“May I cut in?” With this courtly, old-fashioned request, Bob Whitman entered my life. The occasion was an informal dance, innocently called a “jolly-up,” at Holmes Hall, my dormitory at Radcliffe College, where I had started as a freshman a few weeks earlier. Among the Harvard undergraduates who came to try their luck at meeting a new crop of girls were two somewhat older graduate students, both veterans of World War II, who had “gone slumming” to unwind and celebrate having just passed the dreaded oral exam for the PhD in English. One of them, Bob Ganz, was my graduate instructor in the writing course required of all freshmen. He dutifully asked me to dance but was clearly uncomfortable fraternizing with one of his own students. Seeing his discomfort, his friend gallantly relieved him by cutting in.
Bob Ganz's rescuer was Bob Whitman, with whom I danced most of the rest of the evening and went out for coffee with afterward. I don't remember exactly what we talked about, but I do remember how taken I was not only with his blond good looks and obvious erudition but with his understated Yankee manner, so different from the explosive Hungarian interchanges I was used to. It didn't take me long to discover that, although not particularly religious, he had a strong commitment to the moral life, which he interpreted as having a positive impact on the lives of others, as well as a reluctance to let his emotions show, both inherited from his Puritan ancestors.
Bob was, in fact, related through both his paternal and maternal lines to five of the voyagers on the Mayflower, including the military leader, Miles Standish, and the spiritual leader, Elder William Brewster. His parents were both Whitmans (very distant cousins) and both social workers; they had met when they were seated alphabetically, next to each other, at a professional conference. The family was rich in education and culture but not in worldly goods. Bob told me that, during the Depression, his father would often make some excuse to stay home from a family outing to the movies in order to save a quarter, while his mother would never turn away empty-handed the homeless, penniless men who knocked so frequently at their backdoor. These habits, so different from the spendthrift ways of my own family, stayed with the senior Whitmans throughout their lives and were firmly imprinted on their son.
Back in my dorm room at the end of the evening, dazzled by the intensity of my reaction to a man I had just met, I told my roommate, “I've met the man I'm going to marry.” She replied with something like, “Oh, you're just a starry-eyed seventeen-year-old freshman impressed by an older man.” That same evening Bob wrote in a spiral notebook, which he still won't let me see, “have I finally found her?” Improbable as it may seem, the stars we both saw that night were real. Bob followed up in that same journal a few weeks later, “and now I am mooing like a love-sick calf until I see Marina again…She can wrap me around any finger—including 4th finger, left hand.” In 2006, Bob Whitman and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. And that same roommate was among the guests at the elegant dinner party our children hosted to celebrate the occasion.
When I entered Radcliffe—the women's division of Harvard—in the fall of 1952, I returned to Cambridge, the city of my childhood. But contained within it was a world I hadn't known anything about during those earlier years, a world that, in the richness of its offerings and the protection it gave its inhabitants from the problems and tragedies of the world outside, seemed like a modern Garden of Eden. In these new surroundings, linked to family only by an infrequent phone call, I could begin to define myself and my goals in my own terms, rather than struggling to meet my parents' expectations.
Radcliffe women of the 1950s were among the last beneficiaries of a special privilege, the freedom to enjoy learning for its own sake without much concern about what it was useful for or how it would enhance our job opportunities, which we knew would be limited by our gender, no matter how smart we were. And we exercised this privilege in the most stimulating intellectual community in the world, guided by a brilliant faculty and surrounded by Harvard/Radcliffe classmates who were—as we were frequently reminded by our teachers and each other—the cream of the crop. This perspective faded in the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, as women began to challenge the cultural barriers that had prevented them from entering the man's world of career competition and advancement. Although I was one of the earliest and most determined of those challengers, I still look back nostalgically on the freedom my classmates and I enjoyed to pursue whatever subjects we found interesting.
Established in 1879 as an experiment in “separate but equal” education for women, giving them access to Harvard faculty while keeping them in a strictly single-sex learning environment, Radcliffe College had become increasingly integrated with Harvard. Finally, in 1999, it was fully merged into Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and ceasing to exist as an undergraduate institution. In the 1950s, Radcliffe was in the midst of that long transition. Thanks to the pressures of World War II, all our classes, with the exception of gym, had become fully shared with Harvard, and our instructors made no distinctions based on gender when they admitted students to courses or handed out grades. But the Radcliffe dormitories were at least a mile away from the Harvard campus, and women were not part of the social and intellectual world of the Harvard Houses, as the handsome living quarters strung along the edge of the Charles River are called.
The gracious, protective cocoon of Holmes Hall would look like an alien planet to today's students. We sat down to dinners served formally by our freshman classmates, at polished dark wood tables set with real china and flatware. After dinner, we drank coffee from demitasse cups, poured by our elderly but gracious housemother, in a living room that looked for all the world like an enlarged version of those in the affluent suburban homes many of us came from. We lived under strict parietal rules, signing in and out when we were going to be absent after 6:00 p.m., and alert to the fact that we would turn into pumpkins at mid-night. During daylight hours, when the front door was unlocked, a bell desk, guarded on a rotating basis by the hall's residents, prevented any male, including our fathers, from penetrating above the first floor without special permission.
Partly because of the physical separation of our living quarters, but even more because of long-standing tradition, women were allowed to participate in Harvard's rich extracurricular life only on a very limited basis. Radcliffe had its own Choral Union, its own Dramatic Club, and its own newspaper, the Radcliffe News. This last was an amateurish effort, vastly inferior to the royalty of all college newspapers, the Harvard Crimson, and as female undergraduates were somewhat grudgingly beginning to be allowed to work on the latter, my coeditor Jody Fisher and I were delighted to preside over the dignified demise of the News.
