Genius in the Shadows

A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb

By William Lanouette, Bela Silard

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2013 William Lanouette
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62636-023-5

Contents

Illustrations,
Introduction to the 2013 Edition,
Foreword by Jonas Salk,
Preface,
PART ONE (1898–1933),
1 The Family,
2 View from the Villa,
3 Schoolboy, Soldier, and Socialist,
4 Scholar and Scientist,
5 Just Friends,
6 Einstein,
7 Restless Research and the Bund,
8 A New World, a New Field, a New Fear,
9 Refuge,
PART TWO (1933–1945),
10 “Moonshine”,
11 Chain-Reaction “Obsession”,
12 Travels with Trude,
13 Bumbling toward the Bomb,
14 “I Haven’t Thought of That at All”,
15 Fission + Fermi = Frustration,
16 Chain Reaction Versus the Chain of Command,
17 Visions of an “Armed Peace”,
18 Three Attempts to Stop the Bomb …,
19 … And Two to Stop the Army,
PART THREE (1946–1964),
20 A Last Fight with the General,
21 A New Life, an Old Problem,
22 Marriage on the Run,
23 Oppenheimer and Teller,
24 Arms Control,
25 Biology,
26 Beating Cancer,
27 Meeting Khrushchev,
28 Is Washington a Market for Wisdom?,
29 Seeking a More Livable World,
30 La Jolla: Personal Peace,
Epilogue,
Chronology of Leo Szilard’s Life,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Bibliography,
About the Author,

CHAPTER 1

The Family

1898–1912

With an umbrella swinging from his V-neck sweater — so as to keep a hand free for his younger brother, Bela — Leo Szilard strode out into a cloudy fall morning in 1910. For the excursion he had planned, Leo sported a brown felt hat — flat brimmed, flat topped, and uncommonly formal, yet stylish for a twelve-year-old. Most teenage boys in Budapest wore cloth caps, like the one that ten-year-old Bela tugged down against the breeze. But not Leo, whose headpiece made him feel both “dressed up” and “different.” Yet while daring in his dress, Leo was still cautious in his demeanor. He had that umbrella, just in case.

This stroll was the two boys’ first without a parent or governess, and Leo had a special destination in mind. At the wrought-iron front gate to the yard, the Szilard boys left behind their family’s towering stucco-and-timber art nouveau “villa” and turned right onto the Fasor, a broad allée linking Budapest’s café and shopping district with the lush and spacious City Park. Under six rows of horse chestnut trees, the Fasor was divided into five pathways: a roadway down the center for cars, trucks, and horse-drawn carriages; two shaded pedestrian lanes; and along the sidewalk, the tracks for small electric trolleys. (Budapest’s traffic clanked and rattled along on the left then, as it would until the occupying German army ordered a change to right-hand driving in 1941.)

On the long block from their villa to the park, the Szilard boys walked past decorous mansions owned by down-at-the-heel Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and wealthy Jewish merchants, mansions set in green plots that gave this neighborhood the name Garden District. In the park, they followed shaded footpaths that rambled among manicured flower beds. They passed a restaurant beside a lake and, in the water, saw the spires of a castle built in ancient Transylvanian style but actually finished in 1896 for Hungary’s millennial celebration. Beyond the Gallery of Fine Arts, the boys crossed a footbridge over the city’s new subway line, the first on the European continent, then strolled by another boating lake and the elegant, new Gundel’s Restaurant toward the Budapest Zoo.

At the Turkish-style entrance gate — an arch hoisted on the backs of four head-high stone elephants, surmounted by a ring of crouching bears — Leo bought tickets, and once inside, the boys rushed to a mosque-like brick structure that was home for the elephants and the hippos. Several elephants stood in the open yard, begging across a moat for nuts from children. Nearby, but standing alone, was the object of the boys’ journey: the largest and oldest elephant, which Leo adored for being both wise and playful.

