• 14 •
FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1958–59 I took a leave of absence from the Insitute for Advanced Study to work at the General Atomic laboratory in La Jolla on Project Orion. Project Orion was a wild dream, to change the course of human history by flying into space on a grand scale, using our huge stockpile of nuclear bombs for a better purpose than murdering people. We were a bunch of young people who shared the dream. We believed we could actually build a bomb-propelled spaceship with a thousand-ton payload and fly with it to Mars and to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. We imagined ourselves cruising around the solar system with our ship and exploring the planets and moons, just as Charles Darwin cruised with the good ship Beagle around the earth exploring the continents and islands. The dream lasted as a real possibility for about a year. In that year we worked out a detailed design for the ship. We convinced ourselves that it was technically possible to survive the thousands of nuclear explosions that it would take to propel it. We persuaded the U.S. government to give us money to explore the possibilities.
After the first year, two facts became clear. First, the government would support the project as a research venture but not as a real space mission. Second, the radioactive fallout from the bombs would contaminate the environment to an extent that was rapidly becoming unacceptable. After that year, the project continued to do good technical work, but the dream of a real voyage faded. I went back to my earth-bound job in Princeton and kept in touch with the project only as an occasional visitor.
Forty years later my son George published a book, Project Orion (2002). He was five years old when the project started and was always interested in its history. His book contains far more information about the project than I ever knew when I was working on it. He examined the official documents that I never saw and interviewed the people who worked on the project and were mostly still alive. He brought the dream briefly back to life. But by the time the book appeared, I had long ago given up any desire to revive Orion. Orion was a dream that failed, a great adventure for all of us who took part in it, and perhaps a model for future dreams that will one day come true.
At the same time as the big drama of Project Orion, the little drama of my family also reached its climax. The letters in this chapter record both dramas, ending with a marriage in the San Diego courthouse. Between those two dramas there is an interlude at the San Diego Glider Club. The Glider Club owns a landing strip between the General Atomic buildings and the Pacific Ocean. The strip points east-west, perpendicular to the cliffs which run north-south along the shore. The lift that a glider needs to stay airborne comes from the wind blowing up over the cliffs. The lift is strongest over the beach. This means that the glider has to take off upwind and land downwind. The downwind landing is scary when the wind is strong. In 1958 the club-owned glider was a big clunky old two-seater airplane with the engine removed. It came in to land downwind at about sixty miles per hour on a short and bumpy runway. Most of the club members owned smaller gliders that they had built themselves. Those who worked at the Convair factory built their gliders out of parts smuggled out of the factory.
Now, sixty years later, the club is still there, but the old clunky gliders are gone. Instead there are hang-gliders, more beautiful, more convenient, and safer. Next to the landing strip, the elegant modern buildings of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have given the place an air of respectability that it totally lacked in the old days.
I promised a report about my physics and about Sputniks. Here it is.
The kind of physics I was doing in 1947–50 when I did my major work was to start with a set of specific equations (supposedly given by God but in fact written down by Dirac, Heisenberg, and Yukawa) and calculate whatever could be calculated. These equations were supposed to predict everything that could be observed. But since 1950 it has turned out that there is no way to get definite results from these equations. Nobody knows whether they have solutions, and there seems no way to find out. So the general belief has grown since 1950 that these equations are mathematically meaningless. The results we got in 1947–50 were good as far as they went, but there seemed no way to go further in that direction.
In 1952 a new point of view was introduced by a young man called Harry Lehmann, then in Göttingen and now spending a year in Princeton. Lehmann’s idea was to build up a physical theory without any equations at all. That is, without any “equations of motion” which tell definitely how a physical system behaves as time passes by. Instead, Lehmann allowed only to use three general principles to limit the behavior of the system: (1) the spectrum (meaning that the masses and charges and spins of the particles are given); (2) causality (meaning that no particle can travel faster than light); and (3) unitarity (meaning that the total probability for anything to happen is always equal to one).
