The Man Who Stalked Einstein (28 page)

Absorbed in his memories, Lenard fumed over how little credit he had received for
his courageous stance. Had he not stood up to Einstein and called him to account,
who can say what might have happened? He had exposed the Jew to his colleagues for
the sham that he was. He had risked his own career and, given the power the Jew commanded,
perhaps even his life. But he had put the Jew on the defensive.

Although it was not until 1933 that the Jew fled Germany with a price on his head,
Lenard had been in the vanguard. Einstein had been fortunate to get out when he did.
His flight to England, then on to America, had almost certainly saved him from an
early death. With Einstein gone, he’d led the purge that, in short order, eliminated
the duplicitous Jewish race from German academic life.

That Hitler had remembered Lenard’s contributions and so fulsomely expressed his
gratitude gave renewed meaning to the aged professor’s constricted life. The Fuehrer
knew more than anyone about sacrifice, yet here he was acknowledging the hardships
Lenard had suffered. The struggle had been worthwhile.

While Lenard’s grudges would dog him until his death five years later in Messelhausen,
Germany, the good feelings of that day in 1942 never completely left him. Unrepentant
of the harm he had caused to so many people and certain that his assessment of Einstein
and his theories had been correct, he sat alone in his room, Hitler’s visage watching
over him, and reflected with satisfaction on the experiences that had brought him
to his place in the world. Waxing philosophical, Lenard lifted his pen and wrote in
the stilted style of one born in a distant province who, from childhood, had scorned
all learning but science, “To have Adolf Hitler and to know him close to me should
be enough to have lived for.”

* * *

“I have done my share.” Einstein said. Lying in his hospital bed, he painfully turned
toward his longtime secretary, Helen Dukas. “It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

Einstein had been admitted to Princeton Hospital several hours earlier, on April
17, 1955, complaining of chest pain that had worsened over the last several days.
Einstein’s premonition of his death was well founded. Seven years earlier, in 1948,
doctors discovered that he had developed a “grapefruit-size” aneurysm of the aorta,
the body’s largest artery. Nowadays, localized vascular balloonings like Einstein’s
are routinely treated by surgery or radiological procedures. At that time, however,
surgical methods for treating aneurysms were more rudimentary. Einstein’s physicians
felt that there was too much risk for them to operate. Now the aneurysm was leaking,
causing pain, signaling it would soon burst.

Having refused emergency surgery, the seventy-six-year-old made himself as comfortable
as he could. He reminded Dukas that he wished to be cremated the day he died. She
and his older son, Hans Albert, were to spread his ashes on the waters of the Delaware
River, just to the west of where he had lived and worked for the past twenty-two years.
There should be no memorial service and no marker to commemorate his passing.

Between his admission to the hospital and his death early the next morning, Einstein
had several hours to contemplate the cosmic questions that had occupied him during
his remarkably fruitful life. Einstein had been born to Jewish parents. He bore no
illusions, however, concerning the meaning of being a Jew. Recent history had made
it clear to him that “A Jew who sheds his faith along the way, or who even picks up
a different one, is still a Jew.” The Nazi’s near extermination of European Jewry
and his efforts to establish a Jewish university in Jerusalem had strengthened his
identification with Judaism as he’d aged. His beliefs, however, were his own:

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose
purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human
frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body.
. . . It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating
itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe
which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal
part of the intelligence manifested in nature. My religion consists of a humble admiration
of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are
able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.

Einstein died early in the morning on April 18, 1955. He was seventy-six years old.
There was no deathbed conversion. He remained true to his convictions in death, as
he had in life.

Throughout the United States and around the world, people whom Einstein had never
met mourned his passing. The loss was particularly heartfelt in Princeton. The locals
had grown accustomed to seeing Einstein, dressed in baggy trousers, a rumpled sweater,
and sandals, on his daily walks around the town. Despite his once having voiced the
opinion that Princeton was a “quaint and ceremonial village of puny demigods, strutting
on stiff legs,” he loved the small college town’s deep, green leafiness and the stone
spires of its renowned university from the moment he arrived. He quickly renegotiated
his position with the Institute for Advanced Studies from being a five-or-six months
a year visiting scholar to a year-round member of its faculty. In 1934, he and Elsa
bought an ordinary-looking house at 112 Mercer Street and moved in along with Helen
Dukas and, later, after Elsa’s untimely death in 1936, Elsa’s daughter Margot.

Local anecdotes are legion and almost always sympathetic. Among them is a story about
two undergraduates who saw Einstein walking ahead of them on campus one day and conspired
to get his attention. “One plus one equals two!” one of them said in a voice loud
enough for Einstein to hear. “You’re an idiot . . . you know that?” said the other.
“One plus one equals three!” The argument grew more voluble until, after a minute
or so, Einstein stopped abruptly and turned to face them. “Boys, boys,” he admonished
them. “There is no need to fight. You are both right!”

Other stories describe him as an eccentric, seemingly so deeply absorbed in the enormity
of his thoughts that he was incapable of managing the mundane aspects of normal life.
One such story was told by an undergraduate returning to campus in late summer, just
before the beginning of the academic year. The young man decided to spend his otherwise
unencumbered afternoon canoeing on Lake Carnegie at the foot of the campus. Only one
other boat was on the water, a becalmed sailboat that at first glance seemed to be
unmanned. As the young man approached the boat, a man and a woman raised themselves
above the gunwales and waved him over. The man’s disarrayed shock of white hair left
no doubt to his identity. Einstein had forgotten to put a paddle in the boat. They
had been dead in the water for over an hour. Would the young man tow them to port?

