America's use of the atomic bomb to end World War II remains controversial in some quarters. But controversy also surrounds the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project.
Most of the secondary accounts of the operation to build the bomb portray Gen. Leslie Groves as a small-minded Army bureaucrat. But Stanley Goldberg, an independent scholar who is writing a biography of Groves, found that he was the perfect candidate to carry out that monumental task.
Mr. Goldberg stumbled onto his current subject of interest in 1985 when he coordinated an exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Yet his first exposure to the topic occurred decades earlier. As a boy of 11, he read newspaper reports and Junior Scholastic articles about the Manhattan Project just after the bomb was dropped in 1945. Mr. Goldberg became fascinated with science and, much later, received a B.S. in physics.
Mr. Goldberg, however, slipped off the path to a career in science.
"I don't think I had the intuition," Mr. Goldberg admits. Instead of sticking with physics in graduate school, he received his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science at Harvard. Since then, he has spent much of his life trying to understand the role science plays in public policy and teaching science to nonscientists.
Mr. Goldberg did much of his research at the Library and the National Archives.
Among the Library materials Mr. Goldberg has used to write his book on Groves are the personal papers of J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and I.I. Rabi, a professor of physics at Columbia University. He said the papers are crucial for understanding the "sense of the times" during World War II. He also found some spectacular photographs of Groves and the Manhattan Project in the Library's archives.
Until then, Mr. Goldberg had based his view of Groves on secondary accounts that he was a "bumbling redneck who was just worried about procedure. A lot of people disliked him intensely," Mr. Goldberg said.
Indeed, the most famous men of the Manhattan Project -- Enrico Fermi and Eugene Wigner, for example -- regarded Groves as little more than a too-powerful bureaucrat who was getting in their way.
But Mr. Goldberg contends that Groves "was a genius at putting large organizations together."
Groves demonstrated this during the early 1940s when he was put in charge of all Army construction. He judiciously doled out $600 million a month in contracts and moved the United States into a position of high military readiness for World War II.
Among his construction projects was the Pentagon. "That was probably the last government building that was completed in time and under budget," Mr. Goldberg says.
Groves's organizational skills led senior officials in FDR's administration to put him in charge of the top-secret Manhattan Project. At its peak, the project (1942-1945) employed 160,000 people in 39 states and Canada, from labs at Columbia University to a uranium extraction plant in Oakridge, Tenn., to uranium processing facilities at Hanford, Wash. Groves begged, intimidated and used any means necessary to get the necessary materials and personnel for the project.
Mr. Goldberg recounted just one of many examples of Groves's exploits. On his first day on the job, Groves walked into the War Mobilization Board and demanded that the Manhattan Project's priority rating be upgraded from AA3 to AAA, the highest priority. Donald Nelson, then head of the War Mobilization Board, laughed and started to walk away from Groves.
"I guess I'll have to tell the president of the United States that the head of the War Mobilization Board doesn't agree with him that this is the most important project of the war," Groves said. Nelson stopped in his tracks and Groves dictated a letter to Nelson, giving the Manhattan Project AAA priority status.
Groves divided up the seemingly infinite tasks into digestible pieces and reassembled them into a coherent whole, which allowed the United States to build the bomb in less than three years (from the fall of 1942 to the summer of 1945).
Groves was also clever at keeping secrets. The president, Congress and even Groves's wife were kept in the dark. Only Groves and his secretary, Gene O'Leary, knew the scope of the Manhattan Project.
Such insights will be found in Goldberg's book, Fighting to Build the Bomb: The Private Wars of Leslie Groves, due out at the end of the year and published by Steerforth.
Mr. Goldberg also relies on another resource at the Library -- other scholars.
"We talk to each other about our work," Mr. Goldberg says. "It's a very important benefit; you compare notes on what it's like to invent a person," he says, referring to how biographers attempt to understand the motivations and inner workings of their subjects.
