Laughter in the Dark
Kempton, Murray
Laughter in the Dark by MURRAY KEMPTON Linus Pauling has apparently escaped a contempt citation for defying the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. This instructs us in the sort of man who can...
...He confessed with a disarming show of incompetence that his filing system had its aspects of the whimsical and that the process of fishing up the originals had entailed some difficulties...
...A two-page list of citations was duly presented under that label...
...his fellow inquisitors were off job-hunting...
...At the end, standing in the hall, Senator Dodd came over to Linus Pauling, shook his hand, and bid him farewell...
...The moment for him to be struck dead from heaven having passed without incident, Sourwine said that he would summarize J. Edgar Hoover's testimony: "A Communist plot...
...He proudly confessed that he was against the McCarran Act, the Smith Act, and the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...Otherwise, though, he thought the file complete...
...By all evidence the appeal against nuclear testing was conceived at a meeting at Washington University in St...
...He looks in sum like the proprietor of a bicycle shop who spends his nights in the basement pursuing the secret of perpetual motion...
...The history of Linus Pauling's petition is the best indication of how hollow our laughter is...
...His hair sweeps back from a balding summit into a fringe of gray curls at the nape of his neck...
...He said nothing about the threat of a contempt citation...
...To these people the message is irrelevant...
...But does even Senator Dodd believe that Professor Mueller would have signed that appeal if he did not believe in its desperate and painful necessity, and that it made any difference to him who carried it...
...It was his last recorded infamy...
...I could protect myself by agreeing, but I am fighting for other persons who could not make a fight by themselves...
...He is an economic and social liberal whose personal hobby is the imposition of orthodox Christian Democracy upon the American dialogue...
...Linus Pauling looked at Senator Dodd with a face without guile...
...And so Sourwine was left with nothing but the introduction of Dr...
...The issue, to Senator Dodd, is not a peril to our safety so great that Herman Mueller, the celebrated geneticist, is impelled to sign a petition against its continuance, but only whether a Communist may have brought the petition to him to sign...
...all that matters is the messenger...
...They met finally—after numerous sterile legal quarrels—in the Internal Security Subcommittee's hearing room in the Senate Office Building, an enclosure which managed to be spanking new and crowded to the point of squalor...
...Pauling was released from further subpena...
...It is worth a good deal to be a Nobel Prize winner in something or other, a category of immunity applying to forty living Americans...
...But there has been added to it something no less serious, an effort to choke off the national dialogue on an issue which may mean nothing less than the life or death of the world...
...his tone left no doubt that he would do it again...
...And did the witness know that Yudeki Yukawa, a Japanese physicist signer, had won the Lenin Peace Prize...
...Pauling smiled and said that it hadn't been especially pleasant...
...Pauling answered, "urging that Gerald L. K. Smith be allowed to speak and I feel reasonably sure that he is not a Communist...
...He needs, then, to be at once brave, prestigious, and wise...
...Pauling not only had the names...
...The violation of individual liberty is by now habitual, and quite enough of a national disgrace by itself...
...Faces can cheat...
...The grievance at being misunderstood sits like a raven upon the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...
...that he was proud of his personal responsibility, but that his conscience did not permit him "to protect myself by sacrificing these idealistic and hopeful people" who had helped him in his work...
...Sourwine offered for the record an interview with Pauling in the New Times of Moscow...
...But a man needs also to be a forthright and cagey witness ready to go to some personal trouble and expense to cooperate with the investigators and to limit his non-compliance to one of those narrow areas of personal conscience where the Senate cannot fully trust the courts...
...At all costs, Senator Dodd must divert in any way he can our attention from Dr...
...some who are known to be Communists," Sourwine pointed out at one juncture...
...I am," Dr...
...The Senator merely turned matters over to Jay G. Sour-wine, the Subcommittee's counsel, for a full exposition of Dr...
...Mueller was not duped or fooled...
...But I should be happier if I thought the rest of us Americans knew how to take care of ourselves...
...Presumably the matter ends there...
...At the recess, an earnest young man came up and told Dr...
...From such humble origins, it came home to Dr...
...Sourwine contemplated melancholically the softness towards Communism which had penetrated the highest places in the Republic and said that he hoped he had not affronted the Senator...
...Thus it ended—the long pursuit, the heavy threats, the public trial— in the whine of Senator Dodd's sense that he had been misunderstood...
...Pauling explained that, under certain circumstances, life is much simpler than that...
...He himself had sent along $50, which he supposed was the largest contribution...
...But, even so, I am afraid the most unpleasant consequence of these men is the effect they have had on us...
...Pauling had replied MURRAY KEMPTON is a featured columnist and roving correspondent for the New York Post...
...He was operating in the area of his competence...
...They are at once inquisitors and martyrs...
...Sourwine then took the witness through the process by which he had circulated his petitions...
...Pauling settled their argument by freely announcing that he had given an interview to New Times...
...For example, the letter from the only scientist in Laos had fallen behind his bookcase and been recovered too late for inclusion in the volume...
...he had brought them all bound in red morocco, the pages hand-lettered by himself...
...Dodd intervened to say that anybody can get his name in Izvestia and Pravda just by talking to Khrushchev...
