Photo of the Day: Kool Katzenjammer Kids

A week ago yesterday, I drove down to Short Hills, N.J., for the opening of the public park Greenwood Gardens, a 28-acre historic garden of Italianate design. The weather was great, and, with the combination of an article describing the site in The New York Times, the place was so packed that late visitors had to be driven from a nearby parking lot to the site on a short shuttle bus.

An unexpected but thoroughly pleasant addition to the afternoon was a Princeton a cappella group, the Katzenjammers. Their repertoire ranged broadly over pop, jazz, and classical. The coed group performed behind the brick colonial manor house on the grounds to a very appreciative audience, including such songs as “But Not for Me,” “La Vie en Rose,” “Autumn Leaves” (perhaps not completely appropriate for a gorgeous spring day) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (very appropriate for the day’s weather).

I had to keep reminding myself of the real reason I had driven all the way to the estate in the first place: not to listen to the music, but to take in the amazing landscape. (Don't worry: I intend, over the next week or so, to post photos I took on this great site.) I stood transfixed by the group’s sounds, and finally had to tear myself forcefully away to walk around the place. Fortunately, the group has released several CDs and can be found on YouTube, including this clip of them performing Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock.”

This Day in Basketball History (Bradley Nets 2,000th Pt. Vs. Columbia)

January 15, 1965—Bill Bradley’s 41-point effort in Princeton University’s win over Columbia was seemingly uneventful compared with two games before and immediately after: his epic showdown against the Cazzie Russell-led Michigan just before the New Year (recounted in a prior post of mine) and his hot-and-cold game against Cornell the following night.

But the crowd at Morningside Heights that night got to see something special nonetheless: the 2,000th-point in the collegiate career of the future Basketball Hall of Famer and U.S. Senator from New Jersey.

New Yorker writer John McPhee’s fascinating if hagiographic account of the Princeton years of “Dollar Bill,” A Sense of Where You Are, treats the Columbia game in uncharacteristically desultory fashion, noting merely that my alma mater “went down without incident.” I gather that the score was not only not especially close, but that the outcome was never even in doubt.

The squad that Bradley and coach Butch van Breda Kolff faced that night was under the watchful eye of Jack Rohan, the most successful coach in the Lions’ history.

Rohan’s recruiting efforts had not fully borne fruit yet—that would have to wait until the 1967-68 team, led by Jim McMillan, which reeled off 23 wins against five losses, winning the Ivy League championship—but his team could still pull off surprises.

One of these was recounted in a post on Columbia’s Web site by Mike Griffin, a 1965 grad. In January 1964, a capacity crowd at University Hall got the best of both worlds: a typically stellar Bradley performance (36 points) and a thrilling 69-66 victory for the Lions.

Any hopes that history would repeat itself on Morningside Heights—that Princeton, playing away from home, at the end of a period of intense cramming for exams, would play flatfooted--fell by the wayside. When Bradley notched the 2,000th point of his career, play was stopped to present him with the ball. Until that point, only 16 other players in college basketball history had gained as many points.

What happened the next 24 hours proved far more eventful, as the Princeton squad left immediately for Ithaca, N.Y., by bus—in a blizzard. Perhaps that, along with a 20-minute delay of the game against Cornell, unsettled Bradley, because in the first half he was ice-cold: 10 points, but only two field goals made out of seventeen attempted.

In the second half, Bradley ignited, pouring in 30 points and helping to erase the 16-point deficit that the Tigers faced with 14 minutes to go. But Cornell won the game by a point with a jump shot in the closing seconds. That would be Princeton’s only Ivy League loss that magical season.

In the decade to come, Columbia fans who rooted for the home team in professional basketball would be glad to see Bradley on their side for a change. Later that year, he would be drafted by the New York Knickerbockers, where he became an integral part of two championship teams that put into beautiful practice coach Red Holtzman’s philosophy: defense, moving without the ball, and hitting the open man.

This Day in Basketball History (Future Knicks Bradley, Russell Meet in Holiday Tournament)

December 30, 1964—In a performance acclaimed one of the "All-Time Top 10 College Basketball Moments at Madison Square Garden," Princeton’s Bill Bradley scored 41 points, pulled down nine rebounds, and held the player he was guarding to a single point, hearing the first cheers in the New York arena where he’d make his professional home for 10 years. 

