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Reflections of Ken Towery
Reflections on Edward Teller By Ken Towery We noticed an item in the local newspaper recently indicating that Edward Teller, generally called "the father of the H-Bomb" had died at the age of 95. He died, the story said, at his home near Stanford, California, preceded in death by his wife of more than 60 years. It was, as far as we are concerned, a sad day. He was a good man, a good man who ran afoul of his peers because he was an American patriot…and for no other reason. We first met Edward Teller in the middle 60's. He came by the U.S. Senate office where I worked at the time (the office of Senator John Tower, of Texas) to seek the Senator's support for a pet project he was pushing. He thought nuclear power ought to be harnessed for peaceful purposes, and he was confident it could be. Most of his physicist colleagues took the opposite view, acting as if the genie could be put back in the bottle and the bottle given to the Soviet Union for safekeeping. Teller, for many reasons, had already incurred the wrath of America's left. As if his early work on the Manhattan Project (the U.S. government's effort to secretly develop and perfect nuclear fission) was not enough, his insistence on development of the even more powerful H-bomb, and his opposition to those like J. Robert Oppenhiemer, who sought to delay or deny that development, was enough to cause his blacklisting by many so-called "responsible" scientists in all walks of life. Too, he was a Jew who did not hesitate to question the patriotism of other Jews who he thought gave their first love to Israel, rather than America. As far as he was concerned, from all we could understand at the time, he was a genuine patriot who wanted to see his adopted homeland (he was born in Hungary) become and remain the strongest country in the world. He was prepared to give all his energy and talent to see that come about. He did, and that caused him manifold problems among people who should have cheered his position, but didn't, during those Cold War days. To be perfectly honest about it, I was completely unprepared for that first encounter with Edward Teller. Tower had asked me to sit in on the interview, for reasons I did not then understand, and still don't. As far as I was concerned, the man was just another of many people with an axe to grind who streamed by the Senator's office, trying to enlist his support for this or that scheme. Yet I soon felt I was in the presence of a superior brain, indeed a superior human being. There was a magnetism about him. It was nothing he did, or said. It was merely his presence, and the feeling one has when in the company of such an individual. I have never forgotten that first meeting, or, for that matter, the last many years later. At that time the very thought of using nuclear fission for peaceful purposes seemed far-fetched, so great was atomic power identified in the public mind with war, and so great was the opposition to it in the ranks of "accepted" scientists. Those who thought nuclear power could be harnessed for the benefit of mankind were regarded by many as "kooks", people who had fallen in love with nuclear fission because of the power it gave to those who controlled it, in much the same manner made famous later as the Dr. Strangelove in a movie about a crippled scientist who was in love with the a-bomb. Still, Teller's presentation made sense. I had had just enough exposure at Texas A&M to the uses of atomic particles in tracing the movement of minerals on their way through plants to know the fundamental idea was not so far-fetched at all. But his general concept of turning swords into plowshares did require some getting used to, especially when so many recognized physicists said it couldn't be done, or it shouldn't be done. An indication of just how biased the general run of physicists were against Teller can perhaps be illustrated by a true story that unfolded sometime later in Tower's Austin office in the (then) new federal office building, when we were visited by a University of Texas physics professor whose name has long since faded from memory…but whose profile will doubtless be remembered by fellow professors at the University. The professor had a problem, a very big problem. In fact, he had many problems. One, he had seen an item in some newspaper indicating Dr. Teller had visited Tower's office in Washington, D.C. The idea of Tower being visited by, and possibly getting advice from, someone so beyond the pale of public opinion upset the good professor mightily. To illustrate his point, he noted that Teller had been considered for a position as "visiting" professor in the Physics Department at the University of Texas in Austin, but that he and several other professors had quashed the idea. "We simply could not have our students exposed to someone like that," he said. So a majority of the professors blocked consideration of Teller for a visiting post at the University, despite the fact that he was one of the preeminent physicists in the world. By that time, I was looking at my watch. He had already gone through the real reason for his visit…and you wouldn't believe it, gentle reader. In politics, he was a great liberal Democrat, and one would think he had better things to do than take his problems to a Republican Senator. It developed that the primary reason for his visit was a perfunctory letter he had received from Senator Tower's office, taking care of some problem he had identified, and then adding the usual "if I can ever be of further help, please let me know." He had the letter in his hand, and he had come to claim the Senator's promise. His problem was that once upon a time he and his wife had attended a huge rally for Lyndon Johnson, then running for the U.S. Senate. His wife had her foot stepped on in the crowd, and he held Lyndon personally responsible. He wanted a letter of apology from Lyndon. He didn't get it. He tried to sue. The suit was unsuccessful, and he was still angry about the whole deal. He wanted us to help him reinstate his lost cause, which I of course refused to do. So by the time he got around to the Teller thing, we were already far apart. Oh, and another thing. He was exceedingly unhappy that the University of Texas policy makers had taken to having professors sign for rare books they withdrew from the library. Oh, sure, he admitted, they lost a few rare books because some people took advantage of the situation, and some of those rare books were extremely valuable, but that didn't matter. What did matter was that the policy indicated a lack of trust in people like him. He wanted our help in changing the policy. He didn't get that, either. At any rate, as he pressed the Teller thing, I motioned for him to come over to the window. Down below, seven stories down, a huge hole had been opened in the limestone, preparatory to a new First Baptist Church being erected. Dump trucks were scurrying hither and yon, taking loads of rock away from the site. In every case, the driver was black. I pointed to one such driver and told the professor that if we wanted advice on physics, we would take advice in physics from people who knew physics, but that if we wanted advice on matters of personal liberty or government, we were much more likely to take that advice from a