The blatancy of the many gender-based barriers to Radcliffe women's full participation in Harvard's undergraduate life was matched by the passivity of our response. We never thought to question why we were not allowed to study in Lamont, Harvard's undergraduate library, or be admitted to the Harvard Business School. When the overweight French graduate student with bad teeth who served as my thesis adviser made clumsy amorous advances, it never occurred to me that the problem of fending him off without jeopardizing my chances for a summa cum laude was anyone's but mine. My success in doing both turned out to be good practice for dealing with the episodes of sexual harassment—although the term had not yet entered everyday vocabulary—that I encountered during my professional life.
This achievement gave a boost to my self-confidence, but I still meekly accepted put-downs that would be unthinkable today. When an IBM recruiter abruptly terminated a job interview by remarking curtly, after a glance at my left hand, “We have a policy of never hiring engaged girls,” I stood up, smoothed my skirt, apologized for taking up his time, and left the room.
As I recounted this episode to my daughter and her closest friend shortly after they graduated from college, their faces fell in disappointment—they had expected a sharp departing put-down from me, at the very least. How could I make these children of the postfeminist era understand that arguing or making a scene would have been futile? No laws existed to prohibit such policies, and there was no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with which to lodge a complaint. Luckily, I didn't take this dismissal as an indication of my own inadequacy, but rather as an example of the idiocy rife in a world where I would soon have to make my own way. I was to call on this self-confidence many times as I elbowed my way into a man's world, though always with a smile on my face that belied my stubborn ambition.
We Radcliffe women were, in fact, curiously detached from the world outside, oblivious to the sexism and racism that marked the era. No one I knew ever disrupted the smooth academic rhythm to do volunteer work on another continent or work in an election campaign. The only student protest I can remember was aimed at winning the right to wear jeans instead of skirts to dinner—and we lost. And when the college rented television sets for the dormitories so that we could watch the Eisenhower-Stevenson election returns, it never occurred to any of us to ask why the sets had to vanish once the returns were in.
Part of the reason we were so oblivious to the gender-based limitations that surrounded us is that we were the good girls of the 1950s, members of the “silent generation” that was swept away by the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. But the arbitrary boundaries that limited our full access to Harvard's offerings were also obscured by the richness of what was available to us. We studied with the greatest academic stars of the era, whose lectures and questions expanded our intellectual horizons as far as they would stretch. My senior thesis adviser in the Government Department, Carl Friedrich, periodically left my supervision to that amorous graduate student because he was off in Europe, writing new constitutions for several of the war-torn countries there. My graduate student instructor in Government I was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who later headed the National Security Council under President Carter; Henry Kissinger was a graduate student in the same department. Many of my generation of government majors at Harvard remember Brzezinski's impersonation of a Soviet commissar, with a brush of blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a genuine accent (he was Polish, not Russian, although the distinction was lost on us). Most of his listeners were convinced that he was the real thing, only to discover later that he was, and remained, a fiercely anti-communist Cold War hawk.
The professor who had the greatest impact on me, fixing his laserlike gaze on the students as he outlined the roots of American democracy and why it is such a fragile plant, in need of constant nurture, was the political scientist Louis Hartz. He combined professorial rigor with a romantic streak. I will never forget wrestling on his final exam with an analysis of a couplet by e.e. cummings.
While you and i have lips and voices which are
for kissing and to sing with
Who cares if some one-eyed son-of-a-bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with
At the peak of a brilliant academic career, Hartz vanished. I learned from reading his obituary in the New York Times some thirty years later that he had spent the rest of his life wandering in Europe, homeless, alone, and mentally ill—evidence of the unsettling truth that creativity and madness can be closely linked.
Some of the most mind-stretching experiences I had in college, to my surprise, came in one or another of the three much-maligned Gen Ed (General Education) courses every student was required to take during the first two years. I chose Natural Sciences 1, widely dubbed “science for poets,” as well as a quick trip through the history of philosophy and a survey course in intellectual history. In them I wrote papers on such varied subjects as “Science as an Agency of Social Change,” “Religious Truth and Its Relevance for Mankind,” and “Freedom and Security: The Problem of Planning in a Free Society.” Such courses have often been criticized as encouraging dilettantes rather than serious scholars. But for me, at least, they succeeded in their goal—to expose me to some of the greatest thinkers and most difficult questions of all time—and thereby laid a foundation for the sort of critical thinking and analytical dissection of issues that have proved invaluable in every facet of my professional life.
In fact, along with many of my friends, I took what might be called a “smorgasbord” approach to the whole of undergraduate education, sampling tastes of whatever subjects interested us, without worrying about how it all hung together or whether it was preparing us for working lives, which, in any case, were expected to end with marriage. One area I left largely untouched, to my later regret, was math and science. And at least part of the reason was the burden of the expectations I carried as John von Neumann's daughter.
My progress through the first term of freshman calculus was uneventful; I did the work that was required without either huge effort or great enthusiasm. But just after the term ended, two things happened. First, I learned through the grapevine that the young teaching assistant, cowed by my name, had assumed that whenever I asked a question in class I was baiting him. He didn't realize that I was simply a conscientious Radcliffe student who wanted to make sure that I had understood everything.
