Einstein (95 page)

That evening, plans were drawn up for an ad hoc committee, coordinated by Dr. Lyman Briggs, director of the Bureau of Standards, the nation’s physics laboratory. It met informally for the first time in Washington on October 21. Einstein was not there, nor did he want to be. He was neither a nuclear physicist nor someone who enjoyed proximity to political or military leaders. But his Hungarian émigré trio—Szilárd, Wigner, and Teller—were there to launch the effort.

The following week, Einstein received a polite and formal thank-you letter from the president. “I have convened a board,” Roosevelt wrote, “to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium.”
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Work on the atomic project proceeded slowly. Over the next few months, the Roosevelt administration approved only $6,000 for graphite and uranium experiments. Szilárd became impatient. He was becoming more convinced of the feasibility of chain reaction and more worried about reports he was getting from fellow refugees on the activity in Germany.

So in March 1940, he went to Princeton to see Einstein again. They composed another letter for Einstein to sign, which was addressed to Alexander Sachs but intended for him to convey to the president. It warned of all the work on uranium they heard was being done in Berlin. Given the progress being made in producing chain reactions with huge explosive potential, the letter urged the president to consider whether the American work was proceeding quickly enough.
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Roosevelt reacted by calling for a conference designed to spur greater urgency, and he told officials to make sure that Einstein could attend. But Einstein had no desire to be more involved. He replied by saying he had a cold—somewhat of a convenient excuse—and did not need to be at the meeting. But he did urge the group to get moving: “I am convinced of the wisdom and urgency of creating the conditions under which work can be carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale.”
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Even if Einstein had wanted to take part in the meetings, which led to the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bomb, he may not have been welcome. Amazingly, the man who had helped get the project launched was considered, by some, to be too great a potential security risk to be permitted to know about the work.

Brigadier General Sherman Miles, the acting Army chief of staff who was organizing the new committee, sent a letter in July 1940 to J. Edgar Hoover, who had already been the director of the FBI for sixteen years and would remain so for another thirty-two. By addressing him by his national guard rank as “Colonel Hoover,” the general was subtly pulling rank when it came to controlling intelligence decisions. But Hoover was assertive when Miles asked for a summary of information the Bureau had on Einstein.
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Hoover began by providing General Miles with the letter from Mrs. Frothingham’s Woman Patriot Corporation, which had argued in
1932 that Einstein should be denied a visa and raised alarms about various pacifist and political groups he had supported.
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The Bureau made no attempt to verify or assess any of the charges.

Hoover went on to say that Einstein had been involved in the World Antiwar Congress in Amsterdam in 1932, which had some European communists on its committee. This was the conference that Einstein, as noted earlier, had specifically and publicly declined to attend or even support; as he wrote the organizer, “Because of the glorification of Soviet Russia it includes, I cannot bring myself to sign it.” Einstein had gone on in that letter to denounce Russia, where “there seems to be complete suppression of the individual and of freedom of speech.” Nevertheless, Hoover implied that Einstein had supported the conference and was thus pro-Soviet.
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Hoover’s letter had six more paragraphs making similar allegations about a variety of alleged Einstein associations, ranging from pacifist groups to those supporting Spain’s loyalists. Appended was a biographical sketch filled with trivial misinformation (“has one child”) and wild allegations. It called him “an extreme radical,” which he certainly was not, and said he “has contributed to communist magazines,” which he hadn’t. General Miles was so taken aback by the memo that he wrote a note in the margin, warning, “There is some possibility of flameback” if it ever leaked.
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The conclusion of the unsigned biographical sketch was stark: “In view of this radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature, without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.” In a memo the following year, it was reported that the Navy had assented to giving Einstein a security clearance, but “the Army could not clear.”
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Just as the Army’s decision was being made, Einstein was in fact eagerly doing something the likes of which he had not done for forty years, ever since he had saved up his money so that he could become a
Swiss citizen after leaving Germany. He was voluntarily and proudly becoming a citizen of the United States, a process that had begun five years earlier when he sailed to Bermuda so that he could return on an immigration visa. He still had his Swiss citizenship and passport, so he did not need to do this. But he wanted to.

He took his citizenship test on June 22, 1940, in front of a federal judge in Trenton. To celebrate the process, he agreed to give a radio interview as part of the immigration service’s
I Am an American
series. The judge served lunch and had the radio folks set up in his chambers to make the process easier for Einstein.
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It was an inspiring day, partly because Einstein showed just what type of free-speaking citizen he would be. In his radio talk, he argued that, to prevent wars in the future, nations would have to give up some of their sovereignty to an armed international federation of nations. “A worldwide organization cannot insure peace effectively unless it has control over the entire military power of its members,” he said.
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Einstein passed his test and he was sworn in—along with his step-daughter Margot, his assistant Helen Dukas, and eighty-six other new citizens—on October 1. Afterward, he praised America to the reporters covering his naturalization. The nation, he said, would prove that democracy is not just a form of government but “a way of life tied to a great tradition, the tradition of moral strength.” Asked if he would renounce other loyalties, he joyously declared that he “would even renounce my cherished sailboat” if that were necessary.
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It was not, however, necessary for him to renounce his Swiss citizenship, and he did not.

When he first arrived in Princeton, Einstein had been impressed that America was, or could be, a land free of the rigid class hierarchies and servility in Europe. But what grew to impress him more—and what made him fundamentally such a good American but also a controversial one—was the country’s tolerance of free thought, free speech, and nonconformist beliefs. That had been a touchstone of his science, and now it was a touchstone of his citizenship.

