I wondered later whether this decision and the anguish and nervous tension it caused him had perhaps predisposed him to the onset of the fatal illness that came not long after. Obviously taking this step did have some physical impact, for he looked wan and showed the effects of stress. Besides, there was a lot more physical work involved. I don't think that ever before he had worked from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon in the same place and with several meetings every day. No matter how hard he had worked before it had been on his own time and choosing. The first indication that something was very wrong with his health appeared some time after he became a commissioner.
As I had known him over the years he always seemed in good health. He only had infrequent colds, slept well, worked hard, could eat and drink liberally without showing any effects. I don't think he was hypochondriac. On the contrary, except for an occasional cold or toothache, he was very little preoccupied by his own physical state, although he once showed me some correspondence he had had with Dr. Janos Plesch about kidney function. Once on one of our many walks in Frijoles Canyon he remarked in passing a tree throttled by a vine, how horrible it must feel to be surrounded and trapped and unable to get away. This remark came back to my mind later when he became paralyzed.
I got wind of some vague rumors that he was ill. I asked Teller about it, but he gave me evasive answers and said something I could not interpret. I telephoned the house in Georgetown, and Klari told me a noncommittal little story. I could not help but suspect that something was very wrong, and later found out that Johnny had given specific orders that I should not be told that he had developed cancer. One day sitting in his office he had been seized by a violent pain in the shoulder, so strong that he almost fainted. This pain disappeared, but he went to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where a small cancerous growth was removed from his clavicle, probably already a secondary growth. He soon recovered from this surgical intervention and came to Los Alamos for what was to be his last visit there. I still had not been told what was wrong with him.
He came to our house and I noticed that he limped slightly. He seemed obviously preoccupied and perturbed. There was a sadness in him and he frequently seemed to look around, as if, it occurred to me later, he might have been thinking that this was perhaps his last visit and he wanted to remember the scenery, the mountains, the places he knew so well and where he had so often had interesting and pleasant times. Yet at the same time he joked about his presence in Los Alamos as a commissioner. Now he was there not only to think about scientific matters but about very prosaic administrative ones. And Rabi who was in town also chimed in that it was no longer a scientific visit but an inspection tour. Before he left, Françoise showed him a recent snapshot of Claire on her bicycle. He asked if he could take the photo with him. He walked back to the Lodge through the garden, and watching him through the window I definitely had the feeling that somber and melancholy thoughts were in his head.
A few weeks later on one of my visits to Washington Johnny took me to lunch. During the meal he told me that doctors had discovered he had cancer and he described what kind. This was a tremendous shock for me. I told him my suspicions that something was wrong and that for some reason I had wondered if it could be diabetes or his heart. I turned away so as not to show how upset I was, but he noticed it anyway and started telling a joke about a woman in Budapest whose maid had fallen ill. She sent for a doctor who told her that her maid had syphilis. ''Thank God," the woman said, "I was afraid it was measles and she would infect the children." During this dramatic lunch he still showed great strength of will and no signs of knuckling under. I was shattered and wondered whether he would ever recover.
On my next trip I visited Johnny at home. The Georgetown house he had rented was very different from his Princeton one. It was small, very seventeenth-century Dutch with a black-and-white-tiled vestibule as in some of Vermeer's paintings. He was still working at the AEC but walked with increasing difficulty and soon had to take to a wheelchair. Friends and even doctors wondered whether some of it was psychosomatic. It was never clear what kind of cancer he actually had. I never learned the whole story; I don't think many people knew it. Klari would never say much about it. I was told it started in the prostate and ultimately metastasized so that he became partly paralyzed.
During his illness Johnny did not talk to me about his important work on the ICBM Committee; only later I learned that he was Chairman and that it was called the von Neumann Committee. As he grew increasingly ill, some of the meetings were held in his house and later at the Woodner Hotel to which the von Neumanns had moved so as to be closer to Walter Reed Hospital, where he was undergoing treatment. To the end he maintained this complete discretion. Even though I was perhaps one of his closest friends he never broached to me classified or military subjects in which I was not involved. Our usual conversations were either about mathematics or about his new interest in a theory of automata. These conversations had started in a sporadic and superficial way before the war at a time when such subjects hardly existed. After the war and before his illness we held many discussions on these problems. I proposed to him some of my own ideas about automata consisting of cells in a crystal-like arrangement. This model is described in the book edited by Arthur Burks, Cellular Automata, and in Burks's own book on the theory of automata. At that time it was believed that there were 1010 neurons in the small space of the human skull and that from some neurons there issued some hundreds and perhaps in the center region a thousand connections with other neurons. We used to marvel at the complication of the organization of the brain. Now I understand that it has been found that there are thousands of connections from each neuron to others and in some areas fifty thousand and even more. And each neuron, which at that time was believed to be just a rather simple "flipflop." "yes or no" machine, is now believed to be a complicated organ with many more functions. In the space of fifteen years, since von Neumann's death, the facts have become amplified; the whole structure is even more amazing, more incredible than it seemed at the time. Johnny did not live to see the developments following Crick and Watson's work on the structure of the DNA chains in the nucleus of cells and the code which they contain.
It is evident that Johnny's ideas on a future theory of automata and organisms had roots that went back in time, but his more concrete ideas developed after his involvement with electronic machines. I think that one of his motives for pressing for the development of electronic computers was his fascination with the working of the nervous system and the organization of the brain itself. After his death some of his collaborators collected his writings on the outlines of the theory of automata. Published posthumously, his book on the brain had merely the barest sketches of what he planned to think about. He died so prematurely, seeing the promised land but hardly entering it. The great developments in molecular biology really came too late for him to learn much about it and to enter a field which I know fascinated him.