einstein

the progress being made in producing chain reactions with huge explosive potential, the letter urged the president to consider whether the
American work was proceeding quickly enough. 16
Roosevelt reacted by calling for a conference designed to spur greater urgency, and he told officials to make sure that Einstein could attend. But
Einstein had no desire to be more involved. He replied by saying he had a cold—somewhat of a convenient excuse—and did not need to be at the
meeting. But he did urge the group to get moving: “I am convinced of the wisdom and urgency of creating the conditions under which work can be
carried out with greater speed and on a larger scale.” 17
Even if Einstein had wanted to take part in the meetings, which led to the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bomb, he may not have
been welcome. Amazingly, the man who had helped get the project launched was considered, by some, to be too great a potential security risk to
be permitted to know about the work.
Brigadier General Sherman Miles, the acting Army chief of staff who was organizing the new committee, sent a letter in July 1940 to J. Edgar
Hoover, who had already been the director of the FBI for sixteen years and would remain so for another thirty-two. By addressing him by his national
guard rank as “Colonel Hoover,” the general was subtly pulling rank when it came to controlling intelligence decisions. But Hoover was assertive
when Miles asked for a summary of information the Bureau had on Einstein. 18
Hoover began by providing General Miles with the letter from Mrs. Frothingham’s Woman Patriot Corporation, which had argued in 1932 that
Einstein should be denied a visa and raised alarms about various pacifist and political groups he had supported. 19 The Bureau made no attempt to
verify or assess any of the charges.
Hoover went on to say that Einstein had been involved in the World Antiwar Congress in Amsterdam in 1932, which had some European
communists on its committee. This was the conference that Einstein, as noted earlier, had specifically and publicly declined to attend or even
support; as he wrote the organizer, “Because of the glorification of Soviet Russia it includes, I cannot bring myself to sign it.” Einstein had gone on
in that letter to denounce Russia, where “there seems to be complete suppression of the individual and of freedom of speech.” Nevertheless,
Hoover implied that Einstein had supported the conference and was thus pro-Soviet. 20
Hoover’s letter had six more paragraphs making similar allegations about a variety of alleged Einstein associations, ranging from pacifist groups
to those supporting Spain’s loyalists. Appended was a biographical sketch filled with trivial misinformation (“has one child”) and wild allegations. It
called him “an extreme radical,” which he certainly was not, and said he “has contributed to communist magazines,” which he hadn’t. General Miles
was so taken aback by the memo that he wrote a note in the margin, warning, “There is some possibility of flameback” if it ever leaked. 21
The conclusion of the unsigned biographical sketch was stark: “In view of this radical background, this office would not recommend the
employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature, without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background
could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.” In a memo the following year, it was reported that the Navy had assented to giving
Einstein a security clearance, but “the Army could not clear.” 22
Citizen Einstein
Just as the Army’s decision was being made, Einstein was in fact eagerly doing something the likes of which he had not done for forty years,
ever since he had saved up his money so that he could become a Swiss citizen after leaving Germany. He was voluntarily and proudly becoming a
citizen of the United States, a process that had begun five years earlier when he sailed to Bermuda so that he could return on an immigration visa.
He still had his Swiss citizenship and passport, so he did not need to do this. But he wanted to.
He took his citizenship test on June 22, 1940, in front of a federal judge in Trenton. To celebrate the process, he agreed to give a radio interview
as part of the immigration service’s I Am an American series. The judge served lunch and had the radio folks set up in his chambers to make the
process easier for Einstein. 23
It was an inspiring day, partly because Einstein showed just what type of free-speaking citizen he would be. In his radio talk, he argued that, to
prevent wars in the future, nations would have to give up some of their sovereignty to an armed international federation of nations. “A worldwide
organization cannot insure peace effectively unless it has control over the entire military power of its members,” he said. 24
Einstein passed his test and he was sworn in—along with his step-daughter Margot, his assistant Helen Dukas, and eighty-six other new citizens
—on October 1. Afterward, he praised America to the reporters covering his naturalization. The nation, he said, would prove that democracy is not
just a form of government but “a way of life tied to a great tradition, the tradition of moral strength.” Asked if he would renounce other loyalties, he
joyously declared that he “would even renounce my cherished sailboat” if that were necessary. 25 It was not, however, necessary for him to renounce
his Swiss citizenship, and he did not.
When he first arrived in Princeton, Einstein had been impressed that America was, or could be, a land free of the rigid class hierarchies and
servility in Europe. But what grew to impress him more—and what made him fundamentally such a good American but also a controversial one—
was the country’s tolerance of free thought, free speech, and nonconformist beliefs. That had been a touchstone of his science, and now it was a
touchstone of his citizenship.
He had forsaken Nazi Germany with the public pronouncement that he would not live in a country where people were denied the freedom to hold
and express their own thoughts. “At that time, I did not understand how right I was in my choice of America as such a place,” he wrote in an
unpublished essay just after becoming a citizen. “On every side I hear men and women expressing their opinion on candidates for office and the
issues of the day without fear of consequences.”
The beauty of America, he said, was that this tolerance of each person’s ideas existed without the “brute force and fear” that had arisen in
Europe. “From what I have seen of Americans, I think that life would not be worth living to them without this freedom of self expression.” 26 The depth
of his appreciation for America’s core value would help explain Einstein’s cold public anger and dissent when, during the McCarthy era a few years
later, the nation lapsed into a period marked by the intimidation of those with unpopular views.
More than two years after Einstein and his colleagues had urged attention to the possibility of building atomic weapons, the United States
launched the supersecret Manhattan Project. It happened on December 6, 1941, which turned out to be, fittingly enough, the day before Japan
launched its attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the nation into the war.
Because so many fellow physicists, such as Wigner, Szilárd, Oppenheimer, and Teller, had disappeared to obscure towns, Einstein was able to
surmise that the bomb-making work he had recommended was now proceeding with greater urgency. But he was not asked to join the Manhattan
Project, nor was he officially told about it.
There were many reasons he was not secretly summoned to places like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge. He was not a nuclear physicist or a
practicing expert in the scientific issues at hand. He was, as noted, considered by some a security risk. And even though he had put aside his