Who smeared Richard Feynman? | Hacker News Reader

Who smeared Richard Feynman?

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224 pointsbeefman54 comments

My first thought when I saw this letter was that it was Richard Feynman himself, perhaps appropriating the name of someone he knew had been interviewed. It would be entirely consistent with his character to smear himself in order to convince the government that they didn't want him -- just like the letter he wrote to the draft board proclaiming that he was not truly crazy, but was instead precisely crazy enough to not want them to think he was crazy.

Accusing someone of communism in those witch-hunting days was a dangerous thing to do. It seems a bit improbable that Feynman would have done that to himself, knowing that it could jeopardise his participation in other committees/projects/areas that were of interest to him. He wasn't 'forced' to be on the PSAC, it's not like he was trying to get away from jury-duty. He could just as well have said he wasn't interested/able do participate when asked to join.

To me, it would also have seemed a bit out of character, Feynman has demonstrated that he had no big problem speaking his mind, so stealing someone's identity, with the legal risks that represents, especially if it was his estranged wife's, doesn't sound very probable.

But hey, I don't know, I guess I see it as improbable but it's always possible.

I did say that was my first thought -- the article makes a good case and I'm mostly convinced by it.

Considering what happened with Robert Oppenheimer[1], I doubt Feynman would smear himself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_security_hearing

Considering that Feynman neither needed nor wanted any role which would require him to hold a security clearance, I think the case of Robert Oppenheimer would, if anything, have encouraged Feynman to thumb his nose at the establishment. He was always one for doing what he thought was right and ignoring the potential fallout -- witness his willingness to testify to spending time in a strip club.

Hmm, that's a good point. Oppenheimer had much more to lose with his clearance/position and far more baggage they eventually used against him than Feynman (aside from some extremely personal vendettas against Oppenheimer). Maybe it was plausible after all, since Oppenheimer was known to encourage his colleagues to do what they thought was right.

Guessing if comparing the two, it would hurt Oppenheimer's rep more than someone like Feynman, since they blamed Oppenheimer more than anyone when many of the Manhattan Project scientists refused to work on the H-Bomb project with Edward Teller.

A little gem from the article: "It was an extremely ugly, long (2 years!) divorce hearing: it made the newspapers because of Bell’s allegations of “extreme cruelty” by Feynman, including the notion that he spent all of his waking hours either doing calculus and playing the bongos."

if only we could all live in a world where the highest form of domestic abuse was calculus and playing drums.

It said "including", not "exclusively", and continued loud music is a well-known psychological torture used in detainee interrogation...

There's a big difference between blasting music in someone's face for hours and playing an instrument regularly.

At that time, in those jurisdictions, you could only get divorced under very precise circumstances. One of the few ways was for one spouse, typically the woman, to assert "extreme cruelty."

I don't know any more about this divorce than anyone else here but I do know that at the time people did whatever it took to fit in the required "extreme" criteria.

It was also a matter of mutual agreement; sometimes the husband and wife would agree to accuse each other of crap like that. You know you have terrible public policy when couples are incentivized to slander each other in order to separate amicably.

Another common ruse was setting up a fake adultery with the help of an accommodating friend. One spouse would take a picture of the other spouse and the friend coming out of a motel room. Instant grounds for divorce.

That quote omits the actual alleged "extreme cruelty":

"...the appointee's wife was granted a divorce from him because of appointee's constantly working calculus problems in his head as soon as awake, while driving car, sitting in living room, and so forth, and that his one hobby was playing his African drums. His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into a violent rage, during which time he attacked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture."

  > during which time he attacked her

Still sounds kind of vague. What, precisely, does the word "attacked" refer to?

  > threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture.

That would be a form of "threatening" or maybe "menacing", and yeah, it's intimidation, but I wouldn't count it as an attack.

He attacked her, AND he threw bric-a-brak, AND he smashed furniture. Not attacked her by the last two, but in addition. The man was undoubtedly brilliant, spoke well and wrote well.

I don't think it useful, or likely to be accurate, trying to presume his homelife based on his public appearance.

So, like maybe he gave her a black eye, and a fat lip? Did her clothes get ripped? Was there lasting evidence of a serious assault?

Did he knock her down a flight of stairs, and the kick her the stomach until she shat blood?

Or did he just kind of push her aside, or grab her by the wrist, and shove her around and yell a lot, after she stood in a doorway between him and his bongo drums?

