SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - The Letter That Changed The World

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing an atom bomb, I never would have moved a finger,” wrote Albert Einstein in his 1950 book Out of My Later Years. 

He was speaking about a letter from his vacation home on Nassau Point on Suffolk’s North Fork that warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt of a breakthrough in Nazi Germany in nuclear fission which could “lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable…extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Atom bombs. 

That letter from Einstein triggered the Manhattan Project crash program of the United States to build atomic weaponry—to construct atom bombs before Nazi Germany did. And it led to a widening of nuclear technology and what has been called the “Atomic Age.”

On this August 2^nd, on the anniversary of the August 2, 1939 date on that letter, the current owners of Rothman’s Department Store in Southold unveiled Einstein Square in front of the store, centered around a bust of Einstein. The scientist was good friends in the 1930s with David Rothman, the store’s owner when he rented a house on Nassau Point.

I first saw the Einstein letter as a youngster in a display case in the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park.  I had the feeling then of its great importance. Now I think it might be the most important letter ever. I reprinted part of the letter as a facsimile in my 1980 book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, and discuss it in other writings and in TV programs I’ve hosted.

(According to a December 20, 1986 Washington Post article, now online, the letter “was sold to publisher Malcom Forbes today at Christies for $220,000. The price was a record for a 20^th century letter.”) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/12/20/einstein-letter-sold-to-forbes/1f5d23ff-47e3-43ba-a7c0-0199643f1933/

In fact, Einstein didn’t write the letter—although he signed and reviewed it. It was written by physicist Leo Szilard. Fission—the splitting of atoms—had just been done in December 1938 in Germany. Szilard realized the process could be used to create an atomic chain reaction. He made visits to Einstein at his vacation home on Nassau Point with fellow physicists Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller. 

The one-and-a-half page letter—with Albert Einstein, Old Grove Road, Nassau Point, Peconic, Long Island typed on top—cited the fission experiment in Germany and said “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.” 

“A single bomb of this type,” it goes on, “carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.”

The letter continued, “I understand Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over”—an indication that Nazi Germany could be pursuing atomic weaponry.  It urged “government action” by the United States.

After receiving the letter, President Roosevelt acted and the Manhattan Project was formed with major secret laboratories at several locations in the United States, notably Los Alamos, New Mexico and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 

By the time the Manhattan Project produced atom bombs, Germany was defeated. Two of 

the bombs were then dropped on its ally Japan. Szilard was opposed to this maintaining that dropping atom bombs on Japan “could not be justified, at least not until the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender.” Szilard put together a petition signed by hundreds of Manhattan Project scientists asking that atom bombs not be used on Japan. He and other scientists had earlier collaborated on a 1945 report in which Szilard and some of them called for the U.S. to conduct an atom bomb demonstration to make it clear to Japan the consequences of refusing to surrender. Other scientists involved in the report disagreed. As Manhattan Project physicist Arthur Compton wrote: “We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”

Einstein regretted signing the August 2^nd letter and was critical, too, of how atom bombs had led to civilian atomic energy. He also wrote in Out of My Later Years: “Since I do not foresee that atomic energy is to be a great boon for a long time, I have to say that for the present time it is a menace.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

Suffolk Closeup - Dowling College And Southampton College

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Unflattering light has been cast in recent times on the shutdown of what had been a major private college in Suffolk County: Dowling College. Meanwhile, there have been developments involving a main figure at another private college in Suffolk that closed: Southampton College.

Dowling was the first four-year college in Suffolk County when it began operations in 1959 as Adelphi-Suffolk College in a former public school building, “Old 88,” in Sayville. In 1968, after a donation of more than $3 million by real estate investor Robert W. Dowling, it was spun off from Nassau County-based Adelphi and renamed Dowling College. 

I know it well having been a student at Adelphi-Suffolk in 1961 and 1962 during which I launched and was editor of the first newspaper at a four-year college in Suffolk which I named The New Voice. Decades later I would teach journalism at Dowling as an adjunct professor.

Dowling had much going for it. In 1963, as Adelphi-Suffolk, it moved to Oakdale with the former mansion of William K. Vanderbilt the centerpiece of its campus along the Connetquot River. Its faculty was terrific—and included my all-time favorite professor, the late Dr. Charles Raebeck, a brilliant teacher. With small classes, it billed itself as “The Personal College.” Nevertheless, in 2016 Dowling went bankrupt and shut down.  

A 92-page lawsuit charging “negligence” was recently filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on behalf of Dowling creditors. The lawsuit alleges years of “waste, mismanagement and breach of fiduciary duty.” It seeks $50 million in damages to pay creditors. 

Dowling, it states, launched a second campus at Calabro Airport in Shirley as an aviation school “although it was obvious that Dowling could not sustain two campuses.” Dowling’s trustees “never streamlined Dowling’s operations, never underwent any significant self-examination to improve Dowling’s academic or support services, and never directed Dowling’s available resources toward selected programs intended to enhance Dowling’s success.” It charges the trustees “accepted the cockeyed optimism of their presidential hires and continued to operate Dowling as if its problems would simply disappear.”

