• 19 •
IN 1966 Robert Oppenheimer and Imme’s father, Dr. Edwin Jung, were dying of cancer at the same time. Dr. Jung was sixty-one; Oppenheimer was sixty-two. Both had been looking forward to twenty years of retirement, Dr. Jung with his son Diether gradually taking over his medical practice, Oppenheimer with the freedom of a former institute director. The letters begin with the appointment of the new director.
FEBRUARY 17, 1966
A pair of institute trustees came to visit me in a secretive manner and revealed the name of our new director, a man from Harvard called Carl Kaysen. They came to hear any objections I might have before the appointment would be made official. I could honestly say that I am enthusiastic about Kaysen. He is a kindred spirit. He is an economist by trade, but he became involved in military and political problems in the same way I did. While I was receiving my education at Bomber Command from 1943 to 1945, he was just six miles away at the headquarters of the American bomber command at High Wycombe, doing the same job and receiving the same education. We might even have met on the few occasions when I visited the American HQ. He is three years older than me. After the war he went back to university life but continued writing papers on strategy, bombing, disarmament, etc. Once these problems get a grip on a man, they do not let him go.
When Kennedy became president, he immediately put Kaysen into a high position in the White House. While he was there, he did a great deal to push disarmament and liberalize the government’s foreign policy. While I was at the Disarmament Agency in summer 1963, Kaysen went to Moscow with the team negotiating the Test Ban Treaty. Everybody I knew in the government had a great respect for him. I will enjoy to have him here and talk politics with him. I imagine he will find it easy to run the institute with a quarter of his time and keep the rest for government affairs.
After the trustees came, I flew to Florida and spent a weekend with the Space Committee looking at big rockets. The big rockets are now going to start flights leading to the lunar landing. The latest Russian success adds excitement to the race. If all goes according to plan, we shall have some men on the moon before the end of 1968. The main purpose of our meeting was to see what scientific experiments can still be in time to go on these flights.
Yesterday came the worst bombshell. Oppenheimer has a throat cancer and is in New York having radiation treatment. The doctors say it is a superficial thing, discovered early and with a good chance of being cured. I do not know how much of this to believe.
FEBRUARY 28, 1966
I had a great piece of luck. With a young man called Andrew Lenard, I have been in the throes of creation for the last two weeks, and we solved a quite important problem. It is the best thing I have done since the summer of 1961. Now the work is done, but there will be the job of writing it up for publication which I shall also enjoy.
Andrew Lenard came to the institute as a visiting member from the University of Indiana. He started thinking about the problem which we call “stability of matter.” The problem is to understand by strict mathematical proof why ordinary matter consisting of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons does not collapse into a state of lower energy. Lenard made some progress with this problem and then came to me for help. We worked together on it for half a year before we had it solved. Our proof was extraordinarily long and complicated. A much shorter and more illuminating proof was found later by Elliott Lieb and Walter Thirring. Lenard and I consoled ourselves by remembering the words of my old teacher John Littlewood at Cambridge: “First-rate mathematicians find bad proofs and then second-rate mathematicians find good ones.” But in this case, Lieb and Thirring were also first-rate mathematicians.
Last Sunday Kitty Oppenheimer telephoned very distraught, saying she did not believe the doctors were telling her the truth and asking me whether I could find somebody who would. I thought at once of Trudy Szilard, our friend in La Jolla, whose husband Leo had a cancer of the bladder which was completely cured with radiation. She is a medical doctor, and having lived through this crisis with Leo, she knows everything there is to be known about it. I telephoned Trudy’s sister in New York and was delighted to hear Trudy herself answer. She is now in New York and easily accessible. I gave her number to Kitty, and Oppenheimer tells me they had an hour’s conversation which did Kitty enormous good. Yesterday Trudy came down and spent half the day with us here in Princeton. She was as sweet as ever with the children and talked about her various activities, China, Vietnam, and so forth. She is a splendid person, and I was happy to have been able to introduce her to the Oppenheimers at this moment. Oppenheimer continues active and does not look bad to the outward eye.
MARCH 24, 1966
I had a telephone call from London, a film magnate called Roger Caras asking me to come to his studio to help them with a science fiction film called Encounter 2001. Stanley Kubrick, who directed Dr. Strangelove, is also doing this one. Caras will send a car to meet my flight from Paris and another to bring me to Winchester in the evening. I will stay with you a day or two longer to make up for it.
Since I was driven directly from the film studio to my family in Winchester, there is no letter describing the day that I spent with Stanley Kubrick watching him produce the film that became 2001, A Space Odyssey. It is a puzzling film, totally different in style and subject from Dr. Strangelove, but equally memorable. I always considered film to be the most creative art form of the twentieth century, and Kubrick to be one of the great artists.
