The Big One : Checking In With the Three Living American Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize

On a warm afternoon in the late summer of 1963, more than 200,000 people from throughout the United States marched to the base of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. One of them, Martin Luther King Jr., had a dream.

“We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one,” he said in the dramatic cadence of his Southern Baptist heritage. “We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi can’t vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

King’s appeal for human dignity carried far beyond our borders. And on Oct. 14, 1964, 21 years ago Monday, the 35-year-old preacher from Atlanta who believed that nonviolence was the avenue to black equality became the youngest man ever to receive the world’s highest honor: the Nobel Peace Prize.

The search for peace has been an elusive quest. Though a century seldom passes without some attempt to assure tranquility, violence usually prevails. Following World War I, diplomats negotiated numerous pacts “outlawing” war in perpetuity. That the guarantees fell short of the goal was not lost on skeptics such as Thomas Hardy, who dismissed the much-touted Locarno Treaty, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of its seven European signatories, in the doggerel “Christmas, 1924”:

“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it

and pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We’ve got as far as poison gas.

The dichotomy between the actions of man and his professed aspirations was embodied in Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and blasting gelatin. Nobel spent most of his life selling arms and explosives. His life changed in 1888, however, when his brother Ludwig died and a French newspaper, confusing the two, published Alfred’s obituary beneath the headline: “The Merchant of Death.”

So aghast was Nobel at the prospect of carrying that moniker through eternity that he vowed to change his image by rewriting his will. Nobel’s new legacy would be a series of prizes, funded by the interest earned on his $9-million estate, that each year would reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefits on mankind in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace.”

Blessed with the wisdom that occasionally attends the 11th hour of one’s life, Nobel realized that progress toward peace would be more difficult to measure than scientific advancement. To insure against its diminished value, he ordered that the Peace Prize should be awarded only when justified, and then only by Norwegians, since they among all Europeans--even his fellow Swedes, who were charged with administering the other four prizes--had proved the most adept at avoiding armed conflict.

Over the past 84 years, 70 persons have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Sixteen have been Americans, and of that number three--chemist Linus Pauling, plant geneticist Norman E. Borlaug and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--are still living.

In retrospect, some of America’s Peace Prize winners seem inappropriate. Theodore Roosevelt, most often remembered as a bellicose President who prided himself on strategic application of “the big stick,” was honored for his role in negotiating an end to the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. President Woodrow Wilson received a Nobel in 1919 for his part in creating the League of Nations--an ultimately ineffectual organization that was almost immediately dismissed as “a declaration of love without the promise of marriage” by German Adm. Alfred Von Tirpitz. But easily the most controversial Nobel decision occurred in 1973 when U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded a $160,000 Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Tho immediately declined the award; Kissinger accepted, although the war was still being fought and had never been officially declared.

Kissinger’s reaction to the Nobel seemed ambivalent. He didn’t travel to Oslo to accept the award. He donated his prize money to a fund for the education of children of servicemen killed in Vietnam. Following the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, he even tried to return the prize. “There’s no doubt the Nobel is the highest and most satisfying award a political figure active in the field of foreign policy can achieve,” Kissinger says. “In my particular case the subsequent circumstances were rather tragic, and that obviously has to affect my recollection of it.”

Writing in his memoirs of the award to Tho, Kissinger expressed surprise that “a representative of a country that had invaded all neighboring countries could win a peace prize for making a cease-fire that even then it was violating in every provision.” Today, he believes that the legacy of Watergate and a divided Congress were the main factors contributing to the U.S. defeat.

“When you make a peace agreement, you have to assume the United States will enforce its side of the terms, because otherwise you’re just surrendering,” Kissinger says. “It never occurred to us that Congress would legislate a prohibition against enforcing the agreement, or that it would cut aid from $2 billion in the first year (1972) to $750 million three years later. Congress did both of these things, so I was very gloomy, and when Le Duc Tho rejected his award it was a harbinger of things to come.”

In reality, the Nobel was Kissinger’s salvation. It transformed the professor who presided over the loss of Indochina into a statesman who ended the Vietnam War. Suddenly, the road out of Washington did not have to lead back to Harvard.

For Kissinger, the transition from public to private life was relatively painless. In addition to having intelligence and connections, he knew where to find power and how to use it. And his reputation, unlike that of some former colleagues, was untarnished by Watergate.

