Shadowing Einstein
By James Delmont
Fred Jerome was moved to write this book because,as he puts it, "Most Americans today have no idea that Albert Einstein supported so many - or any - political groups. Here is a giant of history - 'Person of the Century' - a man the whole world knows, and yet virtually nobody knows him." The "person" reference is to the choice of Einstein by Walter Isaacson, now CEO at CNN, then managing editor at Time magazine, of the famous scientist as Time's Person of the Century.
Yet Einstein was investigated for years by the FBI. Jerome chides earlier biographers of Einstein for skipping this lamentable chapter in the great scientist's life. Indeed, some of the massive relatively recent biographies of Einstein, scarcely mention J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, which pursued Einstein for years, running up a file that grew to 1,800 pages. Ronald Clark's 718-page 1971 life of Einstein has no index references to either Hoover or the FBI. Ditto Albrecht Folsing's 882-page bio, published in 1997 - which has one index reference to Herbert
Hoover, but none to J. Edgar. …
The Einstein File probably tells the reader more about Hoover, who anticipated Joe McCarthy by many years, than it does about Einstein. A crackpot right-wing publication, The Woman Patriot , attacked Einstein in 1932, in part because he didn't support organised religion. Hoover took the slander seriously and more or less began his infamous Einstein file with this diatribe. Jerome makes a good case for Hoover being more concerned about Communism than about the Nazis, even during World War II Hoover ferociously descended on the political left as the
Cold War ensued in the late 1940s…
If Hoover is a one-note character, Einstein emerges as complex. A pacifist, he supported the war against Hitler. He signed the famous letter that helped inspire the Manhattan Project, later lamenting the decision but still maintaining that it was the right thing to do at the time (to get the Bomb before Hitler's very capable scientists did). Einstein also strongly supported the birth of the new Israeli state, but insisted that Zionists must treat Arabs as equals.
During World War II, Einstein was refused security clearance to work on the atom bomb project, but was hired by the US Navy as a consultant on certain kinds of explosives, work to which he cheerfully applied himself.
The most revealing thing in The Einstein File is the degree of institutionalised right-wing and racist ideology and practice that existed in post-war America. Segregation was standard and lynchings not unknown. US Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana, a notorious rightist, admitted he "sold" one million of his franked, Congressional-use envelopes to the America First organization. Jerome claims that over a million copies of "pro-Nazi propaganda" were mailed through the Congressional franking privileges of 24 members of Congress.