MARCH 30, 1966
I am now finding out how lonely the Oppenheimers really are in spite of their huge number of “friends.” I feel oddly more sad leaving them for two weeks than leaving Imme and the children. These are the last two weeks of Robert’s radiation treatment, and in this time he must know whether it is life or death. I have been over three times to talk with Robert and Kitty. Kitty believes, perhaps rightly, that I can help Robert to keep alive by keeping alive his interest in physics. She feels desperately that he needs to be convinced that he is still needed in the community of physicists. On the other hand, I find that Robert is so physically tired from the radiation that my instinct is to hold his hand in silence rather than burden him with particles and equations. It is odd that I feel so personally responsible for him. I never had been close to him until now. I suppose it is partly the heredity that runs in our family that makes me want to save souls.
My mother’s mother Eleanor Atkey was a famous faith healer, and my mother inherited some of her talent. Our daughter Mia, who is a Presbyterian minister, has it too.
Carl Kaysen spent a good two hours talking with me alone. I talked for an hour about the institute as it is, and he talked for an hour about the things he hopes to do with it. We understood each other very well. I shall enjoy having him for boss. He made one memorable remark: “I did not come here to operate a motel.”
I had recently been interviewed by a journalist about the institute, and I said, “The institute is a motel with stipends,” a remark that attracted some attention. Kaysen objected strongly to my description. Like the first director, Abraham Flexner, Kaysen wanted the institute to be active in public affairs. He did not want it to be merely a rest home for scholars. Kaysen’s plan was to add a new school to the institute, a School of Social Studies, bringing together a group of people dedicated to understanding, and helping to solve, the problems of modern society. Like Flexner, he met furious opposition from the faculty but succeeded in establishing the new school which still flourishes today.
APRIL 22, 1966
In Germany we had a warm welcome, and I felt more than ever one of the family. This time I saw them in a crisis, and I saw them as they really are. On the first day I had a talk with [Imme’s brother] Diether, and he explained what has been happening to Dr. Jung. Dr. Jung had recently come out of the hospital after his second operation. The first operation was an ordinary gallbladder removal. The gallbladder was found to be cancerous, so they did a second operation to look for metastases and take out lymph glands. They were able to take out everything that looked unhealthy. But Dr. Jung as a doctor knows that the chance of real success in such an operation is low. During our five days in Germany he was visibly growing stronger day by day. He was also having intermittent attacks of pain. I felt at first horrified to see him suffering, but in the end I felt strengthened by his calm bravery.
MAY 1, 1966
I have seen Oppenheimer several times since we returned, and each time he looks better and stronger. He is now recovering from the effects of the radiation. The cancer shrank to a size which is barely visible, and the doctors say they can remove it with a relatively minor operation. He is now working half-days in his office.
JULY 12, 1966
I had a phone call yesterday to say that Dr. Jung died. Imme had gone over there in a hurry with the three small children, so she did not come too late. It is a relief to know that this is over. Imme said she intended to ask you to go over there for the funeral, but it all happened so quickly that there was no time to organize anything. I went to see Oppenheimer yesterday and found him considerably better. Next week he will move out of his official residence and will be our next-door neighbour.
JULY 18, 1966
The Oppenheimers are now moved into the Yangs’ house. I enjoy having them for neighbours. Kitty comes and gives me expert advice about my garden, which bushes to prune and which to eradicate. Robert is improving slowly. Yesterday we sat in the garden over drinks, and he was chatting for an hour and a half. Last night I took a bottle of champagne over to the house of my collaborator Andrew Lenard, and we had our little victory celebration which is also a good-bye, for he will be gone to Indiana before I return.
JANUARY 31, 1967, CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA
I came back from our three-day weekend in the snowy mountains. We saw a live wombat and a dead kangaroo. But for me it was the human fauna that were the most interesting. The Seymours, English immigrants, have been in Australia fifteen years without changing their characters or habits. They have one adored little boy, Martin, who is the center of their universe. But these good English parents, although they love and care for their Martin so intensely, are not able to express love in a way that a child can understand. He is like a guinea pig in a cage, carefully fed and admired but never handled. So when I came along and gave him a few bear hugs, the effect was electric. He responded passionately, and I became Uncle Freeman for the rest of the trip. He came running with me at every stopping place, and his parents remarked in a rather baffled tone of voice, “Oh, you are so good with him.” I did not try to explain to them that their beloved Martin is emotionally starved.