Even worse, I ran into the chairman of the math department, a renowned mathematician named Garrett Birkhoff, who was both a coauthor with and a sometime adversary of my father in the world of higher mathematics. Making what he thought was pleasant conversation, he commented, “Well, Marina, I'm glad to see that you've upheld the family tradition by getting an A in calculus.” I smiled and said nothing but thought, “Good Lord, what would happen to the family honor if I ever got an A—?” I vowed not to risk it, and that chance encounter ended my formal study of mathematics on the spot. Although I eventually worked my way through a book on mathematics for economists while giving my firstborn his late-night bottle, and informally audited a math course or two after beginning my own teaching career, I remain surely the most mathematically illiterate economist of my generation.
Even though my father may have, indirectly and unwittingly, truncated my education in this particular direction, he continued to contribute to it in others by the intellectual dialogues he carried on with me in his letters. In one he responded at length to a question in my previous letter to him about whether the indeterminacy at the heart of the quantum mechanics description of reality supported the idea that human beings do have free will, and that we must therefore take responsibility for the decisions we make. He had clearly thought long and hard about the question, and had changed his mind about the answer somewhere along the way.
I did work on causality, free will and quantum mechanics in 1927 and thereafter, up to about 1931. I belonged—and still belong—to the “extreme” denomination who think that quantum mechanics points the moral that the laws of nature are not strict, but in most cases only prescribe the probabilities for otherwise “free” events. At that time I also thought—which I don't think now—that human “free” will may be due to such causes. What I now think is that the quantum mechanical indeterminacy may affect some physiological matters, e.g., a lot in genetics and most in mutations, but not necessarily “free” will. I would be more inclined to think that the “freedom” of will, at any rate as experienced, is a subjective illusion, which means primarily that we are not conscious of the sources of our decisions…I think that W. James pointed out that the Great Unknown, that we feel so often so close to us, and to which we are inclined to attribute such esoteric significance, may be nothing more than our own subconscious. That would make it very physiological, non-wonderful and home made.
The letter concludes with typical self-deprecatory skepticism: “Such is life. Of course it may well be that it is not such. Much love, Daddy.”1 Along with my expensive Harvard education, I continued to receive a complementary one for free.
Once Bob Whitman and I had accidentally found each other, we got together nearly every day. That meant I had to make sharp choices about how I spent my time. Three major occupations vied for my dorm mates' waking hours: studying hard enough to get good grades, going out on frequent dates, and joining the endless games of bridge that went on day and night in the small kitchens on each floor of our dormitory. I figured I could successfully pursue only two of the three, so I foreswore bridge.
I managed to handle the two balls I had chosen to keep in the air pretty well. In a letter I wrote to Bob after the end of my first exam period, I enthused, “I got two A's and two A—'s, which all goes to prove that it is not study but inspiration (yours) which does the trick, and I shall make it a practice for the rest of my academic career to go out every night of exam period.”2 I did have some awkward stumbles, though. Right at the beginning of our freshman year, a friend and I met with the director of volunteers at Mt. Auburn Hospital to offer our services; I had been a candy striper, as junior volunteers were called, at Princeton Hospital and had thoroughly enjoyed it. But our schedules soon overwhelmed us, and we never returned to follow up. It was only after I had been dating Bob for a while that it dawned on me that the elegant, white-haired Mrs. Whitman to whom I had made an unfulfilled promise at Mt. Auburn was his mother.
As Bob and I got to know each other better, my conviction that I had been right in that first snap judgment about him grew firmer. He treated me as an intellectual equal—for once, I didn't have to try to downplay my bluestocking tendencies—and, at the same time, showed a sensitive appreciation for the gap in life experience created by the ten-year difference in our ages. I appreciated his positive reaction, promising to encourage and support me in whatever career I chose, when I voiced my own ambitions, which had put off more than one prospective swain in the past. And, unlike some of the other young men I met, he was in no way influenced by my father's fame, which was particularly notable in the Harvard environment. When he chanced to introduce me to a friend in the math department, the immediate response was “Not the von Neumann?” When I responded with a modest nod, Bob's silent reaction was “Who on earth is this von Neumann?” His puzzlement must have showed, because the friend quickly launched into a brief biography.
Bob cemented his romantic stature in my eyes with all kinds of gestures during that first year. To celebrate my eighteenth birthday, he single-handedly mounted a perfect dinner for ten, complete with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; the only store-bought item was the cake. To this day, he is the chief cook when we entertain, although he leaves the baking to me.
After taking me to a production of Der Rosenkavalier, Bob presented me with a lovely silver pin in the shape of a rose. I admired its beauty but failed to recognize its significance as a proposal, despite the fact that, in the gloriously romantic poem that accompanied it, he referred to it as a symbol of “The multifoliate roses of our love,” writing, “It's just to mark the passage of a year / Since I became your Rosenkavalier.” A couple of years later, while we were planning our engagement party, I mockingly complained that he had never formally proposed to me. Appalled that I had missed the point of his gift, he insisted that I read the libretto of Richard Strauss's opera. How could I have been so dense?
Much more significant than dinners and jewelry was the powerful emotional support Bob gave me through a variety of crises, physical and emotional. When I totaled my car in a frightening accident on the overcrowded Merritt Parkway during an Easter Sunday return from Princeton to Cambridge, with five classmates along, it was Bob who insisted that I “get right back on the horse” by getting behind the wheel of his own car the next day. And when he realized how much my father's pressure on me to get stellar grades weighed on my self-confidence, he took it upon himself to write a letter to a formidable figure he had never met. In it, he urged my father to stop putting pressure on me to excel academically, telling him that I was already putting quite enough pressure on myself. It was this unstinting offer of emotional support, from the very beginning of our relationship, that underpinned me every step of the way as an adult, enabling me to take the chances and make the decisions without which my career could never have taken the path that it did.