Starting this radical program in 1952, Lehmann was only able to prove some weak consequences of his three principles, and it did not look to me then as if any interesting physics would ever come out of it. However, he is stubborn, and he was joined by growing numbers of other people with greater mathematical skill. And now from these three principles we are getting more solid and detailed information about the physical world than we had thought possible. The mathematical difficulties are extreme, and this makes it the right kind of exercise for me. It will be many years before we approach an answer to the central problem, which is to find out how many, and of what kinds, the possible worlds obeying Lehmann’s three principles are. I was for many years prejudiced against Lehmann because I thought not enough physics was put into his principles to get anything useful out. It was only this October when Lehmann came to Princeton that I joined in his program. What I have done since is to clean up two mathematical problems that had held him back for a year.
This work is very long-range. It is not particularly affected by the new ideas of Yang and Lee about space symmetry. They have given us new information about the correct “spectrum” to feed into a theory. We are looking at the deep mathematical structure of the theory, which is largely independent of spectrum. My fault for the last three years has been that I worked on second-rate problems to which one could expect a quick answer. Now I have found the subject for a sustained effort.
I have nothing original to say about Sputniks. I feel cheerful about them. It seems to me clear that the Soviet government does not intend to throw bombs at anybody but does intend to dominate the earth by rapid scientific and industrial growth. This will in turn stimulate the Americans to undertake major projects which they would be too parsimonious to do otherwise. There is no question that colonization of the moon and planets will be one of them. I expect eventually to take a hand in this. The prospect seems to me exciting and hopeful.
MARCH 1, 1958, PRINCETON
Katrin was confirmed on Wednesday. She looked fine in a new pale blue dress, white veil, and a pearl necklace which Imme and I bought her as a surprise present the day before. I was glad to be there and especially to go up with Katrin and stand behind her while she knelt in front of the bishop. The singing was good. They take all the hymns at a fast clip and sound as if they enjoy it. Katrin and her friend Betsy sing regularly in the choir on Sundays. The confirmation service was in the evening, and I took Imme and the little ones along.
The children go on with their lives as gaily as ever. Breakfast table conversation. George: “I know that first there were only ladies in the world, and then afterwards the men came.” Esther: “But that is all nonsense. Don’t you know that at the beginning there were just two people, Eve and that other guy, what was his name?” Another conversation, showing the difference between the scientific and the practical approach. George: “I can understand how a boat moves along when you push on the oars. You push the water away and so it makes room for the boat to move along.” Esther: “But I can make the boat move along even without understanding it.”
APRIL 27, 1958, LA JOLLA
Now I am riding the whirlwind once again. I came here on Wednesday night and had three days of intensive meetings and discussions. Today is Sunday, and I shall spend it alone, thinking over our problems, writing letters, swimming gently in the hotel pool. I have amazing luck in being here [at the General Atomic laboratory] just now. Partly it is not luck. The reason the people here are anxious to keep me is that in summer 1956 I was the only one of the famous visiting scientists who wholeheartedly threw myself into the practical problems of building a reactor and came up with some sensible ideas. Incidentally, the reactor we were so hotly arguing about then is now in material existence and will start to operate on May 6. It is a very small reactor, but it has been a good training ground for the people here. They are ready now to build bigger and better ones.
As a result of my reputation for being ready and willing to work on all kinds of problems, I find myself now in a group of people, all of us under forty, planning an enterprise which will inevitably grow into colossal dimensions. The feeling and atmosphere we are now in must be similar to the atomic bomb project in the earliest days, before Los Alamos was thought of, when Oppenheimer and Teller and a handful of other people were feeling their way into the problem and establishing the basic ideas for everything which came later. It is characteristic of this very early time that there is no feeling of pressure or urgency. Everything is informal and relaxed, and we have difficulty in taking the whole situation seriously. In years to come, when huge projects and empires have grown out of this, the early period will have become legendary, and we will not be able to distinguish our memories of this time from the legends which will grow around us. When we shall finally be caught in the glare of newspaper headlines and international political disputes (and this in the end must happen to us as it happened to Oppenheimer), it will seem incredible that the basic plans shall have been made in such a light-hearted spirit as we are living in today.
Since our project never became a huge enterprise like Los Alamos, we never had to face the political storms that engulfed Oppenheimer and Teller. Our project remained active for seven years with a total staff of about fifty people, never attracting much attention, and then quietly disappeared. In the Test Ban Treaty ratification hearings that determined its fate, the project was barely mentioned.
