Authors: Walter Isaacson
Carrying his violin case, with a profusion of hair poking out from a wide-brimmed black hat, Einstein surreptitiously disembarked onto the tug, which then ferried him and his party to the Battery, where a car was waiting to whisk them to Princeton. “All Dr. Einstein wants is to be left in peace and quiet,” Flexner told reporters.
2
Actually, he also wanted a newspaper and an ice cream cone. So as soon as he had checked into Princeton’s Peacock Inn, he changed into casual clothes and, smoking his pipe, went walking to a newsstand, where he bought an afternoon paper and chuckled over the headlines about the mystery of his whereabouts. Then he walked into an ice cream parlor, the Baltimore, pointed his thumb at the cone a young divinity student had just bought, and then pointed at himself. As the waitress made change for him, she announced, “This one goes in my memory book.”
3
Einstein was given a corner office in a university hall that served as the temporary headquarters of the Institute. There were eighteen scholars in residence then, including the mathematicians Oswald Veblen (nephew of the social theorist Thorstein Veblen) and John von Neumann, a pioneer of computer theory. When shown his office, he was asked what equipment he might need. “A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils,” he replied. “Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.”
4
He and Elsa soon found a house to rent, which they celebrated by hosting a small musical recital featuring the works of Haydn and Mozart. The noted Russian violinist Toscha Seidel played lead, with Einstein as second fiddle. In return for some violin tips, Einstein tried to explain relativity theory to Seidel and made him some drawings of moving rods contracting in length.
5
Thus began a proliferation of popular tales in town about Einstein’s love for music. One involved Einstein playing in a quartet with violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler. At a certain point they got out of sync. Kreisler
stopped playing and turned to Einstein in mock exasperation. “What’s the matter, professor, can’t you count?”
6
More poignantly, there was an evening where a Christian prayer group gathered to make intercessions for persecuted Jews. Einstein surprised them by asking if he could come. He brought his violin and, as if offering a prayer, played a solo.
7
Many of his performances were purely impromptu. That first Halloween, he disarmed some astonished trick-or-treaters, a group of 12-year-old girls who had come with the intent of playing a prank, by appearing at the door and serenading them with his violin. And at Christmastime, when members of the First Presbyterian Church came by to sing carols, he stepped out into the snow, borrowed a violin from one of the women, and accompanied them. “He was just a lovely person,” one of them recalled.
8
Einstein soon acquired an image, which grew into a near legend but was nevertheless based on reality, of being a kindly and gentle professor, distracted at times but unfailingly sweet, who wandered about lost in thought, helped children with their homework, and rarely combed his hair or wore socks. With his amused sense of self-awareness, he catered to such perceptions. “I’m a kind of ancient figure known primarily for his non-use of socks and wheeled out on special occasions as a curiosity,” he joked. His slightly disheveled appearance was partly an assertion of his simplicity and partly a mild act of rebellion. “I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to,” he told a neighbor.
9
His baggy, comfortable clothes became a symbol of his lack of pretense. He had a leather jacket that he tended to wear to events both formal and informal. When a friend found out that he had a mild allergy to wool sweaters, she went to a surplus store and bought him some cotton sweatshirts, which he wore all the time. And his dismissive attitude toward haircuts and grooming was so infectious that Elsa, Margot, and his sister, Maja, all sported the same disheveled gray profusion.
He was able to make his rumpled-genius image as famous as Chaplin did the little tramp. He was kindly yet aloof, brilliant yet baffled. He floated around with a distracted air and a wry sensibility. He exuded honesty to a fault, was sometimes but not always as naïve as he seemed,
cared passionately about humanity and sometimes about people. He would fix his gaze on cosmic truths and global issues, which allowed him to seem detached from the here and now. This role he played was not far from the truth, but he enjoyed playing it to the hilt, knowing that it was such a great role.