Despite my immediate conviction that Bob was the man I wanted to spend my life with, seventeen seemed a bit early to commit myself to an exclusive relationship. The shy, quiet Princeton student who escorted me at the white-tie-and-tails Debutante Assembly and New Year's Ball, an elegant if anachronistic New York ceremony I participated in mainly to please my mother, visited Cambridge at my invitation. But, in the course of that weekend, I managed to maneuver him back-to-back with Bob to assure myself that the sweater I had been endlessly knitting for this first steady boyfriend could be successfully transferred to my new love interest. In another brief relationship, I found myself helping a student at the Harvard Business School finish up his case analyses—always due on Saturday evening—in time for us to go out. The fact that I could participate successfully, if clandestinely, in one of the most dreaded assignments in an MBA program that women were not allowed to enter nourished my growing awareness that arbitrary barriers based on gender were ripe for breaking, and that I just might have what it took to do it.
Two of my three college summers were spent at my mother's new home, the Villa Francesca in the quaint village of Old Field on Long Island. It was a turn of the century mansion overlooking Long Island Sound, designed and built by William de Leftwich Dodge, an American impressionist painter and one of the artists who had decorated the interior of the Library of Congress. Inside its dour gray stone exterior were a living room fireplace and mantel imported from France and one in the dining room brought over from Spain, with ersatz plaster columns painted to match, ornate ceilings painted by the artist-owner himself, and faithful replicas of Greek caryatids holding up the side balconies. The house nicely reflected my mother's flamboyant side; the real estate broker had shown it to my stepfather only after he mentioned that his wife was a “crazy Hungarian.”
They were able to pick up the house at a fire-sale price, partly because it was so eccentric but also because the bank that had attempted to repossess it when the owners failed to make mortgage payments was desperate to unload it. Those owners, former circus performers, had bought the house with a fortune acquired by making and selling fake French perfume during World War II. Once the real thing became available again, their business collapsed. After selling off everything in the house that wasn't nailed down, including a little Italian statue that topped the mosaic fountain on the sun porch, they stubbornly resisted the bank's efforts to evict them by holding off any possible purchaser with a shotgun. Undaunted, my mother somehow penetrated the firearm barrier and made a deal: the besieged owners would vacate the house in return for cash equivalent to three months' rent on a New York apartment and a promise never to reveal their whereabouts to the many creditors who would surely come looking for them. With that, the derelict mansion was ours, and my mother wasted no time restoring it to its former elegance, although the fountain's statue was never replaced.
I spent a lot of time during these summers swimming, sailing, playing tennis, and partying, trying to ignore the fact that, in all of these activities, my brother's talents cast my own lack of them into sharp relief. By the time George reached adolescence, he was already a first-class sailor, horseback rider, dancer, and tennis player and, at the age of sixteen, manager of the major horse show that took place annually just down the hill from our house. I, on the other hand, was famously clumsy. My family never let me forget the time that Desmond put me in charge of tying our boat up as he docked it. I jumped nimbly ashore and tied the ship's line neatly to the metal cleat provided for the purpose, only to discover that I had neglected to tie the other end to the boat, which was drifting steadily away from the dock. And my “clumsy cow” view of myself was reinforced by my mother's shout from the top of the bleachers, “Get the lead out of your ass,” when I missed a shot during a local tennis tournament. She meant to spur me on to do better, but she had a laserlike capacity to hone in on the gaps in my self-confidence and didn't seem to recognize how much such public humiliation hurt.
By the time of these humiliations, I had ceded the field to George in the athletic and social arenas, while regularly besting him in academic performance. It was only as adults, each with our own successful and rewarding career, that we became close friends and mutual supporters and could commiserate with each other on the way in which our parents—that is, our mother and my stepfather—had unwittingly made each of us feel inferior to the other. The sense of personal inadequacy that has dogged each of us throughout our lives, the feeling that we have failed to live up to their expectations, was surely implanted by the messages, spoken and unspoken, that pervaded our growing-up years.
A quite different humiliation was caused not by my mother's outspokenness but by her irresistible charm. As I came downstairs to greet Paul, the wealthy, debonair Frenchman I went out with a few times one summer, I surprised him trying to make out on the sofa with my still glamorous mother. She was resisting valiantly, but the scene was too much for me, and that was our last date. As a wedding present when I married Bob, Paul sent a set of very expensive French crystal sherry glasses. They're meant to wipe out his guilt, I explained to Bob.
I had a real job during those Long Island summers. I earned my first paycheck—forty dollars per week—working as a summer replacement at a weekly newspaper in Huntington called the Long Islander, whose major claim to fame was that it had been founded by Walt Whitman. Because my job was to fill in for whoever happened to be on vacation, I got a taste of every aspect of the newspaper business, from writing up wedding announcements to taking classified ads over the phone. Once or twice I was even allowed to write an editorial, which I did with my fingers crossed behind my back, since the editor-publisher's views were a lot more conservative than my own.
