A Beautiful Mind (23 page)

It was unthinkable that such destructive power would be unleashed. Therefore RAND insisted that it was necessary to ponder the possibility.
³⁰
The rational life was worshiped to an almost absurd degree. RAND was full of men and women committed to the idea that systematic thought and quantification were the key to the most complex problems. Facts, preferably detached from emotion, convention,
and preconception, reigned supreme. If reducing complex political and military choices, including the problem of nuclear war, to mathematical formulae could produce light, why then the same approach must be good for more mundane matters. RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an “optimization problem.”
³¹

RAND was privy to the military’s most highly guarded secrets at a time when the nation was growing increasingly nervous about the safeguarding of those secrets to the point of paranoia. From the summer of 1950 on, RAND would be increasingly affected by the growing alarm over Russian access to American military secrets.
³²
It began with the Fuchs trial in the winter of 1950.
³³
Fuchs was a German émigré scientist who had fled to Britain during the war and eventually wound up working with von Neumann and Edward Teller at Los Alamos. A clandestine member of the British Communist Party, Fuchs subsequently confessed in January 1950 to passing atomic secrets to the Russians and was tried and convicted in London that February. Senator Joseph McCarthy had embarked that same month on his anticommunist campaign, accusing the federal government of security breaches.
³⁴
Four years later, in April of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer, the former head of the Manhattan Project, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and the most famous scientist in America, was declared a security risk by Eisenhower and stripped of his security clearances in the full glare of national publicity.
³⁵
The ostensible reason was Oppenheimer’s youthful left-wing associations, but the real reason, as von Neumann and most scientists testified at the time, was Oppenheimer’s refusal to support the development of the H-bomb.

The fact that McCarthy himself ultimately became a target of censure would do little to dispel the atmosphere of paranoia and intimidation at RAND, which lived on Air Force and AEC money and had projects on the H-bomb and ICBMs.
³⁶
Most of what the mathematicians worked on was not in fact classified, but that didn’t matter. RAND, which harbored a collection of oddballs like Richard Bellman (a former Princeton mathematician who had all kinds of communist associations, mostly accidental, including a chance encounter with a cousin of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), would become particularly careful about minding its
Ps
and
Qs
.
³⁷

Everybody needed a top-secret clearance. People who arrived without a temporary security clearance were banished to “quarantine” or “preclearance” and weren’t permitted to sit with everybody else. Nash’s secret clearance was granted on October 25, 1950.
³⁸
His recollection that he had a top-secret clearance — which a large contingent-in the math division did have — is probably faulty. Nash also recalls that he applied for a Q clearance in 1952.
³⁹
Any consultant to the math division who worked on Atomic Energy Commission contracts was required to have a Q clearance because of access to documents related to the construction and use of nuclear weapons. But despite a November 10, 1952, postcard to his parents telling them that he had applied for a higher clearance at RAND, Nash now says
it was never approved — meaning that his role at RAND was largely confined to highly theoretical excercises as opposed to applications of game theory concepts to actual questions of nuclear strategy — the province of men like von Neumann, Herman Kahn, and Thomas Schelling.
⁴⁰

Everyone had a safe in his office for storing classified documents, and everyone was warned about taking documents out of the building or talking out of school.
⁴¹
Papers had to be put in the safes at the end of every day. There were spot checks. There was a public address system and there were parts of the building that were off-limits to people who didn’t have a Q clearance.

By 1953, soon after Eisenhower issued a new set of security guidelines, security consciousness, in the sense of not overlooking anyone who might be thought remotely unreliable, grew.
⁴²
The Eisenhower guidelines broadened the grounds for denying a clearance or stripping someone of an existing clearance. Without a doubt, fear about potential leaks brought to a boil many simmering antagonisms against individuals and groups who posed little or no actual threat to security. Almost any sign of nonconformity, political or personal, came to be considered a potential security breach. The notion, for example, that homosexuals were unreliable, because of either poor judgment or vulnerability to blackmail, was first codified in the Eisenhower guidelines.