THURSDAY NIGHT, MAY 1, 1958
The word finally came from Washington today: “General Atomic has a contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense to carry out an experimental and theoretical feasibility investigation of a concept for propulsion by nuclear energy of a manned space vehicle capable of interplanetary flight.” This statement is not secret anymore, and we are allowed to use it in our efforts to recruit people. However, the Defense Department says we should tell it to people with a request to keep it confidential.
They will be unhappy if it appears in newspapers or is otherwise spread in public. So please keep it to yourselves.
I was interested in the reactions to our project at General Atomic. I am something of a fanatic on this subject. You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep farming. I think the parallel is quite a close one. If Columbus had been a patriotic Spaniard, he would have better gone into sheep farming. But he was not serving Spain’s purposes. He was using Spain to serve his own. I am unenthusiastic about schemes for irrigating the Sahara. I suppose it will be done someday. But it will be expensive and will take a long time. It is not likely that it could be done fast enough to keep pace with growing population. And it is a problem for politicians and bankers rather than scientists.
We shall know what we go to Mars for only after we get there. The study of whatever forms of life exist on Mars is likely to lead to better understanding of life in general. This may well be of more benefit to humanity than irrigating ten Saharas. But that is only one of many reasons for going. The main purpose is a general enlargement of human horizons.
JUNE 22, 1958, LA JOLLA
I got two good letters from Imme which make me happy. She writes mainly about the children. I had told her by letter the object of our work here. There did not seem to be any need to keep it quiet any longer. Imme replied, “When I drove George to school this morning, I told him about the spaceship. He was very excited, asked immediately which planet you will send it to, and whether there would be a little seat right next to you for him to come along. I had guessed the secret a long time ago and was a hundred percent sure it couldn’t be anything else.” She also reports, “The kids’ report cards are as good as ever. They will be sent off to you, and you will then be able to boast about your offspring on one of the next beer or martini evenings.”
Los Alamos was beautiful. The air up there at 7,500 feet is so clear and light, now I am down here it feels like treacle. The days in Los Alamos were also exciting. The place is much more alive, and people are much more enthusiastic up there than they were when I went a year ago. I found here a letter from George dictated to Imme. He says at the end, “P.S. I was excited about the spaceship. When we drove home from our big trip we saw a jet plane and a spaceship, and the spaceship was made even before yours. Another love from George.”
I never discovered what George had seen that he identified as a spaceship made before ours.
The leader and originator of our project is a young fellow called Ted Taylor, two years younger than I am. He is such a modest and ordinary-looking young man, it is hard to believe when I am chatting with him that this is the Columbus of the new age. But he is it, there is no doubt in my mind about that. He is married to a competent and understanding young wife, and they have four children ranging from ten years to two. I spend a lot of time at their house and enjoy the children. They are not so well-behaved as my children, so you would probably not be too happy in their house. But for me it is fine. On Friday night I went around to their house with a bottle of good cognac, and the three of us, Ted and his wife Caro and I, looked at Jupiter and Saturn through Ted’s six-inch telescope. The seeing was good, and we drank to the moons of Jupiter, to our children, and to the success of our enterprise.
Ted was a graduate student during my time at Cornell. I knew him a bit then, but he was violently unhappy with examinations and coursework. He was clearly not intended to be an academic physicist. I did not think much of him in those days. He had been a student at Berkeley but had been thrown out without a degree. He then went to Los Alamos in a very junior position, at a time when all the clever people had left. (This was around 1947.) At Los Alamos he found the people who were left had no ideas and no desire to do anything new. Ted began stirring them up, telling them better ways to do almost everything, until by 1949 a large part of Los Alamos was working on one or another of his ideas. It became embarrassing that he was in a junior position without any degree. So Los Alamos forced him to go to Cornell. He went back to Los Alamos with his degree and continued pouring out ideas. A great part of the small bomb development of the last five years was directly due to him.
In 1956 he came to General Atomic to be head of the theoretical physics division, with complete freedom to do what he liked. He has been producing a lot of good ideas in the reactor business. But he has been living and thinking with bombs for ten years, and he says when he is lying awake at night, he always comes back to bombs. His dream has always been to find some way of putting these tremendous energies to useful work instead of using them for murdering people. Ted got his inspiration last November as a direct result of the Russian Sputniks. He had never been particularly interested in space-travelling. His schemes for peaceful uses of bombs had always been earth-bound and for that reason difficult to put into operation. Then quite suddenly in November he saw that he had the answer to the basic problem of space-flying, how to get enough energy into a sufficiently small weight.
