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[objects clatter]
Interviewer: Is that in frame?
Cameraman: Well, it depends where Joan is gonna sit.
Interviewer: Joan's gonna be here.
[indistinct chatter]
Interviewer: Okay, whenever you're ready.
Okay, this is a recording for archive purposes.
And the idea is to document,
um, Ted Hall's activities in 1944 and '45
and afterwards, in connection with the Soviet government
and his work on the atomic bomb.
I'm Joan Hall, um...
and I'll be asking questions
and it is the third of June, 1998 in Cambridge.
Okay.
Well, the first question, Ted, is what led you to go
into this activity at the age of 19?
Well, uh, like...
virtually all of the academic people,
at least at Los Alamos,
I was quite concerned with the question
of what the world would be like
when the Second World War was finished?
Joan: Were you scared about this step
that you were going to take? Were you frightened?
I can't remember being frightened.
No, I don't think so.
Joan: You didn't think "If I do this,
I'm breaking the law and they might execute me?"
No.
- No. [chuckles] - Joan: [chuckles]
[somber music playing]
[explosion]
Joan: Did you have any sense that you were doing something
that was disloyal or morally dubious?
Ted: In my mind, this was the question
of protecting the Soviet people
as well as all people from wanton attack.
Preventing an overall holocaust,
which would affect the entire world, really.
[somber music continues]
[somber music concludes]
Joan: I left high school at 15
and went to the University of Chicago,
which I've always recognized
as a pivotal moment in my experience.
This whole intellectual process,
for me, was a wonderful discovery.
In my third year in the place,
I met lots of men because the war ended
and young men were coming back in throngs for the G.I. Bill.
And, God, it was great. [chuckles]
[clears throat] And I made up my mind
that I wasn't going to get married until I was 28
and I was then coming up to 18. I was going to give myself
a good ten years of independence.
And then I met Ted.
And I thought, "What a good-looking guy."
I felt that he was a person I could talk with,
discussing politics or music or anything that interested us.
And that meant that I was friendly with Savy too
because Savy stuck to Ted.
Savy was a very unusual person.
He liked poetry and philosophy and politics in a way.
He had never been molded into a conventional
American youth of his age.
I guess Ted was intrigued by him.
[chuckles] There is a picture of Teddy.
"Spring 1947."
"Grass was our courting ground."
[grandiose music playing]
"In the Quadrangle by Mandel Hall,
after hearing the Communist Gerhart Eisler
denounce the government
that wouldn't let him return to Europe
to build a new socialist East Germany.
With Savy and other students,
we sprawled on the grass in the sunshine..."
No, no, you're never drawing again.
Young Joan: Why? [laughs]
"...and you suddenly pushed me down and lay over me..."
[Young Joan laughing]
"...trying to push a pinch of grass up my nose.
We laughed, wrestled deliciously.
You lingered there for a few more seconds, heavy and warm."
[indistinct chatter, laughter]
[camera shutter clicks]
Joan: "Our bodies first greeting."
I will not. [chuckles]
Young Ted: Get your hair out of my face at least.
"And then that balmy April evening,
when the three of us lay on the grass,
my head on your arm and Savy's head on my thigh.
Under the trees, the moon,
the fragrant spring air throbbing with possibility,
our heads spinning.
I stood up, declared, 'I love you both dearly,
but how can I love you both at once?'
You dryly remarked, 'That's certainly a problem.'"
Interviewer: When did you realize that he...
[chuckles]
Interviewer: ...was more interested in you
than just friendship?
Well, they both were. This was a problem.
I would like to propose a toast, huh?
A toast, to what?
Joan: We could never get rid of Savy.[laughs]
To the revolution in the streets
- of East Germany. - [chuckles]
The people are rising up
against their capitalist overlords...
Joan: [chuckles] I'm sorry, but...
Savy: ...a new day is dawning.
I just don't feel like telling those stories in detail.
They're too private.
Interviewer: That's fine. That's fine.
Can you tell me what your first date with Ted was?
- I never had a date. - Interviewer: No?
We just went around together.
[romantic music playing]
Joan: "Once a wunderkind,
now a brilliant young scientist in love with physics.
A nonconformist, that is to say
with his own precise rules,
keeping well clear of anyone else's nonconformity.
He loved Mahler.
Irony was his mother tongue.
Did I forget to say he was beautiful?"
He had this office at the top of Eckhart Hall
where he had an assistantship.
He had a portable record player and a big box full of 78s.
There was one record he had that we both liked
and that was a Mozart piano and violin sonata.
And that became sort of our song. [chuckles]
♪ ["Violin Sonata No. 24 - II. Andante" by Mozart Plays] ♪
Joan: We would lie on the floor.
[indistinct chatter]
Joan: It was lovely. And...
I didn't then know that there was a colony
of enormous cockroaches living in that building.
But I don't recall that they interfered
with our enjoyment of lying on the floor. [chuckles]
Interviewer: So, how did he pop the question?
[chuckles] He said,
"Joan, I love you, will you marry me?"
And I said, "Yes."
All lying on the floor, yeah.
Because both of us were Jewish and complete atheists,
we said we'd like a non-religious ceremony.
[laughs]
And, uh...
suddenly, Ted went all serious
and he said there's something I have to tell you.
And so...
He said, "Well, you know,
about the work I was doing at Los Alamos?"
"Yeah."
He said, "It was very secret,
we weren't allowed to tell anybody about it."
And that it was very dangerous
that the Americans had a monopoly of this weapon.
Then I said, "Oh, so... So you're gonna give information
to the Russians?"
And he said, "I did, yeah."
And, uh, I thought about that
and I said, "Why? What good will that do?"
And he explained that
it would be a safeguard against another war
if the Russians also had this weapon.
And he said, "I wanted to tell you about it now
before we get married because you might want to drop out."
Well, I didn't want to drop out.
And nothing he could have told me...
He could have told me he murdered somebody
in the street, I don't know, but there was nothing
that could have changed my mind at that point.
And, um, he said,
"You must be careful, this is really secret,
you must not mention it to anybody in any way."
I said, "Okay."
"Not to your mother." I said, "God, no."
At which point, he relaxed and we started cuddling
and we went back to what we were there for.
♪ ["Violin Sonata No. 24 - II. Andante" by Mozart Plays] ♪
Interviewer: And that was that.
That was that.
I... You know, I gave up the idea
of my ten-year freedom period without a backward look.
I just knew I couldn't...
I couldn't let him go.
I knew I'd never meet anyone like that again.
I was right too.
Presenter: In the calm of Harvard University,
there are many thinkers who,
pondering the pressure of today's mechanized world,
are seriously concerned with the effect of modern living
upon mankind.
Joan: Ted was recruited to work at Los Alamos
three years before I met him, when he was 18 at Harvard.
Ruth: I've never seen these letters before.
I can't believe it.
Like teenage Ted.
Yeah, I haven't read them for ages.
- So, I'm... - Ruth: So aware of the world.
This is April '43, so he was 17
and he is rating Harvard as an educational institution.
Joan: But he spells Harvard there
in a funny way, doesn't he?
- Ruth: Yeah. "Hah-vud." - Joan: "Hah-vud."
Ruth: H-A-H-V-U-D.
- It's "Hah-vud." - [all chuckle]
Ruth: "Dear Ed, as an educational institution,
the spirit is all wrong..."
And then written out big in his handwriting,
"There is no laughing in the classes."