Did he overpower her and then hold her down and spit in her face? That might constitute serious psychological abuse, and then again maybe it might not be abuse at all according to some people.

Maybe he put her over his knee and spanked her? (some people might enjoy that sort of thing at the time, and then complain loudly about it later)

What does "attacked" mean?

I don't know why you're asking us this question.

What on earth are you implying? She talks about outbursts and violent rage. It is not relevant to wonder if she enjoyed spanking. Your whole post makes me feel rather uncomfortable.

But that's how smears work. The whole point is to cause deep consternation, because dangerous questions might reflect poorly upon the person that asks them.

So, when confronted with a delicate social scenario that threatens our better intentions, an awkward silence is produced, and everyone's mind races at the grey areas, and 12 people will diverge in 12 directions, guided by assumptions based on personal experiences. But in considering the possibilities, we realize the fact that we are in a situation where we cannot comfortably clarify certain details.

It's important to pick apart details when two people are mutually compromising each other's reputation. It's important to discern who is the agressor, or the possibility that it's an equal match between evenly paired beligerents.

This is where "preponderance of evidence" comes into play. If the situation is criminal, often times that is immediately evident. Serious physical abuse produces serious results. Psychological abuse is more questionable, but criminal psychological abuse generally results in a person that is very obviously broken by profound events.

If something sounds like gossip, then it's more or less a civil disagreement. Sure, emotions may run hot with a gossipy scandal, but at that point it's the social implications of reputation at stake. Serious, within the scope of a professional career, and as an open-ended slow burning problem for the reputable, but that sort of damage is indirect and have yet to completely unfold.

But this is how blackmail works. Is it vapor, smoke and mirros? If there are Ugly dirty details, let's see them. Otherwise, it's simply mud slinging to produce voids of inormation, so that imaginations and simple minds can run wild.

To imply that she accused Feynman of cruelty because she enjoyed getting spanked sexually and then 'changed her mind' is not "asking the dangerous questions"... it is just weird and uncalled for. You're not doing a hero's work, you're just being mildly chauvinistic, and on top of it all trivializing sexual abuse.

Be critical of the basis of her claims all you like. I encourage scepticism. But learn from the others in this thread and keep the criticism relevant and appropriate.

I've had my wife throw items at me. It definitely felt like an attack as opposed to mere threats or menacing.

That could be polite speak for, "totally lost his shit when when I interrupted a derivation"

If someone trashed my knick-knacks and smashed my furniture for what would be normal personal interactions, I too would ask for a leave of absence.

It's important to remember that before the days of no-fault divorce false allegations of cruelty were commonly made to justify the split to a judge. Both parties to the divorce would agree on the story in advance and testify to the same under oath. It amounted to widespread ritualized perjury and was one of the major deciding factors in the passing of no-fault statutes.

This is all to say, take the allegations of extreme cruelty with a grain of salt.

Reading the letters would help. A physical attack. "Choking"

But I would highly doubt her credibility having read her smear letter and the questioning methods they did those times, and the four years needed for the divorce.

p64: from an "Los Angeles Times" report 7/18/56 "His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into violent rage, during which time he choked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture."

The other citations left out the choking part literally: "...the appointee's wife was granted a divorce from him because of appointee's constantly working calculus problems in his head as soon as awake, while driving car, sitting in living room, and so forth, and that his one hobby was playing his African drums. His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into a violent rage, during which time he attacked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture."

I wonder what she wrote on the deleted 13 consecutive pages attachment at the end about his "Evidence of Disloyalty" and "Personality and Character", that the even the FBI decided to delete it. And a second questioning about 2 specific points brought nothing specific, so it was only this famous single letter. I find it interesting how she made up the numbered list of arguments which sound like FBI wordings, probably influenced by the questioning method.

She is summarized by the FBI as "She said that her personal feeling is that FEYNMAN is without character or acceptable moral fiber. She ... emphatically he is not acceptable to her as an appointment to any position with the U.S. Government which would require moral character and emotional stability." (p188) And she refused to furnish a signed statement on these allegations.

It seems like there needs to be another approach to redacting text like this. This one doesn't really cut it, apparently. And slips such as 'her' and 'she' was what primarily gave her away here. So the people who published the file should have been way more careful with this.

Flash forward to modern times...