But his effort in the Holiday Festival Tournament semi-final against top-ranked Michigan came to naught. His fifth foul, coming with Princeton 12 points up with less than five minutes to play against their heavily favored opponents, allowed the Wolverines—featuring Bradley’s future Knick teammate Cazzie Russell —to overtake the Tigers and win, 80-78.

For the general public, the performance by the Ivy League senior confirmed that he was indeed the real thing. The crowd that day gave him a three-minute standing ovation after he was forced to leave the game.

For Bradley, believe it or not, it may have meant more. I don’t mean simply telling him he could excel at the fabled Garden, a sports venue he had never played before. No, I think it further instilled two bits of knowledge that would serve him in good stead throughout his subsequent career as athlete and politician:

1) Ferocious preparation and self-discipline could help him master any realm in which he decided to enter; and

2) Despite his best efforts, he might still lose, and he should not treat the defeat as the end of the world but learn what he could from it and move on.

Or, as he told audiences at the time: “You’ve got to face that you’re going to lose. Losses are part of every season, and part of life. The question is, can you adjust? It is important that you don’t get caught up in your own little defeats.”

In cold print, that philosophy sounds almost like a truism. Try telling that to certain politicians, though.

That profession depends, from election to election, on personal validation, and a number of Presidential aspirants, at one time or another in their careers, have experienced defeats at the polls as a kind of second death. 

Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all experienced these as soul-crushing, and the losses left them, in many cases, smaller, even damaged, men.

In contrast, Bradley comes across as something like the embodiment of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”—i.e., one of those who can “meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”

The most striking instance of this came when he lost the 2000 Presidential nomination to Al Gore. Once a series of losses in the primaries forced him out, he moved on with the next stage of his life, without walking around like a duck struck on the head with a paddle, without making up enemies’ lists, and without biting his lips, turning red-faced, or striking back at opponents in autobiographies.

Bradley started on two Knick teams that won NBA champions, but recalling the ones that got away—without fixating on it—kept his ego in check and his sanity intact.

In the 1990s, I saw him asked in a TV interview about John Starks’ disastrous 2-for-18 shooting drought in Game 7 of the 1994 championship series against the Houston Rockets. Bradley was asked: Would Starks ever be able to live this down?

Sure, Bradley said, though the excitable Knick guard would have to get used to memories of it. He recalled his own experience in 1971, when the Knicks were unable to repeat as champions because he missed a buzzer jumper in the deciding game of the Eastern Conference finals against the Baltimore Bullets. He could still hear from New York cabbies, years later, “Ya bum, how could you miss that shot?”

If you’d like to get a sense of what Bradley was like in his college years, start with New Yorker writer John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are. It’s a fascinating book—for its place in the author's career, for the light it sheds on a great American story, and for its treatment of the major issue changing American society—and, shortly, Bradley’s game—at the time: race.

Not long after his 1977 bestseller about Alaska, Coming Into the Country, McPhee began to write, in almost obsessive fashion, about inanimate objects rather than people (e.g., Basin and Range, The Control of Nature). 

This might have been the nadir of The New Yorker (not counting when Tina Brown asked Rosie O’Donnell to serve as a “guest editor”), in the period when editor William Shawn made a specialty of the legendary “50,000-word piece on zinc” (perhaps best illustrated by E.J. Kahn’s multi-part series on “The Staffs of Life.”)

But the Bradley profile, more than a decade earlier, showed, despite its sometimes overly worshipful tone, just how good McPhee could be. It’s a great foreshadowing of the athlete-politician’s later career, and filled with all kinds of interesting details (e.g., how Bradley scrubbed his hands before games to eliminate excess perspiration and oil, increasing friction that would enable him to grip the ball better).

Many stories of athletes hinge on the obstacles—poverty, a disability—they faced growing up. McPhee’s profile might be the first I’ve read that shows how a life of privilege posed difficulties for its subject in becoming a basketball great. 

The banker’s son also sounds remarkably old-fashioned these days because of his college membership in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

The game against Michigan is also intriguing because of the much-anticipated faceoff with Cazzie Russell. The two men, later teammates on the Knicks, proved, after retirement, that there was far more to their lives than the mere ability to shoot a basketball. 

Bradley’s career, as author and three-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey, is well known. Russell—later a basketball analyst and coach with Savannah College of Art and Design—is a minister, now serving as associate pastor of Live Oak Community Church in Savannah.

