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unremarkable graduate student, and neither did anyone else. In her manuscript, Klari vividly described the paradox of Johnny and Mariette: “They were a perfectly matched pair; gay and gregarious, intelligent and witty—frankly and openly enjoying all the luxuries they could easily afford—but, above all, both of them being intensely ambitious. It is a pity that these two, who remained deeply attached to each other many years beyond their divorce and their respective marriages—it is a pity that they could not overcome their difficulties and stay together. Even separately, they went a long way towards their clearly pinpointed goals, but heaven only knows what further heights they could have attained if they had only stuck it out together—and so speaks the second wife, the successor of Marietta.” 15
     
    As for my father, he wrote in a letter to his close friend, the Polish physicist Stan Ulam, “I am sorry that things went this way—but at least I am not particularly responsible for it. I hope that your optimism is well founded—but since happiness is an eminently empyrical [ sic ] proposition, the only thing I can do, is to wait and see.” 16 Actually, he did nothing of the sort; by the time the divorce was final, he was already writingintimate letters to Klara Dan, who became Mariette's successor. Klari, a noted beauty from the same Budapest Jewish haute bourgeoisie as my parents, hid a first-class brain behind her flirtatious manner. Though not yet thirty, she had already been married twice before, once to a dashing young man who was “an incurable gambler” and then to a banker eighteen years her senior, a “kind, gentle, attentive husband” who bored her to tears, she wrote. I have always felt certain that my father married her on the rebound, both to assuage the hurt caused by Mariette's desertion and to provide himself with a helpmeet who could manage the everyday details of life that eluded him.
     
    Klari was trapped in Budapest for much of 1938 by an inconsistency between Hungarian and American law that threatened to leave her stateless, and therefore unable to leave Hungary, as war appeared imminent. Tensions between the couple ran high as the distance between Princeton and Budapest appeared insurmountable. They were finally able to marry and leave Europe together just before war broke out. But her profound insecurity and the constant demands for expressions of devotion that his letters were trying to respond to would haunt their relationship throughout their marriage. In one, he pleads, “Darling, we will win…and I will make you very, very, very happy! It will be a happy marriage,…and I will be able to reconquer you.” 17 In another he tries to reassure her and apologize at the same time: “You are frightened of life that has maltreated you,…you are terrified even of the breeze because you sense the storm behind it…I seared you, I bullied you, I hurt you!” 18 And, finally, his cry to her: “Please, please, give me a bit of faith…or at least ‘benevolent neutrality.’” 19
     
    My father's lifelong desire to impose order and rationality on an inherently disorderly and irrational world was reflected in many of his handwritten letters to family and close friends. It was also, in the view of science historian Robert Leonard, one of the major motivators of von Neumann's return, after more than a decade, to the development of the theory of games. After publishing the paper containing the central tenet of game theory, the minimax theorem, in 1928, he had dropped the subject entirely until he began to discuss jointly developing the theory and its applications to economics with his friend the Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern in 1940. Their collaboration over numerous breakfastsat the gentlemen-only Nassau Club in Princeton during the years 1940–43, while my father was deeply involved in military consulting and the development of the atomic bomb, culminated in the publication of the