JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 793 Blog Bookstore
While looking at the FBI files for Leo Szilard, a great physicist who had liberal-left ideas about peace and strategy and the use of the atomic bomb (in June 1945), I stumbled onto the files for one of the people sought by the Bureau to talk about Szilard: Albert Einstein. He and Szilard went back a long way, and Szilard's advanced physics supra-intelligence and illuminated social outlook was instantly recognizable to Einstein, making it easy for Einstein to give him an excellent recommendation. Which of course is something the FBI didn't want to hear, as Szilard was mucking around in the national will to use the ultimate weapon, among other things.
I knew a little about the FBI's interest in Einstein, but I had never actually looked at any of the declassified files, which as it turns out live at the FBI site, all 1600+ pages of them. Hoover had some sort of special need to fill with looking after Einstein, whose nearly 20-year-long file is just not pretty. The Director was sniffing around the edges of Einstein's social life, trying to make them into centers to do god knows what with them. One of the files details the subversive organizations that Einstein was associated with--some of the hundreds and hundreds of groups that he lent his name to over the years.
Here's some of those threatening organizations:
Not much to look at, really.
But it is this gentle, subtle, horrible document below that causes real grief, the "under investigation" part at the end is just heartbreaking, a Lilliputian effort to control forces beyond their comprehension. Such is the power of ignorance.
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