When Stanislaw Ulam arrived in Princeton in 1935 he found von Neumann comfortably ensconced in a “large and impressive house. A black servant let me in.” The von Neumanns gave two or three parties a week. “These were not completely carefree,” Ulam notes; “the shadow of coming world events pervaded the social atmosphere.”730 Ulam’s own enthusiasm for America, formulated a few years later when he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard, was tempered with a criticism of the extreme weather: “I used to tell my friends that the United States was like the little child in a fairy tale, at whose birth all the
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