Like the decade itself, RAND had a split personality. Its style was informal. It tolerated quirky people. It was in some ways more democratic than a university. Almost everyone, including von Neumann, was called by his or her first name, except by the guards, never Doctor or Professor or Sir. Graduate students rubbed shoulders with full professors in a way unimaginable in most academic departments. RAND’s president, a former Douglas Aircraft executive, was a spit-and-polish man who was almost never seen in a suit and tie. All but one or two of the mathematicians, including Nash, came to work in short-sleeved shirts. Appearances were so casual that one mathematician, who found it all very déclassé, felt obliged to rebel by wearing a three-piece suit and a tie to the office every day.
⁴³

Practical jokes were as much a part of the RAND culture as pipes and crewcuts. Mathematicians and physicists mixed rubber bands into the pipe tobacco, substituted dog biscuits for cookies, and tilted desks so pencils rolled onto the floor.
⁴⁴
Wit was greatly appreciated. When John Williams, the head of RAND’s mathematics department, wrote a primer on game theory, published as a RAND study, it was illustrated with funny little cartoon figures and full of jokey examples starring John Nash, Alex Mood, Lloyd Shapley, John Milnor, and other members of the math department.
⁴⁵

The mathematicians were, as usual, the freest spirits.
⁴⁶
They had no set hours. If they wanted to come into their offices at 3:00
A.M.
, fine. Shapley, who had come back from Princeton for the summer and continued to insist on the sanctity of his sleep cycle, was rarely seen before midafternoon. Another man, an electrical engineer named Hastings, typically slept in the “shop” next to his beloved computer.
Lunches were long, much to the annoyance of RAND’s engineers, who prided themselves on sticking to a more respectable routine. The mathematicians mostly took their bag lunches to a conference room and pulled out chessboards. They invariably played Kriegspiel, usually in total silence, occasionally punctuated by a wrathful outburst from Shapley, who frequently lost his temper over an umpire’s or opponent’s error. Even though the games typically lasted well into the afternoon, they were rarely finished and finally reluctantly abandoned midgame. Poker and bridge groups met after hours.

There were no afternoon teas, formal seminars, or faculty meetings at RAND. Unlike the physicists and engineers, the mathematicians usually worked alone. The idea was that they would work on their own ideas but would help solve the myriad problems encountered by researchers, picking up problems to solve as the spirit moved them.
⁴⁷
People would drift into each other’s offices or, more frequently, simply stop to chat in the corridors near the coffee stations. The grids and courtyards of RAND’s permanent headquarters — to which the mathematics group moved in 1953, the year before Nash’s final summer at RAND — were designed, by John Williams, as it happens, “to maximize chance meetings.”
⁴⁸
Through such encounters new research was “announced” and mathematicians got hooked on problems that colleagues in other departments wanted solved. Most of the work wasn’t reported formally, and even when it was published as RAND memoranda, there was no formal approval process. A consultant would simply go to the math department secretaries, hand over a handwritten paper, and a day or two later a RAND memorandum would appear.
⁴⁹
Published reports for outside circulation didn’t go through a much more rigorous vetting process.