He had also, by then, adapted willingly to the role Elsa played, that of a wife who could be both doting and demanding, protective yet afflicted with occasional social aspirations. They had grown comfortable together, after some rough patches. “I manage him,” she said proudly, “but I never let him know that I manage him.”
10
Actually, he knew, and he found it mildly amusing. He surrendered, for example, to Elsa’s nagging that he smoked too much and on Thanksgiving bet her that he would be able to abstain from his pipe until the new year. When Elsa boasted of this at a dinner party, Einstein grumbled, “You see, I am no longer a slave to my pipe, but I am a slave to that woman.” Einstein kept his word, but “he got up at daylight on New Year’s morning, and he hasn’t had his pipe out of his mouth since except to eat and sleep,” Elsa told neighbors a few days after the deal was over.
11
The greatest source of friction for Einstein came from Flexner’s desire to protect him from publicity. Einstein was, as always, less fastidious about this than were his friends, patrons, and self-appointed protectors. An occasional flash of the limelight made his eyes twinkle. More important, he was willing and even eager to endure such indignities if he could use his fame to raise money and sympathy for the worsening plight of European Jews.
Such political activism made Einstein’s penchant for publicity even more disconcerting to Flexner, an old-line and assimilated American Jew. It might provoke anti-Semitism, he thought, especially in Princeton, where the Institute was luring Jewish scholars into an environment that was, to say the least, socially wary of them.
12
Flexner was particularly upset when Einstein, quite charmingly, agreed one Saturday to meet at his home with a group of boys from a Newark school who had named their science club after him. Elsa baked cookies, and when the discussion turned to Jewish political leaders, she noted, “I don’t think there is any anti-Semitism in this country.”
Einstein agreed. It would have amounted to no more than a sweet visit, except that the adviser who accompanied the boys wrote a colorful account, focusing on Einstein’s thoughts about the plight of Jews, that was bannered atop the front page of the Newark
Sunday Ledger.
13
Flexner was furious. “I simply want to protect him,” he wrote in a sharp letter to Elsa, and he sent the Newark article to her with a stern note attached. “This is exactly the sort of thing that seems to me absolutely unworthy of Professor Einstein,” he scolded. “It will hurt him in the esteem of his colleagues, for they will believe that he seeks such publicity, and I do not see how they can be convinced that such is not the case.”
14
Flexner went on to ask Elsa to dissuade her husband from being featured at a scheduled musical recital in Manhattan, which he had already accepted, that was to raise money for Jewish refugees. But like her husband, Elsa was not totally averse to publicity, nor to helping Jewish causes, and she resented Flexner’s attempts at control. So she replied with a very frank refusal.
That provoked Flexner to send an astonishingly blunt letter the next day, which he noted he had discussed with the president of Princeton University. Echoing the sentiments of some of Einstein’s European friends, including the Borns, Flexner warned Elsa that if Jews got too much publicity it would stoke anti-Semitism:
It is perfectly possible to create anti-Semitic feeling in the United States. There is no danger that any such feeling would be created except by the Jews themselves. There are already signs which are unmistakable that anti-Semitism has increased in America. It is because I am myself a Jew and because I wish to help oppressed Jews in Germany that my efforts, though continuous and in a measure successful, are absolutely quiet and anonymous . . . The questions involved are the dignity of your husband and the Institute according to the highest American standards and the most effective way of helping the Jewish race in America and in Europe.
15
That same day, Flexner wrote Einstein directly to make the case that Jews like themselves should keep a low profile because a penchant for publicity could arouse anti-Semitism. “I have felt this from the moment that Hitler began his anti-Jewish policy, and I have acted accordingly,”
he wrote.“There have been indications in American universities that Jewish students and Jewish professors will suffer unless the utmost caution is used.”
16
Not surprisingly, Einstein went ahead with his planned benefit recital in Manhattan, for which 264 guests paid $25 apiece to attend. It featured Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D-minor and Mozart’s G Major Quartet. It was even opened to the press. “He became so absorbed in the music,”
Time
magazine reported, “that with a far-away look he was still plucking at the strings when the performance was all over.”
