According to the New York Times, the scientist Richard Garwin has died. Garwin, as his biographer wrote, was “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” At the age 0f 23, he built the H-bomb. He advised every president from Eisenhower to, who knows, probably Biden, on everything from nuclear deterrence to the MX Missile to arms control and more. Enrico Fermi said that he was “the only true genius I have ever met.”

As it happens, I met him, too.

It was the summer of 1985. I had just graduated high school and gotten a scholarship for college from IBM, where my dad worked. As part of my scholarship, I had the option of taking summer jobs with the company, and I elected to work for Garwin, who worked at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, not far from where I grew up.

Despite his being someone no one had ever heard of, I had heard of him. I think I had read a profile of him in Esquire. I was interested in national security issues, and Garwin seemed like my kind of guy. He approached political issues as a scientist, dispassionately, technocratically, non-ideologically. Or so I thought. That’s who I was at the time: interested in politics, distrustful of ideologues. Without realizing that that, in itself, was an ideological position.

I was thrilled to get the job. For comparison’s sake, the following summer, I worked in a communications office at IBM, and that was my last summer at IBM. Garwin’s office felt like an intellectual paradise. He had a bank of filing cabinets filled with his scholarly papers, his many articles and interviews with newspapers and magazines, his correspondence with every important scientist and quite a few politicians and government officials.

When I wasn’t doing actual work in the office, I read everything I could. A lot of it I couldn’t understand; Garwin was a scientist, and I was, and am, anything but. But a fair amount of it, I did understand. Garwin was part of a generation of scientist-activists who spoke out, and were listened to, on the major issues of war and peace. When he was younger, he ran around with Oppenheimer, Fermi, and that crowd. In the 1980s, he was part of a group that included Hans Bethe, the Nobel Prize Laureate, and the two of them led the charge against Reagan’s harebrained Star Wars scheme.

I immersed myself in all of it. I felt like I was near the action. Certainly near the action of magazine journalism and political debate. Out of my work that summer, I got my first publication: a self-important letter to The New Republic. I also got some further work from Garwin, whose connection landed me a position as a researcher for two similarly minded scientist-activists at Princeton, where I went to college. That job helped pay the bills and gave me a further taste for research and writing and journalism.

But that world of Garwin also limited me in certain ways. When I was a sophomore, I applied for another scholarship, and in my application, I had emphasized my interest in arms control and national security. As part of the process, I had to be interviewed by three members of the faculty. One of the professors who interviewed me was a very young John Dilulio, the conservative political scientist, who would go on to contribute words like “superpredator” to our national discourse. Dilulio had been a student of James Q. Wilson of “broken windows” fame, and he was on the rise in academia and politics.

In the interview, Dilulio read to me a passage from the memoirs of Admiral Hyman Rickover, another big shot in the national security world, who had said something to the effect that maybe a nuclear war would be a good thing; it would give humanity a chance to start over and get things right. (I’m going on memory here, so I may be misconstruing the statement.) I had been going on and on in the interview, in my vague attempt to speak technocratic, about nuclear war this, arms control that. And Dilulio just cut through the bullshit to ask me to think in more fundamental and foundational terms about the reality and ethics of thermonuclear war. I hadn’t a clue how to answer him, so caught up was I in mastering the lingo of throw weights and such. I didn’t get the scholarship, but it was an invaluable experience in the limits of expertise. Or pseudo-expertise, in my case.

I still look back on my adolescent self and wonder what was going on in my mind that led me to work for Garwin that summer and aspire to wonk journalism. As best I can gather, it was a combination of the times—being skeptical and dispassionate and moderate seemed grown up and mature—and my personality. I was, in many ways, a born ideologue, in the best sense of that word. I lived for ideas, argument, and somehow or another, eschewing ideology fit the profile of an ideologue in an allegedly non-ideological time.

I often think about my various summer and other jobs that I took between 1981, when I was in ninth grade, and 1999, when I began teaching at Brooklyn College. I worked as a waiter, a short-order cook (I had an accident with a meat slicer that got me some workmen’s comp money), a busboy, a secretary, a word processor, a receptionist, a librarian, a bartender (in England; that was fun), a tutor, a piano teacher, a sales clerk, a cashier, a reporter, and many, many jobs as a research assistant of one kind or another. Garwin was the first time I got paid to do something that seemed vaguely intellectual and journalistic.

He wasn’t a warm or friendly boss; in fact, he was intimidating and forbidding. He was also exacting. Everything in his office had to be done just so. He used to get annoyed with one of the secretaries who refused to put multiple reams of paper into the photocopier. (Garwin had more paper than the Library of Congress.) The secretary claimed that if you put too much paper into the machine, it would jam. Garwin insisted that wasn’t true, that hers was just an old wives’ tale. We had to fill the tray up to the very top with as much paper as possible. The more, the better. I can still hear him kvelling about those reams of paper; it reminded me of Ricardo Montalban enthusing about the rich Corinthian leather in those old Chrysler LeBaron commercials. Garwin was positively passionate on the subject—and incensed that anyone would think otherwise, including the people who had to use the machine every day.

I mostly wanted to talk to him about the larger political issues he was involved in. Understandably, he was more interested in my doing the filing and whatever else it was that he had hired me to do that summer. A few times he let me copy edit his letters, though he got irritated with my edits. Even at the age of 17, I was a better writer than he was, and I’m kind of amazed that I had the chutzpah to argue with him about that. After all, this was the guy who had built the H-bomb, knew Edward Teller, and was leading the charge against Reagan. Needless to say, he prevailed.

What I remember most about that summer was the four of us who worked in Garwin’s office. I don’t want to name names. There was the senior secretary, an older white woman, with what sounded like a vaguely southern accent, who loved to gossip and speculate about the sex lives of the scientists who worked at the Watson Center (sometimes, I don’t think she was speculating; she had the goods). There was the young South Asian computer programmer, working a summer job while he was home from college, who was kind of an older brother to me, who had no brothers at all. And there was the second secretary, a Latina woman who provided a reality check whenever we got too loud in our laughter, which was all the time. It’s still odd to me that the four of us ended up together that summer of 1985, but we loved each other’s company and would sometimes go out after work together.

We kept up with each other, until we didn’t, as so often happens with these things. But I can still picture the four of us, laughing our heads off at Garwin’s quirks and demands, and making a summer’s work go by just a little more quickly.