Maker of Patterns
Page 36
JUNE 30, 1968
I was invited to a meeting of the Defense Science Board, a high-level body of which I am not a member, to discuss nuclear policy. I do not have the illusion that my words at a meeting like this can change anything much. But at least I had something definite to say, and I said it. In general terms, what I had to say was, “Remember 1914.” The professional soldiers spend so many years working out their elaborate war plans that they forget the essential difference between plans and reality. Perhaps I helped to bring them a little closer to reality. It is an odd thing to go to a meeting like this where one tries to influence decisions that may mean life or death to whole countries, particularly in Western Europe. If I have had any good effect, I will never know it. The meeting was thoroughly enjoyable on a personal level, everybody calling one another Fred, Freeman, Sid, etc., and half the time joking. It might have been a lively college debating society. But for me at least, after my experiences at Bomber Command twenty-five years ago, it was not just an intellectual exercise.
In the spring of 1969 I spent a term teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I slept in a guest room at the faculty club. That spring was a time of great turmoil at many universities, including Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Harvard, with rebellious students going on strike and occupying academic buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The violence was worst at Berkeley, where police invaded the campus and many students were arrested. At Santa Barbara and Harvard, protests were mostly nonviolent.
APRIL 12, 1969, FACULTY CLUB, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
I was wakened at six-thirty in the morning by a tremendous crash, followed by some shouts of “help.” I thought somebody must have driven a car into this building at seventy miles an hour. I discovered then that I am after all a coward. Instead of running out immediately to the rescue, I took about a minute to pull myself together, to face whatever had to be faced. In that minute I was somehow paralyzed. And in that minute a man burned to death. I will not forgive myself for this.
When I did run out, I found it was not a car crash but a bomb explosion. Two men were already helping the injured one, and they had quickly carried him into an ornamental pool which put out his burning clothes. He was sitting there in the pool, and he did not look too bad. I could see only that his legs were burned and one hand injured. I then telephoned for an ambulance but somebody had already called. In a few minutes the ambulance men came and put him on a stretcher and took him away to the hospital. The fire in the faculty club was easily put out. At that point I assumed that we had been lucky. Only later I heard that the man was burned so extensively that he is not likely to live. And I cannot escape some responsibility for this. The man was the caretaker of the building, and he found a large package lying in front of the door. It was booby-trapped to explode when he opened it. It was made with a stick of explosive in a container of petrol so that he was well showered with burning petrol. It seems unlikely that we shall find out who placed the bomb. Undoubtedly the radical students will be blamed for it. They have organized a “free university” in the student center next door, including courses in guerrilla warfare and the manufacture of homemade weapons. They have also been protesting the existence of the faculty club as an infringement of their rights.
What is one to make of all this? I look down now from my window, and there is the little pool only ten feet below, where the man was sitting yesterday. Around the edge the blood and ashes are still there. He did not bleed much. If I had been a little quicker, I could have dragged him into the pool in a few seconds. But I did not even look out of the window until it was too late.
APRIL 20, 1969, FACULTY CLUB, UC SANTA BARBARA
It seems a long time ago that Dover Sharp was sitting burned in the little wading pool. He died on Sunday a week ago. I was called in by the police investigating the murder, but I was not able to tell them anything useful. Today the children were running and splashing in the little pool just as if nothing had happened. I remember one of William Blake’s proverbs that I used to be fond of when I was young: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” They certainly believe in that here.
It is interesting to me that you feel more confident about George than about Esther. I would say that this is because you do not know George. I admire the courage and independence of each of them. But George is cursed with his mother’s temperament while Esther has mine. He will always do everything the hard way. I hope for the best, but I will be surprised if he comes through a year on his own without serious trouble. I do not know whether George got accepted at Harvard. Harvard itself is in such a mess just now that we may not know for some time. I had a long and full letter from Esther describing her role in the events of this week. At the mass meeting in the football stadium, Esther went to the microphone in front of ten thousand students and made a speech arguing for peace and moderation. She also rebelled against the majority on the Crimson editorial board who were in favour of coercion. I think she is all right. At least she is getting an education out of this, if not in the way I had intended. And she is clearly on the side of sanity.
MAY 10, 1969, UC SANTA BARBARA
I spent the last few days writing a testimony about missile defense for the Senate Committee on Armed Services. I am in favor of defense but almost all my friends are against it. The crucial Senate vote on the question will come in about a month from now. I wrote a dry and technical testimony without much hope that it will convince anybody. But then I received a copy of the testimony of Wolfgang Panofsky, the chief scientific witness against Missile Defense. He is the son of our old neighbour Panofsky who died two years ago. Panofsky made a good statement, solidly backed up with facts and figures. But at the end of his statement Panofsky argued that we do not need a missile defense against China because we can always destroy the Chinese missiles with a preemptive strike if the necessity arises. When I saw this I said, “Now the Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” like Thomas Huxley in his famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce about the descent of man. I put into my statement the following paragraph:
I am amazed at the cheerfulness with which some of my scientific colleagues, arguing against the deployment of missile defense, speak of our ability to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against China. Anybody who considers a preemptive strike to be preferable to missile defense has not understood what the Cuban missile crisis was all about. The whole point of the Cuban missile crisis was that President Kennedy succeeded, with great wisdom and some luck, in finding a way to avoid a preemptive strike. Precisely to enable some future president to play it cool like Kennedy, to resist pressures to make a preemptive strike in a moment of desperate crisis, this is to my mind the main purpose of missile defense. It is not so much to save our skins as to save our souls.