This copacetic atmosphere was mostly Williams’s doing.
⁵⁰
Witty and charming, weighing close to three hundred pounds, expensively suited, Williams looked like a businessman always about to reach into his pocket to pull out a wad of twenties. An astronomer from Arizona who had spent a couple of years in Princeton attending lectures in Fine Hall, playing poker, and developing an enthusiasm for the theory of games, Williams had been a dollar-a-year man in Washington during the war and became RAND’s fifth employee afterward. Williams hated flying. He loved fast cars. At one point, he spent an entire year outfitting his chocolate-brown Jaguar with a powerful Cadillac engine. It had taken substantial RAND resources (RAND had a repair shop) and considerable bravado to install the thing. Cadillac and Jaguar mechanics had both dismissed the idea as impractical, but Williams had prevailed. He disproved the mechanics’ conventional wisdom in late-night, 125–mile-an-hour drives along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Williams’s approach to management would have made him very much at home in Silicon Valley today: “Williams had a theory,” recalled his deputy, Alexander Mood, also a former Princetonian. “He believed people should be left alone. He was a great believer in basic research. He was a very relaxed administrator. That’s why people thought the math division was pretty weird.”
⁵¹
Williams’s letter to von Neumann offering the mathematician a two-hundred-dollar-a-month retainer conveys the man’s style. The letter said, “The only part of your thinking we’d like
to bid for systematically is that which you spend shaving: we’d like you to pass on to us any ideas that come to you while so engaged.”
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When Williams first arrived, RAND was a tiny annex inside a mammoth Douglas Aircraft factory where thirty thousand workers punched time cards every day. Williams was the one who freed the mathematicians from the clock and then proceeded to demand coffee and blackboards for his mathematicians, explaining that not providing these would guarantee that none of them would produce anything worthwhile. After RAND and Douglas Aircraft parted company, Williams went further. He insisted that the building be open twenty-four hours a day instead of just between eight and five. He got private offices. He set up coffee stations that had their own special full-time maintenance crew. He mollified the engineers and the Air Force generals, who wondered why the hell the mathematicians had to be allowed to be themselves.

Everyone soon knew Nash by sight. He roamed the halls incessantly.
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He was usually chewing an empty paper coffee cup that was clamped firmly between his teeth. He would glide through the corridors for hours at a time, frowning, lost in thought, shirt untucked, his powerfully built shoulders hunched forward, his sharp Nixonian nose leading the way. Sometimes he wore a small, ironic smile that suggested some secret amusement not likely to be shared with anyone he might encounter. When he did meet someone he knew, he rarely greeted him by name or even acknowledged his presence unless spoken to first, and then not always. When he wasn’t chewing a coffee cup, he whistled, often the same tune, from Bach’s
The Art of the Fugue,
over and over again.
⁵⁴

His legend had preceded him. In the eyes of his new colleagues, Arrow recalled, Nash was “a young genius who could do anything, a guy who liked solving problems.”
⁵⁵
Mathematicians who were struggling with tricky problems quickly learned to collar him by planting themselves squarely in his path. Nash’s curiosity was easily piqued, they discovered, provided that the problem struck him as interesting and the speaker mathematically competent. He was usually more than willing to step around to their offices to look at masses of messy equations on their blackboards.

Williams’s deputy, Alex Mood, was one of the first to try.
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A gentle giant of a man with a dry wit and easy manner, Mood happened to be oppressed by a problem left over from a first, ill-fated thesis attempt at Princeton before the war. He had found a better derivation of a famous solution, he felt, but his proof was overly long, too complicated, and distressingly inelegant. Could Nash come up with something “shorter, simpler”? Nash listened and stared, frowned and walked away. But the very next day, he was back at Mood’s door with a clever and entirely unanticipated solution. Nash had “sidestepped the whole induction by regarding integers as variables and sending them to revealing limits.” As much as anything else, Mood was charmed by Nash’s style. “When he found a problem,” Mood recalled, “he sat down and started attacking it immediately. He didn’t, like some of
his colleagues, browse through the library to see what related stuff had already been done.”

Williams too was immediately taken with Nash and took him under his wing. He frequently told others that Nash had greater insight into mathematical structure than any mathematician he had ever known, an extraordinary remark from a man who spent the late 1930s in Fine Hajl and was an intimate of von Neumann’s. “He knew which factors of a hundred thousand were the most important,” Williams used to say.
⁵⁷
He liked to describe how Nash would come into an office, stare at a blackboard dense with equations, and stand there silently, meditating. “Then,” Williams would say, “he’d solve the whole thing. He could
see
the structure.”