From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 08:28:07 PDT
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From the issue dated April 11, 2003
A Man Who Thinks Otherwise
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY
In an academic career spanning seven decades, the lowest
point for Philip Morrison came when students at Cornell
University picked up rocks and hurled them at him.
It was late October 1962, when John F. Kennedy and Nikita S.
Khrushchev were pushing each other to the brink of war in a
standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Mr. Morrison, a
professor of physics, stood on the steps of Cornell's student
union, using his cane to help steady legs weakened by
childhood polio. Along with a colleague, "we gave a half an
hour to the idea that instead of discussing nuclear war or
bombing Russia or Cuba, we should ask first for the state
leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, to meet with the secretary
general of the United Nations to arrange for some sort of stop
to the process. So they could talk it over."
"That could not be called a very radical proposal," says Mr.
Morrison, his voice faltering, dropping to a whisper. "Well,
we were stoned."
The irony of the moment was lost on the students: The man they
were attacking had helped father the atomic bomb, had
witnessed firsthand the horror of Hiroshima, had survived the
dark years of the McCarthy witch hunts, had spent much of his
life trying to protect democracy from tyranny. And the
students were trying to silence him.
Forty years later, the nation is again consumed with concern
over security, with the worry that an attack is just around
the corner. Like the rest of society, academe is adapting,
mobilizing, hardening, retrenching. Many universities are
developing projects to make the nation safer, but at the same
time, they run the risk of curtailing the freedom they seek to
defend. Mr. Morrison, who is now 87 and a professor emeritus
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has seen it all
before, in a career that rode through much of the turmoil of
the 20th century.
It was hard to be apolitical at the University of California
at Berkeley in the 1930s, especially as a graduate student of
J. Robert Oppenheimer. Mr. Morrison was one of Oppenheimer's
most promising proteges, and like many physicists in that
circle, he belonged to the Communist Party, which fought for
liberal causes such as organizing farmworkers and promoting
civil rights for African-Americans.
Mr. Morrison earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1940
and was teaching at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign a year later, when the Japanese bombed Pearl
Harbor. In late 1942, he received a cryptic invitation from
Robert F. Christy, another Berkeley graduate, to pay him a
visit at his office in Chicago. Mr. Christy had disappeared
from academe after the war started, as had many other nuclear
physicists.
When Mr. Morrison arrived for the appointment, he was met by
armed guards. Mr. Christy took him to an office and sat him
down. "You know what we're doing here?" he asked.
"I don't know, but I can imagine," said Mr. Morrison. "Very
likely it's connected with uranium."
"Oh yes. We are making bombs," said Mr. Christy, stunning Mr.
Morrison with his frankness.
"You are one of the very few people in this country -- only a
handful could be useful in this project. Yet I want to ask you
a question," continued Mr. Christy. "If the Germans develop an
atomic bomb first, he said, don't you think we will lose this
war?"
That conversation, all of three minutes long, redirected Mr.
Morrison's future. Terrified by the prospect of a German bomb,
he joined the project, working with Enrico Fermi to refine
methods to produce plutonium. In 1944, Mr. Morrison moved to
Los Alamos, N.M., to help construct the "gadget," as the
plutonium bomb was called. On July 12, 1945, he found himself
riding in a Dodge sedan from the mountains of Los Alamos down
to the desert, with the plutonium core of a gadget named Fat
Man resting in the back seat next to him. Four days later, at
5:30 a.m., he watched the world's first atomic explosion usher
in a new age.
Mr. Morrison then shipped out for Tinian, an island in the
North Pacific, and helped assemble the Fat Man that would
devastate Nagasaki on August 9, three days after a simpler
uranium bomb obliterated Hiroshima. In earlier meetings, he
had argued that the United States could not use the weapon
without a public demonstration first. "My position was simple:
'We have to give a real warning, maybe with movies and all
that, because this is starting a new kind of warfare,'" he
says. But the generals dismissed Mr. Morrison and other
scientists who advocated restraint.
