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The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist, by Fred Jerome. New York: St Martin's Press, 2002. $27.95. Pp. xxii, 358.
According to the author there are some 200 books about Einstein, mostly biographies chronicling his scientific achievements (and, more recently, a few on his relations with women). The one area of his life that has not been touched, except in passing, is his politics, especially his socialist convictions. This lacuna has now been filled in this fascinating and exhaustively researched volume.
The first part of the book covers Einstein's life from his birth in 1879, in Germany, to the end of World War II in the USA. A pacifist from a very early age, at 16 years he renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland to avoid the draft. There, in 1905, he published five papers, including two that introduced his Special Theory of Relativity. They assured his meteoric rise from being an obscure patent clerk in Zurich to becoming acknowledged as the leading physicist in the world.
In 1914, on the outbreak of war, 104 German intellectuals, even including Einstein's friend Max Planck, signed a "Manifesto to the Civilized World" attempting tojustify the war as a defense of civilization against "Russian hordes allied with Mongols and Negroes." Einstein opposed this with a "Manifesto to Europeans" signed by only three other (less well-known) Germans and subsequently banned from publication there. Only through his enormous prestige in the academic world was he able to continue working (and being paid by the government).
During the 1920s Einstein took advantage of his celebrity in support of pacifist and humanitarian causes. At the same time, and with the growing influence of the Nazis, he suffered increasing personal attacks as a Jew. Then, in 1933 during a visit to the USA, Einstein announced his decision not to return to Germany. It was then that he surprised...