einstein

need to keep thrusting himself into the fray.
But one person did get through: Albert Shadowitz, a physics professor who had worked as an engineer during the war and helped form a union
that was eventually expelled from the labor movement for having communists on its board. Senator McCarthy wanted to show that the union had ties
to Moscow and had endangered the defense industry. Shadowitz, who had been a member of the Communist Party, decided to invoke the
protections of the First, not the Fifth, Amendment, as Einstein had recommended to Frauenglass. 20
Shadowitz was so worried about his plight that he decided to call Einstein for support. But Einstein’s number was unlisted. So he got into his car
in northern New Jersey, drove to Princeton, and showed up at Einstein’s house, where he was met by the zealous guardian Dukas. “Do you have an
appointment?” she demanded. He admitted he didn’t. “Well, you can’t just come in and speak to Professor Einstein,” she declared. But when he
explained his story, she stared at him for a while, then waved him in.
Einstein was wearing his usual attire: a baggy sweatshirt and corduroy trousers. He took Shadowitz upstairs to his study and assured him that his
actions were right. He was an intellectual, and it was the special duty of intellectuals to stand up in such cases. “If you take this path then feel free to
use my name in any way that you wish,” Einstein generously offered.
Shadowitz was surprised by the blank check, but happy to use it. McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, did the questioning as McCarthy listened
during the initial closed hearing. Was he a communist? Shadowitz replied: “I refuse to answer that and I am following the advice of Professor
Einstein.” McCarthy suddenly took over the questioning. Did he know Einstein? Not really, Shadowitz answered, but I’ve met him. When the script
was replayed in an open hearing, it made the same type of headlines, and provoked the same spurt of mail, as the Frauenglass case had.
Einstein believed he was being a good, rather than a disloyal, citizen. He had read the First Amendment and felt that upholding its spirit was at
the core of America’s cherished freedom. One angry critic sent him a copy of a card that contained what he called “The American Creed.” It read, in
part, “It is my duty to my country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws.” Einstein wrote on the edge, “This is precisely what I have
done.” 21
When the great black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois was indicted on charges stemming from helping to circulate a petition initiated by the World Peace
Council, Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness on his behalf. It represented a union of Einstein’s sentiments on behalf of civil rights
and of free speech. When Du Bois’s lawyer informed the court that Einstein would appear, the judge rather quickly decided to dismiss the case. 22
Another case hit closer to home: that of J. Robert Oppenheimer. After leading the scientists who developed the atom bomb and then becoming
head of the Institute where Einstein still puttered in to work, Oppenheimer remained an adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission and kept his
security clearance. By initially opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb, he had turned Edward Teller into an adversary, and he also
alienated AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, and his brother, Frank, had been members of the Communist Party before
the war, and Oppenheimer himself had associated freely with party members and with scientists whose loyalty came under question. 23
All of this prompted an effort in 1953 to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. It would have expired soon anyway, and everyone could
have allowed the matter to be resolved quietly, but in the heated atmosphere neither Oppenheimer nor his adversaries wanted to back away from
what they saw as a matter of principle. So a secret hearing was scheduled in Washington.
One day at the Institute, Einstein ran into Oppenheimer, who was preparing for the hearings. They chatted for a few minutes, and when
Oppenheimer got to his car he recounted the conversation to a friend. “Einstein thinks that the attack on me is so outrageous that I should just
resign,” he said. Einstein considered Oppenheimer “a fool” for even answering the charges. Having served his country admirably, he had no
obligations to subject himself to a “witch hunt.” 24
A few days after the secret hearings finally began—in April 1954, just as CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow was taking on Joseph McCarthy and
the controversy over security investigations was at its height—they became public through a page-1 exclusive by James Reston of the New York
Times. 25 The issue of the government’s investigation of Oppenheimer’s loyalty instantly became another polarizing public debate.
Warned that the story was about to break, Abraham Pais went to Mercer Street to make sure that Einstein was prepared for the inevitable press
calls. He was bitterly amused when Pais told him that Oppenheimer continued to insist on a hearing rather than simply cutting his ties with the
government. “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government,” Einstein said. All
Oppenheimer had to do, Einstein told Pais, was “go to Washington, tell the officials that they were fools, and then go home.” 26
Oppenheimer lost. The AEC voted that he was a loyal American but also a security risk and—one day before it would have expired anyway—
revoked his clearance. Einstein visited him at the Institute the next day and found him depressed. That evening he told a friend that he did not
“understand why Oppenheimer takes the business so seriously.”
When a group of Institute faculty members circulated a petition affirming support for their director, Einstein immediately signed up. Others initially
declined, some partly out of fear. This galvanized Einstein. He “put his ‘revolutionary talents’ into action to garner support,” a friend recalled. After a
few more meetings, Einstein had helped to convince or shame everyone into signing the statement. 27
Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s AEC antagonist, was on the board of the Institute, which worried the faculty. Would he try to get Oppenheimer
fired? Einstein wrote his friend Senator Herbert Lehman of New York, another trustee, calling Oppenheimer “by far the most capable Director the
Institute has ever had.” Dismissing him, he said, “would arouse the justified indignation of all men of learning.” 28 The trustees voted to keep him.
Soon after the Oppenheimer affair, Einstein was visited in Princeton by Adlai Stevenson, the once and future Democratic nominee for president,
who was a particular darling among intellectuals. Einstein expressed concern at the way politicians were whipping up fear of communism.
Stevenson replied somewhat circumspectly. The Russians were, in fact, a danger. After some more gentle back and forth, Stevenson thanked
Einstein for endorsing him in 1952. There was no need for thanks, Einstein replied, as he had done so only because he trusted Eisenhower even
less. Stevenson said he found such honesty refreshing, and Einstein decided that he was not quite as pompous as he had originally seemed. 29
Einstein’s opposition to McCarthyism arose partly out of his fear of fascism. America’s most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from
communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. “America is incomparably less endangered by its
own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here,” he told the socialist leader Norman Thomas.
Even to people he did not know, Einstein expressed his disgust in unvarnished terms. “We have come a long way toward the establishment of a
Fascist regime,” he replied to an eleven-page letter sent to him by a New Yorker he had never met. “The similarity of general conditions here to
those in the Germany of 1932 is quite obvious.” 30
Some colleagues worried that Einstein’s vocal opinions would cause controversy for the Institute. Such concerns, he joked, made his hair turn
gray. Indeed, he took a boyish American glee at his freedom to say whatever he felt. “I have become a kind of enfant terrible in my new homeland
due to my inability to keep silent and to swallow everything that happens,” he wrote Queen Mother Elisabeth. “Besides, I believe that older people
who have scarcely anything to lose ought to be willing to speak out in behalf of those who are young and are subject to much greater restraint.” 31
He even announced, in tones both grave and a bit playful, that he would not have become a professor given the political intimidation that now
existed. “If I were a young man again and had to decide how to make a living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher,” he intoned