[Sara chuckles]
"What it boils down to is that there's no appreciation
of the lusty beauty of effective learning,
learning that is to be applied to world building.
That is perhaps the basis of education.
In this sense, the process of education
depends as much, maybe more, on the students as on the profs,
where one authority is dumping his irrefutable facts
into the heads of good students who will learn it all."
- [Sara chuckles] - [chuckles]
Beautiful.
Joan:
[both laugh]
Joseph: A recruiter from Washington came up
to try and find out the most brilliant of the people
still at Harvard in the... in the undergraduate program,
in the field of physics and mathematics.
At this point, Ted was a senior at Harvard at the age of 18.
His mission was to pick up a few very junior physicists
to help in the research work at Los Alamos.
Joseph: Ted and his roommate Saville Sax
were quite left in their politics
and admiring of the Soviet Union.
Joan: Savy struck people as being odd.
[book slams]
Joan: [chuckles] He was funny.
[chair scraping loudly on floor]
Joan: He had a lovely sense of humor,
a completely off-the-wall sense of humor.
[chair thuds on floor]
The letter arrived yesterday, it's official.
They offered me the position,
they want me to start immediately.
That's incredible, Ted.
I think it must have been intense for Ted
and he was a close friend with Savy.
So he wanted to talk to somebody.
[whispers] But it's got to be some sort of weapon, right?
I mean, it's a big deal.
And they don't want us talking about it to anybody.
[whispers] So if this is some super weapon,
you have to share it with the Russians...
Shh.
Joan: Savy came from a politically active
Jewish Russian family.
[whispers] Are you crazy? She's right there.
Savy: [whispers] You know it's true though.
Yeah, the Russians are our allies now,
but you know that they...
Joan: Savy was always having ideas.
Ted would go along with them, they were pretty crazy.
[whispers] You're nuts, you know that?
♪ ["Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" Plays] ♪
♪ Shouting Praise the Lord We're on a mighty mission ♪
♪ All aboard We're not a-goin' fishin' ♪
♪ Praise the Lord And pass the ammunition ♪
♪ And we'll all stay free... ♪
Ted: And I went out to the project
and, um, was told on the first day
what the work would be.
It was rather awesome
and the reason for most of us to be working on it
was the fear that the Germans would develop the weapon first.
I was a, um, a young person.
I saw the world, uh, I guess you might say,
through rather pinkishly colored glasses.
I was very optimistic about the post-war world.
Here it is, General Groves, plutonium.
Well, that's, uh, the first time I've seen it,
but if you don't mind, I wish you'd hold that under it
because there's about 50 million dollars in that tube.
Joan: General Groves couldn't stand the sight
of all these healthy young scientists
walking around in civilian clothes.
Oppenheimer, on the other hand, did want very much a sidewalk.
It must have been a pretty muddy
and primitive place at that time.
And so he made a bargain with Groves,
the youngest members of the staff could be drafted...
if Groves would provide them with a sidewalk.
♪ This is the Army, Mr. Jones ♪
♪ No private rooms Or telephones ♪
♪ You had your breakfast In bed before ♪
♪ But you won't Have it there anymore... ♪
Joan: Ted always said
that he was exchanged for a sidewalk.
He had to move out of his room into the barracks.
He hated the army.
[laughs] He never learned to salute properly.
The bloody hat, he hated the hat.
I was told he used to take it into the forest,
throw it on the ground and grind his heel into it.
♪ This is the Army Mr. Brown... ♪
Joseph: Ted was put on an important program.
He did very well in studying
the physical properties of Uranium-235,
the fissile material of the first atomic bomb.
He did so well at that,
that even at the age of 18 or 19,
he's now put on an even more important project
where he was, um, working on the implosion bomb.
I mean, people right through were aware
that something, uh, gruesome
and horrible was being constructed.
And this was appreciated, but there was, uh,
once one accepted the logic of why you were doing this,
there was dedication and p...
[exhales] I guess it was exhilarating.
[somber music playing]
Interviewer: Well, the Soviets were our allies.
Ted: Yeah.
Interviewer: Why aren't the Soviets
involved with this project?
Ted: Well, a lot of people thought
that it was very important that the Soviet Union
should share in the development and in the information.
Well, during the war, the attitude of the public
and the media, the government, towards the Soviet Union
was one of admiration and support.
Life magazine had a whole spread
about life in the Soviet Union which was just favorable.
That's just one example.
The American ambassador to the Soviet Union
was Joseph Davies, who wrote a book,
which I have on the shelf there somewhere.
[patriotic music playing]
This book was published during the war,
with an introduction by President Roosevelt.
And it was... it sold millions of copies.
When Germany attacked Russia, the Soviet Union became
one of the nations fighting Hitler.
And it was a desperate hour.
There was so much prejudice and misunderstanding
for the Soviet Union, in which I partly shared.
[grand majestic music playing]
I assure you that my purpose in coming here
is to see all things with an open mind
and report them faithfully to Washington.
That's what my President wants, that's why he sent me.
A very great man, your President,
with a deep sympathy for mankind.
Presenter: In the great Donbas, I saw for myself
the wealth of Russia's coal resources.
I went down into the mine and talked with the workers.
Much to my amazement,
I discovered that 30 percent of them are women.
Is it true that, in America,
the women are not allowed to do work like this?
Well, there's no law against it, but we don't like to put them
underground until we have to.
[chuckles]
In my early 20s, I had to assume
the responsibility of running my father's business.
An American woman running a business? [chuckles]
We had the impression that American women
were ornamental and not useful.
And you thought that our women were useful, but not ornamental.
[chuckles] I guess we were both wrong.
I understand you have visited
many other sections of the Soviet Union.
Davies: I've been greatly impressed by what I've seen.
I believe, sir, that history will record you
as a great builder for the benefit of mankind.
We feel more friendly toward the government
of the United States than any other nation.
Russia will never stop fighting its fascist foe.
They will defend their cities,
they will fight in their streets,
in their forests,
behind the German lines and over them in the air.
[audience applaud]
How do we know that we can trust Russia?
Sit down.
Joan: There were certainly sectors of the population
that were very strongly anti-Soviet,
but normal-life people weren't really aware of that.
Were aware of the Russians being heroic, and they were.
[majestic music playing]
They'd lost 20 million people in the war.
Twenty million!
And they were defending Europe,
they were... [chuckles] ...they were beating the Nazis
and they were saving the world for civilization.
That's not... not too extreme.
Ted: A number of scientists raised the question,
"What kind of terms are we going to be on
after the war if we exclude the Russians?"
"What will be the consequences if it isn't shared?"
In fact, some extremely eminent scientists
were worried about this question and said
that the knowledge should be shared.
Niels Bohr was, I think,
most prominent and he wasn't listened to.
These two sets of ideas co-existed within my head.
One was, it's a lovely world,
we've seen the light,
we're getting through with a Second World War
and things are going to be good.
And then off in one corner, there was this little question,
but suppose it isn't like that.
What if, uh...
there's a disintegration into disharmony
between the nations after the Second World War?
And what if a capitalist system generates another Nazi Germany?
Maybe even the United States
might turn into something like that.
Interviewer: Ted, I'm just trying to sail
close to the wind here.
I am trying to see the point at which you convert,
as it were, thinking, into some sort of action.
Did that seem like breaking a taboo to you in any way?
It seemed to me that, uh...
Well, it would, superficially,
would certainly break some taboos
and it's not the kind of thing one is told to do.
You... you're supposed to know
the difference between right and wrong and...
