Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling
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The brief public statement covered a great deal of pain.
A few days earlier, just after the DuBridge statement hit the press, Pauling notified chemistry division head Jack Roberts that he was planning to leave Caltech permanently—"Not without regret," he wrote Roberts, "after more than 41 years that I have spent as a staff member"—and Roberts had taken the news to DuBridge. Over the next few days there were some muddled attempts at negotiating the terms of Pauling's departure—at one point it looked as if Pauling were hoping DuBridge would try to talk him out of leaving—but DuBridge was not in a negotiating mood. He was about to have a thorn removed, and it is likely he did not want to delay the process.
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Outside of his family and a few administrators, Pauling's press conference surprised everyone at Caltech. Most of the chemistry division, including people who had worked with Pauling for forty years, learned he was leaving from the newspapers. A series of quick meetings ensued as Pauling assured the staff working on his projects that they would be taken care of, that he had arranged for them to carry on at Caltech until his grants ran out.
And then, suddenly, he was gone.
Most of the faculty members were stunned. DuBridge forged ahead as though Pauling had never been there, giving nothing more than a perfunctory institutional response of regret to Pauling's announcement. After a few weeks, Max Delbruck and his colleagues in the biology division—scientists who understood the value of Pauling's recent research and had supported his antitesting work—lured him back to attend a small party in honor of the Nobel Peace Prize in the patio between the Kerckhoff and Church laboratories. It was not much compared to the grand jubilee that had accompanied Pauling's first Nobel. Many biologists showed up; a number of chemists did not. Everyone put on a happy face. But the afternoon was tinged with a feeling of sadness and loss, for Pauling and for Caltech.
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A few weeks after he quit Caltech, as Pauling was making arrangements to move to Santa Barbara, he told the ACS that he was quitting that organization as well.
In spite of the media disapproval—perhaps because of it—he was famous now, able to make a life outside of chemistry. The Associated Press voted him 1963's top newsmaker in science, and peace activists were encouraging him to run for president or at least senator from California.
He made sure that he stayed in the headlines, stealing the show at the Washington, D.C., centenary celebration of the National Academy of Sciences in late October by attacking President Kennedy's recently announced plan to send a man to the moon. Pauling called the moon project "pitiful" and said that the same amount of money needed to answer one question about the moon could answer a thousand important questions about the human body. His remarks, quoted on the front page of the Washington Post, threatened to overshadow the NAS's centennial, and the group's president, Frederick Seitz, felt compelled to snatch Pauling away from a group of reporters the next day, haul him into an empty room, and explain to him the importance of avoiding attacks on the administration during an event that was designed to highlight scientific achievements. Pauling agreed to quiet down for the good of the NAS. When they emerged, a reporter asked, "Did Dr. Seitz spank you?" Pauling looked at him for a moment, smiled, and asked, "Who can spank me?"
People could encourage him to do things, but no one could tell him what to do. At age sixty-two, Pauling was quitting the job he had held for four decades, giving up the laboratories he had designed and built, resigning from the professional society he had once headed, and starting over.
That was the way he looked at it. But to many it would seem that Pauling had cut his moorings and would spend the next decade adrift.
Oslo Again
The rest of 1963 was busy. Ava Helen went house hunting in Santa Barbara, eventually finding a small place with a beautiful garden that suited her on Hot Springs Road in the exclusive area of Montecito, and began to make moving plans. It was decided that the Pasadena house, rather than being sold on the market, would go to Linda and Barclay Kamb. Ava Helen and Pauling were also talking with an architect about a new house at Deer Flat Ranch and making arrangements for a December trip to Norway for the Nobel ceremonies.
Everything came to a halt for several days in late November when the Paulings, along with the rest of the nation, learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Despite Pauling's public differences of opinion with Kennedy regarding international policy, he had been impressed by the young president's sense of style, his panache in inviting Pauling to the White House, his ability to treat Pauling graciously despite their differences. "I liked Kennedy," Pauling would later say, "even though I quarreled with him." During the next several months, in every speech he gave about peace throughout the world, Pauling went out of his way to praise Kennedy's role in the adoption of the test-ban treaty.
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Kennedy's assassination had a direct effect on Pauling when he arrived in Oslo. A crowd of reporters and Nobel Committee officials met the Paulings as they debarked from the plane, but there was no official American delegation. The excuse was that the embassy was in mourning for the president, but it was the first time anyone could remember that the representatives of a Nobel Peace Prize winner's nation had not greeted their honored citizen upon their arrival in Norway. The head of the Nobel Committee, Gunnar Jahn, was outraged. Pauling shrugged it off as more Cold War posturing by the State Department; he was used to that.
All four of Pauling's children and his grandson Linus III joined him to enjoy three days of parties, torchlight parades, and speeches as Pauling beamed in the middle of all the attention.
