A Beautiful Mind (37 page)

One morning at the very end of the month, the head of RAND’s security detail got a call from the Santa Monica police station,
⁵
which, as it happened, wasn’t far from RAND’s new headquarters on the far side of Main. It seemed that two cops in vice, one decoy and one arresting officer named John Otto Mattson,
⁶
had picked up a young guy in a men’s bathroom in Palisades Park in the very early morning. He had been arrested, charged with indecent exposure, a misdemeanor, and released.
⁷
The man, who looked to be in his mid-twenties, claimed that he was a mathematician employed by RAND. Was he?

The RAND lieutenant immediately confirmed that Nash was indeed a RAND employee. He took down the details of the arrest, thanked the cop for the backchannel heads-up, and, as soon as he’d hung up the phone, practically ran down the hall to the office of Richard Best, RAND’s manager of security.

Best was a tall, good-looking Navy man who had survived the battle of Midway only to suffer a prolonged and nearly fatal bout of tuberculosis.
⁸
After his discharge, he wound up at RAND soon after RAND had moved to Fourth and Broadway and was assigned to the “front office” where RAND’s handful of top executives was
clustered. Discreet and capable, Best had an easy manner that made him popular both with his bosses and with RAND’s rank and file. His first assignment was to set up RAND’s library, but he quickly adopted the role of general factotum and troubleshooter. In 1953, after the new Eisenhower security guidelines were issued,
⁹
Best somewhat reluctantly agreed to accept the job of security manager. He disliked the McCarthy hysteria over spies and security leaks and thought all the poking around in individuals’ private lives was nasty and not altogether necessary. But he felt he owed RAND, which had kept him on after he suffered a relapse of his illness, and he recognized that RAND couldn’t afford any public-relations disasters.

Best listened carefully, but what was going to happen next was clear. Nash had a top-secret security clearance.
¹⁰
He’d been picked up in a “police trap.”
¹¹
He’d have to go. Best was a Truman liberal who didn’t like the McCarthy witch hunts, and he couldn’t understand what would make a young cop join a “dirty detail like vice.” But he was responsible for enforcing the new security guidelines and the guidelines specifically forbade anyone suspected of homosexual activity to hold a security clearance. Criminal conduct and “sexual perversion” were both grounds for denying or canceling a clearance.
¹²
Vulnerability to blackmail — which was thought to apply to all homosexuals regardless of whether they were open or not — and, indeed, any behavior hinting at a “reckless nature indicating poor judgment” — were also grounds.
¹³

In its early days, RAND had been rather nonchalant about security matters. It hired Nancy Nimitz, the admiral’s daughter, even though she had gone to too many communist front meetings at Radcliffe and Harvard to have a prayer of working for the CIA as she had wished.
¹⁴
It had done its best to defend the mathematician Richard Bellman, a flamboyant character who not only had a wife who had been in the Communist Party but had somehow managed to befriend a cousin of the Rosenbergs on an airplane flight.
¹⁵
One of its top mathematicians in the late 1940s and the author of a book on game theory that is still cited was J. C. C. McKinsey, an open homosexual.
¹⁶
But McKinsey was one of the first victims of the increasingly suspicious and intolerant attitude. No matter that McKinsey was completely open about his homosexual lifestyle and that his research was highly theoretical, thus making him an unlikely target for blackmail. McKinsey was forced to leave RAND.
¹⁷
The de facto prohibition against homosexuals and suspected homosexuals was so strong, then and later, that the director of the national security program testified in 1972 that “it was conceivable that an ongoing [sic] homosexual might be granted a security clearance, but that he could not think of a single case where it had been granted” in the two decades since he had been in his job.
¹⁸

Nash’s arrest was a crisis that had to be dealt with on the spot. Best told Williams the bad news. Williams was genuinely regretful though not especially shocked. Best recalls Williams as being “very open, very relaxed, but appalled that such a valuable researcher as Nash would be lost to RAND.” Williams told Best
that Nash was “a nut, an eccentric,” but an extraordinary mathematician, one of the most brilliant he had encountered. But he did not question for a minute that Nash would have to go.