Mostly, though, I was a reporter, and it was in that capacity that I discovered my enthusiasm for journalism as a profession. The accounts I gave in my almost daily letters to Bob sounded a bit jaded: “I get to write up such fascinating items—weddings, silver weddings, golden weddings (my God, what a rut), Lion's Club elections, old men honored after 179 years with the Podunk Manure Co., etc. Also such fascinating meetings as that of the stockholders of the Hotel Huntington Corporation, which lasted 2 ½ hours and was all Greek to me. I wrote it up under the theory that no one else understood it either so it didn't matter if I mixed up par and market value.” (Luckily, by the time I became an economist, presidential adviser, and corporate director I had learned the difference.) But in the next sentence I wrote, “In all seriousness, I'm having lots of fun.”3
Somewhat later I wrote, “I also find myself police reporter, which is one helluva job. I know the inside of every police station for miles around, the life history, tastes and ‘line’ of every cop, and drew a rather caustic comment from the Judge yesterday when I fell asleep in the jury box [where reporters were allowed to sit during nonjury trials] in Justice Court yesterday.”4
Beneath the mock insouciance of a would-be sophisticate, the enthusiasm of a young woman thoroughly enjoying her varied perspectives on the everyday world comes through. And I actually admitted to being impressed, not to say frightened, when I found myself peering down the barrel of a shotgun wielded by an angry landowner, who was not at all pleased by my effort to write an investigative story on his employment, and mistreatment, of the itinerant farmworkers who tended his cucumbers.
Bob visited as frequently as he could during those Old Field summers and fitted in easily with my family—Mother, Desmond, and George. That meant a lot to me, since the three of them had made subtle but merciless fun of earlier boyfriends who, in their view, did not measure up. Bob's visit to my father's home in Princeton was a different matter. Once we had settled into what promised to be a long-term relationship, we both felt that Bob should get acquainted with the other side of my family as well. It was a visit that he looked forward to with real apprehension, partly because of my father's renown and even more because he knew how much I yearned for paternal approval.
In preparation for the visit, Bob went to the Widener Library to look up some of my father's writings. Among the many impenetrable mathematical titles, one offered a ray of hope: The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Encouraged by the fact that he was pretty good at both bridge and poker, Bob started to read. With some effort, he told me later, he got all the way to page fifteen before a thicket of equations stopped him.
When we got to Princeton, my father must have sensed how tense Bob was and did his best to put him at ease. He offered to show Bob the computer he had built at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Bob, curious to see this revolutionary machine, agreed enthusiastically. Once they got to the building, however, my father pulled out a large ring of keys, muttering as he went through it, “Here's the key to my office at Los Alamos, and here's the one to our house in Budapest.” He was unable to locate the proper key on that ring, however, and Bob never did get to see the construction of vacuum tubes that marked the dawn of the computer age. But my father was a gracious and amusing host throughout the weekend; Bob relaxed, and I sensed that the two had gotten along much better than I had feared.
While I was absorbed in my busy but sheltered college life, my father was caught up in a whirlwind at the center of which was Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, who, as head of the Manhattan Project, had successfully led his team to victory in the race against Germany to produce an atomic bomb, was enjoying the adulation of a grateful nation. In 1947, he had become both the director of the IAS and chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), “the group which, more than any other, made the government's decisions about atomic weapons.”5 But, in the process, he had made two mortal enemies: Edward Teller and Admiral Lewis Strauss. Both men were strong proponents of building a hydrogen bomb (also known as the H-bomb), which Oppenheimer was known to oppose. But both had personal reasons for wanting to bring him down as well. Teller felt that Oppenheimer had never given sufficient recognition to his, Teller's, role in Los Alamos's success, and Strauss had never forgotten that he had been made to look foolish by Oppenheimer in the course of a 1949 government hearing.
While the nation was glued to its television sets in 1954, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings that ended Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt, another drama was being played out behind closed doors. That was a hearing on whether Oppenheimer should be stripped of his security clearance, which was essential to his participation in any matters related to national security. In fact, Lewis Strauss had been working behind the scenes for some time to bring Oppenheimer down. Strauss, a retired navy admiral, wealthy businessman and banker, and confidant of President Eisenhower, who made him his White House adviser on atomic energy shortly after his own election, had quietly arranged Oppenheimer's ouster from the chairmanship of the GAC when his term was up in 1952. But the following year when Strauss, now chairman of the AEC, threatened to have him stripped of his security clearance, Oppenheimer refused to acquiesce without a fight. The result was a hearing before a three-person personnel security board, whose members were selected by Strauss himself.
Oppenheimer's vulnerability to allegations of disloyalty to his country stemmed primarily from his well-known association with members of the Communist Party and his own membership in a number of communist front organizations prior to World War II—indeed, these had very nearly prevented his appointment as head of the Manhattan Project, and the FBI had had him under surveillance ever since. His opposition to the H-bomb project was also raised against him, and he was forced by a bullying prosecutor to confess to a lie he had told in 1943 to protect a communist friend.
One after another, members of the scientific elite who had worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project attested to his unquestionable loyalty to his country, as evidenced by his untiring labors in its defense. Among them was my father, who pointed out how innocent of any knowledge of espionage and counterespionage they had all been at the beginning of the project. “We were little children,” he said, “we had to make up…our code of conduct as we went along.” He wasn't surprised at “how long it took Dr. Oppenheimer to get adjusted to this Buck Rogers universe, [but]…he learned how to handle it and handled it very well.”6
Edward Teller, on the other hand, drove the final nail into Oppenheimer's professional coffin with his reply to a question from a member of the three-person board that served as the jury as to whether he thought the nation's security would be endangered if Oppenheimer were allowed to keep his clearance: “[I]f it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say it would be wiser not to grant clearance.”7 In destroying Oppenheimer, Teller also damaged himself. He became a pariah to most members of the close-knit physics community, many of whom shunned him ever after, even to the point of refusing to shake his hand.