FEBRUARY 16, 1967
We had two faculty meetings. Kaysen is pleased because I steered through the faculty the appointment of a new professor, a friend of mine from La Jolla [Marshall Rosenbluth, a world leader in the field of plasma physics], and this was done without any hostility from the side of the mathematicians. This was Kaysen’s first new appointment, and he was waiting for trouble which did not come. After this good beginning, there is a chance that things will go smoothly for him. Oppenheimer is coming close to his end. He insisted on coming to this faculty meeting, but he can barely speak. We told him how glad we were that he came, but really it is a torture for everybody to watch him sit there speechless and suffering. His doctors have given him up, and we can only hope for a quick end. I had a long conversation with Kitty when I came home from Australia. She sounded close to collapse, and said she hardly sleeps anymore, but she was coherent and rational. The daughter Tony has given up her university studies and taken a job in Princeton so that she is constantly available. Imme remarked that Tony had better be careful or she will find herself nursing her mother for the next twenty years. After saying good-bye to his New York doctors, Oppenheimer has put himself in the hands of our Dr. Blumenthal in Princeton, and Kitty says that Blumenthal has been splendid. Both medically and as a human being, Blumenthal would be a good man to have by when one is dying.
Robert Oppenheimer died in his sleep in the evening of February 18. Kaysen spent the following days organizing a memorial ceremony and taking care of a large number of distingished guests who came to pay their respects to Robert. Among those who came was General Leslie Groves, the leader of the wartime Manhattan Project, who had personally picked Oppenheimer to direct the bomb laboratory at Los Alamos. Groves and Oppenheimer were as different as two people could be, but they worked harmoniously together to get the job done. After the ceremonies were over, with moving reminiscences from George Kennan and Hans Bethe and other friends and colleagues of Oppenheimer, Kaysen remarked to me, “Well, if they fire me from the institute, I can always make a living as a funeral director.”
APRIL 23, 1967
On Friday came the news of Stalin’s daughter. [Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin, had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union and was living a restless life as an exile, first in India and later in Switzerland. Various people in Princeton with an interest in Soviet history were anxious to talk to her.] Edward Greenbaum is a friend of ours and a trustee of the institute. He happens to live next door to Helen Dukas, and so Helen knew when he went off on a secret mission to Switzerland a week ago. Helen immediately guessed that he would be bringing Stalin’s daughter back with him. Nobody believed her until it was in the newspapers on Saturday. Now she is enjoying her triumph. We were glad that Kennan played a courageous role in this affair. He has been as a historian intensely interested in Stalin and took the initiative in going to see Svetlana in Switzerland and persuading her to come here.
JUNE 10, 1967
This week has been spent in a state of wild excitement over the Middle East war. Princeton being a heavily Jewish town, many of our friends have brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles “over there.” I was never very friendly to Israel. [I had lived in England through the years when British soldiers were stationed in Palestine, trying to keep the peace between Arab and Jewish populations, and our soldiers had been repeatedly attacked by Jewish guerrillas.] But this war leaves me profoundly grateful to these people for managing everything so well without our help. I never believed it was possible in this century to fight and win a war in four days. It seems there has been nothing like it since Agincourt. On the first day of the war Dorothy had a lot of her pictures exhibited at an art show at the Princeton Synagogue. In the same school there is a little Israeli girl called Tamar, and we met Tamar with her mother at the show. Tamar is also very gifted. Her mother was saying good-bye to everybody because she was flying home to Israel on Tuesday. I thought, how irresponsible to take a child like that into the middle of the maelstrom. But the mother was completely confident. Another lady offered to keep Tamar in Princeton for a few weeks, and the mother refused without hesitation. I have to admit now she was right.
Our sixth child, Rebecca, was born on July 2. There is no letter describing the birth. The transatlantic telephone had become cheap and convenient enough, so that important events would be reported by telephone. When we first told the girls that a new member of the family would be arriving, Dorothy said, “No, that is wrong. If a new baby was coming, it would have come last year. We had babies in 1959, 1961, and 1963, so the next one would have come in 1965.” We had to explain to her that babies are sometimes allowed to break the rules. Rebecca was an easy baby and grew up with a startling resemblance to childhood pictures of my mother. The same telephone calls that told my mother of Rebecca’s birth brought to us the sad news, that my mother was going to hospital for an operation with a suspected colon cancer. Like Dr. Jung, she needed two operations. Unlike Dr. Jung, she survived them both and lived for seven more years. The following letter was written in response to the alarming news from my mother.
JULY 27, 1967
Dear Mamma, I was thinking, what a bright and charming little girl you must have been in the days when you were given young larks and partridges to take care of, and now there is not one person left alive in the world who remembers you as you were then. All the time I am enjoying the wise talk and tender love of the three little girls, Dorothy’s shrewdness, Emily’s sweetness, and Miriam’s mischievousness, and I am thinking how evanescent this all is. You are perhaps coming near to the end of the road, and we are at the beginning of it, but it is the same road for all of us.