In December Freddy de Hoffmann came to Princeton to tell me of this scheme, and I saw in half an hour that it was the thing all the space-flight projects had been praying for. I have never had any reason to change this opinion. It will work, and it will open the skies to us. The basic idea is absurdly simple. One is amazed that nobody thought of it before. But the only man who could think of it was somebody who had been working and thinking for years with bombs, so that he could know exactly what a bomb of a given size will do. It was not an accident that this man happened to be Ted. The problem is to convince oneself that one can sit on top of a bomb without being fried. If you do not think about it carefully, it looks obvious that you can’t do it. Ted’s genius led him to question the obvious impossibility. For the last six months Ted has spent his time talking to people in the government and trying to convince them that this idea is not crazy. He has had a hard time. But it seems we have now a lot of influential people on our side. Nothing can stop Ted for long. Ted and I will fly to Los Alamos this evening. We travel like Paul and Barnabas.
JUNE 30, 1958, LA JOLLA
Luckily the work is not regarded as having military importance. I think this is a mistake, but I am happy to leave the generals out of it as long as possible. If the project is successful, they will certainly regret that they did not get into it at the beginning. But for the time being they are not interested. The political problems have been normal and understandable. We asked the government for a few million dollars to get the thing started. The committee which reviews such proposals has at least five hundred proposals a year to look at, most of them crazy or stupid but all of them asking for a few million dollars to get started, all of them submitted by people who get indignant when they are refused. The committee was inclined to say no to us. The thing looks completely crazy at first sight, and they had not time to go into it carefully. We had to wear down their resistance, getting various influential people in the government to believe in us and put in good words for us. The committee has not treated us badly. They gave us a number of meetings to explain what we wanted to do, and in the end they agreed to give us the money. The whole procedure took about six months, but the time was not wasted, as we have been getting on with the work. The preliminary work has been paid for out of General Atomic’s pocket.
JULY 13, 1958, LA JOLLA
Such a lovely day it was! My face is as red as a furnace. I was out in the sun and wind for eleven hours, from eight-thirty till seven-thirty. It was a meeting of the Glider Club, and I came out to put the glider together in the morning and stayed to take it apart in the evening. Most of the day I spent doing odd jobs, pulling the towing wire, wheeling the glider around, and so forth. What I like about gliding is that most of the time when you are not flying, there are jobs to do, and it is a friendly group of people. They are mostly simple people who work in the aircraft industry all the week and build themselves gliders at the weekends. The best part of the day was the two flights which I had myself with the instructor. One lasted fifteen minutes and the other ten. I am still very bad, and the instructor is fierce, and I like that. We fly up on a wire which is pulled by a winch, then let go of the wire and sail around in the wind where it rises over the cliffs. This is an excellent place for learning, because the west wind blows steadily up over the cliffs almost all the year round. Today it was a good strong wind, and we could stay up as long as we liked. The seagulls were enjoying themselves in the same wind. It is a beautiful place, with the ocean far below on one side, the yellow cliffs on the other.
I decided I will stay here and bring the family out in September. This means only for one year. We will all go back in the summer of next year. I will have a year away from the institute. It is much better doing it like this than trying to attend to both jobs at the same time. After a year our project will either have collapsed, or it will be so successful that there will not be any great need for me to stay with it.
I talked with Caro Taylor, the wife of our project leader. I was surprised to find her well-informed about English writers of the twentieth century. It seemed odd, because she is an ordinary American girl who married young and has had children to take care of ever since. I found out that her grandmother was a writer called Elizabeth von Arnim, a central figure in the literary society in London fifty years ago. She was for some time mistress to H. G. Wells and afterwards married Bertrand Russell’s brother, who is Caro’s grandfather. But Caro said that Elizabeth von Arnim’s greatest pride was that her grandmother was Bettina von Arnim, who was one of the better-known sweethearts of Goethe.