Rain began to fall as the boys approached the moat, and while Leo fidgeted to undo his umbrella strap, a gust of wind caught his prized brown hat, skimming it over the metal railing and into the moat. Leo grabbed his umbrella by the tip, leaned against the railing, and in a few seconds had hooked his hat onto the curved handle. But just as quickly the old elephant thrust his trunk for the hat. Boy and beast tugged, and despite the uneven match, Leo persisted, his youthful sighs matching the old animal’s low grunts. After a few seconds, the elephant stepped back slowly and nearly yanked Leo into the moat. His chest sore from scraping the railing and afraid he might lose both his umbrella and his arm, Leo stopped pulling and stared as the elephant, with seeming satisfaction, waved the hat around, stuffed it into his mouth, and began to chew.

Leo’s brown eyes glared as, enraged, he strained for composure against Bela’s laughs. Ignoring the laughter, Leo rubbed his forehead in thought as raindrops spattered his hand and face. Then he turned to Bela and announced: “I have figured out that the hat cannot come out at the other end of the beast before tomorrow. Let’s go.” Leo snapped open his umbrella and tramped homeward through the park in brooding silence.

Bela Silard is fond of that episode because it reveals many of his brother’s characteristics at once: a need to be different and independent; an impulse to solutions, undaunted by the odds for success; a resort to reason in a conflict; and a desire to conceal personal emotions. Leo would change in the years ahead, and by his ideas and actions he would help change the world as well — into a more perilous and, eventually, a more peaceful place. But throughout his life, Leo Szilard would also remain as he was that rainy morning at the Budapest Zoo: impetuous, determined, clever, rational, and private. Indeed, these contrary qualities would empower Szilard to challenge — against opponents far more daunting than a hungry elephant — the scientific and political establishments of our century. At times, his feistiness would aid Szilard’s success; at times, it would assure his failure.

Throughout his life, Szilard tried to ignore the past and concentrate on the future. For his childhood playmates he constantly invented new games and new rules for old ones. As a teenager, he became enthralled by physics, the new science of his day. As a scholar, he pushed for novel theories in thermodynamics and mathematics and enjoyed posing ideas in economics and politics that experts said couldn’t be realized — but sometimes were. He delighted in devising inventions: some profound, many impractical. And, in later life, he resisted writing an autobiography, saying the past is unimportant, the future is all.

Yet in ways that he may never have realized or may have surmised and then suppressed, Leo Szilard’s own past held the forces that shaped his richly inventive yet frustrating life. From his intense and exuberant child-hood in Budapest’s elegant Garden District he gained the means to be a pioneer in science and in politics. He also inherited from his forebears mannerisms that would both charm and confuse associates and friends, quirks that sometimes helped to advance his proposals but also made his pioneering ideas toilsome to accept. For by the time he fought that elephant, Leo Szilard had another quality that would both limit and advance his life: a passion to be honest and frank.

Late in life, Szilard traced this consuming candor to his mother and his maternal grandfather:

Very often it is difficult to know where one’s set of values comes from, but I have no difficulty in tracing mine to the children’s tales which my mother used to tell me. My addiction to the truth is traceable to these tales. … My mother was fond of telling tales to her children and she always had some particular purpose in mind. Why she wanted to inculcate addiction to truth in her children is not clear to me.

I remember one story, which made a deep impression on me, about my grandfather. My grandfather was a high school student at the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1848. In high school, when the children were waiting for the teacher to turn up, it was customary in Hungary for one child to keep watch. It was his task to keep a list of those children who were disorderly, and when the teacher came to class he was supposed to submit the list of these disorderly children to the teacher for punishment. In the particular case of the story my mother told me, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 was on. A troop of soldiers was marching by the school [in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city] and a number of children violated orders by leaving the class and lining the street and cheering the soldiers. My grandfather, who was supposed to keep watch on disorderly children, joined those who left the school building and cheered the soldiers. When the teacher turned up for class, all the children were back in the classroom and my grandfather rendered his report. He gave the teacher the list of those children who had violated orders and went out to the street, and this list included his own name. The teacher was so much taken aback by this frankness that nobody was punished.