But there are situations that aren't that simply, uh...
aren't that simply described.
Joseph: As they were approaching success,
they gave him a... a pass to go back
to New York for his 19th birthday.
And there, he got in touch
with his friend Saville Sax,
and they had decided they wanted to get in touch
with the Soviets.
Marcia: They decided the only place they could talk
about this was in a rowboat.
Think you've rowed far enough?
Well, I'm trying to get us away from everybody else.
Marcia: And they went out
and talked about, "So what are we gonna do now?"
And they said, "Well, we can't just walk
into the Soviet consulate, right?
And say, 'Here, we've got this information for you.'"
It's too risky. So let me go.
You want to go and say what?
Well, I'll go under the pretense that I'm trying to find out
information about my grandparents in Vinnytsia.
Boria: I think they were very close,
but on some level, Savy wanted to be Ted.
Ted had this reputation for brilliance.
You're doing something incredibly brave here.
Marcia: They did actually finally get someone
who would agree to talk with them.
How were you treated by the agents
of the Soviet government?
They were not threatening in any way.
They didn't, in any way, match the stereotype
of the heartless, cruel, ruthless,
completely unscrupulous automatons.
They even had senses of humor
and, uh, certainly of compassion.
I'm sure that they had capabilities
of being very indecent towards some people.
Joan: "For the record, could you give an account
of what technical information did you actually transmit
to the Soviets?"
Well, I did transmit a list of names
of some of the physicists who were working.
Joseph: Igor Kurchatov,
the head of the Soviet Atomic Research Program,
realized this was really important stuff.
They had no idea who was out there at Los Alamos.
So, he was already
doing something which was illegal
and potentially could have gotten him put in jail
for many years.
- At the age of 19. - Yeah.
And he did agree to continue.
[mysterious music playing]
Marcia: Ted and Savy worked up
this whole elaborate system
of using Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass,
certain pages, and there were codes
that they could tell to each other.
So he would send a letter about page such and such,
what a wonderful poem this is
and somehow it translated into, "Come and meet me."
Ted sort of described it as almost a comedy.
In Albuquerque,
they just both walked up to each other
and sort of met in the middle of a street
and the agents, at a later point, said,
"Oh, my gosh, don't ever do that."
You know, "You can't both come from different directions
and meet in the middle of a street like that."
Joseph: But it was during that time that Ted did pass along
the rough plans for the implosion bomb.
Ted: I transmitted the concept of the implosion,
in which you design the explosive in such a way,
when the explosives are exploded,
the fissionable material is squeezed down.
And it will be a very rapid energy release
and the exploding bomb.
It was one of the major secrets of the war.
Ted had passed along the first information
the Soviets received that actually showed
the diagram of this bomb that would blow up Nagasaki.
It corroborated the information given by Fuchs.
Joseph: Stalin would have been very dubious
about just getting the version from one spy, Klaus Fuchs,
who was, after all, a German.
The fact that they had identical versions
from two spies in two different divisions
was very persuasive.
And so, they were able to devote billions of rubles
at a time when the economy could not have allowed them
to work on a speculative project.
We feel this probably speeded up the Soviet
development of the bomb by about five years or so.
Ted: I was there.
The test was carried out in an almost deserted region.
There were people who lived there
and, uh, an emergency might develop,
in which they would have to be evacuated very rapidly.
So I was with a bunch of the GIs
and we just whiled away the time
talking about this, that and the other.
I remember a lot of the discussion, uh...
[chuckles]
...was about whether marriage would endure as an institution
and whether it wasn't true that as people's lifestyles change,
you could expect marriage to be a sensible arrangement anymore.
So that's the subject that we worked on
while we were waiting for the explosion.
And then the time came.
[dramatic music playing]
Ted: And it was a rather awesome sight.
And certainly made people think,
"What the hell is this and what are we getting into?"
[dramatic music concludes]
Ted: The mood was generally one of celebration.
It was a... quite a striking success.
♪ ["As Time Goes By" by Rudy Vallée Plays] ♪
♪ This day and age We're living in ♪
♪ Gives cause For apprehension... ♪
Ted: I didn't go to any of the parties.
People got noisemakers and they lit little fires.
♪ ...We get a trifle weary ♪
♪ With Mr. Einstein's theory ♪
♪ So we must get down To earth at times ♪
♪ Relax Relieve the tension... ♪
I was peeved by the reaction of my colleagues.
I didn't think that this was quite the way
to react to such a foreboding event.
[cheering in distance]
Ted: I went back to a dormitory
where I played some music in my crummy record player.
♪ ...Still the same old story A fight for love and glory ♪
♪ A case of do or die... ♪
Ted: I mean, it's as if I was in a little isolation facility,
apart from everybody else.
[cheering in distance]
A large group of physicists in the Manhattan Project
wrote a letter to Truman,
who was the president at that time,
that they didn't sign up for working on this to bomb Japan.
So they proposed
why don't we have a demonstration blast
in the desert and invite Japanese military officials?
Others said we should just drop the project
because there were many secret communications
that were intercepted
that suggested that Japan was about to surrender.
They gave the letter
to Leslie Groves for transmission to Truman.
Leslie Groves did not agree,
so Truman never got that letter.
It's probably unlikely that Truman
would have been convinced.
We know now from a memoir
that General Eisenhower recalled
when Secretary of War Stimson briefed him
on the forthcoming use of the bomb.
I voiced to him my belief that, quote,
"Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender
with a minimum loss of face
and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary."
And I thought that...
"Our country should avoid shocking the world opinion
by the use of a weapon who employment was,
I thought, no longer mandatory
as a measure to save American lives."
The political target of the bombing
was evidently the Soviet Union.
If the Russians were about to invade Japan,
the U.S. wanted to say,
"It was our atomic bomb that made Japan collapse."
"It was not the Russians."
[dramatic music in newsreel playing]
Presenter: Every type of transportation
was completely wiped out.
All institutions and organizations,
public and private, were destroyed.
Over the radio from the United States
came the announcement
that the deadly weapon was the atomic bomb,
the first ever used in the world.
As the situation quieted down,
it became clear how fearful the bomb was.
Fearful beyond ordinary human imagination.
Reporter: This is Major Tom Ferebee
of Marksville, North Carolina,
bombardier of the first atomic bomber.
Would you give us some of your reactions
over the target of Hiroshima?
Uh, my navigator had me
perfectly lined up with the target.
When I touched down on my site,
I could clearly see the city of Hiroshima within my bombsite.
After we felt the explosion hit the airplane,
that is the concussion waves,
we turned around to take a look at it.
The sight that greeted our eyes
was quite beyond what we had expected
because we saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris.
Beneath that was hidden the ruins
of the city of Hiroshima.
The world will note that the first atomic bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.
That was because we wished in this first attack
to avoid, in so far as possible,
the killing of civilians.
Presenter: Hiroshima, seen from the air,
after the atomic bomb blast
that virtually erased this city
of 340,000 people from the Earth.
As far as the eye can see,
stretched scenes of desolation and ruin.
Four square miles leveled by one bomb.
The product of allied science
and a climactic answer to the terror and aggression
let loose upon the world by Japan.
Daniel: The U.S. said, we had to do the bombing
because otherwise, we would have to invade Japan
and that would have cost 20,000 American troops
that they would lose their lives.
Presenter: At the end of two weeks,
which was the critical period,
burns and cuts, which appeared to be curing,
suddenly worsened.
Hemorrhages developed, which could not be stopped.
