Ike would serve the museum as trustee (1948–1953) and honorary trustee (1953–1969). His fellow trustees included Thomas B. Watson of IBM and Arthur Hayes Sulzberger of the New York Times, both also trustees of Columbia University. They saw in Eisenhower a future president of their university, and perhaps of the United States.
IKE, WHO HAD BEGUN TO DALLY with amateur oil painting, made reference in his museum talk to a fellow army artist, Bill Mauldin, the stellar cartoonist of Stars and Stripes. He said, “Frequently the soldier was led to express in artistic fashion something of his own reactions to the phenomena of war. At least you are acquainted with the efforts of our friend Mr. Mauldin in this regard, who spared no pains to show what he thought of us brass hats.” Mauldin had ridiculed the spit-and-polish regulations General Patton imposed on his battle-weary troops. In return, old “Blood and Guts” had Mauldin hauled into his office for “sabotaging military discipline” and threatened “to throw his ass in jail.” Mauldin’s biographer, Todd de Pastino, tells the story. As soon as he heard the news, Eisenhower overruled Patton’s censure, issuing a directive that no commanders were to interfere with the Stars and Stripes—including Mauldin’s cartoons. Ike’s stand on a free press was welcomed by the GIs, hailed by the press, and spread to a wider public in the postwar years. It confirmed Ike’s reputation as a brass hat in touch with civil society: some saw it as a first step to higher office than military command.
SUSAN EISENHOWER, IKE’S GRANDDAUGHTER, tells us that, overseas in 1942, Ike wrote in his diary a short eulogy on his father, who had died back home in Abilene, Kansas: “His finest monument is his reputation.” He could have been describing himself. When Ike returned to the United States, his reputation had soared as a leader of men who swept the Nazis from Europe in the world’s greatest battle to date. He’d juggled the demands of prima donna generals such as Montgomery and Patton and thorny allies like de Gaulle; he had established interim civil regimes in the liberated countries and in partitioned Germany; he had exposed and opened the concentration camps; he’d attended to monuments and returned stolen treasures. As shown in his speech at the Metropolitan Museum, he was also a true humanist who spoke and wrote well: “They who have dwelt with death will be among the most ardent worshipers of life and beauty and of the peace in which these can thrive.”
With a legion of fans behind him and active support by Republican stalwarts such as Watson and Sulzberger and progressive Democrats like James Roosevelt, the “Draft Ike” movement began as early as 1948 and hit its stride in 1952, as David Pietrusza points out. After a brief stint as president of Columbia University—to establish his bona fides as a civilian leader—Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower swept the Electoral College, 442 to 89, to become our thirty-fourth president.
Only the Dixiecrat states refused Ike their votes, but Ike made his position clear. In 1953, in his first State of the Union message, he declared: “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the federal government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.” He used that authority, and followed it up with the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. And then, of course, Ike presided over the interstate highways, the end of the Korean War, the start-up of NASA, the establishment of the National Medal of Science, and the pushback against “so many handguns out there.” Finally, after two terms in Washington, Ike proudly stated: “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People ask how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”
The summer of 1997 was a busy one for phone lines, email connections, and delivery services between Baltimore and Worcester, with numerous collaborative experiments.
—Andrew Z. Fire, Nobel Lecture (2006)
NEWS OF THOSE “NUMEROUS COLLABORATIVE EXPERIMENTS” went viral after December 10, 2006, when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden honored Andrew Fire of Stanford and Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The two scientists had identified RNA interference (RNAi), a defense mechanism used by many organisms against double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) viruses. Interfering RNAs have provided us with a means of selectively shutting down one or another genes in a cell and given us clues to antiviral therapies to come.
A few months later, the names of Fire and Mello joined those of other American laureates carved into a pink granite monument at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 81st Street in New York. The monument, dedicated to Alfred Nobel and to American Nobel laureates past and present, stands behind the American Museum of Natural History in a park named after Theodore Roosevelt, the first American laureate (Peace Prize, 1906). The names of 290 other American Nobel prize–winners have been inscribed on the sides of the monument, and there is ample space for more to come.
The monument in New York came to mind as I read Craig Mello’s conversation with Adam Smith of the Nobel Foundation, who called Mello right after a call from Stockholm had given Mello the news of his award on October 2, 2006.
| [ADAM SMITH]: | Well first of all many, many congratulations on being awarded the prize. |
| [Craig Mello]: | Thank you so much. |
| [AS]: | Where were you when you heard the news? |
| [CM]: | I was checking my daughter’s blood sugar. She has type 1 diabetes so I was actually up, one of the few, I guess, in the North Americas who was awake. |
| [AS]: | Yes, I imagine so. |
| [CM]: | We check her frequently and I just happened to be up, checking her blood sugar. And she had a good sugar actually, 95, which is normal. |
| [AS]: | That’s good news, yes. |
| [CM]: | I was on my way back to bed and the phone rang. |
| [AS]: | So two good pieces of news at once! I imagine you were thinking of other things but what was your first thought on being told? |
| [CM]: | Well, you know, gee, that’s a really hard question! You know first it’s disbelief, and I don’t think it sinks in quickly. I felt I was sort of too young to get it this soon and thought, if it happened . . . |
“This soon” and not later, 46-year-old Mello joined other striplings whose names were carved in granite, among them Joshua Lederberg and James Watson (ages 33 and 34, respectively, when they received their notifying telephone calls).
The Nobel monument was a recent addition to the New York scene. The slab was unveiled on a damp October day in 2003 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with appropriate remarks by Swedish and Norwegian dignitaries, choral music, and a stirring address by Eric Kandel (Physiology or Medicine, 2000), who paid tribute to the city’s public school system, of which he was a product. In the audience were many Nobel prize–winners, their guests, consular and civic officials, and platoons of students from high schools in the neighborhood.
As the flock of VIPs dispersed, a teenaged couple made its way to the monument. Arm draped around his girlfriend’s shoulder, a gangly youth pointed up at the open space under all those names: “I’m going to be the first
