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and ultimately successfully for his young protégé's appointment as one of the founding five professors there.
     
    Mrs. Veblen, a rather formidable grande dame with solid British tweeds and a clipped English accent to match the formality of her name, was herself childless, but she recommended that my mother put herself in the care of her own obstetrician-gynecologist, an elegant and expensive Manhattan physician with his own private hospital on Madison Avenue. And so it was that, when she went into labor, my mother was driven to New York, sitting on a pile of towels, to give birth at The Harbor, the name that appears on my birth certificate. By the time my birthplace was discovered to have been operating as an abortion mill and was permanently closed down, my mother, divorced and remarried and living in Washington, DC, with her new husband, was no longer under Elizabeth Veblen's tutelage and well on her way to becoming a grande dame in her own right.
     
    My own globetrotting in the wake of my peripatetic parents began early. I was born on March 6, 1935; my US passport, issued on April 8 of that year (I had to have my own because the processing of my parents' applications for US citizenship had not yet been completed), bears a photograph of a virtually bald, pug-nosed infant, pudgy hands clasped in the classical manner of newborns. Inside are the entry stamps of Hungary, Austria, Germany, and France, dated from 1935 to 1938. During those first three years of my life I crossed the Atlantic eight times, making the annual round trip in the first-class cabins of such luxury ocean liners as the Queen Mary and the Normandie. Both of these ships, the truequeens of their day, came to unworthy ends. The Queen Mary became a tourist attraction in Long Beach, California, subjected to many changes of ownership and at least one bankruptcy. The Normandie , caught in New York Harbor when war broke out in Europe, was being converted into an American troopship when she caught fire, sank, and was ultimately scrapped.
     
    Apparently my career as an enfant terrible also began early. According to my mother, when a ship's steward attempted to separate my one-year-old self from my parents to take me off to the ship's nursery, I bit him, hard. When I reappeared the next summer, a year older and with more teeth, he was heard to mutter, “Oh no, not her again.”
     
    During these years, the clouds were darkening, both over Europe and over my parents' marriage. As Hitler consolidated his position in Germany and then embarked on his planned European expansion with the annexation of Austria in 1938, my father's letters, particularly those to his close friend the Hungarian physicist Rudolf Ortvay, grew increasingly pessimistic. “I don't believe that the catastrophe will be avoidable,” 8 he wrote in 1938 and added, presciently, “That the U.S.A. will end up again intervening on the side of England (when an English victory is not achievable otherwise) I find indubitable.” 9 A year later he wrote, “It is, for instance, a total misunderstanding of the U.S.A. to believe that it intervened in the World War [World War I] from such (imperialist) motives…I admit that the USA could be imperialist. I would not be surprised if in 20 years it would become so. But today it is not yet.” 10
     
    This conviction that the United States alone could save the otherwise doomed European civilization from totalitarianism, whether the threat came from the right or the left, and avert the ushering in of a new Dark Ages stayed with my father throughout his life. Reinforced by the events of World War II and the Cold War that followed, it was a major motivation, along with a lively personal ambition, for his deep involvement in military matters. It also underlay his extremely hard-line ideas on US policy toward the Soviet Union, which included the possibility of preventive war on the latter. He made his feelings crystal clear in an interview with Life magazine: “If