Dan’s Papers January 20, 2012 danshamptons.com Page 14
Einstein
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wife Margarita Konenkova for these sessions, and, as it happened, sparks flew between Margarita and Albert. According to Isaacson’s account, it appears that Margarita was quite the bohemian lady in her time. She was well-traveled, amusing, a lawyer who spoke five languages and very smart. Her husband, apparently, let her do what Margarita was going to do. Which eventually included an invitation for Einstein. How would he like to come out to a house on eastern Long Island with her and some friends for the weekend? Sergei would be busy with his work in the city. But they’d have a picnic and swim and have a dinner with her friends—who had been invited out to someone’s summer home—and who were fine if Einstein were to come along. According to Isaacson, Margarita was surprised when Einstein accepted. At the time, she was 46. He was 63. And so they went. The house was along the shore in Setauket on Long Island Sound and the result of this weekend was the beginning of an affair Einstein had with her that lasted for four years, right up until the time that the war ended. Indeed, there are photographs of her and Einstein taken back up in Saranac Lake where Einstein apparently felt comfortable introducing her around as his new companion in subsequent years. As it happened, in the late 1990s, some researchers came upon a treasure trove of love letters that Einstein wrote to Margarita after they broke up—because she had returned to Moscow. They were passionate letters of how he missed her. By that time Einstein was 66. The fires still burned brightly.
In another section of Isaacson’s book, Margarita Konenkova comes up again. It has to do with the attention that Einstein, the celebrity, had come to receive from the FBI. Even during the war, when the Russians and the Americans were supposedly friends, the FBI was monitoring Einstein because they believed, erroneously, he might be working with Russian agents against the United States. Isaacson reports that after the war years, it was found that the FBI had been tailing Einstein, making reports about him and otherwise keeping him under surveillance from the time of his arrival in 1933 to his death in 1955. As you know, FBI files have now been opened to the general public because of “Freedom of Information” requirements. Isaacson tells us that the files on Einstein totaled 1,427 pages all stamped “confidential” and stored in 14 boxes. None of it in any way confirmed that Einstein had had any illicit contact with the Russians. But, says Isaacson, the FBI missed something that was going on right in front of their noses. In 1945, Einstein spent an hour visiting the Soviet Vice Consul at his office in Manhattan. The Vice Consul, Ravel Mikhailov, was indeed a Russian spy. Later, after the war, another Soviet spy named Pavlov Sudoplatov wrote a memoir saying that Margarita reported to him with a code name Lukas. There is nothing in any of the files about Einstein’s visit to the Vice Consul. Nor was there any real explanation in Isaacson’s book about the visit, except to suggest that the visit was just incidental. In all Einstein’s writings, including in his love letters to Konenkova, he remarks that he is no
fan of Stalin’s Soviet. Having learned all this from Isaacson’s book, I thought to research this further to see if I could find out why Einstein had visited the Soviet official. With Google’s help, I think I found out. Konenkova developed a yearning during those war years to return to Moscow. Whatever the reason, she did visit with her superior, Vice Consul Mikhailov, who told her he wouldn’t provide her the papers that would allow her to return to Moscow. She pleaded with him. And finally he relented, but on one condition. He would do it if she could arrange for him to meet the famous Albert Einstein. And so that’s why Einstein met with him—to help his girlfriend go home. I found Isaacson’s book about Einstein to be one of the most powerful reading experiences ever. After finishing that book, I bought his new biography, which remains as No. 1 best seller on The New York Times list today, which is his biography of Steven Jobs. But I never got over thinking about Einstein and Southold—it was that summer (1939) that at the urging of several prominent scientists who came out to Southold that Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to create a research facility to invent an atomic bomb before the Germans did—and I never got over the 1,427 pages of reports in 14 files that the FBI collected about this man. And so, having finished this book, I decided to contact the FBI, cite the freedom of information (continued on page 16)