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Even after the pace of Einstein's career slowed and his resistance to quantum mechanics earned him the scorn of some scientists, he still epitomized science in the public eye. As Carl Sagan notes, his example inspired numerous Depression-era youngsters to choose scientific careers. His persona and pronouncements became legends. Asked why he used one soap for washing as well as shaving, he replied, "Two soaps? That is too complicated." Even when receiving visitors like David Ben-Gurion (who later offered him the presidency of Israel), Einstein often would be tieless and sockless. Recalls Physicist-Biographer Banesh Hoffmann, who worked with Einstein: "He never tried to show you how clever he was. He always made you feel comfortable."
Einstein had enormous powers of concentration. When the wind died down while he was out sailing, he would whip out his notebook and do his calculations. Stymied by a thorny problem, he would tell his colleagues in accented English, "Now I will a little tink," pace slowly up and down, while twirling a lock of his unruly hair, or perhaps puff on his pipe, then suddenly erupt in a smile and announce a solution. Interrupted by parades of visitors to his Mercer Street house, he could resume his work almost as soon as they stepped out of his second-floor study. Recalls British Author C.P. Snow: "Meeting him in old age was rather like being confronted by the Second Isaiah—even though he retained traces of a rollicking, disrespectful common humanity and had given up wearing socks."
In 1939, when Einstein's fellow refugees Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner learned that German scientists had managed to split the atom, they sought Einstein's help. Einstein himself may have had only the faintest idea of the recent progress in nuclear physics, but after a briefing by Szilard and Wigner he agreed to write a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility that the Nazis might try to make an atomic bomb. That letter is popularly credited (though its precise effect is unclear) with helping to persuade Roosevelt to order up the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic weapons.
Later, when A-bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein expressed deep regret. After the war, he apologized personally —and in tears—to visiting Japanese Physicist Hideki Yukawa. On another occasion, he said, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb."
In his final years Einstein was an outspoken foe of McCarthyism, which he felt was an echo of the turbulent events that had preceded the downfall of Germany's Weimar Republic. He urged intellectuals to defy what he considered congressional inquisitions, even at the risk of "jail and economic ruin." He was widely denounced, and Senator Joseph McCarthy called him "an enemy of America." In his last public act, Einstein joined Bertrand Russell and other scholars in a desperate plea for a ban on all warfare.
British Science Writer Nigel Calder says that "the Einstein honored in later generations expired long before—in 1919." That