In these days I think of the years when I was close to you and spending many days walking and talking with you, the years we lived in London until I went to America, from 1937 to 1947. I was lucky to have you then to see me through the years of Sturm und Drang, to broaden my mind and share with me your rich knowledge of people. I remember reading aloud with you Sons and Lovers by Lawrence, knowing that you and I were a little like Lawrence and his mother, and that this perfect intellectual companionship which we had together could not last forever. I am grateful for those years, and for the many weeks of renewed companionship that we have had since. I hope this letter does not sound too solemn. I expect to come and see you many times still in the future. I write you these thoughts, just in case you should slip away.
JULY 30, 1967
Did you notice that you and I both used the phrase “if you should slip away” in the letters which we wrote to each other on July 27? I am quite willing to believe that some kind of telepathy may happen at moments of intense feeling such as this. I would like to believe it, because it would be consistent with the idea that some kind of world-soul may exist, an idea that has appealed to both of us. I am a total agnostic, but the laws of physics and chemistry do not exclude a world-soul any more than they exclude our individual beings.
In 1967 Esther and George were still happy to baby-sit and fool around with their little sisters, but they were moving rapidly into a different world. They were teenagers and needed to take charge of their own lives. They were growing up and metamorphizing like caterpillars. You do not know, when the caterpillar becomes a pupa, whether it will emerge as a beetle or a butterfly. Esther applied for early admission at Radcliffe College and got a letter saying she was admitted but strongly advised to wait a year before enrolling. She fought back and enrolled at age sixteen. George at age fourteen became silent and withdrawn.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1967
Today I am driving Esther with ten pieces of luggage to Boston. Esther had her Youth-of-the-Month award. More exciting to me was a certificate from the New Jersey authorities certifying her to be the best high school Russian student of the year for the whole of New Jersey. George is hardly visible. He spends much of his time at the Catacomb, a club for teenagers in the cellar of the Presbyterian church. When at home he mostly plays very quiet sithar music. His bedroom is furnished in the style of a Hindu temple, and with the sithar music and constantly burning incense, the Indian tapestries and paintings covering the walls, the effect on the nerves is very soothing. I think he is beginning to find himself in this pseudo-oriental milieu.
NOVEMBER 17, 1967
It is your golden wedding day, and I cannot let it pass without writing. You can have some satisfaction in looking back, to see how much better the world is in so many ways than it was in 1917. That was a low point in human hisory. You have much to be proud of. Two satisfactory children, forty-six years of sustaining Papa through the ups and downs of a productive life. It is good that you were able to see him through to the end. He would have been much more lost without you than you are without him. You have been the rock on which he built his life.
My parents were married on November 17, 1917, when World War I had destroyed a whole generation of young people, the Germans had won huge victories on the Eastern Front, and the end of the war was not in sight. My father was lucky to have been sent home from the Western Front as a mental casualty, suffering from the disease that was then called shell-shock and is now called Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. My mother nursed him back to health.
Last night I was in Ithaca at the banquet to celebrate Hans Bethe’s Nobel Prize. Ithaca was beautiful, already under snow. Hans was entirely himself, as imperturbable as ever. Rose Bethe said she is glad the prize came to them so late. She said if they had had the prize ten or twenty years ago, many of their friends would have been slightly jealous or doubtful about it. Now everybody considers it overdue and is genuinely happy about it. She is right. It was an outstandingly warm and happy occasion.
DECEMBER 26, 1967
Esther turned up here for two days. I learned a few things about her life at Radcliffe. The main thing is, she has been elected to the Crimson board. As usual, she got what she wanted. The board consists of thirty people of whom only two are first-year students, from Harvard and Radcliffe together. So she had stiff competition to get in. She seems to be firmly set on a career in some kind of journalism. For this the Crimson is an excellent starter. However, I told her in the best fatherly tone that if all she wants from Radcliffe is on-the-job training in journalism, she should take a job on a real newspaper right away and save me about $15,000. She agreed she will now let the Crimson slide a bit and concentrate more on her formal education.
JANUARY 25, 1968
Imme and I had a hilarious evening at the Kaysens. We were invited to supper with Jim Watson (the DNA man) and other people. It was an informal affair, a different atmosphere from such parties in Oppenheimer’s time. The guests were all Harvard people, and there was much talk about Cambridge, Mass. Kaysen started out by saying, “Well, I hear that your Esther has taken Cambridge by storm.” Being elected to the Crimson has really impressed people there. Kaysen said, if you want to get a good education at Harvard, the thing to do is to go onto the Crimson. What I find impressive is that Esther understood so fast that this was the thing to do, quite apart from her performance in actually doing it.