Exemplary behavior by Sigmund Vidor became a compulsion in his daughter Tekla Vidor Szilard and a lifelong bond between her and her son Leo. This honesty gave them a way to be close without being sentimental or emotional. Sigmund Vidor’s example became more than an action to emulate. It was a standard to surpass. Szilard remembered his maternal grandfather fondly; they lived in the same spacious villa on the Fasor until Leo was twelve years old.

But his paternal grandfather, Samuel Spitz, who had died twelve years before Leo’s birth, probably endowed him with just the stubborn self-assurance he needed to be so certain about everything, including his maternal grandfather’s honesty and the courage to fight elephants. The maternal grandfather Szilard knew was gentle, intellectual, and socially admired, while the paternal grandfather he heard little about was a restless vagabond — querulous, strong-willed, daring, adventurous, and proud. The grandfather Szilard knew may have engendered a sense of duty and public responsibility, but the grandfather he never knew gave him a resolute will. And it was that will as much as Szilard’s rigorous honesty that drove this restless genius to try to change our world.

The ancestors Leo Szilard never knew, his paternal forebears, came in the mid-eighteenth century to Slovakia, which lies between Hungary and Poland. They came “from the East,” Szilard’s father Louis noted tersely in his otherwise detailed memoirs, but from just where was never certain. Probably from Galicia, the Austrian sector of divided Poland that is now part of Ukraine. Before that westward move, they, like many eastern Jews, did not use a last name and probably took Spitz as their family name only after settling in Slovakia.

Leo Szilard’s paternal great-grandfather, who was born before 1800, was a shepherd in Nagyfalu (now Vel’ka Ves nad Ipl’om), a small village in the Slovak county of Arva (Orava), just below the high ridge of the Carpathian Mountains, near today’s Slovakia-Polish border. He was said to have lived more than eighty years and to have driven his sheep to the mountaintops for grazing until the last summer of his life. Along with some wonder about his nomadic and restless ways this old shepherd’s sturdiness continued in family legend.

Samuel Spitz, that old shepherd’s only son and Leo Szilard’s paternal grandfather, was born about 1810 and grew up in Arva. There he married a Jewish girl named Leontine Klopstock, who came from Matina, a hamlet in the Tatra Mountains that divide Poland and Slovakia. After their marriage, Samuel and Leontine Spitz moved to Turdossin (Tvarozná), a small village a few miles down the valley of the river Vag (Vah) in western Slovakia. In Turdossin the Spitz family grew rapidly, eventually filling a large farmhouse and barnyard that Samuel had built to contain both his family and a dairy herd.

To earn money, Samuel turned to farming and leased from a Hungarian noble an estate that included a half-ruined medieval castle called Végles (Viglas), near Detva, Slovakia. Perched on the side of a mountain, Végles included a drawbridge and two huge courtyards. It was large enough for the Spitz family, but the estate had poor soil — only good enough for growing oats, rye, clover, and hemp as cash crops. Samuel also planted large areas with potatoes for use as stock in a distillery on the property. In this castle Samuel Spitz raised ten daughters and four sons. After about seven years, however, Samuel’s fortunes completely reversed: his distillery leveled in a boiler explosion, his cattle killed in a barn fire, his sheep lost to drought. Nearly bankrupt, Samuel moved his family into Detva, and soon he moved again, to Körmöczbánya (Kremnica), near Zólyom (Zvolen), today in central Slovakia but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This restless and determined man was an entrepreneur, albeit on a small scale, for Samuel had little luck, and more often than not his failed schemes only left him ever deeper in debt and desperate to concoct new enterprises. He held contracts for timbering on large forest tracts. He operated a village tavern, supplied by the still he ran on the Végles estate. And in years when lumber was in demand, he tried his luck as a lumber merchant, often botching that enterprise. At times, he distributed liquor or imported coal. But with repeated failures, Samuel Spitz in later life grew stern and domineering, bitter about his financial perils and brutish with gout. Sometimes he was so impatient that his wife and children avoided him. When Samuel died an unhappy man, in Kremnica in about 1890, his widow moved to Budapest to live with her eldest daughter.