black dump truck driver than we were from him, only I did not use the term "black," in a deliberate effort to get his attention. Whereupon, he departed, somewhat hurriedly. So over the years, I have followed the Teller name, and just about anything connected to the name. Not long after joining Tower's staff in Washington, while still his Press Secretary, we were visited by Jack Anderson, from the office of Drew Pearson, who then had a nationally syndicated column, but who also was involved in a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper supplement named "Parade." The publisher of Parade, a man named "Red" something or other, had become enamored of Tower, and decreed that a favorable story about the senator should appear in "Parade". It fell the lot of Anderson to write the story. He did not particularly like Tower, nor did Pearson, but orders are orders. So, he came by the office, trying to find some sort of "hook" to hang his story on. He wanted to interview Tower, so Jerry Friedhiem, who was then undergoing an internship as our Assistant Press Secretary, (and who went on to become Assistant Secretary of Defense under Mel Laird during the Vietnam War) and I, walked with him over to the Senate floor to see if we could arrange the interview. On the way there, Anderson divulged a rather strange and revealing story: John F. Kennedy was then President and Lyndon Johnson was Vice President (as we walked, and as he talked), but the story involved Kennedy's predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, who had nominated Lewis Strauss to a Cabinet position as Secretary of Commerce. Strauss had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate three times, as an Admiral in the U.S. Navy, and as member and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. It should have been a piece of cake. However, acting on advice from Edward Teller and others, Strauss, when Chairman of the AEC, had "lifted" the security clearance of one Robert J. Oppenheimer, who had served as head of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer's wife was a communist, and he had some strange friends, but he also had many friends and supporters within Jewish circles at home and abroad. Pearson had been leaned on to do all he could to deny Strauss the position to which he had been nominated by Eisenhower. Pearson went to Lyndon Johnson, who was then Majority Leader of the Senate, and as such, set the calendar. Pearson wanted extended public hearings on the nomination. At first, Lyndon resisted the obvious effort. He really had nothing against Strauss, he said, and the President was entitled to nominate whomever he wanted to fill the vacancies in his Cabinet.. So Pearson began what can only be described as a vendetta against Johnson, to the point where Johnson complained, and asked "What can I do to get you off my back?" The answer was simple: "Hold hearings on Strauss. You supply the hearings, we will do the rest." And they did. In the end Strauss lacked the votes necessary for confirmation. It was the first time a Presidential Cabinet nomination had been denied since 1925, more than a quarter-century earlier. Eisenhower called it one of his most bitter, most humiliating, defeats. Much of the vitriol over Strauss's nomination revolved around deep animosities, including his lifting of Oppenheimer's security clearance, which Strauss had done on the advice of Edward Teller, among others. Oppenheimer had been Teller's boss on the Manhattan Project, but it could not be said they were bosom buddies. The two differed on production of the hydrogen bomb (or the H-bomb), and Strauss sided with Teller in recommending to Truman that the weapon be built. Truman took Strauss's advice and approved development of the H-bomb in an effort to stay even with, or ahead of, the Soviet Union, which was developing its own nuclear weapons, with a good bit of help from ideologically committed spies. Some suggested it was Strauss's approval of the H-bomb, some suggested it was the lifting of Oppenheimer's security clearance by Strauss, some suggested it was the siding with Teller in the H-bomb dispute, some suggested it was internal Jewish politics at play (Strauss, Teller, and Oppenheimer were all Jews), but nevertheless, what should have been a sure thing turned into a bitter defeat for Eisenhower. The resulting H-bomb became the thing Teller was most identified with, and reviled for among America's left. Teller had always taken the position that he did not approve of the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima. He said he would have been happier if a vacant site had been selected in Japan to demonstrate, to the Japanese, just what was in store if they did not surrender. I do not know, that may have been his most deeply felt belief until his death, but he did change his public position on whether the United States was right in dropping the two bombs, one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. Had the United States not dropped the A-bomb, he said, many more lives would have been lost, including those American prisoners of war held by the Japanese, and the millions of American and Japanese lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese homeland. That general subject surfaced in the last visit I ever had with Teller. We had shared a platform at Trinity University in San Antonio in a March, 1995 symposium put on by the Admiral Chester Nimitz Foundation of Fredericksburg. The general subject of the symposium was the plight of American prisoners of war held by the Japanese at the time of the surrender of Japan. Teller was on the panel, and was questioned at length about his involvement in the program. Most of those in the audience, or at least a good many of them, were former prisoners of war and their families, so Teller had generally sympathetic listeners. But there were others on the panel, particularly one from the faculty of Berkley University in California, who could be described as anything but sympathetic. In what I thought was a deliberate effort to rile the audience, one young professor (in his formal presentation) suggested that it was entirely too early to try to make a judgment on the wisdom of using atomic weapons against the Japanese. Time should be allowed to pass, he said, so those then alive and with first-hand knowledge, and biases, of the event could pass from the scene, clearing the way for true historians to pass judgment. It was that comment, one so clearly aimed at both Teller and others on the panel, plus those in the audience with first-hand knowledge of the subject, that drew the ire of listeners. Later, when the panel was dissolved, and when we gathered at a following reception, we sat and visited at length about the day's events. He was clearly still disturbed by the reception he had received from his fellow academics over the years, as well as the reception by certain professors during the preceding discussion. Finally, a sweet young thing who job it was to see that others had a chance to visit with Teller came up and gently suggested that there were others who wished to meet him on that historic occasion. She took him away, but not before I once again felt I was in the presence of a superior brain. He was truly a great American, despite what his critics said.
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