Eleanor and Franklin (154 page)

The Communist drive for unity and harmony on the home front stopped short, however, of those whom Browder called “Trotskyites” and who, in fact, included all liberal and labor leaders who were actively anti-Communist. His messages via Miss Adams were filled with warnings—against James Loeb of the Union for Democratic Action, against Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, against labor leaders like Reuther, Dubinsky, and Alex Rose. There was a long attack on James Carey, secretary of the CIO, who was denounced as “a Catholic ending in the same camp with the Trotskyites out of his bitter natural hate of the Communists.” Eleanor rarely commented on the contents of the Adams letters, but Carey was a personal friend. She had given the letter to the president, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Miss Adams, “but I know you are wrong about Mr. Carey.”

“I am glad to be wrong about Mr. Carey,” Miss Adams wrote mollifyingly. “The thing that upset me was the Town Hall debate in which he disputed the section of the President's message referring to the labor draft.” Eleanor saw no perfidy in Carey's opposition to a labor draft. “Any official of the C.I.O. must be against a Universal Draft because his constituency is,” she replied, “but that does not mean he is opposed to the President.” When Browder, through Miss Adams, attacked the
Nation
, the
New Republic
, the
New Leader
, and “the special Trotskyite section of
PM
headed by Wechsler” for being unduly critical of the president, Eleanor defended Wechsler and the liberal weeklies. “He has a good mind and is honest,” and the publications that Browder has criticized “make more sense to me than your confusing Trotskyite talk.”

The president found Browder's all-out support helpful, but he was content to let the correspondence be handled by his wife. It was Browder's impression that the president felt more kindly toward him than Mrs. Roosevelt, although it was Mrs. Roosevelt who wrote the attorney general and the commissioner of immigration in 1944 when a deportation order was issued against Browder's Russian-born wife Irene. “I think she did so because the President asked her to,” said Browder. “She was not sympathetic either to me or to my wife.” The
president, as Browder had correctly surmised, was a realistic politician, and whatever served the purposes of his policy he was prepared to use. Mrs. Roosevelt, the moralist, found it more difficult.

Just as Baruch, Hopkins, and Reuther all felt it was important to have Eleanor on their side in the conflict that was taking shape over reconversion policies, so the more socially minded nuclear scientists were coming to her with their anxieties about the uses of atomic energy. She had first learned about this most closely guarded secret of war in July, 1943, from a young physicist working on the A-bomb project. “He was convincing & rather frightening & we must have peace in the future” was her reaction to her meeting with the young man in a letter that she wrote afterward in which she did not indicate what it was that had frightened her.
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Scientist Irving S. Lowen was employed at the Metallurgical Laboratory, the Chicago phase of the Manhattan Project, which had among its workers Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner. The last two had persuaded Einstein to send the letter to Roosevelt that led to the launching of the atomic project, and it was under Fermi's leadership that the first chain reaction had been achieved. The MetLab scientists were among the most creative at work in the Manhattan district and were also the ones most concerned with the political and social implications of this new force that they were freeing for man to use. In 1943 their anxiety centered on the fear that the Nazis might develop the bomb first. A message had reached them from a German scientist named Fritz Houtermans. “Hurry up—we're on the track” was the substance of his warning to his colleagues. The MetLab scientists felt that the military men in charge of the project thought of it as a weapon for the next war and did not grasp the need for speed. They were equally sure that the Army's bringing in of the duPont Corporation for the construction of the reactors at Oak Ridge and Hanford meant a nine-month “learning period” delay. The costly preparations that duPont set about making seemed, the scientists felt, to betoken the corporation's interest in obtaining exclusive postwar control of this new energy source.

By the summer of 1943 they were sufficiently exercised over these matters (Arthur H. Compton, the director of MetLab, later wrote that he had had a “near rebellion” on his hands) to decide to go out of channels and try to reach the president directly—and Mrs. Roosevelt seemed the best way to do that. Lowen, an associate of Wigner's, thought he could get an introduction from an NYU colleague,
Professor Clyde Eagleton, and volunteered to go to her not as a representative of the worried scientists, but on his own.

Eleanor saw Lowen at her Washington Square apartment in late July and immediately called the president to urge him to see the scientist. The president proposed that he talk with Dr. Vannevar Bush and Dr. James Conant, director and deputy director, respectively, of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. “Dearest Franklin,” Eleanor wrote afterward, typing out the letter herself:

Mr. Irving S. Lowen, the man whom I telephoned about will be in Washington tomorrow.

Mr. Lowen says that Dr. Bush and Dr. Conant would be of absolutely no use because they have been so close to the project that they have perhaps lost the sense of urgency which these younger men have.

There is they believe, a chance that a very brilliant man who is working on this in Germany may have been able to develop it to the point of usefulness. The Germans are desperate and would use this if they have it ready. It is imperative they feel that we proceed quickly to perfecting it and these young scientists believe that they are already two years behind all that they might have accomplished if they had been allowed to progress.

They want an investigation by an impartial outsider who can see the possibilities of what might happen, but who is not a scientist, a man of judicial temperament who will weigh the possibilities.

Mr. Lowen thinks you might want to speak to some of the other men

Professor H. C. Urey, Columbia

Professor Wigner

Professor Szilard

Professor Fermi

Professor Oppenheimer

Dr. Gale Young

Professor A. H. Compton . . .
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“I hope you see Lowen. He impresses me with his own anxiety,” she added in longhand.

Roosevelt did see Lowen the next day and evidently the young man made an impression, for when the president talked about the bomb to James Byrnes that summer, he told Byrnes that he thought
the Germans were ahead in the race to develop it. Roosevelt also instructed Lowen that if he wished to send him a personal message again, he should place it in a sealed envelope for the president's eyes only and send it to him via Grace Tully.