In reading McPhee’s account, it’s hard not to be reminded of the similarly starry-eyed treatment that sportswriters (usually white) accorded Larry Bird years later. Both players’ intelligence and self-discipline were extolled. 

In contrast, their close African-American counterparts in terms of all-around excellence—Magic Johnson, in Bird’s case; Oscar Robertson, in Bradley’s—were often hailed in physical terms.

Bradley, one suspects, would probably be mortified by this unthinking slighting of blacks. As a teammate of African-Americans, he became annoyed at what he regarded as “white skin privilege.” As a rookie NBA player, he’d receive all kinds of ad offers, but black teammates whose skills he regarded as superior received none.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Bradley’s fame was such that he even inspired a nickname for a nun in my high school, St. Cecilia’s in Englewood, N.J. Her doctors told this Sister of Charity—normally given to teaching the fine points of English and Latin--not to become too excited at games—“‘mind your ticker,’ they tell me”—but she couldn’t help herself.

So, when an opponent dribbled up the court, Sister Margaret Bradley would raise her arms and, in a high, piping voice, exhort our players, echoing the now-familiar chant from Madison Square Garden: “Okay, boys—DEE-FENSE, DEE-FENSE.” 

As a result, she came to share a nickname with the great Knick, one of two she eventually had: “Dollar Bill.” (The other nickname—“Sister Omar”—led her to tell her class, “I know you call me that, but don’t forget—he was a four-star general!”)

This Day in Presidential History (Alum Thwarts Wilson at Princeton)

May 8, 1909—Woodrow Wilson’s plans to transform Princeton University into a more egalitarian institution were struck a staggering blow when a wealthy alumnus gave a sizable donation, but with enough strings attached that it only perpetuated the school’s rigid social hierarchy. The failure of Wilson's bold vision led him to look to wider national vistas for his idealistic dreams to remake the world.

In the most uncanny way possible, the arc of Wilson’s Presidency was foreshadowed by his service in a similar post at the university where he studied as an undergrad, taught as a charismatic professor, and finally led. Both tenures covered eight years; kicked off strongly, with triumph leading to triumph; featured a stroke that very likely affected his ability to compromise; and ended in catastrophic disappointment at the hands of a reactionary but cagey nemesis.

In Wilson’s first four years as Princeton’s leader, from 1902 to 1906, he grabbed the national stage not only as an eloquent speaker but also as a reformer who, in a relatively short time, impacted his school as much as any other college leader before or since, by:

* tightening academic standards;
* instituting sweeping curriculum reforms that moved away from electives to structured studies common to all;
* doubled the faculty by appointing nearly 50 assistant professors, or preceptors;
* changed the school’s status to non-sectarian (and made it a reality by hiring the first Jews and Roman Catholic to the faculty); and

* added to the physical plant.

Nearly a decade later, in his first term as President, Wilson would repeat that success on a national level, by passing the Underwood Tariff, the Clayton Antitrust Act, legislation creating the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission, and the first permanent income tax. He made Congress dance to his bidding.

Severe overwork, however, led to a stroke in 1906, as it would again, to far more devastating effect, in 1919, as he stumped the country for the peace treaty and League of Nations he helped negotiate.

Perhaps he felt his time was running out; perhaps his faculties were affected; perhaps his prior successes had led to arrogance; but for whatever reason, the suppleness and willingness to consult and persuade deserted him, just when he embarked on his most ambitious project yet.

Wilson’s social ideal was something on the order of Oxford University, where students lived and debated in close proximity to each other and their instructors. He loathed Princeton's eating clubs on Prospect Avenue. If you were F. Scott Fitzgerald, they instilled lifelong instruction in the notion that “the rich are different from you and me,” but for all too many others these establishments produced isolation and humiliation.

A plan, which he floated in a trial balloon to the board of trustees in December 1906 and then, more fully developed, six months later, proposed circumventing that, creating four quadrangles in which undergraduates of all four classes would live. Most important, the eating clubs would no longer hold sway on the social scene.

Alumni opposition led the board to retreat from their initial support—and provoked a grim reaction from Wilson, whose blood was up now about the blatant social inequities being perpetrated.

The club issue, just by itself, would have been enough for anyone to deal with—but now Wilson became embroiled in yet another heated dispute involving residences and the alumni.

