World: The Loner

Marvin William Makinen was a bright boy. The son of a laboratory technician, he grew up in Ashburnham, Mass., where his father had a job in a paper mill, showed an early precocity in mathematics, won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Last year he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study as an exchange student at West Berlin's Free University. One of his professors characterized the 22-year-old Makinen as "the most serious and hard-working young American we have seen in Berlin in a long time." Makinen spoke fluent German and Finnish (which he had learned from his family), took...