I put my scarf over my head before ringing the doorbell. Lili opened the door, paler than usual.
“What’s happening, darling? Has someone died?”
She put a finger to her lips. In the living room, Albert was just finishing a tense phone conversation. All faces were turned toward him. Lili, Kurt, Oskar, and Albert’s assistants, Helen and Bruria, were holding their porcelain cups suspended in midair. Helen motioned me to take her place and poured me a cup of tea. I’d have preferred a strong drink. Albert hung up the phone, livid with rage, and collapsed on a chair.
“They have concluded that there is no proof or evidence of disloyalty. But it does not mean, as far as they’re concerned, that our friend is not a danger. Masters of litotes!”
“Good God! Will Robert be removed from the IAS? Or worse?”
“Let’s not lose our heads, Lili. The Oppenheimers are not in the same situation as the Rosenbergs. He will lose his position in Washington and his security clearance at the AEC. It was expiring in any case. They are planning to keep him at a distance from any sensitive work or policy decisions.”
“Why in God’s name did he want to appear before that trumped-up panel? You told him it was a bad idea, Herr Einstein.”
“He wanted to clear his good name. And I believe he wanted to make expiation for his part in Los Alamos.”
“That Teller is one goddamn bastard!”39
“Adele!”
“It’s all right, Gödel. Your wife is not wrong. Their whole file of accusations is based on Teller’s supposed intuitions. The warmongers now have a free hand at the AEC. And that’s what they wanted from the first. To discredit Robert and dispel his influence.”
No one dared to answer Albert, who seemed overcome with sadness. The old physicist wore himself out fighting battles for everyone else, whereas Kurt had never fought for anyone but himself. The German disaster was starting all over again. We were too old or too cynical to be surprised by it. Hitler, too, had conjured up the figment of a Communist conspiracy to weaken democracy. America would take the same path, unless people like Einstein who were both sagacious and willing to sacrifice themselves intervened.40
“Gödel, you discovered a flaw in the American Constitution. No one would listen. Well, here we are! We have put a foot in the shit of dictatorship.”
“Don’t say that sort of thing. Our conversations are monitored.”
The old man sprang from his seat, grabbed a lamp with a beaded shade, and held it to his mouth like a microphone.
“Hello! Hello! Radio Moscow, here! Albert Einstein speaking. I have sold the recipe for pea soup to Stalin, may he choke on it, and Senator McCarthy too! What? Stalin is already dead? Ah!”
He shook the poor lamp.
“Do you copy? What, there’s no one on the line? They should invent a direct line between Moscow and Princeton. Communications are in terrible disrepair.”
We wavered between laughter and anxiety. Bruria, fearing for the general safety, took the lamp from his hands.
“Calm down, Professor! Don’t go looking for trouble!”
He patted his pockets searching for his faithful companion. Helen picked up the beads that had fallen on the rug. As she walked out of the room, she put a placating hand on her employer’s shoulder. Collapsed once more in his chair, he was tugging at the ends of his yellowing, tobacco-flecked mustache. Though his sagging features spoke of his great age, his eyes had lost nothing of their youth: two black stars.
“Unless there is a price to pay, courage has no value. Since I publicly supported Robert, I have had fifty more trench coats dogging my steps! And have you seen what the newspaper boys are writing about me? Thank goodness my Maja is no longer here to read such garbage!”
“You’ve been so brave, Herr Einstein.”
“What can they do to me, Lili? Take away my American nationality?41 Throw me in prison? It is the one good thing about this goddamn fame! It keeps them from doing anything they want!”
He lit his pipe and drew several puffs on it, which seemed to calm him.
“Poor Kitty. She defends Robert tooth and nail although they’ve dug up an affair he once had with a Communist girlfriend! What depths will they not sink to?”
“It doesn’t concern us, Adele! I hate this fishwives’ gossip.”
I swallowed the insult. I wasn’t fooled: Oppie hardly came out of this business pure as the driven snow. I was ready to acknowledge that he had helped us a great deal, but he had also played with fire. This parody of a trial had brought to a close, to his advantage finally, what the press called the “Chevalier affair.” In this time of anticommunist hysteria, anyone who was against using the bomb was considered unpatriotic. Einstein had publicly warned against the H-bomb during a televised interview. The fusion bomb would be a thousand times more destructive than the fission bomb.42 This statement had brought down on Albert the fury of every anticommunist and of their puppet master, J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful and long-standing head of the FBI. After working zealously with the military as the director at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had tried to put the brakes on nuclear proliferation. I had heard him discuss it with his colleagues around a barbecue grill. He claimed that the U.S. arsenal was already big enough to bomb Siberia into the Pacific — big enough to give our Red “opponents” a good scare. When the news emerged in 1949 that the Russians had detonated their first atomic bomb, a wave of espionage fever swept over America, culminating in the arrest and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were supposed to have sold nuclear secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets. And just the summer before, with the witch hunt in full swing and U.S. forces mired in Korea, we learned that the Russians had set off their first H-bomb, less than a year after “Ivy Mike,” the American one. The speed with which the Soviets had developed a thermonuclear bomb gave further grist to Senator McCarthy’s mill. Those commie bastards had the gall to piss as far as we did! Who had sold them their new toy? Suspicion again fell on the Manhattan Project regulars. By posting a moderate stance, Oppenheimer drew fire. Edward Teller had never forgiven him for choosing Hans Bethe to head the theoretical physics department at Los Alamos. Teller had rolled up his white-coated sleeves and set to work digging Oppie’s grave. Robert was no plaster saint. He’d already named names, a common practice at the time, when ancient forms of inquisition were being revived. To cover his rear, he’d had to confess in later hearings, muddling his story, to having been invited, although he never accepted, to give secret information to certain “persons.” He eventually denounced his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor at Berkeley. The new commission charged with investigating Robert’s “loyalty” had quickly picked out the inconsistencies in his earlier testimony. It also probed his past leftist sympathies, exhumed a militant girlfriend and his wife Kitty’s ex-husband, a soldier in the antifascist forces in Spain. The Oppenheimers were predictably enough caught in a web of allegations. With his arrogance and his undeniable intellectual superiority, Oppie offered a perfect target for petty spirits. An excellent chess player, he had taken the calculated risk of positioning himself as a victim: now History would remember him as a martyr, not a craven informer. His darker aspects didn’t negate my affection for him, just the opposite. The all-powerful boss had his flaws too.