His archenemy in this case was Dean Andrew West, a Falstaffian figure who dreamed of an architectural wonderland in which he could create the first American residential college devoted solely to postgraduate liberal studies.

You’d think that the two men, both sons of Presbyterian ministers, would get on famously together, but you’d be wrong. Wilson’s eloquence was a major factor in his success at the school, but his dreams would be insufficient without money.

And nobody could raise it like Dean West. In many ways, it made him the indispensable man on the Princeton campus, so much so that all stops were pulled out when, like Simon Cowell of American Idol these days, he announced that he was considering his career options, courtesy of a very fine offer to come to MIT.

Wilson was faced with the haunting knowledge that there was only one other man besides himself whose loss to Princeton would be “irreparable”—Dean West. Drafting a resolution to this effect for the trustees must have really stuck in his craw. The two men clashed when West pushed to place this college far away from the center of campus. He would prove as implacable and successful a foe as Henry Cabot Lodge would in blocking Wilson's plan for the League of Nations.

In May 1909, West’s hand was strengthened immeasurably with an announcement by William Cooper Procter of the Princeton Class of 1883 that he’d donate $500,000 for the graduate college and program. Oh, but with two conditions: 1) the donors had to raise an equivalent amount, and 2) the college would have to be located off-campus, just as West wanted.

Does that name, “Procter,” sound vaguely familiar? He’s now in the National Business Hall of Fame, but I don’t think that’s why his name rings a bell.

Give up? Well, the Cincinnati industrialist had, only two years before, assumed command of his family firm—one that continues today. I think you know its name now: Procter & Gamble. (The affection for West ran in the Procter family: Mrs. Procter had been a student of West’s in high school back in Cincinnati.)

Obviously, with a background like Procter’s, only one thing succeeds: You give him the soft soap! Lyndon Johnson was a master of this, even flirting shamelessly with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in the hope that it might secure him a friendly reception at the paper.

Now, when he had to turn Procter away from West, Wilson couldn’t do it. Five months after Procter’s initial announcement, the business titan made clear, lest anyone had any doubts, what the nature of this new institution would be: he selected the Springdale golf course as his site.

I remember, just before I entered Columbia University, that the school rejected an endowed professor post from Nelson Rockefeller, because it came with a stipulation—it had to be filled by his old pal Henry Kissinger. The school believed that was an infringement on its academic policies. Wilson used similar logic to go to war against West and Procter.

Once again, the board of trustees took Wilson’s side, as Procter decided to withdraw his offer before a trustees committee could rule against it. But opposition was now coalescing, as it would against Wilson’s League of Nations a decade later.

Once more, an alumnus figured in the war between Wilson and West—only this time, it was too much for even the Princeton president to master. West had used all of his persuasive skill on Isaac C. Wyman, a wealthy elderly bachelor who ended up leaving his $3 million estate to the graduate college—with West as his executor.

Later on, it would turn out that Wyman’s estate was worth only one-third of its original value. But at the time of the announcement, $3 million was a lot to argue against. Wilson couldn’t, and he was forced to give in to his hated rival.

Another alum, M. Taylor Pyne, now wanted Wilson’s removal. Exhausted from nearly three years of fighting, Wilson thought that politics—a path that had long seemed appealing to him—might be just the tonic for his spirits now—lots of crowds cheering his name, with plenty of opportunity to change the world, that sort of thing.

By September 1910, he accepted the Democratic Party nomination for governor of New Jersey, and two months later was swept into office. He was occupying the Oval Office three years later when Princeton University Graduate College was finally dedicated. I doubt that he cheered.

This Day in Sports History (Hobey Baker, Beau Ideal of Athletes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Killed in Accident)

December 21, 1918—Hobey Baker, a legendary collegiate football and hockey star of the early 20th century who was celebrated for his personal and athletic grace by F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers, died test-flying a plane in France, on the same day that he received orders to return home from his WWI squadron.

Faithful reader, I must confess: If a month, even a fortnight, elapses without my mentioning Fitzgerald, I fear that something is…missing…in this blog. Baker figured at most tangentially in the life of the great writer, but he loomed with extraordinary power in his imagination. Indeed, nobody who saw this athlete-pilot could ever forget his natural charisma.

How strongly did Baker figure in Fitzgerald’s consciousness? Well, consider this: Fitzgerald paid tribute to Baker not in one, but two characters in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The surname of the protagonist of this academic bildungsroman, Amory Blaine, derives from Baker’s full name: Hobart Amory Hare Baker.