Many died and the number of deaths
kept mounting from day-to-day.
Daniel: Since hundreds of thousands of people died
in this atomic bombing,
that number of American troops
continually got inflated.
A hundred thousand, then it was a quarter million,
a half a million, until finally, a few years later,
Truman would say, "We saved a million lives
of American troops because of the bombing."
Ted: Two hundred thousand people had been incinerated
and nobody seemed to care much.
Worse than just callousness
and I don't know how to describe it,
except as maybe uncivilized.
I remember it was a jukebox and, uh,
incessantly all day long,
people was playing some damn record
that went something like,
"Nagasaki, Hiroshima, blah, blah, blah, blah,"
in a tone of jubilation.
And, "Oh boy, ain't we great?
Look what we did, we really smashed 'em."
♪ Hiroshima, Nagasaki paid A big price for their sins ♪
♪ When scorched From the face of earth ♪
♪ Their battle could not win ♪
♪ But on that day of judgment When comes a greater power ♪
♪ We will not know the minute And we'll not know the hour ♪
♪ Atomic power, atomic power ♪
♪ Was given By the mighty hand of God ♪
♪ Atomic power... ♪
With this bomb, we have now added
a new and revolutionary increase in destruction.
We have spent more than two billion dollars
on the greatest achievement of organized science in history.
♪ ...It was given By the mighty hand of God... ♪
[song concludes]
I was afraid that a state with such a monopoly
might spell...
might trigger very catastrophic events.
The main enemy
was viewed to be Russia after the war was over.
[ominous music playing]
Daniel: A series of plans were drawn up,
these were all secret, with names
like Pincher and Broiler and Shakedown,
to figure out
how many atomic bombs would be needed
to defeat the Soviet Union.
Joan: The generals, since about 1945,
were actually making plans
to drop atom bombs on Russian cities.
- [siren wailing in distance] - [music continues]
They wanted to bomb the Russians to shit.
Daniel: They figured they really need
a lot of atomic bombs dropped on the Soviet Union
to cripple it,
so it couldn't retaliate by invading Western Europe,
which we could not combat.
On the side of the United States,
we're looking at the nuclear war planners,
being largely from Wall Street.
A very large portion of them
were Wall Street bankers and industrialists.
They had a view that the bomb would be a monopoly
and allow the U.S. to easily take over
the imperial role around the world.
Bankers and industrialists want economic domination.
Right after the war, there was an agreement
between the four allies,
England, France, U.S., and Russia,
to split the oil in Iran.
The U.S. decided that the Soviet Union
should not share any of that oil.
So, the Soviets were very angry about that
and moved troops to their border with Iran
to enforce what they said
would be an equal share of the oil.
So, Truman made a threat
that if you don't pull your troops back
from that border within 48 hours,
we will bomb you.
And it was clear to the Soviets we were talking atomic bombs.
The Soviets withdrew their troops in 24 hours.
Man: [in Russian]
[clock ticking]
Man:
[explosion]
Joan: [in English] I remember the day
when the announcement came
that the Soviets had exploded a bomb.
[dramatic music playing over radio]
News anchor: President Truman's dramatic announcement
that Russia has created an atomic explosion
sends reporters racing for Flushing Meadow,
where Russia's Vyshinsky arrives
to address the United Nations.
Joan: We said nothing, of course.
News anchor: ...about Russia's atomic progress in his address.
He accuses the West of planning atomic war...
Joan: But immediately after lunch went for a walk.
And I felt so proud of him,
as if he had done it all by himself. [chuckles]
It was after that, the whole propaganda apparatus
was devoted to scaring the hell out of the American public.
♪ There's a Communist Ambition now ♪
♪ To rule or wreck us all ♪
♪ With atomic ammunition ♪
♪ They would like To see us fall ♪
♪ Peaceful men of every nation ♪
♪ Would become As common slaves ♪
♪ We'll prevent That situation better ♪
♪ We shall fill our graves... ♪
Let's give Jerry a nightmare, a real red nightmare.
[dramatic music playing in film]
- Soldier: I'll be upstairs. - Jerry: Hey!
What is this? Where do you think you're going?
We have no time for explanation.
I don't care who sent you or why.
You're not gonna take another step until I see a warrant.
It's true, Daddy. I did volunteer for farm work.
But Linda, why?
The party convinced me that I should free myself
of the lingering bourgeois influence of family life.
It's your fault.
You should have spent more time training us
to think along party lines.
It will be my duty to report you.
♪ ...Here's a question Mr. Stalin ♪
♪ And it's you Who must decide ♪
♪ When atomic bombs Start falling ♪
♪ Do you have A place to hide? ♪
[song concludes]
Boria: I don't think you should overestimate
the historical or political sophistication
of either my father or Ted Hall,
but I do feel that what they did was wrong.
The thing that makes it wrong is the association with Stalin,
you know, a mass murderer.
They did look the other way as far as the crimes of Stalin.
Joan: The terrible facts, many of which were true
and some of which were not,
were all propounded by the enemies of socialism,
and we were for socialism. It was very difficult to know
exactly how to relate to these things
and the Communist Party, etcetera,
declared it all lies.
Most of the leadership of the political apparatus
in the Soviet Union was wiped out under Stalin.
And the military also was decimated.
It still is a great enigma and a very difficult question,
how to reconcile the possibilities
of the coexistence
of these backward and forward-looking features.
I felt a tremendous compassion for the Russian people
and their suffering. And certainly didn't feel
this tender feeling towards the Russian state.
Joan: The fact is that he did say,
in later years,
that had he then known of all the horrors
perpetrated by the Soviet government,
he wouldn't have had the stomach to pass information to them.
That is very possibly true, but it's also the case
that if he hadn't done it,
it would have been a misfortune for the world. [chuckles]
We actually joined the Communist Party
because they seemed to be
the most decisive opposition
of the American Right
and the Republicans and people who were against unions.
And against strikes
and against Black people very often.
I mean, this was Trumpian, basically.
These were the people who were wanting to make war on Russia
after the Second World War had finished with all its horrors.
Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust,
not to advantage the Soviet Union,
not to disadvantage the United States.
Interviewer: Do you have any idea, Ted, what was at stake
if they had been able to pin something on you?
Phew. Um...
Well, the obvious, um, similar situation
was the Rosenberg case.
[dramatic music playing in film]
Presenter: Someone had passed
America's atomic bomb secrets to Russia.
This was an undisputed fact that the whole world knew.
The federal government had laid the crime
at the doorstep of two native New Yorkers,
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Their trial had excited interest all over the world.
The two admitted Communist Party members knew
that they faced possible death sentences
in the event of their conviction,
but to the end, they both protested
their innocence of the theft.
And we followed the case with grief and anxiety.
[crowd chanting]
Joan: I mean, a lot of people were maintaining
that the Rosenbergs hadn't done anything.
Ted, privately and secretly, he told me
he did think they had been involved in something.
He didn't know anything about them.
He just speculated that there was something behind it.
Joseph: Hoover was very invested
in trying to win a conviction
and then the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
who actually were guilty of, if anything,
passing along a much less important piece
of a secret about Los Alamos.
The Rosenbergs were, uh, small fish
compared to Ted Hall.
[tense music playing]
Joan: February 1951,
was when he was arrested by the FBI.
Ted: The FBI called me in.
Their agents came around one day
and asked me please to come and accompany them
to the Chicago office.