The woman in the boat almost certainly was Polish-born Johanna Fantiva, Einstein’s
last lover, whom he had convinced to immigrate to Princeton in 1939. Twenty-two years
younger than Einstein, she left a diary in which much is written about a man quite
different than the muddle-headed genius of township lore. Johanna characterized Einstein
as an extremely alert and keen-witted critic of his time, angered by Senator McCarthy’s
anti-communist campaign, the U.S.-supported rearming of Germany, and the American
buildup of atomic weapons. In Johanna’s diary, Einstein comes alive as an amiable
maverick who compared himself to an old car, rife with mechanical problems. Despite
his ills, Fantiva asserted that he not only retained his own good humor but also cheered
up his chronically depressed parrot, Bibo, by telling him jokes.

By the time Einstein reached Princeton, he was fifty-four years old. His best science
was behind him, but he remained among the most respected men on the planet. He had
lived his life according to a consistent moral code. While many disagreed with his
message of pacifistic internationalism, even his critics had to grant that Einstein
had stayed true to his credo. He had seen enough of prejudice and ostracism that he
would not stand for it in any form. He developed a particular empathy for the plight
of black people in America. He was a longtime friend of the actor Paul Robeson, who
had grown up in Princeton. When the great African-American opera singer Marian Anderson
was denied lodging at Princeton’s Nassau Inn following a 1937 performance, he invited
her into his home. From then on, she stayed with Einstein whenever she was in the
area.

Unfortunately, Einstein’s comfort with his pacifist beliefs was challenged by events
happening overseas. He fearfully monitored the increasingly bellicose speeches of
Adolf Hitler and recognized that Europe once again was heading toward war. During
the summer of 1939, while Einstein was vacationing in Peconic, on the northern tip
of Long Island, he welcomed to his rental cottage two old friends. Eugene Wigner and
Leó Szilárd were Hungarian refugees and physicists, who had managed to escape Europe
before Hitler had tightened the noose around that country’s scientists.

Greeting the two men in an undershirt and rolled-up trousers, he led them to the
screened-in porch where he listened to their story. Their visit was not a social one.
Wigner and Szilárd had received word that German physicists had learned how to split
the uranium atom. As Einstein had predicted in his 1905 work on the equivalence of
mass and energy—represented by his iconic formula, energy (E) equals mass (m) multiplied
by the speed of light (c) squared, or E = mc²—the reaction released an enormous amount
of energy. Werner Heisenberg was said to be leading a German effort to build an atomic
bomb. Time was short. Einstein must use his influence to prevail on his friend Elisabeth,
Belgium’s former Queen—now Queen Mother following the death of her husband—to have
her country deny Germany access to the great stores of uranium in the Belgian Congo.

Einstein agreed, but before he could write the letter, Szilárd was convinced by a
friend of President Roosevelt that any international effort would be advantaged by
their going through government channels. Szilárd returned to Long Island, this time
with another Hungarian refugee, the eventual father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller,
in tow.

Einstein knew Roosevelt personally, having been invited with Elsa to have dinner
with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt and spend the night at the White House in 1934.
At Szilárd and Teller’s urging, he dictated a letter to Roosevelt dated August 2,
1939. Because of the demands of the presidency, however, Roosevelt didn’t learn of
Einstein’s concerns until early October, when his friend and economic advisor Alexander
Sachs finally read Einstein’s letter aloud to the president.

In barebones fashion, Einstein’s missive provided Roosevelt with the background
he felt the president needed to understand the magnitude of the crisis and how researchers
had come to unleash the power of the atom. He went on to express his concern that
“[t]his new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs [and] . . . that
extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” He warned, “A single
bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy
the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.”

In light of the fact that the United States then had very sparse known stores of
uranium, and that German scientists might be well on their way to weaponizing this
new threat, Einstein suggested that the president “have some permanent contact maintained
between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions
in America.” Einstein envisioned that this unnamed individual would keep government
departments informed and facilitate special attention to the availability of uranium,
as well as advise the government on increasing funding to universities and institutes
so as to accelerate research on nuclear fission.

It took some time, but Roosevelt eventually treated Einstein’s warning seriously.
He established a board that included members of his military command, as well as Szilárd,
Wigner, Teller, and the physicist Enrico Fermi, who had escaped Mussolini’s fascist
Italy. Einstein was invited to join the following year, but declined and later was
excluded for reasons of national security.

When, in 1933, Einstein first determined he would immigrate, his entry into the United
States was opposed by an organization billing itself as the Women’s Patriot Corporation.
This group had charged that Einstein’s associations with a number of European pacifist
organizations identified him as a communist. The memoranda of that episode of back
and forth with the U.S. government had been retained in what, over the years, had
grown to become a fourteen-hundred-page FBI file. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover claimed
that Einstein was an “extreme radical.” Hoover’s judgment effectively ruled out Einstein’s
participation in the Manhattan Project.

In warning Roosevelt of the German threat and advocating work on nuclear fission
weaponry, Einstein had envisioned nuclear weapons as a deterrent or, at worst, weapons
that would only be used defensively. He was devastated by the catastrophic loss of
life that resulted at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the urging of Szilárd, who was similarly
troubled, he assumed the presidency of a new organization, the Emergency Committee
of Atomic Scientists, dedicated to nuclear arms control, and rededicated himself to
the impossible chimera of a unified world government.

Einstein spent most of his last years in Princeton working on a “unified field theory”—a
scientific and mathematical construct that would comprehensively explain the interrelationships
among all natural phenomena. In the end, the conquest of this last great challenge
eluded him. Nonetheless, Einstein died believing that such an understanding was achievable.
“The most incomprehensible thing about the world,” he wrote, “is that it is comprehensible.”