Fitzgerald depicted him in even greater detail as a character named Allenby, “the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines."

Football obsessed Fitzgerald. He preserved a ticket stub from the 1911 Yale-Princeton game in his scrapbook; he tried out for the Princeton squad as a freshman but was cut within a week; and in the midcareer short story, “Basil and Cleopatra,” his male fictional alter ego stars in the Yale-Princeton game. It’s not surprising that he would so admire Baker, any more than that he would feel the same toward Irving Thalberg, the Hollywood studio head who inspired his last unfinished work, The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald and Baker lived in probably the first American generation that could view football as something other than a crunching death sport. (College football had enacted new rules in 1906, after President Theodore Roosevelt had invited representatives of the three most important school powers at the time—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—and jawboned them into eliminating much of the foul play and brutality that had hitherto marked the sport.)

But when you read the physical descriptions of Baker and Fitzgerald (or, come to think of it, look at the picture accompanying this post), it’s hard not to think that the nonpareil novelist saw in the nonpareil athlete—whom he’d met briefly when the two attended Princeton University--the fulfillment of what he longed to be but couldn’t. Both were not considered tall in their own time, let alone ours; both were blondes; and both were regarded as exceedingly attractive, with soft eyes that concealed considerable melancholy.

You can almost see the wheels of Fitzgerald’s mind move on this point: God, if I were only five feet nine like Hobey and weighed as much as he does, I’d be the toast of Princeton. Every woman would want to sleep with me, and every man want to drink with me. What a cruel world!

(Incidentally, Baker was not the only athlete-pilot transformed into an indelible Fitzgerald character. The other, Tommy Hitchcock, a star polo player, inspired the creation of Tommy Barban, the lover of Nicole Diver, in Tender Is the Night, and, even more memorably, Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Ironically enough, Hitchcock, like Baker, was a former member of the World War I squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille, who died while test-flying a plane.)

Though Fitzgerald was the most significant writer to remember Baker in his work, he was by no means the only one. Mark Goodman wrote of the athlete as a symbol of his time in the 1985 novel, Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies. Geoffrey Wolff briefly summed up his impact in the 1990 novel, The Final Club. I doubt very much if he’s in much demand with young male readers, but as a pup I sought out such midcentury juvenile athletic novels by John R. Tunis as The Kid From Tompkinsville and Highpockets. Well, wouldn’t you know that the figure who inspired his clean-cut athletes was Baker?

Aside from Fitzgerald, though, the most memorable description of Baker might have been provided by Boston Globe columnist George Frazier, who recalled the athlete—in terms redolent, of course, of Fitzgerald—as the epitome of a world where “all of a sudden you see the gallantry of a world long since gone—a world of all the sad young men, a world in which handsome young officers spent their leaves tea-dancing at the Plaza to the strains of the season; a world in which poets sang of their rendezvous with death when spring came round with rusting shade and apple blossoms filled the air."

Among Baker’s athletic accomplishments at Princeton University were:

* He played baseball, football and hockey.
* He led Princeton to one national championship in football in 1911 and two in hockey (1912 and 1914).
( He became the only athlete elected to both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Hockey Hall of Fame—and, in the latter, was the first American-born player inducted.
* Collegiate hockey’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy is named in his honor.

That list, however, gives only the faintest of ideas of why Baker came to be associated with a quality that Frazier styled duende—i.e., the ability to attract others through spellbinding personal magnetism.

Baker set the standard for a code of behavior on the athletic field that couldn’t seem more foreign to our current world of big-bucks glory, trash-talking, and taunting opponents. He adhered to the rules; acted modesty in victory, crediting teammates for his achievements; and drew no attention to himself by conduct or appearance. He was penalized only once during his entire hockey career at Princeton. If you want the essence of this code, think of the advice of the great football coach Paul Brown to his players on displays in the end zone after scoring a touchdown: “Act like you’ve been there before.”

It seems to me that there’s a kind of WASP reserve to this behavior. Perhaps it’s one that Baker learned at St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, N.H., which, according to New Yorker writer Ben McGrath, is “the cradle of American hockey,” since many credit the school as the site of the first U.S. hockey game back in 1883. (Though, come to think of it, a later hockey-playing product of that school, former Presidential candidate—and recent shameless Cabinet post-seeker—John Kerry strikes me far more as the type to hog the puck.)