Marcia: The FBI had been apprised
of these Venona documents,
which were translations of secret cables that were sent
from the Moscow Intelligence Center in New York,
back home to Moscow, saying Teodor Kholl
was one of the now assets of the Soviet Union.
And it looked a lot like Theodore Hall.
And so, that was when the hunt resumed.
We would like to ask you some questions
about your time working at Los Alamos as a physicist.
I'm happy to answer a couple of questions.
Marcia: The lead investigator on this
was Robert McQueen.
This interview will consist of questions
about espionage at Los Alamos.
Do you know this man, Julius Rosenberg?
His wife, Ethel?
I've seen it in the newspapers.
McQueen: Do you know them?
I don't know them personally.
Ted: They dumped a picture on the table
and said, "Do you recognize this person?"
"Do you know who this is and do you know who that is?"
Young Ted: And I don't recognize the name
of the other gentleman you mentioned either.
They were very careful to not let Ted
and those agents of the Soviet Union
know that the Americans had broken
the World War II Venona codes.
Sometimes they... they turned pretty nasty.
McQueen: We have evidence
that you furnished classified information,
provided it to a Russian operative...
Joan: But he was very aware
that they were trying to intimidate him
and one thing they were doing
was keeping the... the office overheated.
McQueen: Kornikov approached you
about furnishing classified information.
Joan: So that he would feel all sweaty.
He... he figured that was what was going on.
McQueen: ...and you and Saville Sax began to do so.
Young Ted: It's not true. I've never shared
any classified information.
Joan: But he was just sitting there calmly.
He had an ability to just to sit, not moving.
McQueen: Aren't you and Sax a member of the Communist Party?
Com... Absolutely not.
Ted: At one point, they both just left me
in the room for a while.
We'll be right back.
Savy, who, as a matter of fact,
was also detained at the same time
and interviewed in the room next to the room where Ted was.
Ted and Savy had discussed this prospect
and they had made a plan.
What were they going to tell them
and how are they going to act?
And Sax, who had an interesting background
in drama and all sorts of things,
just put on a big act of,
"Gee, I don't have a very good memory."
"I can't remember this."
"I don't know about these things."
His eccentricity protected him.
How could this really eccentric guy be a spy?
It doesn't even make sense.
I think he seemed less threatening.
And then I heard the most awful
sounds of anguish and grief coming...
coming through the partition, and from the next room.
McQueen: You came up with a plan about how you'd become spies,
you eventually provided them with...
Ted: In which they were threatening him
with imprisonment.
Savy: I can't remember, I have a bad memory
and can't recall what we talked about.
McQueen: Do you know what the penalty is for espionage?
Joan: And Savy was much more vulnerable,
and they were trying to play Ted
and Savy off against each other.
McQueen: We could help you avoid the electric chair.
Savy: Please, I have a family.
Joan: Savy, mixed up as he was, unstable as he was,
rose to the occasion.
McQueen: You want to see your family again,
you better start cooperating with us.
He knew but he didn't talk.
He cried but he didn't talk.
Ted: And then these two guys came back to question me
further and I think they were just trying to scare me
or get me in a more susceptible mood.
Mr. Hall, do you consent to a search of your work and home?
Do you have a search warrant?
FBI Agent: Do you have something to hide?
Marcia: Ted was a little bit more aggressive with them.
They did ask him, "Did you provide information
about the bomb to the Soviet Union?"
I know the kinds of fishing expeditions
that occur in small rooms like these.
Marcia: He said, "So, you guys, you use really bad methods."
"I've read about some of the things that you've done."
"Why are you doing this and why did you bring me in?"
Ted was a person who did not lie.
He never lied to me. I never lied to him.
It was quite extraordinary... [chuckles]
...I think, in matrimonial relations.
[chuckles] But that was the big lie that Ted told
and that was the only lie of his life as far as I know.
And it was one that had to be done.
[dramatic music playing]
[birds chirping]
[Young Joan speaking indistinctly]
Hey...
Joan: He came home and told me briefly
that they had interrogated him.
We have to get rid of everything.
- Young Joan: Everything? - Anything progressive,
anything incendiary, all of it.
- Okay. - Young Ted: All of it.
Joan: And what we had to do now was to collect
all the left wing literature in the house.
[dramatic music continues]
[Ruthie crying]
[Young Joan speaking indistinctly]
It's okay, sweetheart.
Let's go.
Joan: As we got into the car,
Ted pointed out to me a guy standing on the corner.
He said he was one of them,
one of the FBI guys.
[car engine revs]
Joan: We drove to the home of some friends
who were active with us in our political work,
and we handed them the membership files
because I was membership secretary
of the Progressive Party in that time,
and... and we told them we had to drop out of all activity.
They were bewildered, "Why?"
We couldn't explain.
And then we drove to a spot
where the Chicago drainage canal passes under a bridge,
got out, leaving Ruthie in the back seat.
[footsteps receding]
[dramatic music playing]
Joan: And then we drove home and we went to bed.
I am at a loss to explain how we managed to...
retain our cool.
It looked as if there were storm clouds
that were threatening to destroy us at any moment,
but we didn't know what was going to happen.
So we just practiced this nice easy tactic of...
[scoffs] ...ignoring things as much as possible,
ignoring danger signals.
Over the weekend, we went out with
Ted and Savy, and Savy's wife Sue,
and two push chairs, two strollers, with babies in.
And we strolled around
through the freezing cold of Chicago,
trying to figure out the situation and what to do.
Young Ted: We need to get our handler some message.
[Ruthie cooing]
Joan: We both realized that the risk was horrible.
I quail inside even now when I think how...
my parents would have reacted,
supposing that we were arrested
and taken away from Ruthie.
My mother would have confiscated her.
Uh, I mean, it was just unbearable.
Young Ted: We'll take it one day at a time,
but admit nothing.
Joan: We dropped out of the Communist Party
and the Progressive Party,
which I was particularly active in.
And... and that meant a lot to me, and I was very upset.
I was so upset.
I was being a mummy at home,
and this political activity meant a lot to me.
Not only from the conscientious political
point of view, I wasn't selfless,
I was having a good time.
And I was having a lot of contact with people,
and I felt that I was doing something worthwhile.
And, uh...
and I wanted to be part of that.
[somber music playing]
Joan: On Monday morning,
he went in, he kept his appointment.
FBI Agent: Good morning, Mr. Hall.
Young Ted: Good morning.
Joan: And they were all prepared to resume questioning him.
I would like to pick up
exactly where we left off on Friday.
You were doing some important work on implosion,
which is precisely
what the Soviets needed intelligence on.
Have anything to say?
Young Ted: I've...
[smack lips] I've thought about this quite a bit.
I've spoken to my wife about it, and...
Joan: He said that he had decided
not to converse with them anymore.
And I've decided that...
I don't have anything else to say on this subject,
and I would like to end this interview.
FBI Agent: Mr. Hall,
I don't think that's in your own best interest.
And, uh, he stood up,
preparing to go, and they started threatening him.
Mr. Hall, do you know what espionage is?
Sit back down!
Joan: They said you'd better talk with us
or we're gonna lock you up right now!
This was a bastard called McQueen,
who was leading the investigation.
And Ted sort of shrugged.
I said that I didn't want to continue any further.
It was getting nowhere, and I left.
Joan: They followed him,
and he walked to the elevators.
A whole bunch of guys stood around and watched him do this.
[elevator bell dings]
They didn't follow him.
[dramatic music playing]
Joan: It took him to the ground floor,
and he walked out...
into the ice cold, fresh air.
