Linus Pauling, R I P - Obituary

National Review, Sept 12, 1994

IF LINUS PAULING had confined himself to the study of chemistry, his death probably would have escaped the notice of this journal. But it affronts the memory to read such a headline as in the New York Times, page one: "Linus Pauling Dead at 93/Chemist and Voice for Peace." To dispose quickly of the second point: If Linus Pauling's recommendations had been followed, it is reasonable to conjecture that a) there would have been much less peace than in fact there was during the Cold War; and b) the Soviet Union might well have triumphed.

Oh yes, we speak at NATIONAL REVIEW with something of a personal memory. Some thirty years ago James Burnham wrote an editorial, "The Collaborators." It was Dr. Pauling's practice in those days to threaten a lawsuit against anyone who called attention to his obsessed finding that in all questions in which the Soviet Union and the United States were at odds, the Soviet Union was manifestly in the right. A few weeks after our editorial, we wrote a second entitled, "Are You Being Sued by Linus Pauling?"

The lawsuit proved of some historic legal interest in that ATR's attorney, Mr. C. Dickerman Williams, persuaded the court that New York Times v. Sullivan, which granted immunity to public comment about a public "official" absent "actual malice," granted it also in the case of a public figure. After a fortnight during which Dr. Pauling spent many hours instructing the jury on how distinguished he was, the court threw his complaint out. And we wrote in these pages that if it was incorrect to label Linus Pauling a "collaborator" then the term was no longer useful.

During the missile crisis, Linus Pauling, Friend of Peace, labeled President Kennedy's embargo against Castro's Cuba a warlike deed, its author "worse than Hitler." By the moral standard of this prince of peace, John F. Kennedy was worse than Hitler for acting decisively to frustrate Soviet nuclear designs in Cuba. A year or so later the Nobel Committee gave him another prize, citing his contributions to peace. A stirring editorial in Life magazine raised the question whether the Nobel Committee shouldn't just go away, or consume more vitamin C, before decorating a flagrant fellow traveler.

Some time before he died, Dr. Pauling announced cures for the common cold and for cancer. These cures, according to settled medical opinion, proved as efficacious as his proposals for peace, which amounted to getting out of the way of the Soviet Union.