In September, the war over, he accepted the grim assignment of
touring Japan, "with the sense that I was completing my long
witness to the entire tragedy." He arrived on the first day of
the American occupation and later walked through Hiroshima, a
disaster he called "matchless in human misery."
After the war, Mr. Morrison used his unique set of experiences
to pursue peace, sustained by the hope that such a fearful
weapon would unite the world, not divide it. "I am completely
convinced that another war cannot be allowed," he wrote in
testimony to the U.S. Senate in 1946. Only with international
control of the new bomb could nations hope to avert
annihilation. "We have a chance to build a working peace on
the novelty and terror of the atomic bomb."
Mr. Morrison felt driven to promote peace, but he foresaw that
growing tensions with the Soviet Union might hinder freedom of
expression. So he declined an invitation to return to the
physics department at Berkeley. "I knew that Berkeley was
going to be one of the most vulnerable of places," he says. "A
state university can't stand out against a majority opinion,
even if it is weak and poorly supported."
Instead, in the summer of 1946, he headed for Ithaca, N.Y.,
"because my colleagues in physics were people of such
rectitude, for example Hans Bethe [a Los Alamos alumnus and
future Nobel laureate], that I knew they would be very decent
and believe in the old principles -- and that Cornell was a
quiet place."
But even there, Mr. Morrison could not hide from the Federal
Bureau of Investigation or from red-baiting members of
Congress and the press. When a newsletter called Counterattack
in 1951 described Mr. Morrison as a Communist, members of
Cornell's Board of Trustees called on the university's acting
president, T.P. Wright, to fire the tenured professor,
according to Silvan S. Schweber's In the Shadow of the Bomb
(Princeton University Press, 2000).
The accusations against Mr. Morrison alarmed some alumni and
trustees, and crimped the university's fund raising. The
president told Mr. Morrison that his activities "are bringing
great harm to Cornell." Even Mr. Bethe, who steadfastly
defended Mr. Morrison, was annoyed by his "charitable attitude
towards Russia." In 1953, Mr. Morrison brought more unwanted
publicity to Cornell when he was forced to testify before the
U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee.
Under pressure, the physics professor gradually reduced his
political work, but he defended his right to voice unpopular
opinions. In a letter to Mr. Wright, Mr. Morrison wrote, "Was
it not our own Carl Becker [a Cornell historian] who defined a
professor as 'a man who thinks otherwise'?"
In his townhouse in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Morrison sees
parallels between past and present, although he says the
attacks on civil liberties have grown more sophisticated.
"Many people are being injured, but they belong to categories
which are cleverly chosen so that most people are not too
worried about it. ... It's very unkind, but that's the thing
that works." He sympathizes with ordinary citizens whose lives
have been uprooted, recalling the years he spent defending
himself against accusers.
"It was hateful," he says of the period. "Not the least of it
was that quite good people couldn't see that, or they were
unwilling to see that. And that made it seem still worse."
The attacks from Communist hunters diminished as the '50s
closed, but it would be many more years before the country
would catch up with Mr. Morrison's unbridled support for
peace. He moved to MIT in 1965 and has been there ever since,
promoting science education, continuing his research, and
speaking out. In recent meetings with MIT's president, Charles
M. Vest, Mr. Morrison has advocated on behalf of foreign
students. He is proud that the university has supported their
rights. "The better schools are doing it," he says. "The
weaker schools can't raise their voice so much. Times are
hard."
In his book, Mr. Schweber, a professor of physics and of
history at Brandeis University and Harvard University, calls
Mr. Morrison "one of the most courageous defenders of civil
liberties and one of the most forceful and outspoken advocates
of a peaceful solution to the cold war during the McCarthy
era."
Mr. Morrison waves off that description. "No," he says. "I
just lived a long time. I felt it keenly and saw many things.
I think we tried everything."
But he can't shake the memory of that stoning at Cornell. "It
wasn't all the students. It was only a few. But it made an
impression on me," he says, his pale blue eyes focusing on
something outside the window, far a