Those qualities--and others--have made him a favorite of corporate America. He is an outside director of American Express, an international adviser to Chase Manhattan Bank, a consultant for ABC News and for the investment-banking firm of Goldman, Sachs, and a member of the boards of directors of 20th Century Fox and the Trust Company of the West, a privately held Los Angeles-based trust firm specializing in fiduciary asset management.

When not giving speeches for a fee that can reach $20,000, Kissinger might be at the Aspen Institute or his Georgetown University office. But he’s usually found at Kissinger Associates, the Park Avenue consulting firm he formed in 1982 with retired Air Force general and former National Security Council adviser Brent Scowcroft. High above Manhattan, in an office decorated with autographed pictures of King Hussein, Nelson Rockefeller, former President Ford and Pope John Paul II, Kissinger insists that his company does not peddle influence or arrange introductions. He is less specific about most everything else.

“We never discuss our clients,” he says. Neither will he provide a sample of the political and economic forecasts he sells. “We do it orally; we prefer not to do paper.”

Secrecy is part of the service at Kissinger Associates. According to the magazine Manhattan, inc., this discretion has attracted some 25 clients, about a third of them foreign multinational corporations, that on average pay $200,000 a year for Kissinger’s personalized assessments.

At 62, Kissinger assesses the world in much the same way he did from the West Wing of the White House. “Weapons today are capable of destroying humanity, but almost all the leaders in the world are preoccupied with getting through the next year or two of their incumbency,” he says. “This disproportion between the power of weapons and the foresight of governments is a great problem.”

For California chemist Linus Pauling, life would have little meaning “if I did not continue to use the moral authority of the prize to fight for world peace and what I think is right.”

Pauling is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel prizes, and at 84 he still makes a formidable foe. In his early battles, he confronted the vast unknowns of chemistry. His understanding of X-ray crystallography allowed scientists to chart the movement of atoms within a molecule; he was one of the first to apply the method of wave mechanics to the chemical bonding of molecules. His qualitative approach broadened the understanding of how various complex substances are formed and later led to the development of plastics, synthetic fibers and many new drugs.

In 1942, he created antibodies--in the serum globulins of human blood--that successfully combated germ viruses. These investigations hinted of genius. A 1954 Nobel Prize for chemistry acknowledged it.

Pauling’s scientific accomplishments made him a public figure at the height of the Cold War. In 1957, he clashed with Sen. Joseph McCarthy over a petition, subsequently signed by 11,021 scientists, urging a multilateral freeze of nuclear bomb testing. He picketed the Kennedy White House hours before he was invited to dinner. His arguments against further atomic-weapons testing became a crusade, and on Oct. 10, 1963, the announcement that Pauling had won the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize coincided with the implementation of a partial nuclear test ban.

“Alfred Nobel wanted to invent ‘a substance or a machine with such terrible power of mass destruction that war would thereby be made impossible forever,’ ” Pauling said in accepting the prize. “Thousands of these super-bombs have now been fabricated; and today . . . if they were to be used in a war, hundreds of millions of people would be killed, and civilization itself might not survive the catastrophe. The machines envisaged by Nobel have come into existence, and war has been made impossible forever.”

For Pauling, a self-proclaimed liberal, winning the Peace Prize meant vindication.

“The Nobel Prize made working for peace respectable,” he says with a twist of the dangling locks that fringe his beret. “Its effect was not so much on me and my actions but on my reputation with the American people, who realize that what I say is in the interests of the United States and not just the Soviet Union.”

Today, Pauling’s personal wars are fought on two fronts. At his Institute of Science and Medicine in Menlo Park, Calif., he sometimes is referred to as “The Old Man and the C” because of his belief that Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, can prevent a wide range of maladies from cancer to the common cold. Unfortunately, his quest for conclusive evidence has been as futile as Santiago’s search for fish in the Hemingway novel.

At his rustic, Big Sur split-level home overlooking the Pacific, his thoughts can meander. It’s here, amid the clutter of breakfast dishes and stacks of scientific journals, that he wrote “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” and it’s from here that he carries on his campaign against what he perceives as American belligerency overseas.

Pauling champions the Sandinistas and holds the Lenin Peace Prize. When a Norwegian freighter laden with food and medical supplies ran the Contra blockade of Nicaragua last year, he stood at the forecastle when the ship pulled into the besieged Pacific coast port of Corinto.

