einstein

speech, claiming that he had a list of card-carrying communists in the State Department.
As the head of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Einstein had dismayed Edward Teller by not supporting the building of the
hydrogen bomb. But Einstein also had not opposed it outright. When A. J. Muste, a prominent pacifist and socialist activist, asked him to join an
appeal to delay construction of the new weapon, Einstein declined. “Your new proposal seems quite impractical to me,” he said. “As long as
competitive armament prevails, it will not be possible to halt the process in one country.” 36 It was more sensible, he felt, to push for a global solution
that included a world government.
The day after Einstein wrote that letter, Truman made his announcement of a full-scale effort to produce the H-bomb. From his Princeton home,
Einstein taped a three-minute appearance for the premiere of a Sunday evening NBC show called Today with Mrs. Roosevelt. The former first lady
had become a voice of progressivism after the death of her husband. “Each step appears as the inevitable consequence of the one that went
before,” he said of the arms race. “And at the end, looming ever clearer, lies general annihilation.” The headline in the New York Post the next day
was, “Einstein Warns World: Outlaw H-Bomb or Perish.” 37
Einstein made another point in his televised talk. He expressed his growing concern over the U.S. government’s increased security measures
and willingness to compromise the liberties of its citizens. “The loyalty of citizens, particularly civil servants, is carefully supervised by a police force
growing more powerful every day,” he warned. “People of independent thought are harassed.”
As if to prove him right, J. Edgar Hoover, who hated communists and Eleanor Roosevelt with almost equal passion, the very next day called in the
FBI’s chief of domestic intelligence and ordered a report on Einstein’s loyalty and possible communist connections.
The resulting fifteen-page document, produced two days later, listed thirty-four organizations, some purportedly communist fronts, that Einstein
had been affiliated with or lent his name to, including the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. “He is principally a pacifist and could be
considered a liberal thinker,” the memo concluded somewhat benignly, and it did not charge him with being either a communist or someone who
gave information to subversives. 38
Indeed, there was nothing that linked Einstein to any security threat. A reading of the dossier, however, makes the FBI agents look like Keystone
Kops. They bumbled around, unable to answer questions such as whether Elsa Einstein was his first wife, whether Helen Dukas was a Soviet spy
while in Germany, and whether Einstein had been responsible for bringing Klaus Fuchs into the United States. (In all three cases, the correct
answer was no.)
The agents also tried to pin down a tip that Elsa had told a friend in California that they had a son by the name of Albert Einstein Jr.who was
being held in Russia. In fact, Hans Albert Einstein was by then an engineering professor at Berkeley. Neither he nor Eduard, still in a Swiss
sanatorium, had ever been to Russia.(If there was any basis to the rumor, it was that Elsa’s daughter Margot had married a Russian, who returned
there after they divorced, though the FBI never found that out.)
The FBI had been gathering rumors about Einstein ever since the 1932 screed from Mrs. Frothingham and her women patriots. Now it began
systematically keeping track of that material in one growing dossier. It included such tips as one from a Berlin woman who sent him a mathematical
scheme for winning the Berlin lottery and had concluded he was a communist when he did not respond to her. 39 By the time he died, the Bureau
would amass 1,427 pages stored in fourteen boxes, all stamped Confidential but containing nothing incriminating. 40
What is most notable, in retrospect, about Einstein’s FBI file is not all the odd tips it contained, but the one relevant piece of information that was
completely missing. Einstein did in fact consort with a Soviet spy, unwittingly. But the FBI remained clueless about it.
The spy was Margarita Konenkova, who lived in Greenwich Village with her husband, the Russian realist sculptor Sergei Konenkov, mentioned
earlier. A former lawyer who spoke five languages and had an engaging way with men, so to speak, her job as a Russian secret agent was to try to
influence American scientists. She had been introduced to Einstein by Margot, and she became a frequent visitor to Princeton during the war.
Out of duty or desire, she embarked on an affair with the widowed Einstein. One weekend during the summer of 1941, she and some friends
invited him to a cottage on Long Island, and to everyone’s surprise he accepted. They packed a lunch of boiled chicken, took the train from Penn
Station, and spent a pleasant weekend during which Einstein sailed on the Sound and scribbled equations on the porch. At one point they went to a
secluded beach to watch the sunset and almost got arrested by a local policeman who had no idea who Einstein was. “Can’t you read,” the officer
said, pointing to a no-trespassing sign. He and Konenkova remained lovers until she returned to Moscow in 1945 at age 51. 41
She succeeded in introducing him to the Soviet vice consul in New York, who was also a spy. But Einstein had no secrets to share, nor is there
any evidence that he had any inclination at all to help the Soviets in any way, and he rebuffed her attempts to get him to visit Moscow.
The affair and potential security issue came to light not because of any FBI sleuthing but because a collection of nine amorous letters written by
Einstein to Konenkova in the 1940s became public in 1998. In addition, a former Soviet spy, Pavel Sudoplatov, published a rather explosive but not
totally reliable memoir in which he revealed that she was an agent code-named “Lukas.” 42
Einstein’s letters to Konenkova were written the year after she left America. Neither she nor Sudoplatov, nor anyone else, ever claimed that
Einstein passed along any secrets, wittingly or unwittingly. However, the letters do make clear that, at age 66, he was still able to be amorous in
prose and probably in person. “I recently washed my hair myself, but not with great success,” he said in one. “I am not as careful as you are.”
Even with his Russian lover, however, Einstein made clear that he was not an unalloyed lover of Russia. In one letter he denigrated Moscow’s
militaristic May Day celebration, saying, “I watch these exaggerated patriotic exhibits with concern.” 43 Any expressions of excess nationalism and
militarism had always made him uncomfortable, ever since he had watched German soldiers march by when he was a boy, and Russia’s were no
different.
Einstein’s Politics
Despite Hoover’s suspicions, Einstein was a solid American citizen, and he considered his opposition to the wave of security and loyalty
investigations to be a defense of the nation’s true values. Tolerance of free expression and independence of thought, he repeatedly argued, were
the core values that Americans, to his delight, most cherished.
His first two presidential votes had been cast for Franklin Roosevelt, whom he publicly and enthusiastically endorsed. In 1948, dismayed by Harry
Truman’s cold war policies, Einstein voted for the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, who advocated greater cooperation with Russia
and increased social welfare spending.
Throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in the fundamental premises of his politics. Ever since his student days in Switzerland, he had
supported socialist economic policies tempered by a strong instinct for individual freedom, personal autonomy, democratic institutions, and
protection of liberties. He befriended many of the democratic socialist leaders in Britain and America, such as Bertrand Russell and Norman
Thomas, and in 1949 he wrote an influential essay for the inaugural issue of the Monthly Review titled “Why Socialism?”