Meanwhile we are watching George move in a very different direction. He has as quick an eye for the road to perdition as Esther has for the road to success. He chooses his friends among the hardcore rebels whose main amusement is taking illegal drugs. Possibly he gained entry into this circle, as difficult in its way as breaking into the Crimson, by bringing some supplies from San Francisco. The hardcore drug circle has a rigid code of honour, the basic rule being omertà, silence, not to talk even under the severest pressure. If they accept George, he must have in some way proved his worth. The other night I had a real father-to-son talk with George, the first in several years. We talked for more than two hours. I told George as emphatically as I could of the many young people I have known who went to pieces as a result of drugs. He replied that he knows many more drug-takers than I do and that they all lead sane and satisfactory lives. That was round one. We continued arguing passionately but politely on both sides. In the end I told him that I will do everything in my power to stop him handling drugs, including bringing in the police if I get any hard evidence. I said I would rather see him in gaol than in a mental institution. He took this all calmly, said he respects my frankness and hopes we can continue to respect each other on both sides. One thing at least is clear as a result of this conversation. George is as formidable in his way as Esther is in hers.
FEBRUARY 15, 1968
I am still hopeful that George will come through all this and make something good of his life. I enclose a couple of poems which he wrote recently, probably in a marijuana trance. They are technically imperfect, certainly not on the level of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” but I enjoy the dreamlike flow of the words and images.
And the red knight he tottered from his silken velvet throne
Because the fair one he had wanted was to be no more his own.
And now that he was gone the place was opened to despair
When up upon the hill there cried a youth with long black hair,
And often did he scream, and often he would yell,
That because of the young and fair one, the world would rest in Hell.
And often did they speak of silver silk and gold
To come in times of peace and happiness untold.
And Gods would win their fortunes and Kings let down their hair
Till times would come again when evil was laid bare.
And the ground would bring forth flowers of colors yet unknown
To bathe our mind and body in thoughts our very own.
—GEORGE DYSON, January 1968
Things went much faster than we expected. On Tuesday two big policemen came to the house and asked if they could search George’s room. Then they picked him up directly from school. He has been for three days in the youth house in Trenton, and we are due to get him back tomorrow. In the evening one of the two policemen came again to talk to Imme and me. He seemed to us a very sound and understanding person. He is youth officer for Princeton and handles all the juvenile delinquents here. He said the first thing they did to George at the youth house was to cut his hair. This will cause George tremendous grief. As you can see from his poems, the long hair is important to him. As the policeman said, they do not want to maltreat the boys at the youth house, and yet they want to make sure that the boys really try to keep out of it. This symbolic indignity of the haircut is an essential part of the treatment.
I heard good news of George from a lady who was with him on a camping trip in the High Sierras. She said George was the leading spirit in a group of teenagers who were at the camp and impressed everybody with his flamboyant clothes and behaviour.
Last weekend Esther turned up here, on her way from a reporting trip to Haverford College in Pennsylvania. I took Esther down to the Youth House to have an hour with George, who was still incarcerated. The youth house is a little modern building in Trenton. It is boring rather than punitive. George said he was not badly treated there. The following day he was released and came home looking greatly improved with his haircut. On Tuesday his case will come to the juvenile court, and the court will no doubt put him on probation. I am glad they caught him so early.
MARCH 24, 1968
Last week Imme and I had to appear at the courthouse for a social investigation, which meant that each of us plus George had a half-hour interview with a benevolent but not very bright social worker. Next week there will be a psychological examination. After that finally will be the second hearing by the court, at which the judge will announce his decision. The whole procedure is made inconvenient and time-consuming for the parents, because in the majority of cases the parents are negligent or uncooperative, and this is a good way to convince them that it is worth their while to keep their kids out of trouble.
APRIL 5, 1968
To my mind the shooting of King was a far worse thing than the shooting of Kennedy. I heard King speak in Berkeley about fifteen years ago, before he became famous, and I always had a great belief in him. He was far and away the greatest and most far-sighted of the Negro leaders. I do not blame the negroes at all for rioting now. If I were black, I would be out in the streets with them. Esther talks of going to Europe this summer at her own expense. George is not really changed. Still surly and insolent by turns, but at least he is now working at his schoolwork and getting some A and B grades. The psychologist pronounced him only normally maladjusted.
APRIL 21, 1968
I ran into a problem which you may be able to elucidate. I wanted to refer to the scene at the end of Faust where Faust is talking about organizing a group of people to drain a swamp. I had in mind a vivid picture of this scene, Faust with a shovel in his hand working at the dike, finally taken out of himself by the comradeship of a common effort. When I looked for this scene in the play, I found it is not there. What is there is a philosophical discourse rather than a dramatic picture. Looking back into the past, I wonder where this beautiful and spurious Faust-scene came from, and I believe it must have come from Mamma. Do you have any recollection of having told it to me? And if you did, was your improvement of the original version conscious or unconscious? It is a good illustration of the limited value of education, when the only piece of Goethe that made a deep impression on me turns out to be by you and not by Goethe.