The prize was awarded before a large crowd in the Festival Hall of the University of Oslo. In a brief acceptance address, Pauling credited the work of Einstein, Russell, and "thousands of others" who had labored for peace. He ended by sharing his prize with one special worker for justice: Ava Helen. "In the fight for peace and against oppression, she has been my constant and courageous companion and coworker," he told the crowd. "On her behalf, as well as my own, I express my thanks."
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Instead of returning home after the festivities, the Paulings toured Scandinavia again, spending Christmas with friends in Oslo, enjoying the snowy countryside of Sweden and Norway, then celebrating New Year's in Copenhagen. In early January they flew back to New York. By then the world community of peace activists had had time to organize a tribute for Pauling, sponsored by Bertrand Russell, Norman Cousins, Albert Schweitzer, and a dozen other luminaries, held at the Grand Ballroom of the Commodore Hotel. Three thousand people, including the ambassadors from Hungary, Ceylon, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Indonesia and official representatives from Canada, Algeria, Brazil, the USSR, Israel, India, and Norway, jammed into the room to hear the historian Henry Steele Commager compare Pauling to the ancient citizens of Athens. The Athenians, he said, like Pauling, "knew the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom to be a brave heart." Pauling capped the evening with a version of his Nobel address. At the end he was given a prolonged standing ovation.
It was a wonderful occasion, but a tiring one after their travels. Pauling was behaving as though he had the energy of a young man— he had committed himself to a strenuous series of lectures in the East after the tribute—but all of the activity and the stresses of the changes in his life started to take their toll. A blizzard hit New York, forcing the Paulings to walk on one occasion more than a mile through the snow to get back to their hotel, and both of them fell ill with colds. By the time they finished their lecture tour—met everywhere, they were happy to see, by large and enthusiastic crowds—the colds had turned into severe sinus infections.
They were ill and exhausted by the time they returned to California in February. Then they began the process of uprooting themselves, moving their household, and starting a new life.
Santa Barbara
"Terribly busy," Ava Helen wrote a friend in the summer of 1964. "We have attempted too much in too short a time
. Moreover, our move to Santa Barbara was much more of a task than we anticipated." Linda and Barclay had moved into the Sierra Madre house before Ava Helen had finished moving out, resulting in a bedlam of grandchildren, packing boxes, telephone calls, and moving men. It was a task to shoehorn all of Pauling's books and their personal effects into the smaller Santa Barbara house. At the same time, they were finishing plans for the new house at the ranch, lecturing widely, and trying to get settled in a new town.
When all the Nobel hubbub settled down, the Paulings found that Santa Barbara was a disappointment. It was hard to find the sort of liberal support group they had developed in Los Angeles, and as cosmopolitan as they now were, they began to feel a bit stifled by the small-town feeling. "It seems rather an out-of-the-way place," Ava Helen wrote a friend, "and we miss all of our friends."
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions was also not what Pauling had imagined. An outgrowth of the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, it had been established "to promote the principles of individual liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States." This vague charter was carried out through a series of symposia, publications, and conferences.
In other words, there was a great deal of talk. Pauling had been attracted to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions because it was led by Robert Hutchins, the former head of the University of Chicago, a leading liberal and a man Pauling respected, and he had hoped to use the center and its brainpower to put together, finally, what he had been pursuing for years: a scientifically based ethical system that could be used to answer political and social questions the way scientists answered questions about the natural world. He noted to himself: "I suggest a program of (1) Analyzing the world problem; (2) Deciding on some basic questions or possible axioms; (3) Discussing them, and approving or rejecting them (those approved would constitute a system of ethics); (4) Then using them to reach, one by one, a series of theorems, conclusions about the world that would have to be accepted."
This was grand, optimistic, naive thinking. And it would never come to fruition at the CSDI. Soon after arriving in Santa Barbara, Ava Helen became concerned that her husband would find the Center "altogether too superficial. Hutchins is a brilliant and witty person," she wrote, "but I think he is rather superficial himself. He gives the impression of thinking that almost anything can be solved if one is just witty enough."
After a few months, Pauling was agreeing with his wife. Talking things over was fine as long as it was a means toward an end. But at the CSDI there were endless rounds of discussion and nothing but discussion. "My complaint about the Center," he noted, "is that the great amount of talk leads to little in the way of accepted conclusions."
In addition to political work, Pauling had planned to continue some scientific studies as well. But the CSDI had neither laboratory facilities nor a history of supporting science, points that became important when Pauling applied for grant funding. The National Science Foundation (NSF), for instance, delayed one of Pauling's grant requests in 1964 because he had no laboratory; his affiliation with the center made no sense in scientific terms. When the NSF asked Oppenheimer's opinion, he replied that while Pauling was brilliant, "the institutional arrangements proposed seem idiotic."