Grandfather Samuel’s strong-willed tendency to dominate his family and surroundings continued in his progeny along with the greatgrandfather’s physical sturdiness: not only in Samuel’s son Louis, Leo’s father, but also in his grandsons, Leo and Bela. More urbane Budapest relatives would later say that the Szilard tenacity “ran in the family,” in contrast to their more artistic and pliant natures.

Leo’s father, Louis Spitz, was born in Turdossin, in the Tatra Mountains, on December 23, 1860. Louis remained his familiar name, although he used Lajos, the Hungarian form, in business. Louis was his parents’ third son and as a child became his mother’s favorite. The Spitz family spoke German, and as with many Jews in Slovakia, their cultural leanings were toward Vienna rather than Budapest or Prague. The family read many German literary classics, and the children never learned more than a few words of Slovak, picked up from farm hands and yard workers. Samuel Spitz’s four sons attended Jewish elementary schools, where they were taught in German. None of the girls attended school, but when finances allowed, they studied at home with German-speaking tutors. The two older boys, Arnold and Max, were later sent to commercial schools, one in Germany, the other in Austria. When they turned ten, the two younger boys, Louis and Adolf, were enrolled in high school in Kremnica. There, for the first time, they had to struggle to learn Hungarian, a language unlike any in Europe whose origins lie in central Asia. Louis Spitz was a poor student who satisfied a sweet tooth by selling decals to his classmates.

Even less is known about the maternal grandparents in Leo’s father’s family. His grandmother, Leontine Klopstock Spitz, was the eldest of six children born in the Tatra Mountains to Joseph Klopstock and his first wife. Leontine had also three stepsisters and a stepbrother, children of Klopstock’s second wife.

In 1880, when he was twenty, Leo’s father, Louis Spitz, graduated from high school in Kremnica and left Slovakia for Pest. The city of Budapest, which had united only seven years earlier, consisted of Buda, a hilly area west of the Danube, and Pest, the level area to the east. Louis enrolled at the Institute of Technology (later called Technical University) to study engineering, and despite his poor command of Hungarian, a language that he would never speak easily, he was diligent, ambitious, and persistent, soon becoming one of the best students.

But because his father, Samuel Spitz, was usually in debt, Louis had to earn a living in his spare time. He supported himself by tutoring high school students from Budapest’s middle-class families, teaching them the German language and its classical literature. Louis’s effort and sacrifices paid off, for shortly after he graduated from the institute as a civil engineer, he could choose from among good jobs with several of Hungary’s leading building contractors. But eventually he grew restless working in large organizations, decided to establish his own business, and in this way became a successful and prosperous contractor. His specialty was to plan and construct bridges and embankments for railway lines.

Louis Spitz first met Tekla Vidor in Budapest on Christmas Day, 1896. He had just turned thirty-six, and she was twenty-five. Meant to appear a coincidence, their introduction had been arranged by Tekla’s cousin Willie. Tekla was an intensely introspective and moralistic girl who thought little about romance or “husband hunting.” To many friends and relatives she appeared an earnest adolescent, perhaps too serious for her years. The couple met at other gatherings that holiday season, and by the time Tekla discovered Willie’s designs, she so admired Louis as a “self-made man” and so enjoyed his conversations about a range of topics — but never his personal feelings — that she quickly forgave her cousin’s matchmaking.

Tekla wrote later that she liked Louis’s “big brown eyes and the tan that made him appear so different from the young men of the day who frequented tea parties and coffeehouses. …” Soon she “began to think about the possibility of his proposing, and it was a disturbing thought that it would be up to me to make a decision. … I was shaken by doubt, restlessness, agitation.”

(Continues…)Excerpted from Genius in the Shadows by William Lanouette, Bela Silard. Copyright © 2013 William Lanouette. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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