After graduating from Princeton, Baker briefly worked at J. P. Morgan, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was with something like relief that he jumped at the chance to prove his mettle in a new arena: as a pilot in World War I. Another part of Baker’s full name, “Hare,” could apply to the lightning-fast reflexes he brought to both athletics and aviation.

During the war, he served with the Lafayette Escadrille, where he was credited with three confirmed kills to his name. (His Spad XIII was painted orange and black in honor of Princeton.)

Recent writers, such as Sports Illustrated’s Rom Fimrite and biographer Emil Salvini, have suggested a disappointment and restlessness at the war’s conclusion that led Baker to go up in the plane one last, completely unnecessary time. How else to explain why he would do so:

* after receiving orders to return home;

* after disregarding the vociferous protests of his own men, who feared that Baker’s stated rationale—that he would take “one last flight in the old Spad”—would prove to be exactly that;

* after being told that the carburetor of the plane he would test had failed in flight only a few days before;

* or why, instead of conducting a crash landing—something the plane could easily have handled—Baker tried to maneuver the stalled plane back to the air base.

The world of Baker, like that of the Jazz Age that Fitzgerald was fortunate enough to live and chronicle in his short life, is gone now. You can recover something of Fitzgerald’s world from reading his magical prose. The essence of Baker, however, remains far more quicksilver, like the man himself—a faint, darting shadow who lived before the rise of newsreels or TV, now only recalled from memorial plaques and awards for sports whose spirit has departed drastically from the gentleman’s sportsman image conveyed so powerfully by the Princeton legend.

Flashback: Einstein Comes to America, October 1933

October 17, 1933—Albert Einstein and his wife arrived in New York Harbor on the ocean liner Westernland, then were whisked away from a crowd of reporters by tugboat to New Jersey, where he would take a position with Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. 

His move, as newsworthy as it was, was just one part of what might have been the greatest brain drain in history—the vast exodus of scientists, writers, directors, artists, architects, and other intellectuals who first fled Hitler’s Germany, then the other European powers that fell under the Nazi shadow.

As a Jew, the German scientist had already been marginalized in his own country. 

A Nazi edict on April 7 dismissing politically suspect academics would undoubtedly have caught him in its web anyway, since by the start of the 1933-34 school year that fall fully 15 percent of the nation’s established university teachers had already been cashiered, according to Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich.

Einstein had taken the extraordinarily brave step earlier in the year of denouncing the thuggish crackdown by the regime after the Reichstag fire. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Science before that organization could accede to the Nazi demand that he be expelled. 

But, since he was visiting America at the time of his denunciation of Hitler’s terror, there was nothing he could do to prevent the seizure of his property.

Joining Einstein among the refugee tide were the following past or future Nobel laureates: Gustav Hertz, Erin Schoringer, Max Born, Fritz Haber and Hans Krebs. Who knows how much of a military advantage Hitler would have gained during World War II if he had not evicted so many?

Staying in America –even a beautiful campus such as Princeton’s—did not prove to be the happiest period in Einstein’s life, however, and for more than the obvious reason that he was now cut off from longtime friends and family. There were also these issues:

* Just like a great forebear in applying the laws of mathematics to the physical universe, Isaac Newton, Einstein devoted himself to an endeavor that consumed his energy with little to show for it. Newton had become sidetracked by alchemy, while Einstein’s unfulfilled passion was for a unified field theory.

* Einstein’s prestige was considerable enough that his letter to FDR warning that Germany could design an atomic bomb would lead to the Manhattan Project. But his socialism and pacifism rendered him so politically suspect that he could not serve on the project.

* The scientist’s political views led him to run afoul of Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. His public statement that all intellectuals called before McCarthy’s committee should refuse to testify led at least one witness to take his advice. Hoover’s paranoia was so wide-ranging concerning Einstein—as attested to by the 1,800 pages in the FBI file—that the agency head even suspected the scientist might be a Communist spy.

For a treatment of the Princeton sojourn of this genius, I recommend renting a DVD of a highly fanciful—but equally delightful—romantic comedy, I.Q., with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins as the young lovers brought together by Walter Matthau, playing the bushy-haired refugee who in this movie—if not in real life—had a sly twinkle in his eyes during these years.