This paragraph came to me like a flash of lightning, and I think it will get through to the senators. It is true, and it is in language they cannot fail to understand. Especially it is designed to speak to Senator Edward Kennedy who is the leader of the opposition to missile defense. If you read in the newspaper that Senator Kennedy changed his mind, you will know why.
Senator Kennedy did not change his mind, but the United States continued to develop and deploy missile defense, with my support. I support missile defense as a long-range strategy to replace offensive nuclear forces and possible preemptive strikes. Instead, we have deployed missile defense in a halfhearted way, as an addition to offensive forces and possible preemptive strikes. I still have hopes that we will one day shift to a genuinely defensive strategy, getting rid of offensive forces and using missile defense as the basis of a more stable world.
MAY 20, 1969
George has decided to undertake an extremely rugged walking tour alone. He will walk down the Continental Divide over the highest part of the Rocky Mountain country. It will take him forty days, and I suppose he is aware of the biblical precedent. Imme and I talked with him at length about the details of his plan. He has tried to foresee
all the difficulties. He will nowhere be further than three days walk from some kind of road. He has ordered seventy large-scale maps which he will carry along with him, and also seven smaller-scale maps which he will leave with us with his intended route marked on them. So if he is missing, we will know where to send a rescue party. He is collecting an elaborate medical kit so he can deal with anything from diarrhea to snakebite. He has also a fat book with pictures of all the edible and poisonous plants of the Rocky Mountains, which he will carry so he can live on the country. Imme and I agreed that we should let him go. The risks are real. But it is obviously necessary to George’s spirit to do something extraordinary. We are impressed with the professional way he is making his preparations. When I said good-bye to him this morning he looked grateful and happy.
When George was preparing his trip, I asked him whether it would not be safer to take a friend with him. With two people, if one was sick or injured, the other could walk down to find help. George replied, “I would be delighted to take a friend along if there were anybody I could stand to live with for six weeks.”
JULY 6, 1969
George met ferocious and continued snowstorms, quite unusual at this time of year, and the high country was so deep in soft snow that it was completely impassible. He struggled for a week and then retreated to Chicago. I am glad that he had the sense to retreat when things became impossible. He will start again further south in a few days from now and hopes to do the second half of his originally planned route. I had two good letters from him from up in the mountains. He may have learned something from this fiasco.
AUGUST 9, 1969
We spent two days glued to the TV watching the moon trip. For me the moon program came as a surprise. I had expected they would do their best to make it into a public spectacle, but I had no idea this would be possible on the very first trip. I had known what the astronauts would be doing, but I had not imagined that they could have a TV camera set up in the right place so that one could see all this as it was happening. I was astonished at the way the astronauts talked. Normally they say very little when they are working, but for the whole two and a half hours on the moon they kept up a continuous stream of conversation, full of information and clearly understandable. The operation was obviously planned as a theatrical production with the whole world for audience, but I had not imagined it could be done so effectively. From a scientific point of view I am much more excited by the Mars pictures which came back this week. Both the Mars flights were brilliantly successful and have given about a hundred times more information about Mars than we had before.
George came to see me in Boulder the day before I left. He spent altogether only two weeks on the high mountains instead of the six he had planned. The first time he went up, there was too much snow to move. The second time he found the going very easy, and he covered twice the distance he had expected each day. Now he is at the Sierra Club camp and earning his keep there.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1969
I quote a postcard which arrived for George yesterday: “Dear George, wherever you are, thank you for your great work in the San Juans. Your initiative and effort and attitude made the camp operate very smoothly. Whenever you get your check, it will include a bonus in appreciation of your help. Hope you’ll be available for the Wind Rivers next year.”
The postcard came from the manager of the Sierra Club camp where George was a counselor. At this camp he got to know Barbara Brower, then a teenager, the daughter of the Sierra Club director David Brower. As a result, he was invited to visit the Brower home. He was informally adopted into the Brower family and became a friend of David Brower, Anne Brower, and their sons Kenneth, Robert, and John, who became for him the brothers his own family lacked.
NOVEMBER 30, 1969
A thing happened this week which makes me particularly happy, the announcement of Nixon that he will renounce and destroy all biological weapons. This was largely brought about by a friend of mine, Matthew Meselson, who shared an office with me at the Disarmament Agency in Washington six years ago. Meselson is a Harvard biologist. He spent a great part of his time for the last six years quietly campaigning against biological weapons. Finally his efforts came to fruition this week. I wish I had been equally effective.