And he practically ran to catch a taxi and get home.
Marcia: And FBI agent McQueen was very frustrated
because he had gotten nothing.
In the '90s, after McQueen left the FBI
and he was a judge,
he said, "You know,
I really question whether those Venona documents
would have been admissible in court."
[doorbell rings]
[ominous music playing]
Joan: One day, this guy comes up,
and he said he was from the telephone company
and there was a fault that he had to correct.
He went into the house, and he took the phone apart.
We had a knock at the door,
and outside the door was Ed,
Ted's brother, who joined the Air Force.
Ed! [chuckles] What a surprise!
I have this brother who is 11 years older than me
and somewhat of an engineering genius.
For better or for worse
with regard to the future of his soul,
he's the person who invented and was the real architect
of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Man: [over radio] ...two, one, zero.
[dramatic music playing]
Joan: We were delighted to see him.
And then Ed and Ted went for a long walk,
during which Ed said,
"What sort of a mess have you got yourself into?"
Young Ted: Oh, my God, Ed, of course, you know,
I... I didn't mean to get you in any sort of trouble.
Joan: Ted explained what he had done
and what the FBI were doing.
I just need to know what I'm dealing with.
Ed didn't criticize him in any way.
The repairman finished his repairs,
and then Ed and Ted came back
and Ed went over to the telephone...
[ominous music playing]
Joan: ...listened,
went... [blows air]
[chuckles]
...made gestures
indicating that we won't talk about this...
that yes, it was bugged.
Joseph: In the decade after Ted had been instrumental
in making the atomic bomb,
his brother Ed was instrumental in making America
be able to build intercontinental rockets.
Interviewer: That could hold those bombs?
[chuckles] Theoretically, yeah,
that could theoretically hold those bombs.
And, uh, and it might... [chuckles]
It might have been very awkward for the powers-that-be,
if they aimed a punch at me and they ended up... [chuckles]
...hitting him by mistake.
It would have been a deep disgrace for them,
if it were found out that their chief rocket expert
was the brother of their atom spy. [laughs]
It's a beautiful picture. [laughs]
He would never have, um...
chastised me or, um, attacked me in any way anyhow.
I said to Ed, "You know, we really...
we really appreciate the way you reacted to this thing,"
and he said, "How else could I have reacted?"
And he really... he really had no idea.
This was his brother, what on earth could he have...
could he have thought?
Whatever his brother does is okay.
That's the way it is.
and he said, "Well, well, well, sure, go ahead." [chuckles]
"Withdraw my clearance, you've seen the end of me."
[chuckles]
Well, that's one fact that most people don't know about
when they raise the question of why I...
wasn't locked up.
[dramatic music playing]
Joan: We did a lot of driving around
in our little old car.
The FBI started following us,
and I would sit beside Ted,
and when he noticed in the mirror
that there was a car behind,
he would go like that, indicating that we had a tail.
They tailed us all over the place
for no absolute purpose from their point of view,
because we didn't go anyplace that they were interested in.
I think it was just harassment.
But we took that as well
with complete composure, both of us.
And from then on, I had this secret with him,
which we never spoke about because he was...
he was afraid of microphones.
The FBI continued
questioning all sorts of people who were in the circle
of friends and family members,
and, you know, it caused quite a bit of discomfort.
Supposing that we were arrested,
both of us, like the Rosenbergs...
Oh, God, I mean, the disgrace
among all our acquaintances, and family and friends, phew.
Didn't bear thinking about.
We both felt things may go very, very wrong.
[inhales] The danger was extreme.
Must have been sometime during the spring,
Ted, he had actually going for a walk
with his Russian guy, who came to Chicago.
The only way out of it, apart from the FBI
changing their minds and leaving us alone,
was to be taken
off to the Soviet Union and be evacuated.
Secretly, I rather relished the idea of going to Russia
and learning Russian. [chuckles] Like a fool.
This Russian guy,
he indicated that if we were in New York,
they could help us more.
And as it happened, Ted had just finished his PhD.
So he applied for a job
at the Sloan Kettering Institute
for Cancer Research in New York City.
They hired him
for the princely sum of I think 6000 dollars a year.
To my mother's hysterical displeasure,
we left Chicago and moved to New York.
[soft music playing]
Joan: We bought a nice little house in Connecticut.
Debbie was born in 1954 in May...
and we began living a suburban life,
in which my role was to keep the house going
and look after the kids.
And I was really...
fairly successful in my role as a mother,
but when it came to keeping house, I was rotten,
and it was a source of great conflict
between me and Ted. [chuckles]
Because I did not really like accepting that my destiny
was to keep the house clean, and...
And I had nobody to talk to.
There was nobody that I could speak to
about things that really concerned me.
I was friendly with some of the women around there,
but all that one can really speak about was
babies and labor pains, and...
cooking and stuff. [chuckles] And, well, that...
that... that interested me to some degree, there's a limit.
Interviewer: But, politics, no.
Joan: Absolutely not.
[soft music concludes]
[dramatic music playing]
Presenter: One of the greatest peacetime spy dramas
in the nation's history reaches its climax
as Julius Rosenberg and Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg,
who, with her husband, was convicted
of actually transmitting the secrets to Russia
through Soviet diplomatic channels,
enter the Federal Building in New York to hear their doom.
It is a stern jurist they face in Judge Irving Kaufman.
He sentenced both Rosenbergs to death in the electric chair.
It is the first time in peacetime
that such a death penalty has been handed down,
and while appeals to the highest courts are planned,
it certainly appears that the spies
are headed along a one-way street.
When the verdict came down, and they were
sentenced to be executed...
we didn't know what was going to happen.
Knowing Ted, he felt kind of responsible in a...
funny kind of way. He was doing it,
and he was getting off at the moment scot-free.
And he told me beforehand that he was going to offer
to confess his role in the hope of saving their lives.
I told him absolutely don't be silly, it wouldn't save them,
and it would destroy us.
And he accepted my view of things.
So he gave up the quixotic idea of sacrificing his life,
and my life, and Ruthie's life
for the salvation of the Rosenbergs,
which probably wouldn't have happened anyway.
The night of the execution, we were invited to a party.
It was an invitation from my department head
and something that
would be very, very, very strange to refuse.
[scoffs] I put on my most decent dress,
and we got into the car and drove out.
[Mahler playing over radio]
Joan: We had the radio on,
it was playing a Mahler Symphony,
which, for Ted, had always had a very profound...
link with him somehow,
and later with me, when he played it for me.
It was the last movement of the Ninth Symphony,
which is a farewell.
As it happens, our route from our house
to their house took us right past Sing Sing.
It was pretty close.
Joan: The execution was planned.
It had to be before sunset
to comply with some kind of Jewish law.
And the combination of this music,
and what we knew was going on
a few miles away from us, was, uh, an experience.
It was excruciating, it was excruciating.
We both sat there, like, I don't know what,
looking into space and hanging onto ourselves.
We didn't speak.
And we got up to the party,
and we went in and there were all these people laughing
and drinking and...
hanging around in garden chairs and so on.
And, at the earliest possible, decent moment,
we made an escape and drove home.
But we didn't talk about it. There was nothing to say.
Ted: And it certainly, uh, brought home the fact that
there were flames consuming people,
and that we were pretty close to being consumed.
[somber music playing]
Ted: It could easily be imagined.
Joan: One of the traumatic things about it
was the jubilation expressed by large swathes
of the American population, and of course,
the morbid...
fascination of the media with the details of these deaths.
