My wife and I met Leo Szilard, one of the most delightful and obviously brilliant people we have known, late in 1942. He was working on the mysterious Metallurgical project at the University of Chicago. (We met him through a Hungarian psychologist whose name we have forgotten.) He used to come to tea on our special day for that. He was a deeply serious, but also humorous and entertaining, person. Walking home with him after a party one evening we found him seemingly rather depressed. We speculated, “Perhaps his research is going badly.”
Next day we learned it had been going only too well. A chain reaction had gone off as predicted the day before. The “metallurgical” secret was no longer that but a fact known around the world. Why was Szilard depressed? He soon told me why. He foresaw the atomic bomb, and not only that, he foresaw trouble with Russia as the Russians learned how to do what could be done militarily with this terrible new explosive.
The idea that Russia would be unable to do what we had done was not his idea at all; and in this he was like most physicists that I knew. I recall his saying that we had not yet had war with Russia because the weapons for such a war had not been invented, but that they would soon be available. He did think that nuclear fission would make energy cheaply and abundantly, and in this, like a good many physicists, he underestimated the human difficulties of dealing with the new process without deadly dangers.
Szilard had an exacting conscience and was deeply upset by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was on the side of those physicists who thought the bomb should have been demonstrated to the Japanese, rather than dropped upon them before they knew it existed. He asked me to help him draw up a statement for professors to sign protesting the dropping; it was addressed to President Truman. We worked out a statement to this effect. It turned out that few on the faculty were willing to sign.
The discouraging thing was that even the members of the Divinity School were unresponsive to Szilard’s proposal. One church historian and I got together to formulate a statement that would receive more support. We did not roundly condemn the president’s decision, but put the emphasis on what the country should do, now that Japan had surrendered. The war was over; but the world was left, much of it in misery, poverty, and hunger, with the principal exception of U.S.A. We advocated generosity.
Fifty some signatures were assembled and the document was sent to the White House. It received some publicity. I have often wondered if the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe was not, to some extent, occasioned by our proposal. It may have helped.
Szilard did not sign the final statement at all. It was too weak in its ethical judgment of our behavior to the Japanese. He and I did not in the least quarrel about this. As a philosopher (I teach that subject), I always had the impression that in his philosophy Leo was a Kantian, a sincere and intelligent one.
On the lighter side. At a party, mostly for physicists, which we attended, a naive lady asked Enrico Fermi, “Please tell me, do atoms have sex?” Fermi was speechless; but Szilard took up the challenge, “Why yes, dear lady, of course they have.” (Fermi seemed glad to be let off the hook.) I heard Leo claim, I think as a joke, that the ball-point pen was a Hungarian invention. He told two Hungarian tales the like of which I have not heard in any other context.
One was about a lady who began to be known in her village as in danger of becoming an old maid. It was embarrassing. She announced that she was going to travel for a time. Some weeks later she returned and told neighbors that she had met the man of her choice and married him; but that he had some business to attend to before rejoining her. Some months passed, no husband appeared. Before the situation could again be an embarrassment, the lady announced she had decided to divorce the man since he did not come as promised. So now she could be a divorced woman, and would never need to be an old maid.
The other Hungarian tale was about a count who kept telling his friends that the first thing he wanted to do was to make a lot of money. Why is making money so important, he was asked. “So that I can despise it as I should,” he replied.
Our choicest recollection of Leo concerns our daughter, then a very articulate as well as pretty child of five. Leo, having come for tea, overheard Emily saying repeatedly to her mother, “I want some chocolate.” Her mother rebuked her for this insistent request and then left the room (to bring something from the kitchen). Leo rose and went out the front door. It was then wartime and chocolate was rationed. Dorothy, returning from the kitchen, noted Leo’s absence and thought he must have been displeased by Emily’s behavior. Soon, however, he reappeared carrying a sizable bag which he opened, pouring out the contents in front of Emily. The bag contained a pound of chocolate kisses, which Emily began to enjoy. “Now,” said Leo to Dorothy, “I have ruined her for life. Every time she wants something she will expect some man to give it to her.”
Szilard was so disgusted by Hiroshima that he left nuclear research and turned to biophysics, in which he could use his knowledge for wholly nonmilitary purposes. I gather that he worked out some worthwhile contributions to his new subject. My leaving Chicago for Emory University in 1955 took me away from this extraordinary man, except that I read his essays on nontechnical subjects. I recall the one in which he imagines the Russians coming to take over our country. He knows that some commissaire will interrogate him about his view of the situation and wonders what he will say in reply. He thinks and thinks and then says to himself, “I have it; I will tell him the truth. He won’t know what to make of that.” I quote from memory, probably missing some of the point.
After Hiroshima, Leo also decided that, to raise the level of consciousness of the community it would be a good idea to talk to an important religious authority. He selected the Cardinal of the Chicago area as the authority and asked me to accompany him in his visit to the Cardinal’s office. During the taxi ride — he insisted on paying for it, saying that he was sure my salary was less than his, to which I felt safe in replying that I too was sure of that — I recall nothing else that was said.
When we had been ushered into the presence of the Most Reverend, Szilard set forth his view about the importance and dangers of nuclear energy. The Cardinal made a brief reply, saying that God had locked up the energy in question so securely that only after thousands of years had it been unlocked. He assured us that “The Church would consider the matter, and in due time make a statement about it.” We came away remarking to each other that we were tempted to wish the energy had been still more securely locked up.
Other things that Szilard did are well known, in his efforts to promote and safeguard the use of atomic energy. I heard him give a talk to a scientific club at the University of Chicago in which he told us how he had tried without success in England to secure a grant of, I think, two or perhaps five thousand pounds or dollars to make a crucial experiment bearing on atomic fission, then had gone to New York and there succeeded. It was in the “romantic period of physics” when a few thousands sufficed to make a big discovery, rather than the millions that have since become necessary.
A final Szilard story: The afternoon of the day the production of a chain reaction was announced in the newspapers, mentioning Fermi and Szilard, the latter and a young philosopher friend of ours came to tea. “Well,” said the philosopher to Szilard, “I hear you have become a great man.” Replied the suddenly famous physicist, “I’ve always been a great man.” Conceit? Not at all, just wit, plus good semantics. Greatness is one thing, being favorably reported in the news is another. It was not Szilard who had changed overnight, but the newspaper writers and readers. This man had long known his abilities and substantial achievements.
I feel somewhat similarly about the case of Bernard Shaw — a very different man—- saying to the world at age 90, “My powers are waning; I hope this will be a comfort to those who found me unbearably brilliant in my prime.” This too was not conceit. The powers had been brilliant, some had found them unbearable, and they were waning. In addition Shaw was communicating another actual fact: that he could still play his expected role of public entertainer. To hew so close to reality is hardly conceit. Szilard was a minor artist in the entertainment role, as well as a great scientist: a truly wonderful, many-sided person.