17
In his attempt to prevent such events, Flexner had begun intercepting Einstein’s mail and declining invitations on his behalf. The stage was thus set for a showdown when Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York decided it would be a good idea to get Einstein invited to visit President Franklin Roosevelt, which Wise hoped would focus attention on Germany’s treatment of Jews. “F.D.R. has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany, and this would be little enough,” Wise wrote a friend.
18
The result was a telephone call from Roosevelt’s social secretary, Colonel Marvin MacIntyre, inviting Einstein to the White House. When Flexner found out, he was furious. He called the White House and gave a stern lecture to the somewhat surprised Colonel MacIntyre. All invitations must go through him, Flexner said, and on Einstein’s behalf he declined.
For good measure, Flexner proceeded to write an official letter to the president. “I felt myself compelled this afternoon to explain to your secretary,” Flexner said, “that Professor Einstein had come to Princeton for the purpose of carrying out his scientific work in seclusion and that it was absolutely impossible to make any exception which would inevitably bring him into public notice.”
Einstein knew none of this until Henry Morgenthau, a prominent Jewish leader who was about to become treasury secretary, inquired about the apparent snub. Dismayed to discover Flexner’s presumption, Einstein wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, his political soul mate. “You can hardly imagine of what great interest it would have been for me to meet the man who is tackling with gigantic energy the greatest and
most difficult problem of our time,” he wrote. “However, as a matter of fact, no invitation whatever has reached me.”
Eleanor Roosevelt answered personally and politely. The confusion came, she explained, because Flexner had been so adamant in his phone call to the White House. “I hope you and Mrs. Einstein will come sometime soon,” she added. Elsa responded graciously. “First excuse my poor English please,” she wrote. “Dr. Einstein and myself accept with feelings of gratitude your very kind invitation.”
He and Elsa arrived at the White House on January 24, 1934, had dinner, and spent the night. The president was able to converse with them in passable German. Among other things, they discussed Roosevelt’s marine prints and Einstein’s love for sailing. The next morning, Einstein wrote an eight-line piece of doggerel on a White House note card to Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians marking his visit, but he made no public statements.
19
Flexner’s interference infuriated Einstein. He complained about it in a letter to Rabbi Wise—on which he put as his return address “Concentration Camp, Princeton”—and he sent a five-page litany of Flexner’s meddling to the Institute’s trustees. Either they must assure him that there would be no more “constant interference of the type that no self-respecting person would tolerate,” Einstein threatened, or “I would propose that I discuss with you severing my relationship with your institute in a dignified manner.”
20
Einstein prevailed, and Flexner backed off. But as a result, he lost his influence with Flexner, whom he would later refer to as one of his “few enemies” in Princeton.
21
When Erwin Schrödinger, Einstein’s fellow traveler in the minefields of quantum mechanics, arrived as a refugee in Princeton that March, he was offered a job at the university. But he wanted instead to be tapped for the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein lobbied Flexner on his behalf, but to no avail. Flexner was doing him no more favors, even if it meant depriving the Institute of Schrödinger.
During his short stay in Princeton, Schrödinger asked Einstein if he was indeed going to come back to Oxford later that spring, as scheduled. He had called himself a “bird of passage” when heading off to Caltech in 1931, and it was unclear, perhaps even in his own mind,
whether he saw this as a liberation or a lament. But now he found himself comfortable in Princeton, with no desire to take wing again.
“Why should an old fellow like me not enjoy peace and quiet for once?” he asked his friend Max Born. So he told Schrödinger to pass along his sincere regrets. “I am sorry to say that he asked me to write you a definite no,” Schrödinger informed Lindemann. “The reason for his decision is really that he is frightened of all the ado and the fuss that would be laid upon him if he came to Europe.” Einstein also worried that he would be expected to go to Paris and Madrid if he went to Oxford, “and I lack the courage to undertake all this.”
22