Spring 1953
Now, the thing I think would interest the committee very greatly, if you could possibly explain to them . . . Doctor . . . how you can account for what would seem to be an abnormally large percentage of communists at MIT?—ROBERT L. KUNZIG, Counsel HUAC, April 22, 1953
THE COLD WAR promised to be the sugar daddy of the MIT mathematics department, but McCarthyism — which blamed the setbacks in that war on sinister conspiracies and domestic subversion — threatened to devour it.
While Nash and his graduate student friends were shooting each other down and playing games in the mathematics common room, FBI investigators were fanning out around Cambridge, rifling through trash cans, placing individuals under surveillance, and questioning neighbors, colleagues, students, and even children.1 Their targets, as Nash and everyone else at MIT would learn in early 1953, included the chairman and the deputy chairman of the MIT mathematics department, as well as a tenured full professor of mathematics, Dirk Struik — all three one-time members, indeed, leading members, of the Cambridge cell of the Communist Party. All three were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.2 It was a state of siege and everyone in the mathematics department felt the threat.
At the time, Nash was no doubt far more preoccupied with the draft — not to mention growing complications of his personal life — than with the possible repercussions for himself of the persecution of his benefactors. Nevertheless, the whole episode was a warning that the world he and other mathematicians inhabited was an extremely fragile one. A congressional committee could destroy your career, just as your draft board could send you halfway around the world.
The whole thing had begun as a farce.3 McCarthy’s original list of communists, announced in February 1950, was studded with academics, including the father of Nash’s friend Lloyd Shapley, Harvard astronomy professor Harlow Shapley, whom McCarthy incorrectly identified to reporters as “Howard Shipley, astrologer.” But as the red hunt gathered momentum, the entire scientific community felt vulnerable. Princeton’s Solomon Lefschetz would be identified as a possible communist sympathizer by an investigative body.4 Within a year, Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, one of the most revered scientists in America and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, would be humiliated by the McCarthyites.
When the subpoenas were issued, nobody knew how MIT would handle the matter. Other universities had responded with immediate firings and suspensions.5 “McCarthyism was a big threat to these schools,” Zipporah Levinson, Norman Levinson’s widow, recalled. “During the war the government had started pouring money into them. The threat was that the research money would dry up. It was a bread-and-butter issue.”6 Martin and Levinson were certain that they were about to lose their jobs and wind up blacklisted for good, like so many others. Levinson talked about becoming a plumber and specializing in the repair of furnaces. The investigators had their eye on the three Browder boys — sons of former Communist Party head Earl Browder, who had all studied or were studying mathematics at MIT and were scholarship recipients, as well.7
“MIT was turned topsy-turvy,” Mrs. Levinson recalled. “The faculty debated and debated how to prove that MIT was patriotic. There was strong pressure to name names.”8 As it turned out, Karl Compton, the president of the university and an outspoken liberal who was a supporter of the Chinese revolution and a critic of Chiang Kai-shek, may have felt that he himself would soon be subpoenaed. He hired a white-shoe Boston law firm, Choate, Hall & Steward, to defend Martin, Levinson, and the others for a minimal fee.9 By April, when Martin and Levinson were forced to testify, The Tech was running daily stories and anti-McCarthy sentiment was running high on campus.10
There is no evidence that the FBI ever questioned Nash or any other students or faculty in the department, or asked for depositions, in an effort to establish a link between Levinson’s and Martin’s Communist Party membership and classified defense research — a link that probably never existed, given that both left the party soon after the end of the war. The graduate students and junior faculty in the department stood on the sidelines and watched lives and careers ruined and homes, even car insurance, lost. “By that time, young people had prospects, jobs, optimism,” Mrs. Levinson recalled. “The younger people — Nash’s group — didn’t want to be too friendly. They were scared. They distanced themselves.”11
Martin and several others named their former associates. Norman Levinson refused to name anyone who had not been previously named. “Ted and Izzy Amadur hemmed and hawed. Norman knew that Ted Martin and Izzy would cooperate. They spilled all the names. Norman said he’d talk freely about the party but that he wouldn’t name names. The lawyer told Norman, no you don’t have to say any names. He’d cooperate, but he wouldn’t give any names.”12 Martin gave a pathetic, frightened performance. Levinson’s testimony, by contrast, demonstrated the qualities of intellect and character that made him such a force in the mathematics community. In a series of forceful and eloquent answers to direct questioning, he managed at one and the same time to defend the youthful idealism that led him into the party, attack the intellectual poverty of communism, and, implicitly, call into question the committee’s assumption that communism was a threat to the nation. He spoke out against the hounding of former party members and asked the committee to take a stand against the blacklisting of Browder’s oldest son, Felix, who had finished his Ph.D. and was unable to obtain an academic post.
Thanks to MIT’s support and the compromises they struck, Levinson and the others kept their jobs. But the whole dispiriting affair, which had been preceded by months of harassment and threats, left deep scars on everyone involved. Martin, in particular, was shattered and deeply depressed, and was unable, nearly forty-five years later, to talk about it.13 Levinson’s younger daughter, a student in junior high school, suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with manic depression. Levinson and his wife blamed it partly on her being harassed by the FBI.14 And those on the periphery, ostensibly unaffected, learned a lesson, namely that the world they so very much took for granted was dangerously fragile and vulnerable to forces beyond its control.
Nash took no part in the heated discussions among some of the graduate students over the morality of the mathematicians’ decision to cooperate with the government.15 Any discussion of morality raised for him the specter of hypocrisy. But the angry, frightening, turbulent time would supply him with some of the prosecutory demons that came to haunt him later.16