If the intention of this directive was to cut his wife out of the chain of communication (the president must have been annoyed at the breach in the project's secrecy that the scientists' going to Eleanor represented), it was ineffective. A few months later when Lowen asked to see the president again because nothing materially had changed and the Germans, in the view of some of the MetLab leading scientists, were “about to use the weapon we all fear,” Roosevelt, about to leave for Casablanca, referred him to Conant. A desperate Lowen again went to Eleanor.

With the president in Casablanca she did not know to whom to turn. “The announcement from Germany yesterday of a secret force to be used to destroy in great & unprecedented ways,” she wrote her husband, “has made one young scientist jittery again & he is calling me on the phone this morning but what can I do?” She decided she had to do something, and arranged for Lowen to see Early and Rosenman as well as Baruch.
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“This fellow came into Steve's office, a little wild-eyed,” Judge Rosenman recalled. “Is your room tapped?” was the scientist's first remark to Early. “If he had not been sent by Mrs. Roosevelt, Steve would have thrown him out then and there,” said Rosenman. Then Lowen darted over to a closed door and threw it open to see if anyone was listening at the keyhole. Reassured that all was secure in the White House, he told them about the A-bomb project and the fears of the scientists that the project was moving slowly because of military red tape and duPont's interest in a postwar monopoly of atomic energy.

“Do you know anything about this?” Early asked Rosenman after the man had left.

“Not a thing.”

“What should we do?”

“You and I,” suggested Rosenman, “should get into a car and go to
see Bob Patterson.” They did. Judge Patterson, the assistant secretary of war, confirmed that a bomb, thousands of times more powerful than dynamite, was being developed and expressed complete confidence in General Leslie R. Groves, who was in charge of the project. “The first thing to be done is to transfer this fellow,” added Patterson.

Baruch saw Lowen the next day.

The young man was in a highly nervous state. All I could get from him was that he was engaged in developing a secret process at the University of Chicago, and that he was convinced that his work was being obstructed. I could learn no more, but I had heard enough to know that the matter was not in my bailiwick. I asked Dr. Conant to see the troubled physicist.

There was no way around Conant, who, the Chicago group felt, constituted part of the problem. “I should like to take this opportunity to tell you,” Conant reported to the president upon the latter's return from Casablanca,

that in my opinion, based on intimate knowledge of this whole project, everything is going as well as humanly possible. I believe we are very fortunate in having in General Groves, the Director of the enterprise, a man of unusual capability and force. Criticisms like Mr. Lowen's are based on an incomplete view of the total picture on the one hand and on the other represent the inevitable emotional reactions of human beings involved in an enterprise of this sort.
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One consequence for Lowen was that he was transferred out of the project. “I seem to be pretty effectively stopped from doing any more fighting,” he reported to Eleanor. If she wanted any more information, Lowen continued, Wigner, Szilard, and Fermi would be happy to come to Washington to supply it.
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In a memo to the president, Eleanor suggested that he might ask Dr. Conant to see Wigner, Szilard, and Fermi “to tell about their work which has such important implications for the future.”

Roosevelt was getting a little impatient. “Dear Van,” he wrote Dr. Bush, “This young man has bothered us twice before and I think Jim Conant has seen him twice. I fear, too, that he talks too much. Do you think we should refer the matter to Conant?” Five days later Bush reported back:

Conant had a long talk in Chicago with Fermi and Wigner, and tells me they are quite satisfied with the arrangements now in effect and do not share Lowen's views. I spent all day with Szilard yesterday. His criticism boils down to the feeling that his group have not been fully used. There has, of course, been a reluctance to introduce scientists of foreign origin to the full knowledge of a matter of potentially great military importance. There is also a matter of early patent applications which has its difficulties.

My conclusion is that there have been no more missteps and delays than ought to be anticipated on a matter of this novelty and complexity and that the organization is sound and in capable hands.
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Conant's report to the president was not wholly correct, according to Wigner: “By that time I felt it was too late for a change, but we certainly did not tell Conant we did not share Lowen's views.” While reconciled to the arrangements with duPont, the MetLab men were more than ever concerned with long-range development and control of the atom. Eleanor saw Lowen again, three weeks after D day. “We now have the discovery, I'm told, which he feared Germany would have first but I gather no one wants to use it for its destructive power is so great that no one knows where it might stop.” “Our fears were political,” recalled Wigner. “They were fears about letting this destructive force loose upon the world.”
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To the nuclear scientists, and to the country generally, Eleanor and Franklin were partners. In the 1944 presidential campaign those who viewed her as a “dangerous” woman counted this against Roosevelt, but to the New Deal wing of the Roosevelt coalition her presence at his side was a reassurance as to Roosevelt's purposes. The prospect of a fourth term gave Eleanor fewer problems than had the third: “I don't know what F. will decide but if he thinks he is needed I'm sure he'll make the fight & if he loses, I shant be as sorry as I would be if he didn't accept the responsibility when he felt he should.”
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She listened to the Republican convention, which nominated a Dewey-Bricker ticket at the end of June:

All promises & no performance. We'll promise too in our convention & how little any of us really know what we can do after the war. All one should say is: “Build a character that can meet new conditions without fear, develop the power to think things thro' & face
facts & recognize the interdependence among men!” I wonder why we can't all be humble & less bombastic?
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May Craig, who stopped at Hyde Park en route home from the Republican convention, told Eleanor that the Republican campaign was to be keynoted to youth as against “a tired old man.” “Fortunately, he looks pretty vigorous,” was Eleanor's comment to May, as it was to a discouraged young friend who wrote her that the Democratic party had turned timid and respectable. The president had to compromise at the moment because winning the war was the most important thing, Eleanor replied. “When the war is over even an elderly gentleman like the President may do some surprising things.”
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