As for presidents, Dowling had quite a number, at one point four in four years. They included Robert Gaffney, a former FBI agent, Suffolk County executive and state assemblyman. And there was Scott Rudolph, a trustee switched to being the college’s president although, says the lawsuit, he was “potentially the only college president in the United States who had not graduated from college.”

There’s been a “tentative settlement” of the lawsuit, Newsday has just reported, “that would nix a public airing of the institution’s 2016 bankruptcy and closure.”

I knew Southampton College well, too, serving as an adjunct journalism professor at it for 25 years, until it was closed by Long Island University in 2005. Opened in 1963, it was a fine teaching institution.

A key figure in Southampton’s last two decades was Robert F.X. Sillerman who became its chancellor in 1993. Mr. Sillerman “had amassed a huge fortune in the radio business by buying poorly performing stations, improving their management, and then selling them at a considerable profit,” notes Dr. John A. Strong, long-time Southampton history professor, in his excellent book, “Running on Empty, The Rise and Fall of Southampton College, 1963-2005.” 

Mr. Sillerman had no background in education. He contributed millions of dollars to keep the college going. Still, his push to establish “a new curriculum with an emphasis on innovative interdisciplinary courses” did not help. As a professor, I believe strongly in interdisciplinary education—not compartmentalizing academic areas but integrating them.

But most Southampton students preferred specific disciplines: English or art or business and so forth. The Strong book relates Professor Robert Pattison, long chair of its Humanities Department, dismissing Mr. Sillerman “as someone who may have read an article on interdisciplinary education in a Brandeis alumni magazine or had perhaps seen a program on PBS.” Still, Mr. Sillerman kept pushing this “core” concept declaring it would “revolutionize and redefine a liberal arts and sciences education in the 21^st Century.” Southampton College didn’t make it far into the 2lst Century. And Mr. Sillerman’s personal fall in recent times was as extreme—from being a billionaire to corporate bankruptcy. 

As Newsday reported last month, “A onetime billionaire from Southampton has agreed never again to serve as an officer or director of a public company.” This was in settlement of a securities-fraud case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Sillerman’s SFX Entertainment went into bankruptcy in 2016. He has sold his waterfront estate and other properties in Southampton and moved to New Hampshire. As an article in Forbes magazine put it, his “blueprint to take over the electronic dance music world is in shambles, the result of poor management, suspect financial planning and a certain hubris…” 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

People In The News - Harold Stein Inducted Into International Filk Hall Of Fame

Harold Stein Inducted into the International Filk Hall of Fame

At the 2019 FilKONtario’s 31^st Convention held in Toronto (Canada) on the April 12-14 weekend, Harold Stein was honored (posthumously) with the presentation of his induction into the International Filk Hall of Fame.  Filk is the folk singing genre of the Science Fiction community and members gather at various locations both nationally and internationally.  The Filk Hall of Fame inducts up to three people annually, who have made a difference in one way or another – by their singing or their “backstage” efforts – over a minimum period of five to ten years, and who had been nominated by their peers. This ensures that the contribution is truly of enduring value.

The Jury, which includes the one member of the FilKONtario convention committee plus Harold Stein at the Sat. night Filk at I-Con 27 in 2008 (Photo by Lenny Provenzano) one representative from each of the other filk convention committee members since the last FilKONtario, critically reviews the nominations. The jury makes selections based on the quality and detail of the information in the nominations and not on personal information they may have. Contributions to filk music and the filk community, of a lasting value, are important. Each honoree’s nomination is made into a Citation, and the new members of the Filk Hall of Fame are inducted at the FilKONtario banquet. There, members of the committee read the Citations (which are based on the nominations) and presented to the Inductees with their individual plaques. Their names are added to the Filk Hall of Fame cumulative plaque. A Hall of Fame Plaque is also handed out. They are also honored in song, at the Hall of Fame Concert the next afternoon.

Harold Stein was the closest to an official filk archivist, amassing and cataloging a collection of filk convention material, recorded performances (from national and international concerts to local “house filk” gatherings).  He make sure that performers had an opportunity to obtain copies of their performances and in his archivist role he worked to identify and preserve many recordings (from a variety of sources).  He was respectful of people’s wishes and intellectual property as noted on his website FloatingFilk.com — “Do Not Record requests are always honored.” He would not include any music or songs on CD’s (that were made available to other filkers) unless he had written permission to do so. Harold assisted in running sound at innumerable conferences and ran filk programming at I-Con 2008 and I-Con 2009, and was the Techno-Guest at ConCertino in 2009.  From as early as the mid-1990’s he was a volunteer at every convention he attended for the sound crew and for the art shows.

