einstein

So Einstein sought to make it clear that the world government he envisioned would not try to impose a Western-style liberal democracy
everywhere. He advocated a world legislature that would be elected directly by the people of each member country, in secret ballot, rather than
appointed by the nation’s rulers. However, “it should not be necessary to change the internal structure of the three great powers,” he added as a
reassurance to Russia. “Membership in a supranational security system should not be based on any arbitrary democratic standards.”
One issue that Einstein could not resolve neatly was what right this world government would have to intervene in the internal affairs of nations. It
must be able “to interfere in countries where a minority is oppressing a majority,” he said, citing Spain as an example. Yet that caused him
contortions about whether this standard applied to Russia. “One must bear in mind that the people in Russia have not had a long tradition of
political education,” he rationalized. “Changes to improve conditions in Russia had to be effected by a minority because there was no majority
capable of doing so.”
Einstein’s efforts to prevent future wars were motivated not only by his old pacifist instincts but also, he admitted, by his guilty feelings about the
role he had played in encouraging the atom bomb project. At a Manhattan dinner given by the Nobel Prize committee in December, he noted that
Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had created the award “to atone for having invented the most powerful explosives ever known up to his time.”
He was in a similar situation. “Today, the physicists who participated in forging the most formidable and dangerous weapon of all times are
harassed by an equal feeling of responsibility, not to say guilt,” he said. 7
These sentiments prompted Einstein, in May 1946, to take on the most prominent public policy role in his career. He became chairman of the
newly formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which was dedicated to nuclear arms control and world government. “The unleashed
power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,” Einstein wrote in a fund-raising telegram that month, “and thus we drift
towards unparalleled catastrophe.” 8
Leó Szilárd served as the executive director and did most of the organizational work. But Einstein, who served until the end of 1948, gave
speeches, chaired meetings, and took his role seriously. “Our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric
man’s discovery of fire,” he said. “This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.” 9
The Truman administration proposed a variety of plans for the international control of atomic power, but none were able, intentionally or not, to
win the support of Moscow. As a result, the battle over the best approach quickly created a political divide.
On one side were those who celebrated the success of America and Britain in winning the race to develop such weapons. They saw the bomb
as a guarantor of the freedoms of the West, and they wanted to guard what they saw as “the secret.” On the other side were arms control advocates
like Einstein. “The secret of the atomic bomb is to America what the Maginot Line was to France before 1939,” he told Newsweek. “It gives us
imaginary security, and in this respect it is a great danger.” 10
Einstein and his friends realized that the battle for public sentiment needed to be fought not only in Washington but also in the realm of popular
culture. This led to an amusing—and historically illustrative—tangle in 1946 pitting them against Louis B. Mayer and a coterie of earnest Hollywood
moviemakers.
It began when a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scriptwriter named Sam Marx asked if he could come to Princeton to get Einstein’s cooperation on a
docudrama about the making of the bomb. Einstein sent back word that he had no desire to help. A few weeks later Einstein got an anxious letter
from an official with the Association of Manhattan Project Scientists saying that the movie seemed to be taking a very pro-military slant, celebrating
the creation of the bomb and the security it gave to America. “I know that you will not want to lend your name to a picture which misrepresents the
military and political implications of the bomb,” the letter said. “I hope that you will see fit to make the use of your name conditional on your personal
approval of the script.” 11
The following week Szilárd came to see Einstein about the issue, and soon a bevy of peace-loving physicists was bombarding him with
concerns. So Einstein read the script and agreed to join the campaign to stop the movie. “The presentation of facts was so utterly misleading that I
declined any cooperation or permission of the use of my name,” he said.
He also sent a spiky letter to the famed mogul that attacked the proposed movie and also, for good measure, the tone of previous ones that
Mayer had made. “Although I am not much of a moviegoer, I do know from the tenor of earlier films that have come out of your studio that you will
understand my reasons,” he wrote. “I find that the whole film is written too much from the point of view of the Army and the Army leader of the project,
whose influence was not always in the direction which one would desire from the point of view of humanity.” 12
Mayer turned Einstein’s letter over to the film’s chief editor, who responded with a memo that Mayer sent back to Einstein. President Truman, it
said, “was most anxious to have the picture made” and had personally read and approved the script, an argument not likely to reassure Einstein.
“As American citizens we are bound to respect the viewpoint of our government.” That, too, was not the best argument to use on Einstein. There
followed an even less persuasive argument: “It must be realized that dramatic truth is just as compelling a requirement to us as veritable truth is to a
scientist.”
The memo concluded by promising that the moral issues raised by the scientists would be given a proper airing through the character of a
fictional young scientist played by an actor named Tom Drake. “We selected among our young male players the one who best typifies earnestness
and a spiritual quality,” it said reassuringly. “You need only recall his performance in ‘The Green Years.’ ” 13
Not surprisingly, this did not turn Einstein around. When Sam Marx, the scriptwriter, wrote beseeching him to change his mind and allow himself
to be portrayed, Einstein replied curtly: “I have explained my point of view in a letter to Mr. Louis Mayer.” Marx was persistent. “When the picture is
complete,” he wrote back, “the audience will feel in greatest sympathy with the young scientist.” And from later the same day: “Here is a new and
revised script.” 14
The ending was not that hard to predict. The new script was more pleasing to the scientists, and they were not immune to the lure of being
glorified on the big screen. Szilárd sent Einstein a telegram saying, “Have received new script from MGM and am writing that I have no objection to
use of my name in it.” Einstein relented. “Agree with use of my name on basis of the new script,” he scribbled in English on the back of the
telegram. The only change he requested was in the scene of Szilárd’s 1939 visit to him on Long Island. The script said that he had not met
Roosevelt before then, but he had. 15
The Beginning or the End, which was the name of the movie, opened to good reviews in February 1947. “A sober, intelligent account of the
development and deployment of the Atom Bomb,” Bosley Crowther declared in the New York Times, “refreshingly free of propagandizing.” Einstein
was played by a character actor named Ludwig Stossel, who had a small part in Casablanca as a German Jew trying to get to America and would
later have a flicker of fame in Swiss Colony wine commercials in the 1960s in which he spoke the tagline “That little old winemaker, me.” 16
Einstein’s efforts on behalf of arms control and his advocacy of world government in the late 1940s got him tagged as woolly-headed and naïve.
Woolly-headed he may have been, at least in appearance, but was it right to dismiss him as naïve?
Most Truman administration officials, even those working on behalf of arms control, thought so. William Golden was an example. An Atomic
Energy Commission staffer who was preparing a report for Secretary of State George Marshall, he went to Princeton to consult with Einstein.