...This instructs us in the sort of man who can expect to face up to a Congressional investigation and walk away without the prospect of prison or expensive litigation...
...With the Congressional investigator among what Senator John F. Kennedy is accustomed to describe as the unfinished business of the Sixties, these qualifications can hardly give the rest of us much comfort...
...He and Pauling are very different men...
...The distinction of these men does not, of course, as Senator Dodd has said, render them immune from the criticism of laymen...
...Senator Dodd turns out to have a cunning face and an innocent head...
...But their concern is something far more consequential than the concern of laymen, because their judgment in these matters is far better than ours...
...Pauling with the signatures of thirty-six Nobel Prize winners in the sciences...
...There are on the list of professors from the U.S.S.R...
...Pauling that he deserved to be deported...
...Pauling remembered with obvious pleasure that he had...
...The dimensions of his research would have confounded a witness less subtle and cunning...
...It is my opinion," said Linus Pauling, "that Mr...
...After this close brush with damnation, the Senator wound up his business by saying that Dr...
...Louis where Dr...
...Sourwine asked him if he knew what J. Edgar Hoover had said about the San Francisco affair...
...I made a statement," Dr...
...That may be so," intervened Senator Dodd...
...At issue was the petition signed by 9,285 scientists from twenty-two countries demanding cessation of nuclear testing which Dr...
...No, I didn't," Pauling answered...
...Pauling's...
...Pauling had spoken, mimeographed on the campus, and shipped around the world...
...Pauling's "Affiliations with Communist Organizations...
...Sourwine moved to Fulton Lewis, Jr.'s, estimate that the gathering of these 9,000 signatures the world around could not have cost less than $100,000...
...Mueller's reasons for believing it...
...it is hard to say what is the most unpleasant aspect of these men, their malice or their self-pity...
...He cut it off after six pages, and asked Dr...
...He could still end that way...
...Pauling replied, "unwilling to subject these persons to reprisals by this committee...
...Pauling is tall and bony, with the high, slightly breathless voice of Robert Oppenheimer...
...I mean it may be so," the Senator went on, "that it's your opinion that he is mistaken...
...Senator Dodd opened their confrontation with a twelve-page statement whose most spectacular sentence was that Dr...
...There now," he said, "that wasn't so bad, was it...
...I am glad that Linus Pauling knows how to take care of himself, and I enjoyed his performance...
...As it is, when we laugh at the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, we are laughing in the dark...
...it seems their ultimate effrontery that they wish both to be feared and loved...
...He is the picture of that ultimate subversive, the slightly cranky creator...
...Sourwine's mouth fell open...
...But we are hardly superior beings when fools have subpena power and the prerogative of punishing laughter...
...The Senate had demanded the names of the persons who helped him circulate the petition...
...And now Senator Dodd moves to tell us in the face of this situation, that any person or group of persons trying to discuss this matter seriously can expect to be harassed, chivvied, and bullied to the full extent of his power to subpena...
...Senator Dodd thanked him for all this trouble, and moved on to ask if he had the names of the persons who had helped him circulate the petition...
...there were ripples of laughter at each inanity of Sour-wine's, at each stroke of Dr...
...Dodd is described by his enemies as a former FBI agent and by his friends as founder and rock of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice...
...The Subcommittee, or more properly, the lonely Senator Dodd, kept him for an hour or two in the afternoon worrying over these dry bones...
...We have just finished a great political campaign in whose course neither major candidate discussed nuclear testing in any fashion above the frivolous...
...Pauling if he had the names of his petitioners to the United Nations...
...There was a moment of silence while all parties waited for Senator Dodd to rise to it...
...Pauling has an innocent face and a cunning mind...
...Had he, Sourwine asked, ever given assistance to a man he knew to be a non-Communist...
...Pauling entered a mild demurrer...
...he signed the petition because he believed it...
...Senator Dodd's hair sweeps back intact in a faintly pink-white pompadour...
...It was, of course, the happy laughter of superior beings in the presence of fools...
...I do know he won the Nobel Prize...
...The certain activities were familiar to the witness and no apparent cause for shame to him...
...It's amazing," he said gaily for the information of Fulton Lewis, "what you can do for a little money if people are behind you...
...The audience at the hearings was generally hostile and derisive to the Subcommittee...
...He apologized for not having done as much as he might to secure the freedom of Morton Sobel...
...Pauling's status as a man not on trial...
...Pauling was not on trial there...
...The witness was asked whether he had picketed the Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco last winter...
...his audience, although divided, was largely hostile...
...In that case, said Senator Dodd, Sourwine might put it in...
...There was a little laughter in the room...
...The abyss yawned before Senator Dodd...
...Their quarrel had been joined...
...Hoover is mistaken...
...And, even with these possessions, the assumption, on October 11, when Pauling came to his final confrontation with Senator Thomas J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, was that he could only end in the courts...
...That would be troublesome, the witness answered, because being native-born, he had no place to go...
...he has the lean untrusting face of a Spanish cardinal during one of the less popular phases of papal history...
...Pauling had presented to the United Nations in 1958...
...and Senator Dodd hastened to amend the title to "Certain Activities of Dr...
...Senator Dodd was the only Senator present...
...Pauling said that he was not sure he was interested in knowing...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