The work goes very well. More people now joined in. We are about twelve altogether. It is very different from a month ago when we were three. It makes me happy to watch the whole thing gradually take shape under our hands, like a figure being chiseled out of a piece of marble. We shall certainly run into difficulties which make us fall into doubts and despair, but so far everything has turned out unexpectedly easy. I am happy I agreed to stay through the first year. One advantage of this is that I am continually flying back and forth across the continent. Last week I had to go east and took advantage of the chance to spend a few days in Princeton. The family was in excellent shape. Katrin seems to love commuting to New York and doing three hours of the most strenuous dancing in the heat of the afternoon. She is outstanding even in comparison with the New York children. Several afternoons I went swimming with the little ones. They were glad to see me, in a relaxed unexcited way.
When I was in Princeton last week, I had a talk with Oppenheimer and got him to agree to my taking a year’s leave of absence. He was sympathetic and said he felt a certain nostalgia for the days in 1942 when he was in the early stages of his project. He was emphatic that I should refuse to consider staying away from Princeton longer than a year. It may be difficult when the time comes to step out of this project. I am glad that there will be no choice. Unless I leave the institute permanently, I have to return in September 1959, and I am sure this will be the right thing to do. Princeton was beautiful in the summer heat, especially the nights with hundreds of fireflies flashing in the trees.
AUGUST 16, 1958, LA JOLLA
Last week to Boston where I had a fruitful time discussing our spaceship with the experts. I left behind a lot of enthusiastic people. They have there a variety of “shocktubes,” long glass pipes down which they make gas flow extremely fast, and these they can use for doing experiments which will help us along with our plans. Yesterday I had a flight to Pasadena which I visited for the first time. I went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the place where Explorer satellites are made. The reception there was rather cool—the lady at the front office decided Taylor and I were a pair of crackpots and tried to get rid of us. After half an hour of arguing we got inside, and then it all went well.
Today was Saturday, and I went gliding again. It was a lovely day, the wind rather weak but still enough to give some lift on the cliffs. Hot sun and white puffball clouds. I had five flights, and I feel better at it every time. I am not so scared as I was at first. Especially I enjoy the landings, and I am beginning to be able to hit the intended spot instinctively. The greatest achievement today was that I ran the winch all by myself. The winch is the machine which pulls in wire at sixty miles per hour and pulls the glider up into the sky. It is a fearsome machine, you have to jam down the accelerator until it screams at a certain pitch (there is no speedometer) and then let it go gradually up. I was much more scared of the winch than of the glider. But today I gave about ten winch-tows, and the pilots said they were satisfactory. So I am now “checked out on the winch.”
AUGUST 31, 1958, LA JOLLA
I have been going through the deeper crisis of my family problem. It has all ended well.
Kreisel is now in Princeton. He is taking Verena away with him. This time there is no coming back. She will go right away to Reno and get the divorce settled. Then they will probably marry. I am not responsible for her anymore. Imme, Esther, and George will join me here in two weeks’ time, and we shall start our family life again as it was last year. Verena will drive the car across the country with them. Katrin will choose whether she wants to come here with us or go to a boarding school near San Francisco which has a good ballet school nearby. The people at the New York school where Katrin spent the summer were enthusiastic about her. They said San Diego is hopeless, and the only good place on the West Coast is this one near San Francisco. Verena and Kreisel will be living at Stanford where Kreisel now has a job. This will also be close to Katrin’s school. So probably she will choose to go there. All this seems to be as satisfactory an outcome as could have been reached. But Verena had still one more trick to play. She said she will not deliver the children until I have agreed in writing I will let them come to her during school holidays. I do not like to agree to this; there might be circumstances in which it would be bad for them. I shall probably agree to these terms. I need these children badly now, and she knows it.
Last night I telephoned and talked to both Imme and Verena. Imme agreed to come out here for a month or two until the new girl is settled in. I felt good talking to her again. Then I talked to Verena and called her an unscrupulous old bitch and that felt good too. I guess that is the end of the story.
SEPTEMBER 17, 1958, LA JOLLA
The family is here, in excellent health, and all have started their new schools. The drive across country was smooth and rapid. We are living in a big house with a private swimming pool which is a great joy. Verena and I are now deep in legal negotiations leading to divorce. This is a black and horrible business, but I see light at the end of the tunnel. It would not have been better to do this in New Jersey. I hope it will all be over in about a week. Margot Kaufner [the new au pair replacing Imme] will be here in two weeks, and Imme will be gone six weeks later. Imme has been wonderful all through these lacerating days. Torments and terror vanish as soon as she is nearby.
