PURPOSE AND PLAN 11Bureau of the Associated Press came on the line and told me that the Oppenhei-
mer case would be all over the papers on Tuesday morning. He was eager for a
statement by Einstein as soon as possible. I realized that pandemonium on Mercer
Street the next morning might be avoided by a brief statement that evening and
so said that I would talk it over with Einstein and would call back in any event.
I drove to Mercer Street and rang the bell; Helen Dukas, Einstein's secretary, let
me in. I apologized for appearing at such a late hour and said it would be good if
I could talk briefly with the professor, who meanwhile had appeared at the top of
the stairs dressed in his bathrobe and asked, 'Was ist los?' What is going on? He
came down and so did his stepdaughter Margot. After I told him the reason for
my call, Einstein burst out laughing. I was a bit taken aback and asked him what
was so funny. He said that the problem was simple. All Oppenheimer needed to
do, he said, was go to Washington, tell the officials that they were fools, and then
go home. On further discussion, we decided that a brief statement was called for.
We drew it up, and Einstein read it over the phone to the AP director in Wash-
ington. The next day Helen Dukas was preparing lunch when she saw cars in
front of the house and cameras being unloaded. In her apron (she told me) she
ran out of the house to warn Einstein, who was on his way home. When he arrived
at the front door, he declined to talk to reporters.
Was Einstein's initial response correct? Of course it was, even though his sug-
gestion would not and could not be followed. I remember once attending a seminar
by Bertrand de Jouvenel in which he singled out the main characteristic of a
political problem: it has no answer, only a compromise. Nothing was more alien
to Einstein than to settle any issue by compromise, in his life or in his science. He
often spoke out on political problems, always steering to their answer. Such state-
ments have often been called naive.* In my view, Einstein was not only not naive
but highly aware of the nature of man's sorrows and his follies. His utterances on
political matters did not always address the immediately practicable, and I do not
think that on the whole they were very influential. However, he knowingly and
gladly paid the price of sanity.
As another comment on political matters, I should like to relate a story I was
told in 1979 by Israel's President Navon. After the death of the then Israeli pres-
ident, Weizman, in November 1952, Ben Gurion and his cabinet decided to offer
the presidency to Einstein. Abba Eban was instructed to transmit the offer from
Washington (27). Shortly thereafter, in a private conversation, Ben Gurion asked
Navon (who at that time was his personal secretary), 'What are we going to do
if he accepts?'
Einstein often lent his name to pacifist statements, doing so for the first time in
1914 (14a). In 1916 he gave an interview to the Berlin paper Die Vossische Zei-
tung about the work on Mach by his pacifist friend Friedrich Adler, then in jail
"Oppenheimer's description, 'There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and
profoundly stubborn' [Ol] shows the writer's talent for almost understanding everything.