The institute is lively, there are ten physicists here and I am working hard at some good problems. Today I discovered a little theorem which gave me some intense moments of pleasure. It is beautiful and fell into my hand like a jewel from the sky.
This theorem was published in a little paper with the title “A New Symmetry of Partitions” in a mathematics journal (1969). Through all my years in America, I took occasional short holidays from physics and returned to my first love, the theory of numbers.
JUNE 30, 1968
I was invited to a meeting of the Defense Science Board, a high-level body of which I am not a member, to discuss nuclear policy. I do not have the illusion that my words at a meeting like this can change anything much. But at least I had something definite to say, and I said it. In general terms, what I had to say was, “Remember 1914.” The professional soldiers spend so many years working out their elaborate war plans that they forget the essential difference between plans and reality. Perhaps I helped to bring them a little closer to reality. It is an odd thing to go to a meeting like this where one tries to influence decisions that may mean life or death to whole countries, particularly in Western Europe. If I have had any good effect, I will never know it. The meeting was thoroughly enjoyable on a personal level, everybody calling one another Fred, Freeman, Sid, etc., and half the time joking. It might have been a lively college debating society. But for me at least, after my experiences at Bomber Command twenty-five years ago, it was not just an intellectual exercise.
In the spring of 1969 I spent a term teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I slept in a guest room at the faculty club. That spring was a time of great turmoil at many universities, including Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Harvard, with rebellious students going on strike and occupying academic buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The violence was worst at Berkeley, where police invaded the campus and many students were arrested. At Santa Barbara and Harvard, protests were mostly nonviolent.
APRIL 12, 1969, FACULTY CLUB, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
I was wakened at six-thirty in the morning by a tremendous crash, followed by some shouts of “help.” I thought somebody must have driven a car into this building at seventy miles an hour. I discovered then that I am after all a coward. Instead of running out immediately to the rescue, I took about a minute to pull myself together, to face whatever had to be faced. In that minute I was somehow paralyzed. And in that minute a man burned to death. I will not forgive myself for this.
When I did run out, I found it was not a car crash but a bomb explosion. Two men were already helping the injured one, and they had quickly carried him into an ornamental pool which put out his burning clothes. He was sitting there in the pool, and he did not look too bad. I could see only that his legs were burned and one hand injured. I then telephoned for an ambulance but somebody had already called. In a few minutes the ambulance men came and put him on a stretcher and took him away to the hospital. The fire in the faculty club was easily put out. At that point I assumed that we had been lucky. Only later I heard that the man was burned so extensively that he is not likely to live. And I cannot escape some responsibility for this. The man was the caretaker of the building, and he found a large package lying in front of the door. It was booby-trapped to explode when he opened it. It was made with a stick of explosive in a container of petrol so that he was well showered with burning petrol. It seems unlikely that we shall find out who placed the bomb. Undoubtedly the radical students will be blamed for it. They have organized a “free university” in the student center next door, including courses in guerrilla warfare and the manufacture of homemade weapons. They have also been protesting the existence of the faculty club as an infringement of their rights.
What is one to make of all this? I look down now from my window, and there is the little pool only ten feet below, where the man was sitting yesterday. Around the edge the blood and ashes are still there. He did not bleed much. If I had been a little quicker, I could have dragged him into the pool in a few seconds. But I did not even look out of the window until it was too late.
APRIL 20, 1969, FACULTY CLUB, UC SANTA BARBARA
It seems a long time ago that Dover Sharp was sitting burned in the little wading pool. He died on Sunday a week ago. I was called in by the police investigating the murder, but I was not able to tell them anything useful. Today the children were running and splashing in the little pool just as if nothing had happened. I remember one of William Blake’s proverbs that I used to be fond of when I was young: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” They certainly believe in that here.
It is interesting to me that you feel more confident about George than about Esther. I would say that this is because you do not know George. I admire the courage and independence of each of them. But George is cursed with his mother’s temperament while Esther has mine. He will always do everything the hard way. I hope for the best, but I will be surprised if he comes through a year on his own without serious trouble. I do not know whether George got accepted at Harvard. Harvard itself is in such a mess just now that we may not know for some time. I had a long and full letter from Esther describing her role in the events of this week. At the mass meeting in the football stadium, Esther went to the microphone in front of ten thousand students and made a speech arguing for peace and moderation. She also rebelled against the majority on the Crimson editorial board who were in favour of coercion. I think she is all right. At least she is getting an education out of this, if not in the way I had intended. And she is clearly on the side of sanity.