Though he believes a nuclear balance makes war unlikely, Pauling thinks that true world peace will never be attained until Moscow and Washington learn to coexist in the same world.

“The gross national product of the Soviet Union is half of ours, which makes the burden of keeping up with us twice as heavy,” he says. “We need to stop wasting money on arms and improve the standard of living on both sides.”

For plant geneticist Norman Borlaug, 71, an adequate standard of living begins with a full stomach. In 1970, he received the Peace Prize for developing the high-yield cereal grains that eliminated hunger on Taiwan, boosted wheat production throughout the Asian subcontinent and allowed South Vietnam’s delta to feed itself in the midst of war.

The political implications of Borlaug’s decades of research are undeniable. If armed communist revolt was one attempt to end poverty, increased food production could be another. The prolific new varietals, declared one former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, were ammunition for a “Green Revolution.”

The key to the Green Revolution, as Borlaug never tires of explaining with near-missionary zeal, is not simply an improved seed but rather a scientifically balanced “production package” in which seed, water, fertilizer and intensive care are applied in measured amounts. “The high-yielding varietals are only the catalyst,” he explains. “They have the genetic potential, but they’ll always need the basic necessities.

“I tell these leaders of developing countries that an ability to grow food is only part of the solution to hunger. Their governments have to ensure that fertilizer is available at the right time; that farmers have credit at planting time that they can pay back at the harvest, and that once the crop is in, the grower receives a fair world price.”

If dictators, commissars and sultans all listen to Borlaug, it’s because his techniques work. The new strains of wheat, corn and rice he began developing in 1944 had increased worldwide harvests fourfold by the time he won the Nobel in 1970. Since then, his work in many developing countries has reduced the specter of famine.

“At the start of the Green Revolution in the mid-’60s, India produced 11 million metric tons of grain a year,” Borlaug says. “This year India will produce 46 million tons. The additional production has put an extra $5 billion into the hands of the small farmers of that country. It also has enabled India to put 30 million tons of grain in storage.”

The problem the world now faces, he says, is feeding its expanding population. “Every year there are 84 million more people on this earth. Just to feed those present now requires a highway of grain that goes around the Equator, about 60 feet wide and 8 feet deep. Each year we have to rebuild that highway, plus construct another highway of grain of similar dimensions at the rate of 800 miles a year, just to maintain the status quo in food production.

“To keep food production in pace with population growth, we’re bringing an additional 22 million acres under cultivation each year, but many countries have no more land to clear and plow.”

Working out of Mexico City, where he is a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Borlaug spends most of his time traveling around the world’s parched fields and isolated valleys on behalf of the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation or the Food and Agriculture Organization. He is seldom found in a city, believing it is necessary to stay in the trenches of the Green Revolution and “talk to plants . . . I’m skeptical of reports with a lot of numbers written by scientists who didn’t spend a lot of time in the fields,” he says.

Since leaving the United States more than four decades ago, Borlaug has trained hundreds of agronomists throughout the developing world. They call themselves Borlaug’s apostles, and together with their mentor they have, since 1960, doubled the world output of wheat and other cereals. India, once food-deficient, now exports grain. Since 1974, cereal production is up 60% in India, 40% in China and 300% in Thailand. Only in Africa, where governments persist in subsidizing cities by keeping food prices artificially low, has the production package failed to produce bounty.

Though high-yield cereal grains have allowed a reprieve from the specter of global famine and revolution, Borlaug still worries about the future--usually once a year when he returns to the United States to assume temporary duties as professor of International Agriculture at Texas A & M University. “It frightens me to see the complacency of the American people with respect to food. It upsets me, when you’ve lived and worked around misery, to return here and listen to people who have never had an empty stomach talking about the morality of birth control. Only an affluent country that’s never known hunger could tolerate persons who go around dynamiting family-planning centers. If I could live my life over again, I’d start talking earlier about the problem of overpopulation.”

Borlaug has seen the power of the prize at work. “When I received the prize, there were two international research institutes for agriculture,” Borlaug says. “Their combined budgets were equal to the cost of 2 1/2 Phantom jet fighters. Today, there are 13 institutes around the world that have $184 million in funding. Agricultural science was always the ugly duckling--until the Nobel Prize gave it prestige.”