He had forsaken Nazi Germany with the public pronouncement that he would not live in a country where people were denied the freedom to hold and express their own thoughts. “At that time, I did not
understand how right I was in my choice of America as such a place,” he wrote in an unpublished essay just after becoming a citizen. “On every side I hear men and women expressing their opinion on candidates for office and the issues of the day without fear of consequences.”

The beauty of America, he said, was that this tolerance of each person’s ideas existed without the “brute force and fear” that had arisen in Europe. “From what I have seen of Americans, I think that life would not be worth living to them without this freedom of self expression.”
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The depth of his appreciation for America’s core value would help explain Einstein’s cold public anger and dissent when, during the McCarthy era a few years later, the nation lapsed into a period marked by the intimidation of those with unpopular views.

More than two years after Einstein and his colleagues had urged attention to the possibility of building atomic weapons, the United States launched the supersecret Manhattan Project. It happened on December 6, 1941, which turned out to be, fittingly enough, the day before Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the nation into the war.

Because so many fellow physicists, such as Wigner, Szilárd, Oppenheimer, and Teller, had disappeared to obscure towns, Einstein was able to surmise that the bomb-making work he had recommended was now proceeding with greater urgency. But he was not asked to join the Manhattan Project, nor was he officially told about it.

There were many reasons he was not secretly summoned to places like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge. He was not a nuclear physicist or a practicing expert in the scientific issues at hand. He was, as noted, considered by some a security risk. And even though he had put aside his pacifist sentiments, he never expressed any desire or made any requests to enlist in the endeavor.

He was, however, offered a bit part that December. Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw the Manhattan Project, contacted Einstein through the man who had succeeded Flexner as the head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Frank Aydelotte, and asked for his help on a problem involving the separation of isotopes that shared chemical traits. Einstein was happy to comply. Drawing on his old
expertise in osmosis and diffusion, he worked on a process of gaseous diffusion in which uranium was converted into a gas and forced through filters. To preserve secrecy, he was not even allowed to have Helen Dukas or anyone else type up his work, so he sent it back in his careful handwriting.

“Einstein was very much interested in your problem, has worked on it for a couple of days and produced the solution, which I enclose,” Aydelotte wrote Bush. “Einstein asks me to say that if there are other angles of the problem that you want him to develop or if you wish any parts of this amplified, you need only let him know and he will do anything in his power. I very much hope that you will make use of him in any way that occurs to you, because I know how deep is his satisfaction at doing anything which might be useful in the national effort.” As an afterthought, Aydelotte added, “I hope you can read his handwriting.”
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The scientists who received Einstein’s paper were impressed, and they discussed it with Vannevar Bush. But in order for Einstein to be more useful, they said, he should be given more information about how the isotope separation fit in with other parts of the bomb-making challenge.

Bush refused. He knew that Einstein would have trouble getting a security clearance. “I do not feel that I ought to take him into confidence on the subject to the extent of showing just where this thing fits into the defense picture,” Bush wrote Aydelotte. “I wish very much that I could place the whole thing before him and take him fully into confidence, but this is utterly impossible in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied his whole history.”
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Later, during the war, Einstein helped with less secret matters. A Navy lieutenant came to visit him at the Institute to enlist him in analyzing ordnance capabilities. He was enthusiastic. As Aydelotte noted, he had felt neglected since his brief flurry of work on uranium isotopes. Among the issues Einstein explored, as part of a $25-per-day consulting arrangement, were ways to shape the placement of sea mines in Japanese harbors, and his friend the physicist George Gamow got to come pick his brain on a variety of topics. “I am in the Navy, but not required
to get a Navy haircut,” Einstein joked to colleagues, who probably had trouble picturing him with a crew cut.
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Einstein also helped the war effort by donating a manuscript of his special relativity paper to be auctioned off for a War Bond drive. It was not the original version; he had thrown that away back when it was published in 1905, not knowing it would ever be worth millions. To re-create the manuscript, he had Helen Dukas read the paper to him aloud as he copied down the words. “Did I really say it that way?” he griped at one point. When Dukas assured him that he had, Einstein lamented, “I could have put it much more simply.” When he heard that the manuscript, along with one other, had sold for $11.5 million, he declared that “economists will have to revise their theories of value.”
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The physicist Otto Stern, who had been one of Einstein’s friends since their days together in Prague, had been secretly working on the Manhattan Project, mainly in Chicago, and had a good sense by the end of 1944 that it would be successful. That December, he made a visit to Princeton. What Einstein heard upset him. Whether or not the bomb was used in the war, it would change the nature of both war and peace forever. The policymakers weren’t thinking about that, he and Stern agreed, and they must be encouraged to do so before it was too late.

So Einstein decided to write to Niels Bohr. They had sparred over quantum mechanics, but Einstein trusted his judgment on more earthly issues. Einstein was one of the few people to know that Bohr, who was half Jewish, was secretly in the United States. When the Nazis overran Denmark, he had made a daring escape by sailing with his son in a small boat to Sweden. From there he had been flown to Britain, given a fake passport with the name Nicholas Baker, then sent to America to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

Einstein wrote to Bohr, using his real name, in care of Denmark’s embassy in Washington, and somehow the letter got to him. In it Einstein
described his worrisome talk with Stern about the dearth of thinking about how to control atomic weapons in the future. “The politicians do not appreciate the possibilities and consequently do not know the extent of the menace,” Einstein wrote. Once again, he made his argument that it would take an empowered world government to prevent an arms race once the age of atomic weaponry arrived. “Scientists who know how to get a hearing with political leaders,” Einstein urged, “should bring pressure on the political leaders in their countries in order to bring about an internationalization of military power.”
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