Pandora's Keepers (14 page)

Compton needed all these qualities because overseeing a bunch of bright scientists was no easy task. They were all independent,
and more than a few were egotists. That certainly was true of Szilard. Opinionated, immodest, pushy, and demanding, Szilard
was a difficult man even for his friends and rubbed many people—especially bureaucrats and soldiers—the wrong way. “He was
odd,” said a colleague who liked him. “There was no doubt about it: eccentric.”
¹²
“He’s a queer fish,” thought another, “very pleased with his own ability as a physicist.” Szilard even threatened at one
point to resign from the project and “file patent applications” if his salary wasn’t raised.
¹³
So adept was he at offering his opinions and telling others what to do that colleagues took to calling him “the General.”

A gadfly and an iconoclast, Szilard moved through the Met Lab like a whirlwind, firing off hectoring memos to Compton and
kibitzing other scientists. His passion for politics began to rival his interest in physics in June 1942, when he learned
of a visit by two army colonels to Compton’s office. Szilard had assumed that one atomic bomb would be enough to sober humanity
into forsaking war. “You’ve got to sit down and get reoriented,” the colonels had instead told Compton’s assistant. “The thing
we’re talking about is not a few bombs; what we are talking about is
production capacity
to continue delivering bombs at a given rate. That, you will discover, is a very different problem.”
¹⁴
Their comment shocked Szilard and his Met Lab colleagues, who began to fear where the military was taking the project.

The military, for its part, viewed scientists as nonconformists with strange accents, no discipline, and a lot of arrogance.
Generals and admirals were horrified at the absence of a chain of command below Compton and at the freewheeling structure
of the Met Lab, and were skeptical about the likelihood of physicists producing anything useful.

Army Brigadier General Leslie Groves, whom the War Department appointed czar of the Manhattan Project on September 17, 1942,
certainly felt this way. Groves was a career officer and son of an army chaplain who was a strict disciplinarian. He had grown
up a service brat shaped by the military culture and the traditional American values of God and country. He had attended the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated fourth in his class in 1918—too late to take part in the fighting
in World War I—then joined the Corps of Engineers. As a construction engineer, he had never commanded troops in combat, but
he was very patriotic and very ambitious.

Alert and confident, Groves assumed a commanding manner. But his authority and pugnacity were belied by his appearance. He
had an oversize waistline that gave a midriff bulge to his starched khakis. He was addicted to ice cream, and there was always
a box of chocolates in his office safe. All this, along with a small mustache and too-tight collar, made Groves look rather
like an Oliver Hardy in uniform. But his steel-blue eyes were penetrating, and his facial expression was decisive. He knew
his business and he knew how to get things done.

With Groves, you had better do your job, do it well, and do it on time. If you did not, he screamed and threatened and his
neck veins popped out in anger. He had no patience for procrastination, no tolerance for sloppiness, no time or talent for
small talk. An army subordinate remembered Groves as

the biggest sonovabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none,
he had tireless energy—he was a big man, a heavy man but he never seemed to tire. He had absolute confidence in his decisions
and he was absolutely ruthless in how he approached a problem to get it done. But that was the beauty of working for him—you
never had to worry about the decisions being made or what it meant…. I hated his guts and so did everybody else but we had
our form of understanding.
¹⁵

Most of Groves’s subordinates feared him; only a few liked him. He preferred it that way.

The bitterest day of Groves’s life was when he was ordered to assume direction of the Manhattan Project, which Roosevelt and
Stimson transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers’ control when it became clear that its scale would be far beyond the managerial
and logistical capacities of Bush and Conant. “What little I knew of the project,” Groves later wrote, “had not particularly
impressed me.”
¹⁶
He had spent the first year of the war overseeing construction of the Pentagon and expected to be assigned a field command
as a reward. Now he would spend the rest of the war overseeing a bunch of “long-hairs” on a potential boondoggle—“a crazy
Buck Rogers project,” he called it—with a budget that amounted to less than what he had spent on the Pentagon in a week. Even
though he was not pleased, he would make the most of it. He would throw himself into the project with enormous energy and
no letup. He expected friction with scientists who lacked discipline and did not know how to take orders. But now
he
was in the driver’s seat—he was the boss.

Groves’s brusque demeanor explained much of the tension that would develop between him and the Manhattan Project scientists.
Vannevar Bush wrote a memo after meeting him that said in part: “Having seen Groves briefly, I doubt whether he has sufficient
tact for such a job. I fear we are in the soup.”
¹⁷
Other scientists were appalled at the general’s apparent lack of intellectual curiosity. Groves told Ernest Lawrence during
one of his trips to Berkeley, “I’m not the least bit interested in the scientific knowledge of the world, except insofar as
it gets the job done.”
¹⁸
The story spread among scientists like wildfire.

From the beginning, Groves distrusted the scientists, particularly the accented foreigners and their tendency to break into
incomprehensible languages when they talked to one another in his presence. What were they saying? He viewed scientists as
intelligent and curious, but also undisciplined and unfocused. They needed enforceable rules. To him, they neither understood
nor respected the military ethos of obedience and conformity. The stage was set for trouble.