Nash was not the first RAND employee to be caught in one of the Santa Monica police traps. Muscle Beach, between the Santa Monica pier and the little beach community of Venice, was a magnet for bodybuilders and the biggest homosexual pickup scene in the Malibu bay area.
¹⁹
In the early 1950s, the Santa Monica police were running regular undercover operations to entrap homosexuals with the aim of driving them out of town. “One cop follows a guy into the head and makes a remark. If he’s accepted, a second cop comes in and arrests him,” explained Best. The police rarely stopped at the arrest itself but, in an act of special vindictiveness, almost always notified the man’s employer.
²⁰
“We lost five or six people to police programs over a period of several years,” said Best.

Normally the department head, in this case Williams, would fire the employee personally. However, Best and his boss, Steve Jeffries, went around to Nash’s office and confronted him with the bad news themselves.
²¹
Nash, for a change, was at his desk. He did not ask what they were doing there but just stared at them. The two men closed the door and said they had something to discuss. Best’s manner was unthreatening but direct and he proceeded calmly. RAND would be forced immediately to suspend Nash’s Air Force clearance.
²²
The Air Force would be notified.
²³
And — this was the bottom line — Nash’s consulting arrangement with RAND was over for good.

“You’re too rich for our blood, John,” he concluded.

Best was nonplussed by Nash’s reaction. Nash did not appear shaken or embarrassed, as Best had anticipated. Indeed, he seemed to be having trouble believing that Best and Jeffries were serious. “Nash didn’t take it all that hard,” said Best. “He denied that he had been trying to pick up the cop and tended to scoff at the notion that he could be a homosexual. “I’m not a homosexual,” Best quotes Nash as saying. “I like women.” He then did something that puzzled Best and shocked him a little. “He pulled a picture out of his wallet and showed us a picture of a woman and a little boy. ’Here’s the woman I’m going to marry and our son.’ ”

Best ignored the picture. He asked Nash what he’d been doing in Palisades Park at 2:00
A.M.
Nash responded by saying that he had merely been engaging in an experiment. The phrase Nash kept repeating was something to the effect that he was “merely observing behavioral characteristics.”
²⁴
Best recalled retorting, “But John, the police picked you up. You were found doing such and so.” Best repeated what he knew of the police report in detail. Recalling the incident in 1996, Best said: “Nash was charged with ’indecent exposure.’ That’s going into a public head and making a come-on to another man. That means taking out your penis and masturbating. That’s the come-on.” Best made it clear that it didn’t really matter whether the cops were telling the truth or not. “The very act of charging you makes it impossible for you to continue here,” he told Nash.

Jeffries and Best told Nash that he would have to leave his office right away.
They escorted him from the building. They would clear out his desk and send his personal papers and belongings, they said. It was all done very politely, with no hint of vindictiveness. Nash had the option of working in quarantine, the preclearance room located just beyond the main lobby. Or, if he preferred, he could finish up whatever he was working on at home.

What was Nash’s reaction? Due to leave Santa Monica in another week or so anyway, he did not decamp immediately, though Best doesn’t remember whether he returned to the RAND building. “He left in a week or two weeks. Not helterskelter,” Best recalled. What was going through Nash’s mind in that interval? Was he angry? Depressed? Frightened? Was he thinking of approaching Williams or Mood with his version of events? Did he try to have RAND’s decision reversed? Generally, of course, people did not. Fearful of scandal and aware of the contempt with which any hint of homosexuality was viewed, people in Nash’s shoes were usually only too happy to slink away without a murmur of protest.

In the end, Nash did what he had learned to do in less extreme circumstances. He acted, weirdly, as if nothing had happened. He played the role of observer of his own drama, as if it were all a game or some intriguing experiment in human behavior, focusing neither on the emotions of people around him nor on his own, but on moves and countermoves. In his first postcard home that September, he described — with remarkable detachment — another kind of storm: “The hurricane was a fascinating experience.”
²⁵
At some point he told his parents he’d had trouble with his RAND security clearance, blaming it on the fact that his mentor at MIT, Norman Levinson, was a former communist who had been hauled before HUAC that year.

