The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(25)

By late 1956, Amos was not merely a platoon commander but a recipient of one of the Israeli army’s highest awards for bravery. During a training exercise in front of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, one of his soldiers was assigned to clear a barbed wire fence with a bangalore torpedo. From the moment he pulled the string to activate the fuse, the solider had twenty seconds to run for cover. The soldier pushed the torpedo under the fence, yanked the string, fainted, and collapsed on top of the explosive. Amos’s commanding officer shouted for everyone to stay put—and leave the unconscious soldier to die. Amos ignored him and sprinted from behind the wall that served as cover for his unit, grabbed the soldier, picked him up, hauled him ten yards, tossed him on the ground, and threw himself on top of him. The shrapnel from the explosion remained in Amos for the rest of his life. The Israeli army did not bestow honors for bravery lightly. As he handed Amos his award, Moshe Dayan, who had watched the entire episode, said, “You did a very stupid and brave thing and you won’t get away with it again.”

Occasionally, people who watched Amos in action sensed that he was more afraid of being thought unmanly than he was actually brave. “He was always very gung ho,” recalled Uri Shamir. “I thought it was maybe compensation for being thin and weak and pale.” At some point it didn’t matter: He compelled himself to be brave until bravery became a habit. And as his time in the army came to an end he clearly sensed a change in himself. “I cannot rid myself of the feeling that you would almost not know me today,” Amos wrote to his sister. “Letters cannot convey the drastic changes of a boy in an army uniform that you will meet. He will be very different from the young boy in khaki shorts that you left at the airport five years ago.”

Apart from that short note, Amos seldom mentioned his army experiences, in print or conversation, unless it was to tell a funny or curious story—how, for instance, during the Sinai campaign, his battalion captured a train of Egyptian fighting camels. Amos had never ridden a camel, but when the military operation ended, he won the competition to ride the lead camel home. He got seasick after fifteen minutes and spent the next six days walking the caravan across the Sinai.

Or how his soldiers, even in combat, refused to wear their helmets, claiming that the weather was too hot for them and “if a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway.” (To which Amos said, “What about all those bullets addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern’?”) More typically Amos’s stories began with some offhand observation of the world around him. “Almost always when he encountered you he would start the conversation with ‘Did I tell you this story?’” recalls Samuel Sattath, an Israeli mathematician. “But the stories were not about him. He would say, for example, ‘You know, in an Israeli university meeting, everyone jumps in to speak, because they think someone else might be about to say what they want to say. And in an American university faculty meeting, everyone is quiet, because they think someone else will think to say what they want to say . . .’” And he’d be off on a disquisition on the differences between Americans and Israelis—how Americans believed tomorrow will be better than today, while Israelis were sure tomorrow would be worse; how American kids always came to class prepared, while Israeli kids never did the reading, but it was Israeli kids who always had the bold idea, and so on.

To those who knew Amos best, Amos’s stories were just an excuse to enjoy Amos. “People who knew Amos could talk of nothing else,” as one Israeli woman, a friend of long standing, put it. “There was nothing we liked to do more than to get together and talk about him, over and over and over.” There were—for starters—the stories about the funny things Amos had said, usually directed at people whom he found full of themselves. He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.” He’d heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.” Once, after Amos gave a talk, an English statistician had approached him. “I don’t usually like Jews but I like you,” the statistician said. Amos replied, “I usually like Englishmen but I don’t like you.”

The effect on others of whatever Amos said only led to even more stories about Amos. There was—to take just one example—the time that Tel Aviv University threw a party for a physicist who had just won the Wolf Prize. It was the discipline’s second-highest honor, and its winners more often than not went on to win the Nobel. Most of the leading physicists in the country came to the party, but somehow the prizewinner ended up in the corner with Amos—who had recently taken an interest in black holes. The next day the prizewinner called his hosts to ask, “Who was that physicist I was talking to? He never told me his name.” After some confusing back-and-forth, his hosts figured out that the man meant Amos, and they told him that Amos wasn’t a physicist but a psychologist. “It’s not possible,” the physicist said, “he was the smartest of all the physicists.”

The Princeton philosopher Avishai Margalit said, “No matter what the topic was, the first thing Amos thought was in the top 10 percent. This was such a striking ability. The clarity and depth of his first reaction to any problem—any intellectual problem—was something mind-boggling. It was as if he was right away in the middle of any discussion.” Irv Biederman, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, said, “Physically he was unremarkable. In a room full of thirty people he’d be the last one you’d notice. And then he’d start to talk. Everyone who ever met him thought he was the smartest person they had ever met.” The University of Michigan psychologist Dick Nisbett, after he’d met Amos, designed a one-line intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are. “He would walk into a room,” recalled his close friend and collaborator Varda Liberman, a mathematician. “He didn’t look special. And the way he dressed said nothing. He’d sit there quietly. And then he would open his mouth and speak. And in no time he became the light that all the butterflies fly to; and in no time everyone would look up to him wanting to hear what he would say.”