Nixon was able to move decisively to get rid of biological weapons because he made the move unilaterally. He did not need to negotiate details of the move either with the Soviet Union or with the U.S. Senate. Twenty years later George Bush senior made a similar unilateral move getting rid of half of our nuclear weapons. Bush removed all the nuclear weapons from the U.S. Army and from the surface navy, leaving only the nuclear weapons belonging to the air force and the submarine navy. These two unilateral moves were the most substantial acts of disarmament in our history. Unfortunately our academic experts are always talking about disarmament reached by international negotiation rather than unilaterally. In my opinion, major and important acts of disarmament will always be easier to make unilaterally. It was also an advantage that both Nixon and Bush were right-wing Republicans. For a Democrat, such a unilateral move would be much more difficult.
Esther telephoned that she is hoping to have a summer job working for Senator [George] McGovern, one of our most intelligent and peace-loving senators. It would be a great experience for her if she is accepted. A brief letter from George announcing that he is happily settled at Berkeley and is living on board a twenty-two-foot sloop in the San Francisco Bay. It sounds like an idyllic existence. He is intending to buy the boat and eventually to sail her. She was built in England nine years ago and came to San Francisco under her own sail. So one day you should expect him to come sailing up Southampton Water to pay you a visit. I hope he will learn how to sail before trying any big voyages.
Soon after I received this letter from George, he disappeared from Berkeley. His sister Katrin was then living in Vancouver. With some help from Katrin, he went to join her in Vancouver. I told him that I wholeheartedly approved of his move to Canada. At that time Katrin had another friend, Jason Halm, who had been drafted into the U.S. Army and was already on his way to Vietnam. Jason was in the back of an army car driving through San Francisco to meet the boat taking him to Vietnam, and at the last possible moment he quietly dropped out of the car. With some help from Katrin he also arrived in Vancouver. Soon after that Jason and Katrin were married. They invited George to attend their wedding, and during his visit he answered a newspaper advertisement for a job on a boat, and stayed. George and Jason were welcomed generously by the Canadian government and later became Canadian citizens. George moved out of the Halm household and built himself a comfortable home a hundred feet up in a tall Douglas fir tree overlooking the ocean a few miles north of Vancouver. A few years later, Kenneth Brower published The Starship and the Canoe (1978), which described George’s life in Canada.
FEBRUARY 28, 1970
I was taking care of Stephen Hawking, a young English astrophysicist who came here for a six-day visit. I had never got to know him till this week. Stephen is a brilliant young man who is now dying in the advanced stages of a paralytic nerve disease. He got the disease when he was twenty-one and he is now twenty-eight, so his whole professional life has been lived under sentence of death. In the last few years he has produced a succession of brilliant papers on general relativity. In conversation he has one of the quickest and most penetrating minds I have come across. He is confined to a wheelchair, can barely hold his head upright, and his speech is hard to understand. These days while Stephen was here, I was in a state of acute depression thinking about him, except for the hours when I was actually with him. As soon as you are with him, you cannot feel miserable, he radiates such a feeling of strength and good humour. I was running after him to escape from my misery. After spending these days with him, I am not surprised that he found a girl who would marry him. They have a three-year-old son about whom Stephen talks with great pride. Stephen would only laugh if you told him this, but I think he must be some kind of saint.
• 20 •
ADVENTURES OF A PSYCHIATRIC NURSE
WHEN I WAS appointed a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, I used to say that my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse, giving consolation and comfort to the young visiting members when they suffered from loneliness or depression. The visiting members were in a highly stressful situation, facing a year or two of complete freedom, with the expectation that they should do something brilliant. If they failed to perform, given this unique opportunity, there was a real danger of psychological collapse. In my time as a professor I lost three young people whom I had invited as members, one by suicide and two who ended up in mental institutions. I do not know how many I saved. I only know that the institute is a dangerous place for young people, and as a professor, I bore a heavy responsibility for their mental health. The letters are as usual arranged chronologically, beginning with family affairs and then telling stories of psychological disasters.
One of the group of professors arriving at the institute in 1935 was Hetty Goldman, a famous archaeologist who spent many years excavating the ancient city of Tarsus in Turkey. When I came to Princeton, Goldman was retired, but the institute maintained an active group of archaeologists led by Homer Thompson. Thompson organized archaeological lectures for the general public. The lectures were well advertised and well attended. My hometown Winchester, where my parents lived, sixty-one miles southwest of London, was also a famous archaeological site. Our house was built over a Jewish cemetery with graves of wealthy Jews who flourished in the city in the twelfth century A.D. Anywhere in the neighborhood, if you dig down a few feet, you will find historic relics. Winchester began as a Celtic city around 300 B.C., was enlarged by the Romans and further enlarged by the Saxons. It was the capital of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex where King Alfred reigned in the ninth century. After the Norman conquest, Winchester remained an important center of the royal administration, with an enormous cathedral and an enormous palace for the presiding bishop. The college where my father taught and I studied still occupies the solid stone buildings built when it was founded in 1382.