Meanwhile, the highly efficient RAND machinery ground on. Best said: “We withdrew his clearances and notified the Air Force of the charges that had been made.” RAND negotiated with the Santa Monica police, who wound up dropping the charge in return for RAND’s assurance that Nash had been fired and was leaving the state for good. According to Best, such deals were typical. In any case, the arrest did not make
The Evening Outlook
and any record of it has long since been expunged from police files and court records.

Alexander Mood didn’t try to keep the arrest a secret — that was impossible given Nash’s sudden eviction from his office — but he concocted a cover story to the effect that Nash had simply been strolling in Palisades Park trying to solve a mathematical problem when he was picked up. “He told the officers he was just thinking and … they finally learned that what he had told them was true,” Mood said later.
²⁶
Most RAND employees learned nothing different. It was after all close to Nash’s normal departure date in any case. But his name was abruptly crossed off the list of consultants.
²⁷
Nash never bothered to deny the arrest.
²⁸
And Lloyd Shapley and others in the math division learned about it because Nash had called Shapley from the police station to bail him out.
²⁹
Shapley later told another mathematician that Nash had been playing some kind of game.
³⁰
In any case, with so many mathematicians shuttling back and forth between RAND, Princeton, and
other universities, news of the arrest soon leaked back to Princeton and MIT,
³¹
adding to Nash’s already considerable reputation for quirkiness, if not downright instability.

Nobody protested his treatment. He was not the easiest person to sympathize with, and few people, even in the mathematical community, questioned the government’s attitude toward homosexuals. Homophobia was, after all, widespread in a society increasingly paranoid and fearful of nonconformity of any kind. Williams, true to form, used the incident in one of his homilies on managing mathematicians. In a memorandum to the mathematics division, written a year or two later, he asked the rhetorical question: “What can mathematicians do to hurt us?” One of his examples was alluded to only with a phrase — “He could get arrested for solicitation.” Williams’s punch line, however, was “the worst thing a mathematician could do to RAND is to leave.”
³²

Although Nash appeared unscathed, the arrest was a turning point in his life. Aloof, ambitious, coolly indifferent to others as he often appeared, Nash was by no means a true loner. Living in a tolerant ivory tower, he had been lulled into believing that he could do as he liked. Now he learned, in a particularly brutal fashion, that the emotional connections he sought threatened to destroy all else that he valued — his freedom, his career, his reputation, success on society’s terms. Contradictory imperatives can engender tremendous fear. And fear can be subtly destructive.

An individual’s vulnerability to schizophrenia, researchers now believe, lies in his genes. But psychological stresses are thought to be catalysts. Psychologist Irving I. Gottesman at the University of Virginia, whose studies of twins helped discredit the old Freudian theories of schizophrenia, puts it this way: “Each case is different, with a different mix of genetic and psychological factors. Certain events are definite stressors, but it’s not famine or war. It’s idiosyncratic. It’s things that get to the soul and self-identity and expectations of oneself.”
³³
Rather than a single trauma, a string of events from childhood through young adulthood produces strains that mount like straws on the proverbial camel’s back. “It’s things that build up, things that lead to a lot of brooding,” says Nikki Erlenmeyer-Kimling, a professor of genetics and development at Columbia University.
³⁴
Like the effects of the teasing he endured in childhood and adolescence, the damage from his arrest would only become apparent with time.

The arrest preceded the onset of Nash’s illness by more than four years. Stories of other mathematicians who were caught up in the meanness and bigotry of those times illustrate how disequilibrating being harassed and humiliated can be. J. C. C. McKinsey committed suicide in 1953 within two years of being fired by RAND.
³⁵
Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who cracked the Nazi submarine code, was arrested, tried, and convicted under Britain’s anti-homosexual statutes in 1952; he committed suicide in the summer of 1954 by taking a bite of a cyanide-laced apple in his laboratory.
³⁶
Others, less well known, less obviously brutalized,
had breakdowns that led to their giving up mathematics and living on the margins of society.