My parents first met as small children. According to family lore, Mariette Kövesi rode into Johnny (in Hungarian, Jancsi) Neumann's life on a tricycle at the age of two and a half, as a guest at the fourth birthday party of one of his younger brothers. Unfortunately, there is no record of my father's reaction; he was just eight years old. The Neumann and Kövesi families (the hereditary nobility bestowed by the Austro-Hungarian emperor on my banker grandfather, Max Neumann, which allowed my father to add von to his surname, came later, in 1913) were friends and summertime neighbors, both members of the Jewish but highly assimilated Hungarian haute bourgeoisie, which flourished in Budapest in the years preceding World War I. These families, and others like them, were at the heart of the brief, shining moment when Budapest was not only co-capital, with Vienna, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also vied with its sister city for the title of intellectual capital of Europe.
Both my parents spent their childhoods in the privileged, warmly protected environment of highly educated, professionally successful, affluent, and close-knit families. Both families lived during most of the year in large, elegant apartments in the heart of the Pest—or more commercial—side of Budapest. The apartment my father grew up in occupied one floor of a building purchased by his grandfather, who used the first floor for his agricultural implements business and installed each of his daughters, their husbands, and their children on one of the floors above. And both families spent summers in elegant “country” homes in the Buda hills overlooking the flat Pest area. The distance between the summer and winter residences was less than five miles, but each family made an annual hegira between them, with maids covering the city furniture with dustcloths and packing huge trunks and wardrobes for the trip.
My father's upbringing was singular, though, because his extraordinary precocity was recognized very early and his education was tailored to make sure that it was fully developed. His instruction at one of Budapest's three best-regarded secondary schools, the Lutheran Gymnasium, which also produced the Nobel Prize—winning physicist Eugene Wigner, was supplemented, beginning at age eleven, by private tutoring from prominent mathematicians at Budapest University. His first published paper was written jointly with one of those tutors when Johnny was seventeen. The paper, on a very abstruse theorem in geometry, already reflected a key characteristic of all his contributions to pure mathematics: his ability “to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of [pure] logic.”1
But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
While my father was growing up in a family environment that involved structured discussions of philosophy, politics, banking, science, literature, music, and just about any subject on earth around the family dinner table—discussions in which Johnny and his two younger brothers, Michael and Nicholas, were encouraged to participate—my mother, Mariette Kövesi, was experiencing a very different sort of childhood. She was an only child, six years Johnny's junior (he was born in 1903, she in 1909). Her father was a highly regarded internist and professor of medicine at the University of Budapest, also with a wide range of intellectual interests, centered on music. But he was extremely busy, rather domineering, and reputed to be a chronic womanizer. He was also, for a considerable period of his adult life, addicted to drugs he first took for relief of postoperative pain; as a physician, he had easy access to supplies. My grandmother's response to boredom and neglect was to become a first-class hypochondriac; her immediate reaction to any family conflict was to take to her bed.
However difficult her parents' relationship with each other was during Mariette's girlhood, there was one matter on which they were in complete agreement: the importance of building a protective wall around their beloved, headstrong only child. She was not allowed to go to school until she reached high school age. Her father's fear of childhood infectious diseases, stemming from his experience as a physician in the days before vaccines or antibiotics, had been exacerbated by a near fatal bout of diphtheria Mariette had suffered as a small child. But Géza Kövesi also believed that classroom schooling would not allow enough time for other pursuits he regarded as important: languages, music, and above all sports. And Mariette did indeed become a first-class tennis player in her teens and, she proudly reminded her children, the first woman in Hungary to earn a diploma in dressage from the famed Spanish Riding School in Vienna, home of the Lipizzaner horses.
Mariette's academic isolation was by no means lonely or deprived of fun. She was at the center of a tightly knit group that included four other girls her own age from her parents' social circle. The bonds of friendship formed among the five members of this self-styled “cooking club” endured until their deaths, sundered by neither the Atlantic Ocean nor the Iron Curtain, which separated the ones who lived much of their adult lives in the United States from those who remained in Hungary. And they clearly had very good times together. As old women, they frequently regaled their relatives and one another with tales of the mischievous tricks they had played on their siblings and each other.
When she was in her teens, though, Mariette was moved to frustration and rebellion by the constraints her parents imposed on her social life. Even after she had entered Budapest University, majoring in economics, her parents insisted that she be driven to parties by the family chauffeur and that he wait for her to make sure she arrived home safely at the appointed time. Once, when she got home after curfew, her father met her at the head of the stairs with a sharp slap in the face, never mind that she was twenty years old and already engaged to be married.