MAY 10, 1969, UC SANTA BARBARA
I spent the last few days writing a testimony about missile defense for the Senate Committee on Armed Services. I am in favor of defense but almost all my friends are against it. The crucial Senate vote on the question will come in about a month from now. I wrote a dry and technical testimony without much hope that it will convince anybody. But then I received a copy of the testimony of Wolfgang Panofsky, the chief scientific witness against Missile Defense. He is the son of our old neighbour Panofsky who died two years ago. Panofsky made a good statement, solidly backed up with facts and figures. But at the end of his statement Panofsky argued that we do not need a missile defense against China because we can always destroy the Chinese missiles with a preemptive strike if the necessity arises. When I saw this I said, “Now the Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” like Thomas Huxley in his famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce about the descent of man. I put into my statement the following paragraph:
I am amazed at the cheerfulness with which some of my scientific colleagues, arguing against the deployment of missile defense, speak of our ability to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against China. Anybody who considers a preemptive strike to be preferable to missile defense has not understood what the Cuban missile crisis was all about. The whole point of the Cuban missile crisis was that President Kennedy succeeded, with great wisdom and some luck, in finding a way to avoid a preemptive strike. Precisely to enable some future president to play it cool like Kennedy, to resist pressures to make a preemptive strike in a moment of desperate crisis, this is to my mind the main purpose of missile defense. It is not so much to save our skins as to save our souls.
This paragraph came to me like a flash of lightning, and I think it will get through to the senators. It is true, and it is in language they cannot fail to understand. Especially it is designed to speak to Senator Edward Kennedy who is the leader of the opposition to missile defense. If you read in the newspaper that Senator Kennedy changed his mind, you will know why.
Senator Kennedy did not change his mind, but the United States continued to develop and deploy missile defense, with my support. I support missile defense as a long-range strategy to replace offensive nuclear forces and possible preemptive strikes. Instead, we have deployed missile defense in a halfhearted way, as an addition to offensive forces and possible preemptive strikes. I still have hopes that we will one day shift to a genuinely defensive strategy, getting rid of offensive forces and using missile defense as the basis of a more stable world.
George has decided to undertake an extremely rugged walking tour alone. He will walk down the Continental Divide over the highest part of the Rocky Mountain country. It will take him forty days, and I suppose he is aware of the biblical precedent. Imme and I talked with him at length about the details of his plan. He has tried to foresee all the difficulties. He will nowhere be further than three days walk from some kind of road. He has ordered seventy large-scale maps which he will carry along with him, and also seven smaller-scale maps which he will leave with us with his intended route marked on them. So if he is missing, we will know where to send a rescue party. He is collecting an elaborate medical kit so he can deal with anything from diarrhea to snakebite. He has also a fat book with pictures of all the edible and poisonous plants of the Rocky Mountains, which he will carry so he can live on the country. Imme and I agreed that we should let him go. The risks are real. But it is obviously necessary to George’s spirit to do something extraordinary. We are impressed with the professional way he is making his preparations. When I said good-bye to him this morning he looked grateful and happy.
When George was preparing his trip, I asked him whether it would not be safer to take a friend with him. With two people, if one was sick or injured, the other could walk down to find help. George replied, “I would be delighted to take a friend along if there were anybody I could stand to live with for six weeks.”
JULY 6, 1969
George met ferocious and continued snowstorms, quite unusual at this time of year, and the high country was so deep in soft snow that it was completely impassible. He struggled for a week and then retreated to Chicago. I am glad that he had the sense to retreat when things became impossible. He will start again further south in a few days from now and hopes to do the second half of his originally planned route. I had two good letters from him from up in the mountains. He may have learned something from this fiasco.
AUGUST 9, 1969
We spent two days glued to the TV watching the moon trip. For me the moon program came as a surprise. I had expected they would do their best to make it into a public spectacle, but I had no idea this would be possible on the very first trip. I had known what the astronauts would be doing, but I had not imagined that they could have a TV camera set up in the right place so that one could see all this as it was happening. I was astonished at the way the astronauts talked. Normally they say very little when they are working, but for the whole two and a half hours on the moon they kept up a continuous stream of conversation, full of information and clearly understandable. The operation was obviously planned as a theatrical production with the whole world for audience, but I had not imagined it could be done so effectively. From a scientific point of view I am much more excited by the Mars pictures which came back this week. Both the Mars flights were brilliantly successful and have given about a hundred times more information about Mars than we had before.
George came to see me in Boulder the day before I left. He spent altogether only two weeks on the high mountains instead of the six he had planned. The first time he went up, there was too much snow to move. The second time he found the going very easy, and he covered twice the distance he had expected each day. Now he is at the Sierra Club camp and earning his keep there.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1969
I quote a postcard which arrived for George yesterday: “Dear George, wherever you are, thank you for your great work in the San Juans. Your initiative and effort and attitude made the camp operate very smoothly. Whenever you get your check, it will include a bonus in appreciation of your help. Hope you’ll be available for the Wind Rivers next year.”
