public reaction to Pauling's prize was also deeply split. The small papers of the left-wing press and a few big papers, most notably the Washington Post, were congratulatory, but most of the mainstream media—generally slavish in its adulation of new Nobelists—was unusually critical. If anyone deserved the prize, the editorial argument went, it was Kennedy, whose tough stand during the Cuban Missile Crisis had put the Soviets on notice that they'd better negotiate. Kennedy had achieved peace the way Americans liked: by staring down an adversary. Pauling, by contrast, was an appeaser, a "placarding peacenik," as the New York Herald-Tribune put it. The Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal said that Pauling's prize was really a reward for the U.S. pro-Communist movement. The Luce magazines were especially harsh, with Time using the occasion of the award as an excuse to once again list Pauli
ng's record of Communist-front associations and Life titling its editorial about the award "A Weird Insult from Norway." The Life piece was unprecedented in its viciousness: "However distinguished as a chemist, the eccentric Dr. Pauling and his weird politics have never been taken seriously by American opinion." It concluded that the award was "an extraordinary insult to America." Instead of basking in adulation, Pauling found himself a few days after the prize announcement writing Henry Luce "to express my indignation, and my contempt for your magazine."

  As a former president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), he expected that the organization would congratulate him, but he was disappointed here as well. The ACS magazine snubbed him, virtually ignoring his prize, running only a single paragraph about it buried in the back pages of one issue.

  This chorus of disapproval was surprising to Pauling, and hurtful. As usual, however, he swallowed his emotional response and moved briskly ahead as though it did not matter.

  But it did matter, deeply. The unexpectedness of the prize, followed quickly by his disappointment at how it was received both nationally and at Caltech, upset Pauling. He reacted quickly, rashly, and in ways that would change the course of his life.

  - - -

  On October 18, exactly one week after learning he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Pauling held a press conference in the living room of his Sierra Madre house. As cameras whirred and clicked, he read a prepared statement. He was taking a leave of absence from Caltech, he said, to take a position at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI), a Santa Barbara-based think tank devoted to studying political and social issues. In answer to questions, Pauling insisted that there was "no rift" between him and Caltech; the decision to move on, he said, reflected a change in his personal priorities and had been planned before the prize. He cut the questions short and ushered out the press.