[somber music continues]
Joan: It was hideous, it was really, really awful.
You think the United States is an ugly place now,
it was worse then.
But after that, we felt that getting out of the United States
into a foreign country would be less menacing for us,
but it wasn't the one deciding factor.
Ruthie finished elementary school,
and she would have been absolutely wrong for
junior high school, it would've been wrong for her.
She was a...[chuckles] ...very intellectual child,
and she didn't go for all the girly stuff
that people went for.
The whole lipstick and high heels
and that kind of crap just didn't appeal to her.
I was fascinated with the idea of going abroad.
I was always fascinated with Europe.
He went to a conference in New York,
and which was attended by Dr. Cosslett,
who was head of the electron microscope section
at the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge.
And they discussed whether Ted could come to Cambridge
on a one-year contract, and create an instrument
with localizing elements within organic tissue.
The idea of going to Cambridge,
the idea of doing that particular research,
all caught the imagination of both of us,
and we decided to come.
Interviewer: You were 12 when you moved here, was that hard?
- It was wonderful. - [Sara chuckles]
Ruth: It was a big adventure. We didn't fly here.
We came over on the Queen Mary.
Sara: Mm-hmm.
I mean, here was this new world where you could be an atheist
and say so. [chuckles] You know.
And communist, even, wasn't a dirty word.
When we moved here, it was different.
She took up her life again.
You know, she wasn't at home, but thank goodness for her,
you know, she went back to do a degree,
and then ended up teaching,
but yeah, Italian Russian literature.
All my grandparents were Russian.
They spoke Russian between themselves,
and I felt that I had been cheated out of it somehow,
and I wanted to recover it.
And so I studied the Russian language
and Russian literature with great enjoyment.
Since you have to do two languages at Cambridge,
Italian was my second language.
I taught Italian for 20 years.
Interviewer: So you enjoyed it?
Joan: Oh, very much.
[chuckles]
This was, uh, what he sent
to the Harvard University Alumni Association.
"Dear Report Chairman,
my wife and I have three children.
She teaches Italian language and literature in a college
and I am doing technical work
in biology and physics in the university here.
I do not believe
there is anything worth noting in our personal histories."
One of the people we interviewed was a retired CIA agent
named Cleveland Cram.
Cram said the FBI put up the Brits
to come and interview Ted.
They came and said, "Well, we're not the FBI."
"You can talk to us freely."
Joan: And they told him, "We know what you've done,
now why don't you just come clean?
Think how much better you'll feel."
And Ted was very much tempted.
Because he didn't like to lie,
but he wisely told the guy he'd have to think about it.
He came home,
and we were walking along Grantchester Street,
I remember, and he told me
he was sort of tempted to do that,
and I stopped in my tracks,
and I said, "You will tell them nothing!"
And he says, "Do you think so?" I said, "Absolutely."
"You stick to your story. You had nothing to do with it."
And he said, "All right, if that's what you think,
that's what I'll do."
I mean, they were hand-in-glove with the FBI,
and it would have been a disaster.
Joseph: What his career,
what his achievements might have been like,
had he not been a Soviet spy at Los Alamos.
He spent ten years at Sloan Kettering
trying to cure cancer.
He was one of the pioneers of science of electron microscopy.
Ted Hall was a man with a remarkable mind.
Sarah: My father explained everything to me
when I was 12 or 13.
What he had done, and what his motive was.
So, I listened and I respected it,
but I didn't sit around thinking about it a lot.
I mean, I was 12.[chuckles]
Sarah: I had other things on my mind.
- Interviewer: Was he proud? - I think so.
I think he was, and I think he also, like,
had some self-doubt that he didn't express,
and some concern about what he had done,
like whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing,
but he never admitted to that.
Boria: My parents constantly had FBI agents, um,
posted outside their house,
and people going through their garbage,
and their phones tapped,
and, well, uh... a lot of the paranoia, and...
Interviewer: So, when he told you about the spying,
did you believe him?
No. [laughs] No, I didn't.
I just mostly just banished the idea from my mind,
until a Washington Post reporter called me
and told me that he'd found that out.
Well, uh, he... he'd been dead for a while.
And um... I, uh...
I felt... completely exhausted,
totally drained, utterly devastated.
Crowd: [chanting] Free our sisters! Free ourselves!
Free our sisters! Free ourselves!
- Woman: What do we want? - Crowd: Equal pay!
- Woman: What do we want? - Crowd: Liberation!
Joan: It was just towards the end of the '60s
when the feminist movement came along,
and I was totally committed to that.
I joined the first feminist group I could find.
Crowd: [chanting]
They had started a Marxist study group,
in which we were reading Capital,
page by page, out loud and discussing it.
Wow, was that valuable.
And that gave me a much better idea than I had before
of what Marx was all about.
We were Marxist and communist in our thinking.
But we did become aware of the fact
that the Russians didn't seem to give much support
to revolutionary tendencies in other countries.
Reporter: In the Czech capital, thousands rejoiced
in their newfound free way of life.
But the Red Army was back.
Joan: And the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.
Reporter: The hammer and sickle had returned
to a pound and cut the Czechs' hopes
of a liberal self-governing communist way of life.
Joan: They seemed to be running their own communist empire.
I mean, these things were really traumatic.
Interviewer: As the arms race between the Soviet Union
and the United States escalated to outrageous proportions,
did that feed any regrets
or concerns about what he'd done?
It certainly confirmed Ted's view about the dangers
inherent in the way the United States was being run,
the American military... the military industrial complex,
as Eisenhower sweetly put it.
We have been compelled to create
a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,
the acquisition of unwarranted influence
by the military industrial complex.
[ominous music playing]
Joan: The arms race was a complete farce
at the expense of the American people.
The American military perpetrated this notion
of parity, that we had to keep up with the Russians,
we had to outstrip them,
we had to make more bombs than they did. But the fact is,
if the United States had 100 atomic bombs,
and the Soviets had 110 atomic bombs,
the deterrent effect would still hold.
One bomb was enough to cause a world catastrophe.
Reporter: With atomic warheads,
guided missiles traveling at 3,000 miles an hour
will bring still another dimension to global warfare.
Daniel: The U.S. was always considerably ahead.
The goal of the U.S. was to try to be so far ahead
that it could carry out a first strike
against the Soviet Union,
and not suffer too much of a response.
That's why both sides
have so many different types of nuclear weapons
mounted on so many different delivery systems.
[reporter speaking Russian]
Man: [translating in English] Objectives deep
in enemy territory will be destroyed
by intercontinental ballistic missiles.
All situations on land and in the air are being met.
It would be better now to restrict the term Cold War
to refer to the war which is being waged
by militarism, against the population of the earth.
I think I judge him
much more charitably now than I did initially.
Through my younger years, I was very angry at Savy.
Part of the reason why I wrote my book, Stealing Fire,
was to lay that anger aside.
Ted had the sort of accomplishments
that Savy aspired to,
but it was very difficult for him to match.
For Savy, this was his big accomplishment,
and I think, he felt that
Ted had sort of stolen even that from him.
Ted had taken his glory, Ted had taken his girl,
and Ted had so much else besides.
Sarah: Okay, this is a sculpture
that I did of my father, um...
Also, like when, when people die,
I start painting and drawing and sculpting them. [chuckles]
It's kind of my... part of my grieving process.
