Enrico's health was by now not the best. The preceding summer in Los Alamos, his wife Laura had noticed that his appetite was poor, and this began to worry her. He also showed less energy for exercise and in the tennis games he loved to play. But there were no other physical symptoms, and Laura thought that this was possibly due to his involvement in the H-bomb controversy and the Oppenheimer affair, and to his skepticism and pessimism about the general state of world politics. She hoped the summer's rest away from home would do him good.
The Fermis always lived simply and frugally, and in Paris we noticed that they were reluctant to frequent the "good" and expensive French restaurants. Enrico did not really enjoy food that summer. Neither could we persuade them to stay in first-class hotels, which they certainly could afford better than we could in those days. On our little overnight joint trip we followed suit and took simple lodgings with them in a modest, small inn in the Vallée du Cousin some hundred fifty miles south of Paris. It is curious how one remembers physical settings. It was late evening, there were stars in the sky and we sat on a terrace next to a murmuring stream discussing the Oppenheimer Affair. Some electrical wires were strung between two houses and all the while we talked Fermi was looking at a bright star, and by moving his head so the wires would hide it from sight, he was observing the scintillation.
We agreed that the affair would ultimately lead to a beatification of Oppenheimer; he would become a great martyr and his accusers would be damned. Both Fermi and von Neumann were, in the hearings, fully on Oppenheimer's side and defended him against the accusations, though neither was a great personal friend or special admirer of his. Fermi was not greatly impressed by his physics and had some reservations about his political leanings. He felt however that Oppenheimer had been treated very shabbily. We also discussed the attitude of Edward Teller, and I asked Fermi how he viewed the future. Suddenly he looked at me and said: "I don't know, I'll look at it from up there," pointing at the sky. Did he have some premonition that he was dangerously sick? If so, he never admitted it in so many words nor did he look it. But this struck me as a bolt from the blue, especially since he repeated it once more as we discussed the foundations of physics, the mysteries of particles, the behavior of mesons, and his changing interests from nuclear structure to the supposedly more fundamental parts of the physics of particles. Again he said: "I'll know from up there." The next day we separated, the Fermis driving east to Grenoble and Les Houches, and we, Claire, and Françoise's brother south, to spend a vacation in La Napoule, near Cannes on the French Riviera.
When we returned to the United States at the end of the summer, the news was that Fermi was very ill, that an exploratory operation had been performed immediately upon his return to Chicago and that a generalized cancer of the esophagus and stomach had been found. Some of his friends thought the cancer might have been caused by his early work with radioactive materials at a time when precautions were not very carefully observed. I wondered then whether a habit of his which I had noticed of occasionally swallowing hard, and which I thought was a deliberate form of self-control, might have been connected all along with a physical difficulty.
His illness progressed rapidly. I went to Chicago to visit him. In the hospital I found him sitting up in bed with tubes in the veins of his arms. But he could talk. Seeing me, he smiled as I came in and said: "Stan, things are coming to an end." It is impossible for me to describe how shattering it was to hear this sentence. I tried to keep composed, made a feeble attempt at a joke, then for about an hour we talked about many subjects, and all along he spoke with serenity, and under the circumstances really a superhuman calm. He mentioned that Teller had visited him the previous day, and joked that he had "tried to save his soul." Normally it is the priest who wants to save the soul of the dying man; Fermi put it the other way round, alluding to the public hullabaloo about Teller and the H-bomb. Perhaps their conversation had an effect, for shortly after Fermi died Teller published an article entitled "The Work of Many People," toning down the assertions of Shepley and Blair. During my visit to Fermi Laura dropped in and I was amazed at the ordinary nature of their conversation about some household appliance.
We talked on and I remember his saying that he believed he had already done about two-thirds of his life's work, no matter how long he might have lived. He added that he regretted a little not having become more involved in public affairs. It was very strange to hear him evaluating his own activity — from the outside, as it were. Again I felt that he achieved this superobjectivity through sheer will power.
Somehow the conversation turned to the progress of medicine. He said, "Well Stan, you know, my chance of living through this is perhaps not zero but it is less than one in a hundred." I looked at him questioningly and he continued, "I believe that in twenty years or so a chemical cure for cancer will be found. Now I have only two or three months, and assuming uniform probabilities, the ratio of these times is one hundred to one." This was his characteristic way of trying to be quantitative, even in situations where it is not possible. Then half seriously I raised the question whether in a thousand years so much progress will be made that it may be possible to reconstruct people who had lived earlier by tracing the genes of the descendants, collecting all the characteristics that make tip a person and reconstructing them physically. Fermi agreed, but he added: "How about the memory? How will they put back in the brain all the memories which are the makeup of any given individual?" This discussion now seems rather unreal and even weird, and it was partly my fault to have put us on such a subject, but at the time it came quite naturally from his super-detachment about himself and death. I paid him one more visit, this time with Metropolis; when we came out of his room I was moved to tears. Only Plato's account of the death of Socrates could apply to the scene, and paraphrasing some of the words of Krito I told Nick, "That now was the death of one of the wisest men known."
Fermi died shortly after. A short time later I was passing through Chicago again and called on Laura. I gave the address to the driver and added that this was the house of the widow of the famous Italian scientist who had just died. The driver, who happened to be Italian and who had read about it in the papers, absolutely refused to let me pay the fare. Only when I told him he could give the money to charity did he take it.
Just after Johnny was offered the post of AEC Commissioner and before he accepted and became one in 1954 we had a long conversation. He had profound reservations about his acceptance because of the ramifications of the Oppenheimer Affair. He knew that the majority of scientists did not like Admiral Strauss's actions and did not share the extreme views of Teller. Some of the more liberal members of the scientific community did not like Johnny's pragmatic and rather pro-military views nor did they appreciate his association with the atomic energy work in general and with Los Alamos in particular, especially his contributions to the work on the A and H bombs. He recognized this feeling even among some of his Princeton associates, and he was afraid that it would become stronger when he joined the Atomic Energy Commission. This despite the fact that in the Oppenheimer Affair, even though he did not especially like Oppenheimer personally, he defended him with great objectivity and gave very correct, courageous, and intelligent testimony.
The decision to join the AEC had caused Johnny many sleepless nights, he said, and in a two-hour visit to Frijoles Canyon one afternoon he bared his doubts and asked me how I felt about it. He joked, "I'll become a commissionnaire." (In French the term is used to mean errand boy.) But he was flattered and proud that although foreign born he would be entrusted with a high governmental position of great potential influence in directing large areas of technology and science. He knew this could be an activity of great national importance. Indeed, with his supreme intelligence, he could have done an enormous amount of good in seeing what was valuable in certain programs and in initiating new ones. As a friend of his and having pressed him to accept the offer, Strauss would be obligated to support his views and ideas. Besides, Johnny had a bit of the Teutonic trait of being easily impressed by officialdom. At any rate, he was torn between two poles: a feeling of pride with the hope of doing something good and useful and the fear of becoming associated in the minds of his colleagues with a small minority of the scientific community and of career-oriented persons. Acceptance required taking a leave of absence from the Institute and some financial sacrifice as well. I do not know the details of the promises that Strauss may have made or the pressures he may have exerted.