Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary

6. The Prime of Life

153 chapter 6 The Prime of Life The impact you’ve had on my life, and surely many, many others, is very great and I’d like to communicate to you how much you’ve helped me. Even tho I was much younger than yourself and full of doubts and undirected, your friendship, strength of personality and convictions and commitment to bettering human life (even all life) in the world, has given me a role model – and understanding of how woman can be compassionate, discriminating and effective. —Sharon Reddin Iverson to AHP, December 7, 1981 Someone has said that the greatest handicap that a woman has who wants a career is that she hasn’t a good wife. I think there is some truth to this. —Ava Helen Pauling, “More about Women,” April 11, 1965.1 On September 23, 1964, the day the Paulings returned to their new home in Santa Barbara, a terrible brush fire forced them to evacuate. “There were twelve of us working,” she wrote to a friend, “and in two hours we had completely emptied the house—completely is not quite right as we left behind our beds, desks and other large pieces of furniture. We were able to remove our treasures.”2 Staying in a nearby motel, they expected to hear that their Hot Springs Road house had burned, but miraculously, the fire spared it, though some of Pauling’s new colleagues were not as fortunate. (Robert Hutchins, the center’s founder, lost his house and everything in it.3 ) Two days later the Paulings were able to start moving their precious objects back into the house. The next week they departed for a long lecture tour in Australia. The Paulings’ move to Santa Barbara did not bring a slowing in their activities. Instead, their work broadened. After a long trip to Australia in Ava Helen Pauling 154 1965, Ava Helen begged off their usual hosting of a pancake breakfast for the WILPF chapter in Pasadena (in what was now Linda’s and Barclay’s house). “We have such a heavy schedule this spring that we are filled with despair most of the time…There is always the pressure of the uncompleted work and the many tasks which are waiting for us,” she moaned, letting down her guard in the face of relentless invitations.4 For Linus, the transition to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions initially promised to allow him to merge his science and his politics, without the tacit disapproval of CIT colleagues and trustees hanging over him. In February he had given an inaugural lecture at the center, “Science and Peace,” that recapitulated his Nobel address of December. He reviewed the history of the test ban movement and paid tribute to the recently murdered President Kennedy, from whose death the world was still reeling at the time of the Nobel ceremony. He also characteristically reminded his listeners of the futility of nuclear war by citing the certain casualty counts, both immediate and delayed, that would result from a war using just 1 percent of existing weaponry. “No dispute between nations can justify nuclear war. There is no defense against nuclear weapons that could not be overcome by increasing the scale of the attack.”5 The Nobel Peace Prize had given Linus Pauling one of the world’s most prestigious and influential imprimaturs. Despite his disappointments at Caltech, he was now free to pursue and integrate all of his interests. Yet not surprisingly, the loss of his daily academic and research leadership role hit himhard.FollowinghisSISSappearancesin1959and1960,heandAvaHelen had launched a series of costly and long drawn out libel suits, challenging publications from the tiny Nevadans on Guard to William Buckley’s popular National Review for their editorial portrayals of Pauling as a Communist fellow traveler. Over the next six years, the suits failed one after another. Several papers did settle out of court, but for minuscule amounts: a total of about thirtyfive thousand dollars, by Thomas Hager’s estimate. Legal history in the making turned against Pauling with the Supreme Court’s New York Times Company Ava Helen and Linus, and Boris Davydov after Linus received the Lenin Peace Prize, June 15, 1970. The Prime of Life 155 v. Sullivan decision in 1964, which established a different libel standard (the “actual malice” standard) for public figures. (Ironically, this decision that cut the legs out from under Pauling’s libel...