Drawing on his skills in interpersonal relationships, my father remained friends with both Teller and Oppenheimer and maintained a good relationship with Admiral Strauss. He had been unable to prevent Oppenheimer's expulsion from the world of decision making on national security matters in which he had played such a central role. He did succeed, though, in persuading Strauss, who was also chairman of the institute's Board of Trustees, not to oust Oppenheimer from the directorship there as well, thus salvaging a role for his devastated colleague, albeit a truncated one, in the world of physics that had been his universe since childhood. Oppenheimer proved himself worthy of my father's intervention on his behalf by building the IAS into one of the world's great centers of physics, as he had done twice before at other institutions—at the University of California, Berkeley, before the war and then at Los Alamos.
In the fall of 1954, hard on the heels of both the Army-McCarthy and the Oppenheimer hearings, my father was himself nominated for a seat on the AEC—later superseded by the Department of Energy—which had regulatory control over all activities involving the development and use of nuclear energy. It was a prestigious post, and one that required a spotless record of loyalty to the United States. My father's scientific prominence, his central role in the Los Alamos project, and his hard-line stance against Soviet communism won him Senate confirmation with flying colors. The congratulatory letter I wrote him was enthusiastic, but it also had a less straightforward subtext. Heavily influenced by my mother's desire to conceal our family's Jewish origins, over the years I had internalized her fear that the truth might somehow detract from my social acceptability. In my letter, I expressed concern that his sudden prominence in the public eye might “out” our ancestry.
His reply addressed both his attitude toward the nomination and my awkward, as well as naive, request that he keep up the pretense of what he called, with his flair for a good pun even when discussing serious matters, “pseudo gentility.”
The job isn't mine yet, I have to be confirmed by the US Senate and in view of my doings in re: Oppenheimer this might yet lead to a bust, but I think that is less probable than 50%, although not at all impossible. The job is of course horribly tempting for an ambitious SOB like I am…It is interesting to come to close quarters with some of the most Buck Rogerian technical jobs, and with some of the weirdest things of the so-called “contemporary scene.” I would be lying if I did not admit that it is—to put it mildly—very stimulating.
Now to the Aryan business…Dear, I love you even if you decide to pass as a Chinaman. I don't despise you for trying to appear mildly Episcopalian, for a man who tries to get along at the same time with R. Oppenheimer and L.L. Strauss, the foundations of quantum mechanics and the hydrogen bomb, I couldn't take exception to such a matter even if I wanted to. I do think that you are taking unnecessary chances for an inadequate return. You are a talented girl, and you could probably get along in this silly world without indulging in such marginal operations. However this is no mortal sin.8
I accepted his mild rebuke in the loving spirit in which it was offered, but it would be a good many years before I saw the wisdom of my father's words and abandoned any effort to conceal my ethnic origins, although I remain to this day a communicant of the Episcopal Church I grew up in. This is not because I share the Christian belief in the promise of life after death, although, as the end of my eighth decade draws inexorably closer, I sometimes regret not having this psychological bulwark against mortality. But the older I get, the more I am convinced that when I die my body will return to the elements and a shrinking number of my genes will be passed down from one generation of my offspring to the next, but that my individual consciousness, my “self,” will be forever extinguished. Why, then, do I remain a participant in the traditional Episcopalian service? It is because I find the familiar liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer a helpful framework within which to “keep myself constantly mindful of la condition humaine” as I once wrote to my mother.
My father took a much more serious view, however, of my declared intention to marry Bob as soon as I graduated from college. In writing to me about his concerns, he bemoaned the fact that he hadn't told me his feelings when we were together.
I was quite melancholy afterwards, isn't it symbolic of how I always managed my affairs with you—lots of hemming and hawing, and an occasional emotional burst, always very, very late. Perhaps it is not too late each time, I am afraid it is too little.
Dear, I am very worried about your plans. I may be seeing ghosts, but I think I don't.
Don't misunderstand me. I like Bob, I could, if I saw more of him, like him a great deal more. Also, he is clearly able, for many good reasons, e.g., otherwise you would probably not pass the time of day with him, nor could he have landed the Princeton job [where he had just been appointed an instructor in English, beginning in the fall of 1955].
But…
Dear, do not misread your own character. You are very, very talented and then some. You absorb information like a sponge, you have sense and charm, you can handle the most highly desired task in the world: dealing with people, influencing people. You are God's own chosen executive, and I am not joking. You would also make a damn good journalist, and a few other things.
Besides, you like money. Whether you show it or not…you have expensive tastes. You are “genetically loaded” from both sides, both Mariette and I adore money…[so] it would be a pity, a misery to see you in petty, straightened circumstances, and worst of all, cut off from using your talents and acting your proper role in life.9
Then, fearing that he hadn't expressed his feelings sufficiently clearly, he wrote me less than a month later, repeating his previous concerns and spelling them out at greater length.
[T]his marriage will set you very straight and narrow financial limits for good and ever. Also, the accidents of academic promotion are not unlikely to land you in remote and otherwise unrewarding places, where you have no means to do anything, to be anything, but a “Hausfrau.” And—all of this has such a desperate finality and ineluctability, right from the word go, right from the age of 21 on. Do you really believe that the mood in which you do this, at 21 or 22, will last at 30 at 40 at 50? It seems to me a desperate chance.
