ABSTRACT
The overt acts used to identify von Neumann as an agent of evil were his work at Los Alamos on the atomic and hydrogen bombs and his service on the Atomic Energy Commission, acts treated as doubly suspect because they are alleged to reveal a lust for power that reflected his bourgeois origins. The author claims that von Neumann worked at Los Alamos and served on the Atomic Energy Commission because he had a bourgeois admiration of the powerful and a bourgeois ambition to acquire power. The appreciation for worldly success and pleasure in enjoying it are quite human attributes that could not have been lacking in von Neumann’s character, despite his genuine modesty concerning his own achievements. The truly astonishing omission from the author’s biography of von Neumann is the almost complete lack of any reference to the dominating interest of von Neumann’s scientific and intellectual life after World War II—from 1945 to 1957, the year of his death.