I made it on a papier-mâché core,
and I felt that the crumbling kind of also showed
his depression and some lack of fulfillment
in certain regards.
We've had to move around a lot.
My grandfather bought this property in the '30s.
Savy used to love this river
that runs through this property here.
And his ashes were scattered in the river.
And I made this portrait of like, him in the water.
More than him being a spy, he was my father.
And I feel that he deserves my loyalty.
Ruth: I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and there was a demonstration going past
of loads of people, like, "Don't bomb."
And I was there tugging at Ted's arm, saying,
"Come on, come on." You know, "What are you waiting for?"
- You know, "Come!" - Sara: Yeah.
I remember him standing there just standing stock still,
just standing, then he said, "What the hell?"
And he took me by the arm,
and we went and we joined the demonstration.
Mmm.
And I couldn't understand.
Sara: That's the thing,
the way that I looked at Joanie and Teddy.
Growing up, I had known them
to be utterly through and through...
um, desiring a better world...
and believing that a revolution was necessary...
but not acting,
- not actually being activists. - Ruth: Yeah.
And so growing up as a teenager,
I was a bit scornful.
- Ruth: Scornful? - A little bit.
You know, all the talk, and... but what are they doing?
- Ruth: Right. - Sara: When I was about 20,
listening to the radio one day,
I heard a program, by chance, about the Manhattan Project.
And, um, I listened to it
and then I phoned up and I asked Teddy,
I said, "I've just heard this radio program."
[chuckles] "Were you there?"
Ruth: [laughs] God!
So, he said, "Yes."
- Pause. - Ruth: Pause. [chuckles]
And he said, "Yes," and he explained to me
that he had...
um...
The motivation was to develop the bomb before the Germans.
That was how he justified doing it.
Ruth: Well, that was the reason he did it.
Yes, that's right, and he told me
about how he'd felt when they tested it...
Ruth: Right.
...and how he... People had been celebrating
and he felt really awful
and he had just gone back to his room.
Ruth: Yeah.
I just thought, "Shit, he's human." [chuckles]
You know, he's been involved in designing and making
the most horrendous thing on earth,
and not something to be proud of.
I didn't know that he'd mitigated it,
by making sure that it was shared information.
Ruth: Right.
- And it never occurred to me. - Ruth: Yeah.
And then when they told me,
the penny dropped. Everything...
[clicks tongue]
- Oh. - Ruth: [chuckles]
Hmm.
So it made sense of...
It made sense of their life, of our life, of...
[Sara sobs]
Joan: There are elements of the best parts of Ted
in all of my three kids.
And the things I loved about him, I love in them.
Sara, being excessively modest
and didn't like being compared to her sisters,
and still doesn't,
tended to reject all things
that would make her look as if she was shining.
Debbie became a young Maoist,
early in the game when China was the good guys.
She did a lot of anti-Vietnam War campaigning.
She circulated petitions, she went on marches,
anything anybody was doing, she did it.
And studied the violin,
and played years... years beyond her age.
[violin music playing]
Joan: She was... she was a phenomenon.
Interviewer: Did you tend to look at Debbie in particular
as sort of becoming the activist
that you had maybe hoped you could have been?
I could never have been like her. [laughs]
She was a ball of fire.
I never could have been like her, but yeah, she was...
Part of me wanted her to...
just concentrate on her wonderful abilities.
Interviewer:
Hmm.
Sara: Just before Debbie died, Joanie was painting...
- Right. - ...but she stopped dead...
[chuckles] ...completely stopped.
Ruth: You know, I think losing a child,
anybody who has a child,
and many people who don't, can imagine.
Joan: Ted wrote in the 50th Anniversary Report
of the Harvard class of 1944.
[clears throat]
"I'm afflicted with Parkinson's disease,
and an inoperable cancer,
and I recently experienced the death
of a dearly loved daughter.
Some of the horrors in the world,
in the world scene are incomprehensible,
but life still seems amazing and beautiful."
Yes, I think that's amazing and beautiful.
Marcia: At the time, I think he thought
that he was not going to live to see this book written,
and I think that he looked at this as a way to explain
what he had done, who he was, and why.
[somber music playing]
Joan: So that was the first blast of publicity,
and there were cameras outside,
and I tried to send them packing.
The "wunderkind spy," I called it. [chuckles]
And yeah, they were all excited
about this young, young guy.
Well, he was young.
I mean, the tabloids were worse.
The other papers reported it
in the usual objective style
that the newspapers claim to have, which they don't.
I've got a great big stash of clippings upstairs, which...
Interviewer: I would like to see them...
By all means, you can have them
and throw them down your loo when you're finished.
It didn't cause us to weep, I'll tell you.
We were disgusted, but...
it didn't hit us where we lived, no.
Interviewer: And why is that?
We knew they were bastards, you know.
Interviewer: What should have been done with Ted Hall?
Shot.
He was a military man.
He was a soldier in the United States Army.
And that son of a bitch should have been retrieved,
once we found out what he had done...
called back into the army,
court-martialed, and summarily executed.
Interviewer: How do you personally feel
about what you did?
I have to think, I know that
my body is, uh, disintegrating
rather slowly and gracefully, I hope,
but I have to think in terms of its finiteness...
And then I... I have to think that, well, that...
that's my history and that's it, it doesn't...
It would be nice to be proud,
but I'm not... I'm... I'm not... I'm not a proud person.
Interviewer: What made you do it?
[scoffs, laughs]
I guess a major factor would be compassion.
It's a stab at a description anyway.
[pensive music playing]
Joan: He had been in and out of hospital a few times.
As things got worse,
they offered this treatment, that treatment and so on.
At one point, I went home,
to get some dinner and get some sleep.
Around 7:30, the telephone rang
and the nurse told me that about 15 minutes before,
he had passed away.
[sighs]
I went right away...
and came into the room, talking to him...
about how much I loved him,
and continued smothering my...
my dead Ted with love and... sweet nothings.
"What if I had died instead
and left you here behind, alone in your 80s?
How would you have lived?
Would you have solved the riddle
of quantum mechanics?
How would you have remembered me?
Anyway, you'd surely have married again,
one of those women who loved you and envied me.
And for long years of Indian summer,
you would drive along together
and talk in the car and in bed,
while my gray ashes
melted silently into the earth
under the tall tree in the park.
Ah, now I'm jealous. I want to be your second wife."
Joan: In my walking days, when I used to walk to town,
passing by this tree,
people used to look at me funny
because I would stop and talk to it.
[chuckles]
And I did explain to one of them that my husband's ashes
- were buried under there. - [chuckles]
It's lovely how the trunk goes up
in the center of that.
This tree is quite exceptional. It's huge, but very graceful.
Ruth: Yeah, it's amazing.
Joan: It really is a tree that reminds me of Teddy
because its sturdiness with grace is sort of him.
Yeah, and he loved it.
And he loved it. He absolutely loved this tree.
Interviewer: Is there anything specific
you want to say to the next generation?
Oh, wow. [chuckles]
I think the next generation, um...
should realize, should have to realize
that the world has come extremely close
to real... actual... Sorry.
[sobs]
I didn't expect that.
[sighs]
The world has come extremely close
to real actual total disaster.
Catastrophe.
And that, um...
And that people,
not the government, but people must...
be concerned about these things,
and be prepared to insist, to demand,
to compel government policies,
which don't put the world at risk again.
Interviewer: Thank you very much.
♪ ["Violin Sonata No. 24 - II. Andante" by Mozart Plays] ♪
[music concludes]