His mother, Phyllis Stein of Hauppauge, Long Island, (on being informed that Harold was being inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame) explained, “Harold had often said that there were so many others that he felt were so deserving of this honor and that he felt he had several years (and others to go first) to be recognized at the Filking Hall of Fame.  He also said repeatedly that he was making sure to withhold his cancer fighting time from everyone (those who knew were sworn to secrecy, so to speak) so that it would not affect his eligibility status — he was truly “the listener” and all of us (his parents and his cousin/”big brother” Larry Levy of Rockville Centre, Long Island) had planned to be in Ohio in October 2018 to see him receive his recognition at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest event as the “Listener Guest of Honor”.  He did not make it there in person but was certainly there in spirit and he made sure to hold on until his longtime friends — Merav, Lisa, Spencer, Josh, Mark, Sue, Batya and Alex, coming from Brooklyn to Boston to the Chicago areas— were able to visit him, so that he could see them during his last few weeks as well on the night before he died and to hear some of the music from that Ohio weekend.”

Hauppauge HS Teacher Arrested For Sexually Abusing Student

Mark KimesSuffolk County Police have arrested a Hauppauge High School teacher for sexually abusing a teenage boy at the teacher’s home in Moriches.

An 18-year-old male reported to detectives that when he was a 16-year-old student at Hauppauge High School, located at 500 Lincoln Boulevard, he was sexually abused by his chorus teacher, Mark Kimes, at the teacher’s home. Following an investigation, Seventh Squad detectives determined Kimes had inappropriate contact with the teen while serving as his teacher.

Kimes, 53, of  Moriches, was arrested at his home at approximately 6:45 p.m. on August 13 and charged him with Criminal Sex Act 1^st Degree and three counts of Endangering the Welfare of a Child. He was held overnight at the Seventh Precinct and was scheduled to be arraigned at First District Court in Central Islip on August 14.

The investigation is continuing. Anyone with information is asked to call the Seventh Squad at 631-852-8752 or anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS.

A criminal charge is an accusation. A defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Plum Island Weaponized Ticks Fact Or Fiction?

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“Pentagon May Have Released Weaponized Ticks That Helped Spread of Lyme Disease: Investigation Ordered” was the Newsweek headline last month. The article below it was about the U.S. House of Representatives having “quietly passed a bill requiring the Inspector General of the Department of Defense to conduct a review into whether the Pentagon experimented with ticks and other blood-sucking insects for use as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975.”

The article continued: “If the Inspector General finds that such experiments occurred, then, according to the bill, they must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the scope of the research and ‘whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experimental design’…potentially leading to the spread of diseases such as Lyme.”

The measure was introduced by Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, “who was ‘inspired’ by several books and articles claiming that the U.S. government had conducted research at facilities such as Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, for this purpose.” 

One of the books, published earlier this year, was “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” by Stanford University science writer Kris Newby. It includes interviews with Willy Burgdorfer who is credited with having discovered the pathogen that causes Lyme disease and earlier developed bioweapons for the Department of Defense. Said Mr. Smith on the House floor: “Those interviews combined with access to Dr. Burdorfer’s lab files suggest that he and other bioweapons specialists stuffed ticks with pathogens to cause severe disability, disease—even death—to potential enemies. With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States…Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true.”

Whether Lyme disease resulted from activities on Plum Island—a mile-and-a-half off Orient Point —is an issue I’ve pursued since tick-borne Lyme disease became widespread in Suffolk County. 

A 1982 book linking Plum Island and Lyme disease was “The Belarus Secret: The Nazi Connection in America” written by John Loftus, an attorney specializing in pursuing Nazis for the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice. He tells of former “Nazi germ warfare scientists” brought to the U.S. after World War II who “experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s…Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that ‘clandestine attacks on crops and animals’ took place at this time.”

Mr. Loftus points to “the hypothesis that the poison ticks are the source of the Lyme disease spirochete.” And adds: “Sooner or later the whole truth will come out, but probably not in my lifetime.”

In 1995, with Lyme disease epidemic in Suffolk, indeed in many areas of the U.S., a just-elected congressman from Suffolk, Michael Forbes, conducted what he told me would be a “raid” on Plum Island. He would go to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and demand information about tick weaponization there and a link to Lyme disease as related by Mr. Loftus. He took John McDonald, a Newsday investigative reporter, and me.

Representative Forbes confronted the center’s director, Dr. Harley Moon, who in intensive questioning took the position that “we don’t have any paperwork on that.”

Then in 2004 came another book, “Lab 257,” also by an attorney, Michael Carroll, formerly a law firm associate of the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Using documents he found in the National Archives, he exposes a full story about Plum Island. He details how Erich Traub during World War II was the “lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory” in the Baltic with a mission in World War II of poisoning cattle in the  Soviet Union. Traub and hundreds of other Nazi scientists were brought to the U.S. in the U.S. government’s “Project Paperclip” after the war. Traub was the “father” of the establishment of a biowarfare center on Plum Island, says “Lab 257,” with the same mission Insel Riems had—going after Soviet livestock now with the Cold War having begun.

“Lab 257” relates how “animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. They called him the Nazi scientist…they were inoculating these ticks.” Mr. Carroll, too, points to the possibility of Lyme disease emerging from activities on Plum Island with ticks. 

Will we know in our lifetimes a confirmed link between biowarfare and Lyme?

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.