12 INTRODUCTORYfor having shot and killed Karl Sttirgkh, the prime minister of Austria [El]. After
the death of Leo Arons, a physicist Einstein admired for his political courage but
whom he did not know personally, he wrote an obituary in Sozialistische Mon-
atshefte [E2]. After the assassination in 1922 of his acquaintance Walther Rath-
enau, foreign minister of the Weimar republic and a physicist by education, Ein-
stein wrote of him in Neue Rundschau: 'It is no art to be an idealist if one lives
in cloud-cuckoo land. He, however, was an idealist even though he lived on earth
and knew its smell better than almost anyone else' [E3]. In 1923 Einstein became
a cofounder of the Association of Friends of the New Russia. Together with Lor-
entz, Marie Curie, Henry Bergson, and others, he worked for a time as a member
of the League of Nations' Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (16d). Among
those he proposed or endorsed for the Nobel peace prize (31) were Masaryk; Her-
bert Runham Brown, honorary secretary of War Resisters International; Carl von
Ossietzky, at the time in a German concentration camp; and the organization
Youth Aliyah. He spoke out about the plight of the Jews and helped. Numerous
are the affidavits he signed in order to bring Jews from Europe to the United
States.
Pacifism and supranationalism were Einstein's two principal political ideals. In
the 1920s he supported universal disarmament and a United Europe (16d). After
the Second World War, he especially championed the concept of world govern-
ment, and the peaceful—and only peaceful—uses of atomic energy (27). That
pacifism and disarmament were out of place in the years 1933 to 1945 was both
deeply regrettable and obvious to him (25b). In 1939 he sent his sensible letter to
President Roosevelt on the military implications of nuclear fission. In 1943 he
signed a contract with the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance as occasional consultant
(his fee was $25 per day).* Perhaps his most memorable contribution of that
period is his saying, 'I am in the Navy, but I was not required to get a Navy
haircut.' [Bl]. He never forgave the Germans (27).**
Einstein's political orientation, which for simplicity may be called leftist,
derived from his sense of justice, not from an approval of method or a sharing of
philosophy. 'In Lenin I honor a man who devoted all his strength and sacrificed
his person to the realization of social justice. I do not consider his method to be
proper,' he wrote in 1929 [E4] and, shortly thereafter, 'Outside Russia, Lenin and
Engels are of course not valued as scientific thinkers and no one might be inter-
ested to refute them as such. The same might also be the case in Russia, but there
one cannot dare to say so' [E5]. Much documentation related to Einstein's inter-
ests in and involvements with political matters is found in the book Einstein on
Peace [Nl]).
Einstein was a lover of wisdom. But was he a philosopher? The answer to that
"The account of Einstein's consultancy given in [Gl] is inaccurate.
**Einstein's cousin Lina Einstein died in Auschwitz. His cousin Bertha Dreyfus died in Theresien-
stadt.