“Don't—for heaven's sake—imagine that we are so very different. In spite of my curses about the human race, I have been as happy as I can constitutionally be, most of the time, with Mariette and with Klari. But I could have never existed—not with a female angel—without external success and some strong intellectual interest…I doubt that things with you are fundamentally different.10
I was deeply moved by the love and concern expressed in this letter. But, even as I recognized the truth of many of my father's observations about me, I remained firm in my belief that Bob was the person I wanted to spend my life with, and that I would somehow manage to avoid the limitations and frustrations the letter had described. Wanting to respond positively to my father's outpouring of emotion, I tried to reassure him by saying that a year's separation, while I finished my senior year in Cambridge and Bob spent his first year teaching at Princeton, would give us time to test our relationship.
For my father, happiness was found first and foremost in the world of the intellect; for my mother, its wellspring was social relationships. True to form, she was as delighted with my marriage plans as my father was horrified. Her fear had always been that, by “letting my brains show,” competing with men in the intellectual sphere, I would reduce my chances of finding a mate, which in any case would become more difficult after the college years were over and there were fewer single males at hand. Whereas my father's mantra was “Don't marry until you have established your own professional persona,” hers was “Marry early, even if it means marrying often.” Her enthusiasm, tinged with relief, was enhanced by the fact that my chosen mate was a certified New England Yankee, whose Mayflower pedigree laid to rest her fears about my Jewish origins by guaranteeing my social acceptability and that of our future children.
Soon after my exchange of letters with my father, I went off to Europe for six weeks with four of my college classmates, including my old friend Margaret Rabi. We had a fine time on our mini-grand tour, visiting all the major tourist sites in England, France, and Italy that we could cram in, engaging in a variety of mild flirtations while fending off the more annoying amorous advances of French and Italian males, and discovering that if we ate enough croissants and drank enough café au lait at our “free” breakfast, we could make it until dinnertime, thus saving the price of lunch.
We even survived without mishap the ocean crossings over and back on a creaky Italian ship called, euphemistically, the Castel Felice. We didn't tell our parents until we were safely back home that we generally slept on deck in preference to the crowded, smelly dormitory to which we were assigned, or that a couple of the young ladies in other groups who did likewise became pregnant by members of the ship's crew.
Hoping, once again, to give my father pleasure, I picked up a couple of mementos to bring home to him. One was a statue of a rotund, smiling ivory Buddha, the symbol of wisdom, which bore a more than passing resemblance to its intended recipient. The other was a slim volume of pornographic limericks to add to his vast collection—Count Palmyra's Book of Verses—whose cover left no doubt about what was inside. By the time I delivered these gifts, neither one of us had much heart to laugh together over them.
I had just returned to my mother's house from our European jaunt when a call came from my stepmother, telling me that my father had just been operated on for a malignant tumor so large that it had led to a spontaneous fracture of his collarbone. On hearing the news, Desmond, whose career in health physics had made him wise to such matters, immediately told me to ask whether the tumor was primary or secondary. On hearing that it was secondary, he gently explained to me that the cancer had metastasized from some other site. In the days before chemotherapy, such a diagnosis was a certain death sentence.
My father knew only too well what he was facing, but he told the truth to as few people as possible and carried on with his busy life as before. When I visited him and Klari in Washington, he clearly preferred to avoid any discussion of what lay ahead. I went along with his unspoken desire to pretend that everything was normal, although I cried myself to sleep many nights after I returned to my final year of college. But at the same time, I asserted my growing independence in a particularly painful way, by truncating the “test year” I had promised him. The summer's brief separation had only strengthened my conviction that I wanted to be reunited with Bob as soon as possible; we made plans to announce our engagement at Christmas and marry in June, as soon as I graduated.
Confronting both his imminent mortality and the knowledge that I was determined to take the step he had so vehemently argued against, my father wrote me a letter that was both angry and anguished.
I feel thoroughly shocked…A person of your intelligence and sensitivity cannot fail to know that you are breaking a gentleman's agreement. Your lightness in glancing over this does you very little credit…
I am sorry, but I must mention one more thing. At the time of the rather depressing episode of your worries, that my nomination to the AEC might lead to a public disclosure of your jewish origin, I wrote you…that I would, if you wish, put up and cooperate as far as I can with your desire to “pass” as gentile. However, I also wrote you, that there is one exception to this. I would consider it as definitely unconscionable if you concealed—by commission or by omission—from your future husband the fact that you are 100% jewish on both sides and no nonsense about it.11
On this score, at least, he had no reason to worry. It had never occurred to me not to tell Bob everything I knew about my origins, and he regarded my ethnicity as just one interesting but not particularly important piece of the mosaic that made me the person I was.
After his long cri de coeur about what he regarded as both a personal betrayal and a seriously unwise decision on my part, my father drew a line in the middle of page 8 of his letter and launched into a long, detailed, scholarly discussion of the proposed topic for my senior thesis. I was planning to write on the political theories of an obscure seventeenth-century theologian called Bossuet, a proponent of the absolute divine right of kings. In his response to my query, my father wrote knowledgeably about that bishop's theory of history, monarchism, and anti-Protestantism and suggested that I compare his theory of the state to that of Calvin, quoting in French, from memory, the essence of the latter's views on the subject. Never once, in a letter that ranged from outraged anguish to an intellectual tour de force, did my father refer to his own dire situation.12
Despite the pain he felt at my unshakeable decision, my father acquiesced in our plans with the outward graciousness that was his hallmark. Although by the Christmas vacation of 1955 he was confined to a wheelchair, he traveled from Washington to New York, where we had arranged to hold our engagement party in a hotel rather than at my mother's home on Long Island, in order to make the logistics easier for him. He captivated the guests with his wit and charm, never referring to his condition or revealing his true feelings about the event.