SEPTEMBER 26, 1958, LA JOLLA
The nightmare of haggling over our marriage settlement is over. Yesterday I drove with Verena to Los Angeles, and there we together signed the papers for our permanent separation. She then got onto the airplane for Reno, and I drove the 150 miles back here alone. I got back at nine o’clock and found the children asleep and Imme quietly waiting for me. The divorce will now take six weeks and is a pure formality, since the difficult questions of custody and finance are decided in advance by the separation agreement. The terms of the agreement are roughly:
1. I have custody of the children during school terms and Verena during the holidays.
2. I pay for them to travel to her three times a year if the distance is less than 1,500 miles, once a year if it is over 1,500 miles within the U.S., and if it is a trip across the ocean, I pay for it only if I am traveling to Europe myself.
3. I am responsible for all support and maintenance of Esther and George; Verena for Katrin.
4. I have undivided possession of the house and the car.
5. I pay Verena $12,000 within two years, plus $1,000 for the lawyers.
Thank God this is all over!
OCTOBER 6, 1958, LA JOLLA
Imme did not say yes to my proposal. She intends to go back to Germany in November and think over at leisure what she will do. I also consider this wise for her. The new girl Margot Kaufner arrived on Wednesday, and she is very good with the children. She will certainly be able to take over from Imme quite effectively. Yesterday the whole family drove into Mexico, and we had a delightful Mexican lunch, Imme and I danced to the music of a jukebox while Margot and the children applauded. Mexico is noticeably more clean and prosperous than it was two years ago.
I am sitting after supper in the big living room of our house while Imme and Margot are chattering away in German. It is good to listen to them, there is such a lot of laughing, though I do not understand most of the jokes. These two girls get along well together, they are both efficient in the house and good with the children. It is a pity I cannot keep both of them!
OCTOBER 12, 1958, LA JOLLA
This weekend I have been alone with Katrin. I enjoy her a lot when the little ones are not in the way. Katrin also enjoys being able to cook and mess around in the kitchen without supervision. She gets my meals, washes my socks, and plays the housewife efficiently. Now she is doing her homework. The family left on Friday morning, so Katrin has the household for three days. I am glad to have some time with her, to talk and get to know her again. She is growing very fast into a young woman.
Yesterday Katrin and I spent the whole day up at the cliffs at the Glider Club. It was a beautiful day. I was in the air five times. Katrin would like to learn to fly, and I will let her begin as soon as I have her mother’s permission. But for her the flying is not so important. The reason she will happily spend a whole day up there on the cliffs is Keith. Keith is a fourteen-year-old boy whom I got to know and like during the summer. He is an excellent glider pilot and also a good sport and does more than his share of the routine work. He is too busy with his hobbies to be interested in girls. I had never thought of him in connection with Katrin. However, a week ago when I took her up to the cliffs the first time, she attached herself immediately to him, and he seemed to enjoy her undisguised admiration. Yesterday she spent the whole morning sitting beside him in the cage while he operated the winch, and in the afternoon they went down the cliffs for a long walk together. If this is to be her first serious love, I cannot imagine a healthier or sounder way it could have happened. I never thought her taste was good enough to fall in love with somebody like Keith. As usual, I underestimated her.
Imme and Margot Kaufner and the little ones all went off at six on Friday morning. Katrin was strongly urged to go with them, but she refused. This makes me secretly happy. She said to me, “I like Mummy all right, but I do not respect her.” These words were her own, I did not suggest them to her. She knows more about life at thirteen than I did at thirty!
OCTOBER 17, 1958, LA JOLLA
I feel now more optimistic about the chance of Imme saying yes to me. The reason the chances have improved is that I had a reply to my official letter to Dr. Jung in Wertheim. Dr. Jung writes in a very friendly way and says he will not attempt to influence Imme’s decision one way or the other. The thing I liked best in his letter was these sentences; [English translation: “If she decides to become your wife, the difference in age between the partners does not worry me. My own parents lived their lives together in a harmonious marriage, and the difference between their ages was one year greater.”] The problem of the age difference had been for me the greatest worry, and so it was specially good of him to write me those words. Imme also was visibly relieved when she saw the letter.