This extreme protectiveness was all the more irksome because Mariette was very popular, a belle in her social circle. She was what the French call a jolie laide, actually quite homely when analyzed feature by feature but so witty, vivacious, and fashionable that the overall impression was that of a beauty. As her youthful charm matured into elegance, she retained this quality until the end of her days.
The privileged, family-centered lives enjoyed by both the Neumann and the Kövesi clans during Johnny and Mariette's childhood and youth were played out against the background of continuous turmoil in Central Europe. The upheavals began with Hungary's participation on the losing side of World War I, starting when Johnny was ten and Mariette four. There followed, in quick succession, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 133 days of “Red Terror” brought on by Béla Kun's coup and declaration of the Soviet Hungarian Republic, and the successful countercoup of Vice Admiral Miklos Horthy, the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy.
Horthy's regime brought a degree of stability to the chaos-wracked nation, but a rising trend of nationalism and anti-Semitism was exacerbated by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, under which Hungary lost some two-thirds of its territory to its neighbors Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Of particular importance to the parents of sixteen-year-old Johnny was the passage of the so-called Numerus Clausus, sharply restricting the access of ethnic Jews to higher education. Over the two decades that followed, Hungary engaged in a variety of arrangements and alliances aimed at regaining its lost territories, the ultimate effect of which was to push the nation increasingly in the direction of the Nazi-Fascist alliance.
The two families were outwardly relatively unaffected by the conflict that engulfed much of the world in 1914–18. The boys were too young for military service, and both families were able to maintain the accustomed patterns of their lives. Only when the communist coup of 1919 actually threatened the lives of well-to-do bourgeois families did the two households decide to flee the country. The von Neumanns sat out the 133 days of the Red Terror at a vacation home on the Adriatic coast, near Venice. They returned to Budapest to find their apartment and belongings unscathed as soon as the takeover ended.
Once back in Budapest, the families were clearly troubled by the growing anti-Semitism in their homeland; the Neumanns' pragmatic response was to send Johnny to the less restrictive environment of the German Weimar Republic for further education, even though anti-Semitism was also taking root there. The ultimate fate of Jews in both Hungary and Germany once Hitler had taken control was beyond their wildest imaginings, as it was for the millions of European Jews who paid with their lives for their inability to foresee the future in time to escape it.
Underneath the apparently unruffled exterior of their everyday lives, both Johnny's and Mariette's views of the world were strongly shaped by these years of turmoil. My father traced the origins of his hawkishness regarding the Soviet Union (he openly favored a preventive attack on that country immediately following World War II, when we had the atomic bomb and it didn't) to the traumatic impact of the 1919 communist coup. In hearings on his nomination to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1955, he was unequivocal: “My opinions have been violently opposed to Marxism ever since I remember, and quite in particular since I had about a three months taste of it in Hungary in 1919.”2 Both my parents retained throughout their lives a cynicism, a be-ready-for-the worst attitude toward world events, that contrasted sharply with my optimistic American worldview.
This difference was brought home to me in the summer of 1974 when, as the Nixon impeachment proceedings were under way, I was about to set off on a monthlong vacation in Europe with my husband and children. My mother was aghast that we would leave home at a time so fraught with uncertainty. My response was that, while I had no idea who would be president by the time I returned, I felt confident that my credit cards would continue to be accepted in Europe and that we would be greeted by the same grumpy but benign customs officials when we returned. It took the catastrophe of 9/11 to shake the American sense of security that separated my weltanschauung from that of my parents.
The relationship between my parents blossomed from childhood friendship into romance during the summers of 1927–29, when my father came home to Budapest on summer holidays from his position as a privatdozent (assistant professor) at the University of Berlin. Things accelerated rapidly from an unannounced engagement to marriage when my father was invited to spend a term lecturing at Princeton University from February to May of 1930 and wanted to take my mother with him as his wife.
By the time of their elaborate wedding on New Year's Day, 1930, Johnny had acquired international fame in mathematical circles on the basis of the thirty-two major papers he had published, at a rate approaching one a month.3 Some of these papers were major contributions in different areas of pure mathematics, including logic and set theory. Others laid the foundation for his mathematical formalization of the new physics—the probabilistic approach of quantum mechanics that was replacing the determinism of classical Newtonian physics in explaining the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. This latter work culminated in the publication in 1932 of his book The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, which is today still in print and regarded as a significant advance in modern physics.
Von Neumann's name is not always associated with the origins of quantum mechanics, but he is universally recognized as the father of game theory. A paper he published in 1928 set forth a proof of the minimax theorem, the basis of that theory, which he later developed in the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, coauthored with economist Oskar Morgenstern. The crux of this proof was to show that, in any precisely defined conflict (which he called a “game”) between two individuals where one's win is equal to the other's loss, there is a strategy that guarantees the smallest maximum loss or largest minimum gain for each player, regardless of what his opponent does.
While Johnny was building his brilliant academic career through an astonishing outpouring of significant contributions in a variety of fields, Mariette was a bright but not particularly serious student of economics at the University of Budapest, a pursuit she unhesitatingly abandoned in favor of marrying Johnny and venturing off with him into the New World. I can't help wondering if, along with her genuine affection for this brilliant, handsome young man whom she had known all her life, she wasn't motivated in part by the prospect of putting an ocean between herself and her overprotective parents. Johnny and Mariette were, in any case, a golden couple—both of them intelligent and witty, charming and gregarious, elegant and fun loving, and affluent enough to indulge their taste for luxury.
Mariette's family had demanded that Johnny convert to Catholicism before the wedding, as they themselves had done some years earlier, and he readily complied. Such conversions were common among the assimilated Jewish haute bourgeoisie of Budapest during the years of the anti-Semitic Horthy regime. For many in this group, whose ties to their ancestral religion ranged between loose and nonexistent, this attempt to cling to their assimilated status was a natural one, even though it was doomed to failure; the regime's definition of Jewish was clearly ethnic rather than religious.
These efforts to repudiate or conceal Jewish origins—echoing the response of the converted Jews to the vicious anti-Semitism of fifteenth-century Spain—followed my parents, and many other Central Europeans as well, to the United States. My father was entirely pragmatic about the matter; no one as well known as he was could hope to conceal his origins. In addition, many of his friends and colleagues were secular Jewish intellectuals like himself, their attachment to their ancestral roots consisting mainly of a large store of Jewish jokes, sometimes directed at the goyim (non-Jews) and sometimes at themselves. One of my father's best-known lines was, “It takes a Hungarian to go into a revolving door behind you and come out first.” One of his friends recalled that they used to amuse themselves in boring lectures by holding up a finger for the other to see every time the speaker said something that labeled him a nebbish, a Yiddish term of condescension.
My mother's attitude was quite different, and she brought it with her across the ocean. Throughout my childhood and, even more, my adolescence, she impressed on me constantly the importance of concealing my Jewish ancestry, convincing me that it was some sort of shameful secret. The threat she felt was not to her life or her legal rights, but rather to her social acceptability, her fear of being regarded as an outsider. At a time when many clubs and other social organizations banned Jews, and private schools and Ivy League universities had unacknowledged but widely recognized quotas, this was not an idle concern. She bonded with America almost from the instant she set foot on its soil, and in her mind being 100 percent American did not include minority status.
Over the years, I have been constantly surprised and puzzled at how widespread this attitude was, not only among Central Europeans who emigrated to the United States before and after World War II but also among their American-born or American-raised offspring. Public figures such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Senator George Allen have described their parents' efforts to conceal their Jewish origins from them, and questions about whether and when they actually knew the facts have become grist for the political and media mills.
I myself lied to my father's biographer, Norman Macrae, about my mother's ethnic origins—fortunately, I was neither a member of the president's cabinet nor running for public office. Although I felt craven at telling an outright lie that disavowed half of my ancestry, this feeling was outweighed by an intense need to avoid becoming alienated from my mother during what I foresaw might be the last year of her life. I knew she would never forgive me for outing the carefully hidden secret that had become such an important part of her self-identity.
My choice of what I saw as the lesser of two evils was confirmed by the Hungarian American author Kati Marton, whose book The Great Escape tells the story of my father and eight other Hungarian Jews who reached the pinnacle of success in their fields after emigrating to the United States. In the course of interviewing me for that book, she confided that, in terms of her relations with her own parents, she wished she had made the same decision I had. In her book Enemies of the People, Marton tells how she learned of her own Jewish ancestry, quite by accident, at the age of thirty. When her father learned that she had discovered his secret, she wrote, “It put a strain on our relationship for the next 25 years.”4
At a 2006 family gathering of some forty-five descendants of a common ancestor brought together from all over Europe and the United States by an enterprising cousin for an all-day celebration in Budapest, I asked several American members of my children's generation what their experiences had been regarding the “Jewish question.” Each of them responded that his or her parents had shrouded the issue in silence or mystery. Some of the families were devout Catholics; others were Protestants of varying denominations and degrees of religious commitment. All of the relatives I talked to—including myself and my daughter—had non-Jewish spouses. Among my generation, I appeared to be the only one who had chosen to tell my children about their Jewish background, emphasizing pride in that intellectual heritage rather than embarrassment or insecurity about their association with an oft-despised minority. And my daughter has made sure that her own children are just as knowledgeable about, and proud of, the Hungarian Jewish side of their ancestry as they are about my husband Bob's Mayflower American one.
Having put an ocean between themselves and the more overt anti-Semitism they had left behind, my parents arrived in Princeton filled with enthusiasm for life in the United States—fortunately, their multilingual upbringing had included the study of English—along with considerable naïveté regarding social customs and everyday behavior in the New World. This ignorance of the social mores of their new homeland led them to show up at Princeton dinner parties shockingly late and wildly overdressed, as had been the custom in their European circles. With one foot in their new world and one in the old, they spent roughly a third of each of the years 1930-32 in Princeton; a third in Berlin, with my father teaching an academic term in each place; and the third on vacation in Budapest, back in the arms of their families. This peripatetic existence was complicated by the fact that my mother's response to the weeklong ocean voyage—the only way of crossing the Atlantic at the time—was seasickness so severe that one ship's doctor feared that she might die of dehydration before they reached land.
While my father carried his busy and productive life as a member of the global mathematical elite to a new venue, my mother made the shift from protected young girl to mistress of a household in her own way. She expanded her belle of the ball persona to incorporate that of social hostess, holding evening open houses for my father's colleagues and students in their Princeton apartment. When it became clear to her that, in a country where chauffeurs were not a staple of academic life, a driver's license was essential, she took the advice of a friend who told her that the best way to acquire one was to offer the person in charge of the test drive a cigarette from a case containing a five-dollar bill—a substantial sum in 1931. The bribe worked, and my father apparently followed her example.
Accordingly, they both remained appallingly bad, albeit licensed, drivers until the end of their days. My father's car-totaling accidents were a more or less annual event, and when once asked why he habitually drove a very unacademic Cadillac, he replied “because no one will sell me a tank.” Many decades later, in Washington, DC, my husband narrowly avoided having his own car struck by a vehicle that barreled at full speed through a stop sign. As it passed him, he recognized his mother-in-law at the wheel, with both of our young children as passengers. From that day forward, the children were strictly forbidden ever to ride alone with their grandmother until they were old enough to take the wheel themselves.
My father's professional life in the United States became full time in 1933, when he was appointed at the age of twenty-nine as one of the five original members of the faculty of the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, along with three much older but also very distinguished mathematicians and, of course, Albert Einstein. The faculty of the institute did not—and still does not—have teaching obligations; the aim of its founding benefactors was to provide a pleasant, secure environment in which the world's leading mathematical minds could spend all their time thinking and writing (gradually, the institute expanded to incorporate a number of other academic disciplines as well) without the interference of other commitments.
Given what was happening in Germany, the institute appointment came just in time. In April 1933, the Nazi government passed laws mandating the firing of all civil servants (a category that included university professors) “descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents.”5 Although my parents continued to visit their families in Hungary every year until 1939, they made their transits across Germany as quickly as train schedules allowed. My father began his tenure at the IAS in the fall of 1933; shortly thereafter, both he and my mother applied for US citizenship. Their lives as Americans had truly begun.
While Europe was, in my father's words, “relapsing into the dark ages,”6 my parents were able to continue their gilded lives in their adopted country. The institute's professorial salary of ten thousand dollars per year was, during the Great Depression, more than adequate to support a lifestyle that included a series of luxurious rented homes on Library Place, Princeton's most elegant neighborhood, several servants, and my mother's Paris wardrobe. The von Neumanns soon became locally famous for their parties, at which resident and visiting geniuses imbibed large quantities of alcohol and generally let their hair down. My mother told a tale of one particularly exuberant evening at the end of which she and my father threw the dishes out the window rather than clean up.
These gatherings were not entirely frivolous, however. A growing number of scientists fleeing Hitler's expanding reach obtained temporary appointments at the institute, and the von Neumann parties, to which many of the world's most brilliant scientific minds gravitated, provided networking opportunities for these displaced scholars seeking permanent jobs.7 The plight of many of his fellow European intellectuals underscored both my father's conviction about the scale of the disaster that was occurring in Europe—even though he didn't fully foresee the horrors of the “final solution”—and his goal of seeing his adopted country become the savior of civilization.
My father's assistance to Jewish intellectuals whose lives and livelihoods were threatened wasn't confined to helping them once they had reached the safety of the United States. Among his papers are a letter to Abraham Flexner, director of the institute at the time, pleading with him to intercede with the State Department (which was rife with anti-Semitism) to grant a visa to Kurt Gödel, a non-Jew who had nonetheless been deprived of his job by the Nazis, as well as letters to colleagues at various American universities, discussing the possibilities for jobs for refugee mathematicians and physicists. To save one of them, André Weil, von Neumann appealed directly to the French ambassador (representing the collaborationist Vichy government) to the United States. His mission was successful, and Weil ultimately spent many years on the faculty of the IAS. By helping in various ways to facilitate the ingathering of many of the world's finest minds, my father was making his own contribution both to the literal and economic survival of scientific colleagues and to the intellectual treasure that propelled the United States to the forefront of scientific discovery in the second half of the twentieth century.
My parents' social life was anchored in their relationships with my father's colleagues at the institute. These included Einstein, the only other European among the institute's original five professors. In those days Einstein was quite a social being, most unlike the recluse he became after his wife's death in 1936. My mother told of the excursion she took with the Einsteins while my father was out of town, to a concert in Newark, some forty miles from Princeton, when she was very pregnant with me. Apparently Einstein got bored with the music and nudged his wife, saying “Come on, Elsa, let's go.” And leave they did, quite forgetting my mother, who had to take a milk train home. She awoke the next morning to find a large bouquet of roses from Einstein, along with a note of abject apology.
My own earliest memories of Einstein are of a much more reticent personality. By then his wife Elsa was dead and he had pretty much retreated from social encounters. He was visible mainly at a distance during the afternoon teas that took place daily in the institute's Fuld Hall, and his fame rested not only on his brilliance but also on his eccentricity, symbolized by his wild hair and the fact that he didn't wear socks. He had one close friend among his colleagues, Kurt Gödel, with whom he walked daily to and from the institute, deep in conversation as they went.
Gödel, an Austrian who spent long periods at the institute during the 1930s and moved to the United States permanently in 1939, had made his own major contribution to mathematics in his “incompleteness theorems.” In them, he showed that no set of axioms (basic propositions) underlying a mathematical system could provide the basis for proving all the true statements within that system, that an attempt would always be stymied by a paradox of the sort inherent in the statement “I never tell the truth.” He was also a close friend of my father's, even though his incompleteness theorems had demonstrated that von Neumann's own early effort to ground all mathematical statements in a set of fundamental axioms—the subject of his doctoral dissertation—was doomed to fail. Sadly, Gödel, who was subject to bouts of severe depression, became convinced toward the end of his life, long after Einstein and von Neumann were dead, that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and died of starvation.
Despite her rising position in the Princeton social hierarchy when Einstein left her behind in Newark, my mother was still very young, in her early twenties, and inexperienced in the ways of her newly adopted homeland. It is not surprising, therefore, that when she had doubts about Princeton's small-town hospital as a place in which to deliver her firstborn, she should have turned for advice to the British-born wife of one of her husband's colleagues, Elizabeth Mary Dixon Richardson Veblen. Oswald Veblen, nephew of the famed social critic Thorstein Veblen and one of the leading lights of Princeton's mathematics department before he joined the IAS faculty, was my father's American mentor. He was responsible for Princeton offering my father a one-term per year lectureship in mathematical physics in 1930–32 and, when the IAS was founded, pushed strongly and ultimately successfully for his young protégé's appointment as one of the founding five professors there.
Mrs. Veblen, a rather formidable grande dame with solid British tweeds and a clipped English accent to match the formality of her name, was herself childless, but she recommended that my mother put herself in the care of her own obstetrician-gynecologist, an elegant and expensive Manhattan physician with his own private hospital on Madison Avenue. And so it was that, when she went into labor, my mother was driven to New York, sitting on a pile of towels, to give birth at The Harbor, the name that appears on my birth certificate. By the time my birthplace was discovered to have been operating as an abortion mill and was permanently closed down, my mother, divorced and remarried and living in Washington, DC, with her new husband, was no longer under Elizabeth Veblen's tutelage and well on her way to becoming a grande dame in her own right.
My own globetrotting in the wake of my peripatetic parents began early. I was born on March 6, 1935; my US passport, issued on April 8 of that year (I had to have my own because the processing of my parents' applications for US citizenship had not yet been completed), bears a photograph of a virtually bald, pug-nosed infant, pudgy hands clasped in the classical manner of newborns. Inside are the entry stamps of Hungary, Austria, Germany, and France, dated from 1935 to 1938. During those first three years of my life I crossed the Atlantic eight times, making the annual round trip in the first-class cabins of such luxury ocean liners as the Queen Mary and the Normandie. Both of these ships, the true queens of their day, came to unworthy ends. The Queen Mary became a tourist attraction in Long Beach, California, subjected to many changes of ownership and at least one bankruptcy. The Normandie, caught in New York Harbor when war broke out in Europe, was being converted into an American troopship when she caught fire, sank, and was ultimately scrapped.
Apparently my career as an enfant terrible also began early. According to my mother, when a ship's steward attempted to separate my one-year-old self from my parents to take me off to the ship's nursery, I bit him, hard. When I reappeared the next summer, a year older and with more teeth, he was heard to mutter, “Oh no, not her again.”
During these years, the clouds were darkening, both over Europe and over my parents' marriage. As Hitler consolidated his position in Germany and then embarked on his planned European expansion with the annexation of Austria in 1938, my father's letters, particularly those to his close friend the Hungarian physicist Rudolf Ortvay, grew increasingly pessimistic. “I don't believe that the catastrophe will be avoidable,”8 he wrote in 1938 and added, presciently, “That the U.S.A. will end up again intervening on the side of England (when an English victory is not achievable otherwise) I find indubitable.”9 A year later he wrote, “It is, for instance, a total misunderstanding of the U.S.A. to believe that it intervened in the World War [World War I] from such (imperialist) motives…I admit that the USA could be imperialist. I would not be surprised if in 20 years it would become so. But today it is not yet.”10
This conviction that the United States alone could save the otherwise doomed European civilization from totalitarianism, whether the threat came from the right or the left, and avert the ushering in of a new Dark Ages stayed with my father throughout his life. Reinforced by the events of World War II and the Cold War that followed, it was a major motivation, along with a lively personal ambition, for his deep involvement in military matters. It also underlay his extremely hard-line ideas on US policy toward the Soviet Union, which included the possibility of preventive war on the latter. He made his feelings crystal clear in an interview with Life magazine: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?”11 This view sounds incredibly heartless and immoral today, but it should be judged in the context of the times: “It was widely held, especially by liberal intellectuals, that the French and British governments had behaved in a cowardly and immoral fashion when they failed to march into Germany in 1936 to stop Hitler from remilitarizing the Rhineland…To them, the idea of forestalling a terrible catastrophe by a bold preventive action was neither insane nor criminal.”12
Not long after my arrival, as Europe was descending into chaos, my parents' marriage also began to fall apart. Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him. My mother, accustomed to being the center of attention, didn't like playing second fiddle to anyone or anything, even when the competition was her spouse's supercreative mind. She began to pay more and more attention to a graduate student in physics who was a regular at the von Neumann soirees. His name was James Brown Horner Kuper, as befitted the scion of a well-to-do New York family of solid Dutch ancestry and impeccable social credentials. But she whimsically called him Desmond, after a favorite china dog, and the name stuck with him for the rest of his life.
The cracks began to show in the summer of 1936, when Mariette extended her visit with her parents in Budapest and Johnny returned to Princeton without her. In 1937 she spent much of a six-week Nevada residency, required for a divorce there, on horseback at The Ranch at Pyramid Lake, some thirty-five miles through the desert from Reno. The surprisingly intimate letters she wrote from the Riverside Hotel in that city to my father back in Princeton are remarkable partly for the vehemence of her negative reaction to the Reno of the 1930s: “I believe that hell is certainly very similar to this place. It is indescribable, everyone is constantly drunken and they lose their money like mad 5–6 hundred dollars a day, the roulette table stands in the hall just as a spittoon some other place.”
Aside from the availability of horses, the Ranch was apparently no better: “The place itself is terribly primitive…There is no telephone or telegraph,…mail once a day…[I]t is entirely crazy here…I believe I won't survive. I live in the midst of an Indian reservation there is a beautiful lake and the country is so divine that it is difficult to imagine. But these horrible females it is impossible that there are so many kinds of women in the world…Riding is very beautiful but the evenings are deadly, imagine dinner at six and night goes until ten o'clock.”
Even more revealing is the fact that she addresses the husband she is in the process of divorcing as “Johnny Sweetheart,” and entreats him, “[D]o you love me a bit” and “If you have time love me a bit.” She ends one letter with “I have the howling blues” and signs the other “Million kisses.”13
The ambivalence reflected in these letters persisted throughout Johnny and Mariette's lives, creating puzzlement and pain for the spouses they subsequently married. Desmond pretended not to notice, but my father's second wife, Klari, was haunted by the lively ghost of a legally terminated relationship. In her unpublished autobiography, she wrote, “This [a meeting of the two couples at a party] was definitely a crisis—a crisis which was followed by many other similar ones for many, many years. Gradually I did get used to them and learned how to handle the situation, but Johnny and Marietta never ceased playing the game of detached attachment or vice versa, which ever fit best.”14
I don't believe my father ever really understood why my mother left him for an unremarkable graduate student, and neither did anyone else. In her manuscript, Klari vividly described the paradox of Johnny and Mariette: “They were a perfectly matched pair; gay and gregarious, intelligent and witty—frankly and openly enjoying all the luxuries they could easily afford—but, above all, both of them being intensely ambitious. It is a pity that these two, who remained deeply attached to each other many years beyond their divorce and their respective marriages—it is a pity that they could not overcome their difficulties and stay together. Even separately, they went a long way towards their clearly pinpointed goals, but heaven only knows what further heights they could have attained if they had only stuck it out together—and so speaks the second wife, the successor of Marietta.”15
As for my father, he wrote in a letter to his close friend, the Polish physicist Stan Ulam, “I am sorry that things went this way—but at least I am not particularly responsible for it. I hope that your optimism is well founded—but since happiness is an eminently empyrical [sic] proposition, the only thing I can do, is to wait and see.”16 Actually, he did nothing of the sort; by the time the divorce was final, he was already writing intimate letters to Klara Dan, who became Mariette's successor. Klari, a noted beauty from the same Budapest Jewish haute bourgeoisie as my parents, hid a first-class brain behind her flirtatious manner. Though not yet thirty, she had already been married twice before, once to a dashing young man who was “an incurable gambler” and then to a banker eighteen years her senior, a “kind, gentle, attentive husband” who bored her to tears, she wrote. I have always felt certain that my father married her on the rebound, both to assuage the hurt caused by Mariette's desertion and to provide himself with a helpmeet who could manage the everyday details of life that eluded him.
Klari was trapped in Budapest for much of 1938 by an inconsistency between Hungarian and American law that threatened to leave her stateless, and therefore unable to leave Hungary, as war appeared imminent. Tensions between the couple ran high as the distance between Princeton and Budapest appeared insurmountable. They were finally able to marry and leave Europe together just before war broke out. But her profound insecurity and the constant demands for expressions of devotion that his letters were trying to respond to would haunt their relationship throughout their marriage. In one, he pleads, “Darling, we will win…and I will make you very, very, very happy! It will be a happy marriage,…and I will be able to reconquer you.”17 In another he tries to reassure her and apologize at the same time: “You are frightened of life that has maltreated you,…you are terrified even of the breeze because you sense the storm behind it…I seared you, I bullied you, I hurt you!”18 And, finally, his cry to her: “Please, please, give me a bit of faith…or at least ‘benevolent neutrality.’”19
My father's lifelong desire to impose order and rationality on an inherently disorderly and irrational world was reflected in many of his handwritten letters to family and close friends. It was also, in the view of science historian Robert Leonard, one of the major motivators of von Neumann's return, after more than a decade, to the development of the theory of games. After publishing the paper containing the central tenet of game theory, the minimax theorem, in 1928, he had dropped the subject entirely until he began to discuss jointly developing the theory and its applications to economics with his friend the Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern in 1940. Their collaboration over numerous breakfasts at the gentlemen-only Nassau Club in Princeton during the years 1940–43, while my father was deeply involved in military consulting and the development of the atomic bomb, culminated in the publication of the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
Even in the midst of this enormous project, squeezed into spare moments snatched from the frenetic pace of his secret and often hair-raising wartime missions, my father's puckish sense of humor didn't desert him. Klari collected elephants, and she had hundreds of them, from one hewn out of a solid chunk of pink alabaster to the one I carved for her in a bar of Ivory soap. She insisted that she would have nothing to do with the Theory of Games unless it tipped its hat to her with a drawing of an elephant somewhere in its pages. So there, on page 64, illustrating an abstruse proof in set theory, is a collection of dots and curved lines that clearly traces out an elephant in full pursuit, trunk aloft and ears and tail flying.
One reason for my father's dogged commitment to getting the book done was his (and his coauthor's) profound dissatisfaction with the standard assumption of neoclassical economics, the dominant school of thought at the time, that individuals make “rational” economic decisions without taking into account what other people's responses are likely to be. This totally contradicted reality as he saw it. His own emphasis on social context and the characteristics of the multiple possible outcomes of the strategic “games” played by individuals, businesses, or nation-states in a wide range of human interactions is reflected in the title of John McDonald's book on game theory written for a general audience: Strategy in Poker, Business, and War (1950).
The first applications of game theory, in fact, came not in economics but in simulations of possible scenarios of future military conflicts, strategic analyses conducted by the Rand Corporation for the US Air Force—a use entirely consistent with my father's ultrahawkish view of the world. It was decades before this theory became integrated into mainstream economics, but today political scientists use it to analyze countries' relationships in peace as well as war, anthropologists call on it to ferret out patterns of interaction among neighboring cultures, and biologists employ it to examine the effects living cells have on each other.
In this use of game theory to uncover previously hidden patterns, scientists in a wide variety of fields are spurred by motives not unlike those of the theory's progenitor. In Leonard's words, “It is difficult not to see in his [von Neumann's] efforts an element of perhaps subconscious resistance to the conditions of the time; an almost defiant willingness to see order beyond the disorder, equilibrium beyond the confusion, to seek an inevitable return to normality once the present transition, with its ‘abnormal spiritual tensions,’ was over.”20
In the event, my father's domestic life would reach a new, if somewhat shaky, equilibrium long before his wider world returned to some semblance of normalcy. Indeed, near the end of his life, he seems to have concluded that such normalcy, like the Holy Grail, would remain forever beyond reach. That pessimism is certainly implied in an article he wrote for Fortune magazine in 1955, the year he was found to have the cancer that would kill him. Asked to give his views on America in 1980, he titled his response “Can We Survive Technology?” In it he predicted, “Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more awful…In the years between now and 1980 the (global) crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say.”21
Despite the ambiguous wording, this last sentence reflected his fear that mankind might not survive another twenty-five years but instead would become the victim of its own self-destructive inclinations. He had quantified this fear in a letter to Klari in 1946 regarding the probable date of the next war: “I don't think this is less than two years and I do think it is less than ten.”22 It was not technology itself that my father feared but human nature: “It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electrical field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.”23
My father's belief in a coming Armageddon, and his firm conviction that the only hope for civilization lay in American victories over both nazism and communism, was born as the storm clouds gathered over Europe in the mid-1930s and lasted until his death. The result was a clear line of demarcation between the two halves of his life as a scientist. During the first half, which spanned his youth in Europe and his early days in the United States, he made fundamental contributions in the realm of pure mathematics and mathematical physics, involving himself in some of the major scientific issues that roiled European intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1935, though, he symbolically put Europe behind him by resigning from the German Mathematical Society, writing, “I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to remain a member of the the German Mathematical Society any longer…”24 He was equally emphatic twenty years later in explaining his reasons for coming to America: “I expected World War II, and I was apprehensive that Hungary would be on the Nazi side, and I didn't want to be caught dead on that side.”25
As soon as he obtained American citizenship in 1937, von Neumann embarked on a collaboration with the US military that lasted the rest of his life, first with the Ballistics Research Laboratory of the Army Ordnance Department in Aberdeen, Maryland, then with the Manhattan Project and, after World War II, all three branches of the armed forces, the Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission. His work in such disparate areas as game theory, digital computers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, meteorology, and other kinds of mathematical modeling was united by their relevance to real-world problems, including military, economic, and political applications. Although he remained on the faculty of the IAS until 1955, the contemplation of pure mathematics in its tranquil surroundings was pushed aside by his involvement in crucial issues relating to the security of the United States, to the dismay of his mathematics colleagues. It was this second John von Neumann, a man of affairs in the most fundamental sense, that I knew as my father.