So Pauling began looking elsewhere. For a time it looked as if the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) might work out; one of Pauling's former students, Fred Wall, had just been named head of the department of chemistry there and was thrilled with the idea of snagging a Nobelist, even part-time. Wall quickly offered Pauling an adjunct appointment and sent what he thought would be a routine recommendation up the administrative ladder for approval.
He was shocked when the UCSB chancellor rejected it. It appeared, he told Pauling with embarrassment, that Pauling's political activities had made him too controversial to work at Santa Barbara. Pauling immediately went at it with the chancellor via telephone and letter, and the issue eventually went to UC system head Clark Kerr for resolution. As Wall remembers it, a few of Kerr's trustees—perhaps remembering how Pauling had taken on the system during the loyalty-oath controversy—said they would allow Pauling to become a teacher in the UC system only over their dead bodies. The chancellor's decision held.
Pauling told Fred Wall that he would never set foot on the UCSB campus again.
Santa Barbara was not turning out well.
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But Pauling was less a citizen of Santa Barbara than he was a citizen of the world. In 1964 he and Ava Helen traveled on peace tours to Mexico, England, France, Germany, and Australia. Ava Helen, now a well-known peace activist in her own right, went on a solo trip to a Women Strike for Peace meeting in The Hague. At the airport she was delayed and eventually denied entrance to the country because "they did not want demonstrators," as one official told her. It took calls to Pauling in the United States, then his calls to the Dutch embassy in Washington, D.C., before the situation was corrected and she was admitted.
At home, they both threw themselves into a variety of projects. Pauling spent time working on an ambitious CSDI-supported project called "The Triple Revolution," a liberal proposal to change American society in response to recent advances in weaponry, automation, and human rights. When published, the ideas—including a guaranteed wage for all Americans and massive public investments in rapid transit, education, and low-cost housing—were either attacked as the work of "leftwingers, socialists, pacifists, and far-out economic theorists," or, more commonly, ignored. It was another example of the failure of the CSDI method.
In their spare time, the Paulings tried unsuccessfully to arrange a tour of Cuba, pored over everything they could find about the Kennedy assassination—the evidence convinced Pauling that the killing was organized by a cabal of Texas industrialists, right-wingers, and pro-Johnson supporters—and spent increasing amounts of time studying and speaking about a new issue: Vietnam.
"I am not quite sure why we decided to do all of this at once, but I suppose we thought we could do five times more than people usually attempt to do," Ava Helen wrote. "I am not sure this is correct, however." Her letters from this period refer constantly to her worries about the amount of stress in their lives, the way that Pauling was working himself to death, and their pessimism over Republican Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy. "Everything is fine here," Ava Helen wrote, "except that the fascists get braver all the time. . . . Perhaps the name of the Center should be 'The Center for the Study of the Malfunctioning of the Democratic Institutions of the United States.'"
The only bright spot came during the 1964 election. Not because Johnson won—"Those people who say LBJ is President but Goldwater won the election have some truth," Ava Helen wrote—but because Pauling received more than twenty-five hundred write-in votes for governor of California.
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The next two years were not happy ones. Pauling spent a decreasing fraction of his time at the CSDI and an increasing portion traveling and working on his own. The Vietnam War had now replaced the test ban issue as their primary focus. Pauling deplored the war as both unconstitutional—Johnson was waging war, he argued, without a declaration from Congress—and unnecessary. He made a strong public attack on U.S. policy in February 1965 at a CSDI-sponsored event in New York called Pacem in Terris and followed it with an appeal to world leaders, signed by eight of the ten living Peace Nobelists, to support a political settlement starting with an immediate cease-fire. Pauling sent his Vietnam Appeal to a slate of world leaders, then tried to play peacemaker by forwarding Ho Chi Minh's response to LBJ. His efforts were ignored by the White House.
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His only scientific tools now a pencil, paper, and slide rule, Pauling turned in the summer of 1965 to pure physics, working on a new theory of the structure of atomic nuclei. Here again, he took on the task from the viewpoint of an atomic architect. The result, which he called the "close-packed spheron theory," described the nucleus in the same w
ay he described the structure of crystals, as an aggregate of particles that logically assumed a certain form because of size and charge considerations. It was his attempt to do for nuclear physics what Pauling's rules had done for crystallography in the 1920s. It was an interesting simplification of existing theories, but it did not really break much new theoretical ground and received only modest interest from physicists when it was unveiled at the NAS meeting in the fall of 1965.
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By the time he celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in February 1966, Pauling was increasingly restless and unfocused. He had no research group, no definitive scientific problem to work on, no absorbing political fight to which to devote himself.
There were fights, however, that he had started in other areas, notably the courtrooms hearing his lawsuits. Some had died a natural death during the preceding years. The second suit he had helped initiate against the Department of Defense, for instance, had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which finally made it clear in mid-1964 that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue.