From the issue dated April 11, 2003
|
|
|
A Man Who Thinks OtherwiseBy RICHARD MONASTERSKYIn 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 protégés, 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 away. In character, Mr. Morrison didn't let the rocks silence him on that day long ago. "We dodged," he says. "They got some shame and stopped after a little while. Ran out of stones. Then we went back and talked." http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 49, Issue 31, Page A56
|
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