"It's okay, we're only collecting metadata."

Yes, which is to not redact text. As you have already found, it is an exceedingly complex problem to do it correctly. But more importantly, when it is done incorrectly, or redactions are made from political motivations (as we've seen excessive evidence of), they are practically impossible to challenge.

The difference of length between "he" and "she" would be enough to reveal that information.

They just draw a black box over the text in the PDFs now...

(No joke)

Yes, but now they remove the underlying text too. It was fun while it lasted.

Current best practice is actually to draw the black boxes, print it, then scan it back in. The result is crummy quality pdfs with no metadata or hidden text.

Well you'd think but I worked for an org back in 2005 that decided to completely optimise that step away.

They were an aerospace/defense company building IFF units no less...

I think that was still a year or so before news stories started coming out about government "redacted" documents that were not actually redacted.

A lot of the NSA-related documents released after redaction were certainly run through the "redact,print,scan" routine, and I know the Navy does the same as a best practice now.

Maybe that hasn't made it out to the defense industrial base by now, but I'd be surprised if 9 years worth of being beat about the head regarding redaction mistakes wouldn't have fixed things even there.

Wouldn't "redact, print-preview, save" be good enough?

Or redact, screen-shot.

Does that preserve anything that an actual paper print and rescan would remove?

Oh, there's tons of much better methods that would be more than good enough. Adobe even provides specific redaction features that drill down within the PDF data itself to make sure that nothing gets drawn under a redaction block, it works quite well.

But the government is about making procedures that are both easily understood by low-paid civil servants and unlikely to be screwed up in major fashion (e.g. our GS-7 scanning documents back in might use the wrong file name or reverse the pages or something, but they probably won't leak classified data if they do that).

Enjoyed the article liked the 'lofi' images with typewriter text, am using the smear image as wallpaper.

Would it not be entirely in character if Feynman had picked up echos of the profiling process and smeared himself? Obviously can't be this letter.

Feynman was in fact critical of the Soviet Union:

>I think that Russia represents danger in saying that the solution to human problems is known, that all effort should be for the state, for that means there is no novelty.

(from 'The Meaning Of It All', Ch. II)

Interesting comment in the blog (by Raphael) http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-fe...

> With regard to the censored words, I would argue that they are probably “my former husband,” instead of “my ex-husband, the”.

Author reply:

> Yeah, it’s possible. I don’t put a lot of faith in character length analysis, [...]

Is there any type-set technology on proving possibilities for redacted texts?

Typewriter text is fixed width, so I imagine they get an average width for one character then calculate the number of characters in each redacted bit.

What had you in mind?

Interestingly, although it seems harder, this sort of analysis is much more reliable with proportional fonts, because the specific width of the gap narrows the number of possibilities down considerably.

That would would depend heavily both on the proportional-width font that was used and the accuracy with which we could measure the width of the gap.

You don't really even need to measure widths, since they fall in a grid. Just count the number of characters directly above or below the redacted passage. (For fixed-width, I mean.)

> Through the years that he has been at the California Institute of Technology (REDACTED) he has in my opinion made a definite point of knowing well and cultivating such persons as the president of California Institute of Technology, the dean of the school of physics, department heads (including REDACTED and Linus Pauling), regents of California Institute of Technology, as well as REDACTED.

Well it shouldn't be too much detective work to figure out what Caltech department head Feynman was buddy buddy with other than Pauling. They seemed to feel need to redact the name for some reason.

From all of the references to Caltech implying a personal knowledge of the school, to the continual references to Feynman being a religious skeptic and critical of Republicans, I'd guess this letter was written by a conservative working at Caltech. It would make sense in terms of the initial FBI contact, the acquaintanceship but not friendship with Feynman etc.

Why would someone working at Caltech be interviewed in Idaho? The ex-wife theory seems a whole lot more credible.

I have no idea but as long as we're speculating there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I

The FBI surely must have known about the nasty divorce (the TA mentioned it was very public at the time). So, did that fact get into consideration while evaluating Feynmann?

I might be a bit naive, but I don't want to assume it was a simple witch-hunt.

Without looking, I would have guessed Edward Teller, but the gender thing shoots that down.

The letter was not anyway near Teller's style of writing.

Was Teller a bible-swearing kind of person?

Maybe not a smear...

If it were his wife, it seems just as likely she knew something of his character...

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