The postcard came from the manager of the Sierra Club camp where George was a counselor. At this camp he got to know Barbara Brower, then a teenager, the daughter of the Sierra Club director David Brower. As a result, he was invited to visit the Brower home. He was informally adopted into the Brower family and became a friend of David Brower, Anne Brower, and their sons Kenneth, Robert, and John, who became for him the brothers his own family lacked.
NOVEMBER 30, 1969
A thing happened this week which makes me particularly happy, the announcement of Nixon that he will renounce and destroy all biological weapons. This was largely brought about by a friend of mine, Matthew Meselson, who shared an office with me at the Disarmament Agency in Washington six years ago. Meselson is a Harvard biologist. He spent a great part of his time for the last six years quietly campaigning against biological weapons. Finally his efforts came to fruition this week. I wish I had been equally effective.
Nixon was able to move decisively to get rid of biological weapons because he made the move unilaterally. He did not need to negotiate details of the move either with the Soviet Union or with the U.S. Senate. Twenty years later George Bush senior made a similar unilateral move getting rid of half of our nuclear weapons. Bush removed all the nuclear weapons from the U.S. Army and from the surface navy, leaving only the nuclear weapons belonging to the air force and the submarine navy. These two unilateral moves were the most substantial acts of disarmament in our history. Unfortunately our academic experts are always talking about disarmament reached by international negotiation rather than unilaterally. In my opinion, major and important acts of disarmament will always be easier to make unilaterally. It was also an advantage that both Nixon and Bush were right-wing Republicans. For a Democrat, such a unilateral move would be much more difficult.
Esther telephoned that she is hoping to have a summer job working for Senator [George] McGovern, one of our most intelligent and peace-loving senators. It would be a great experience for her if she is accepted. A brief letter from George announcing that he is happily settled at Berkeley and is living on board a twenty-two-foot sloop in the San Francisco Bay. It sounds like an idyllic existence. He is intending to buy the boat and eventually to sail her. She was built in England nine years ago and came to San Francisco under her own sail. So one day you should expect him to come sailing up Southampton Water to pay you a visit. I hope he will learn how to sail before trying any big voyages.
Soon after I received this letter from George, he disappeared from Berkeley. His sister Katrin was then living in Vancouver. With some help from Katrin, he went to join her in Vancouver. I told him that I wholeheartedly approved of his move to Canada. At that time Katrin had another friend, Jason Halm, who had been drafted into the U.S. Army and was already on his way to Vietnam. Jason was in the back of an army car driving through San Francisco to meet the boat taking him to Vietnam, and at the last possible moment he quietly dropped out of the car. With some help from Katrin he also arrived in Vancouver. Soon after that Jason and Katrin were married. They invited George to attend their wedding, and during his visit he answered a newspaper advertisement for a job on a boat, and stayed. George and Jason were welcomed generously by the Canadian government and later became Canadian citizens. George moved out of the Halm household and built himself a comfortable home a hundred feet up in a tall Douglas fir tree overlooking the ocean a few miles north of Vancouver. A few years later, Kenneth Brower published The Starship and the Canoe (1978), which described George’s life in Canada.
FEBRUARY 28, 1970
I was taking care of Stephen Hawking, a young English astrophysicist who came here for a six-day visit. I had never got to know him till this week. Stephen is a brilliant young man who is now dying in the advanced stages of a paralytic nerve disease. He got the disease when he was twenty-one and he is now twenty-eight, so his whole professional life has been lived under sentence of death. In the last few years he has produced a succession of brilliant papers on general relativity. In conversation he has one of the quickest and most penetrating minds I have come across. He is confined to a wheelchair, can barely hold his head upright, and his speech is hard to understand. These days while Stephen was here, I was in a state of acute depression thinking about him, except for the hours when I was actually with him. As soon as you are with him, you cannot feel miserable, he radiates such a feeling of strength and good humour. I was running after him to escape from my misery. After spending these days with him, I am not surprised that he found a girl who would marry him. They have a three-year-old son about whom Stephen talks with great pride. Stephen would only laugh if you told him this, but I think he must be some kind of saint.
By some miracle that the doctors do not understand, Stephen Hawking is still alive and still intellectually active at age seventy-four. The last time I saw him was at a meeting in New York in April 2016, discussing future space missions to be funded by the Russian oligarch Yuri Milner. Totally paralyzed and able to speak only through a computer, he still travels around the world, writes best-selling books, and enjoys being a public celebrity. The public has good taste in its choice of heroes. The public responds to Hawking as it did to Einstein, knowing that they are great human beings as well as great scientists.