OCTOBER 21, 1958, LA JOLLA
The good news is here already. Imme said yes. This happened not with any sudden decision but gradually and quietly. Now I am in a state of great happiness and confidence about the future. We have not begun any celebrations because we do not want to tell anybody anything until the divorce is over. Imme insists that not even the children be told before the divorce is settled. I think she is wise; if Verena should know that we decided definitely to get married, it puts Verena into a stronger legal position which she might use to blackmail us further. So please do not say a word to anybody until I give you the go-ahead. The divorce hearing is now set for November 12. Yesterday we had a pleasant hour at a good jeweler’s shop looking at rings. I am giving her a beautiful diamond. It makes me happy to spoil Imme a bit. She has never been spoilt before. I promised Imme we shall both come to Europe next summer to visit her family and mine. I wish this news could make you as happy as it makes me.
OCTOBER 26, 1958, LA JOLLA
On Friday night Imme and I had supper at a little restaurant in Mexico. It is a great asset of this place that in an hour one can drive across the border into a completely different world. They gave us excellent food and wine and some Spanish guitar music and took our picture. The picture turned out not so bad as I had expected. We definitely decided on Mexico City for our honeymoon. Dates are still vague, but it will be sometime before Christmas. It is a great help in Mexico that Imme has fluent Spanish. Everything is open to us in a way it never was to me alone.
OCTOBER 31, 1958, LA JOLLA
I came back at one a.m. this morning from a week at Livermore where they make bombs. It is a good sign of my general recovery that I was able to go away for a week and forget my personal drama in the middle of the public drama at Livermore. Livermore was wildly exciting. The days I was there were the last days before the test ban went into effect, and they were throwing together everything they possibly could to give it a try before the guillotine came down. Everybody was desperate and also exhilarated. Edward Teller who is the head of the lab talked to me about his plans. He was in good spirits and pressed me with invitations to come and work for him. But it was good to get home this morning and see Imme and the children again. They had been enjoying themselves and managing things very well without me.
George hangs round Imme’s neck and asks her please please not to go home to Germany. George is quite worried about her going, and it will be a great relief for him when he learns the truth. Esther is much less attached to Imme and more to her mother. Also she is the only one of the three who genuinely likes Kreisel (and the feeling is reciprocated). Esther is on the surface unworried, but certainly she suffers quite a lot underneath. When she went to Reno for the weekend, she was happy with her mother and found it hard to say good-bye again. When she came home, she said to me, “It would be better not to have a mother at all, as soon as the milk is finished.” I think it is best for Esther to see as little as possible of the other family, but I am obliged to send her for Christmas and Easter. She will work her way through these problems somehow.
NOVEMBER 17, 1958, LA JOLLA
Now for some good news. I heard officially today that the divorce in Reno is decreed.
So now we can tell everybody about our plans. We shall be married here in San Diego on Friday, November 21. I told the children last Wednesday that Imme was going to marry me, and the reactions were characteristic. George: “You know, always when I asked Imme if she was going to stay with us, she always said yes. I believe she has been planning to marry you all the time.” Esther: “I am glad there will be two families now. And the children will be able to hop from one to the other, like grasshoppers.” Katrin: “Congratulations. I think this is the best thing that could happen for both of you.”
NOVEMBER 25, 1958, LA JOLLA
Just to let you know that we did get married and are still alive. We had a delightful two-day honeymoon in San Francisco, and we shall take off for a real ten-day honeymoon in Mexico City sometime in December. The wedding itself was an unconventional but merry affair. The judge took us between two traffic violation cases. So we all sat, with the flowers and the three children and the two witnesses, in the court while the lawyers were cross-questioning some poor fellow who had been crashed into by a carload of drunk Mexicans. The children were fascinated by the whole proceeding. After a long time the jury came back and pronounced the verdict guilty. The judge then adjourned the case and said, “Well now, let’s get these people married.” And so we were.
Imme wants a baby very much, so don’t be surprised if one is already on the way when you next see her. I was willing to wait a couple of years, but she says she will always feel like Verena’s housemaid until she has a real baby of her own. I will be extremely happy if one arrives soon. Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and we shall have the children here for our celebration.