Soon after the beginning of the New Year, my father entered Walter Reed Hospital, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. Given the gravity of his illness, both of my grandmothers urged me to postpone our wedding, feeling that such a celebration would be inappropriate while he lay dying. Although I respected my grandmothers' traditionalist views, I didn't see that waiting for him to die before going ahead with our plans would either give my father comfort or show him respect. And I certainly didn't intend to deceive him by pretending that I had followed his wishes by breaking the engagement.
Despite my firmness, or rather because of it, I was an emotional wreck during the last term of my senior year at Radcliffe, knowing that I had reneged on a promise to the father I had spent my whole life striving to please. What's more, I had done it when we both knew he was dying. I actually took my final exams in the college infirmary, having been felled by a variety of symptoms that, though real enough, were almost certainly emotional in origin. No one from my family was there to see me receive the prize for the highest-ranking academic record in my class at graduation; my mother was also ill at the time, my stepfather was recovering from major surgery, and my stepmother was looking after my father in Washington. But Bob and his mother provided my cheering section, and I did the same for him when he received his PhD from Harvard the following day.
Our wedding took place just ten days after these academic rites of passage. The Episcopalian service was held in the beautiful, whitewashed, eighteenth-century Caroline Church, which my mother and stepfather attended in Setauket, a few miles from their home. That, too, had its complications. During one of the premarital sessions with the rector that were required of all couples intending to be married in the Episcopal Church, Bob mentioned that he was a Unitarian. This threw the good clergyman into embarrassed confusion; apparently baptism in a Trinitarian sect—one that accepts the reality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—was a requirement for an Episcopalian church wedding.
Bob responded that if rebaptism was a requirement for us to be married in the church of my choice, he would go through with it, but he would regard it as a meaningless ritual. The rector was, naturally, appalled, and at our next session he reported triumphantly that he had obtained permission from the bishop to waive the rebaptism requirement. When Bob told this story to his mother several years later, she burst out laughing. It turned out that, although he had been raised a Unitarian, he had been baptized in the Congregational Church, which was acceptably Trinitarian, so the whole imbroglio had been totally unnecessary.
Every detail of our very traditional ceremony seemed perfect: I wore my mother's heirloom Brussels lace veil, attended by six bridesmaids in the excessively bouffant pastel (in my case pink) dresses that were the fashion of the day. And the mountain laurel was in full bloom at the reception, held on the patio and in the garden of my mother's home with its stunning view of Long Island Sound. But there was one painfully discordant note. Although my father couldn't be there, his mother, my beloved Granny Gitta, was. The guests were shocked, though, that as we were reciting our vows, she turned her back to the altar. She died of cancer herself a few months after the wedding, and those who saw it tried to attribute her peculiar behavior to the fact that she was already ill. But I believe she knew exactly what she was doing: exhibiting a silent protest at the joyous ceremony that was taking place as her oldest and favorite son was dying. Fortunately, my back was to her as I faced the altar, so I didn't learn of her silent protest until much later, when it could no longer mar the joy of the day.
After I changed into the matching blue and white dress, coat, and remarkably unbecoming hat that constituted my going-away outfit, Bob and I ran down the front steps of the Villa Francesca through a shower of rice. Our wedding trip consisted of a hurried one-day drive to Camp Chewonki in Maine, where Bob would be in charge of the junior division of the camp. Only the dead fish that my brother and Bob Ganz had thoughtfully wired to the car radiator as a going-away gift marked us as newlyweds. It was discovered when we stopped for gas and asked the attendant to track down the source of the odd smell coming from under the hood of the car.
Our summer as Mama and Papa Woodchuck to a bunch of eight- to ten-year-old boys took the place of a honeymoon, which would have to wait until we could afford it. But, in an odd way, that summer served as a kind of prolonged honeymoon, by providing an interlude that postponed the beginning of real married life together, with its attendant routines, roles, and responsibilities. It also gave us the leisure and privacy to explore together, for the first time, the delights of sexual intimacy.
The camp provided us with our own little cabin off in the woods and excused Bob from having to spend more than a few nights in a cabin with the campers. His duties were not onerous and left us with a good deal of time together, without any of the pressures of a career-oriented job. We ate all three meals every day in the camp dining room, consuming institutional food in a huge hall filled with more than a hundred shouting, jumping, food-tossing boys. But it postponed for a couple of months the need to test my nonexistent cooking skills. My housekeeping consisted mainly of sweeping out our tiny cabin with a broom, and about all the camp expected of me was to give the nurse an occasional hand in the infirmary and, once in a while, drive into town on an errand. I was also asked to give a weekly bath to some of the junior boys, but that job came to naught when the boys protested violently. Somehow they sensed that I wasn't a legitimate stand-in for their mothers.
All in all, I had plenty of time to write thank-you letters for wedding presents and think about what the future held. I was determined to make a success of my brand new marriage without the tensions I saw in those of both my parents, and Bob and I definitely wanted to have children. At the same time, I knew my father was right. Unlike most of my classmates and female contemporaries, I also wanted a career that would carry the opportunity for both high impact and high earnings. But I hadn't the slightest idea what that career would be or how to go about finding it.