In September 1942 Szilard circulated a memo around the Met Lab:

Compton delegates to each of us some particular task and we can lead a very pleasant life while we do our duty. We live in
a pleasant part of a pleasant city, in the pleasant company of each other, and have in Dr. Compton the most pleasant “boss”
we could wish to have. There is every reason why we should be happy and since there is a war. on, we are even willing to work
overtime.

Alternatively, we may take the stand that those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially
contributed to its development have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at
the proper time and in the proper way.

I believe that each of us has now to decide where he feels that his responsibility lies.

Szilard insisted that scientists pay more attention to the consequences of their work:

It is within our power to construct atomic bombs. What the existence of these bombs will mean we all know. It will bring disaster
upon the world even if we anticipate them [i.e., the Germans] and win the war, but lose the peace that will follow…. One has
to visualize a world in which a lone airplane could appear over a big city like Chicago, drop his bomb, and thereby destroy
the city in a single flash. Not one house may be left standing, and the radioactive substances scattered by the bomb may make
the area uninhabitable for some time to come.

It will be for those whom the constitution has entrusted with determining the policy of this country to take determined action
near the end of the war in order to safeguard us from such a “peace.”…

Perhaps it would be well if we devoted more thought to the ultimate political necessities which will arise out of our present
work. You may feel, however, that it is of more immediate concern to us that the work which is pursued at Chicago is not progressing
as rapidly as it should.
¹⁹

Thanks to comments like this, Szilard’s colleagues at the Met Lab looked upon him as the conscience of the project. He was
the one who got them thinking about the moral and political implications of what they were doing. Groves, on the other hand,
looked upon Szilard as a troublemaker and a menace. “What a pain in the neck Szilard was,” Groves complained to an interviewer
after the war.
²⁰
“Sure, we should never have had an atom bomb if Szilard had not shown such determination during the first years of the war.
But as soon as we got going, so far as I was concerned he might just as well have walked the plank!”
²¹
Groves even tried to send Szilard to an internment camp. The general drafted a letter for Secretary of War Stimson that said:
“It is considered essential to the prosecution of the war that Mr. Szilard, who is an enemy alien, be interned for the duration
of the war.”
²²
Stimson refused to sign it.

Although Stimson denied Groves’s request, the general found other ways to harass Szilard. He required that “enemy aliens”
account for their whereabouts at all times and further compelled Szilard to obtain army authorization every time he wanted
to leave Chicago. The restrictions became new rules to be broken, and Groves reacted by ordering security agents to shadow
Szilard. The agents’ reports on his movements read less like a John le Carre novel than a Marx Brothers’ script:

Surveillance reports indicate that Subject is of Jewish extraction, has a fondness for delicacies and frequently makes purchases
in delicatessen stores, usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, walks a great deal when
he cannot secure a taxi, usually is shaved in a barber shop, speaks occasionally in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly
with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn
around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were
watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.
²³

Szilard usually knew exactly where he wanted to go but was often so annoyed by his tails that he deliberately tried to trick
them. Other times he took pity on the agents and invited them along for a taxi ride or a cup of coffee. “Why can’t you be
a good American?” a security agent once asked him, half exasperated, half begging. “Like who?” “Well, like me.” “
Ugh
. No,” said a smiling Szilard.
²⁴

When the surveillance turned up nothing, Groves ordered Szilard’s phone tapped and his mail opened. He had the power to dismiss
Szilard from the project and at one point took a step in that direction by threatening to make him take “an indefinite leave
of absence without pay.” Groves told a security officer that “the investigation of Szilard should continue despite the barrenness
of the results. One letter or phone call once in three months would be sufficient for the passing of vital information and
until we know for certain that he is 100% reliable we cannot entirely disregard this person.”
²⁵

But Szilard was irrepressible. That—and his talents as a physicist—made him a favorite of Compton, despite their very different
backgrounds and temperaments, and when Groves pressured Compton to fire Szilard, Compton protected him, even writing to officials
in Washington in praise of his efforts:

Szilard was the first in this country, perhaps anywhere, to advocate trying to secure a chain fission reaction using unseparated
[uranium]. He has perhaps given more concentrated thought on the development of this project than has any other individual.
As an experienced physicist and engineer and a man of unusual originality, his thoughts have been of great value in determining
the direction of our work. He has likewise been from the beginning actively concerned with the more far-reaching problems
of organization and civil and military uses of the process. Even though not all of his ideas are practical, I consider him
one of the most valuable members of our organization.

Compton also noted Szilard’s early efforts to keep fission secrets from the Nazis, and his vocal advocacy of a bomb program.
Compton concluded his assessment by characterizing Szilard as “an independent individualist, vitally and I believe unselfishly
concerned with the effective progress of our program.”
²⁶

Szilard was not alone: another maverick had joined the Manhattan Project by 1942. Nearly every physicist involved in the project
knew of him because he was the kind of man one talked about, the sort of character that makes a novelist’s fingers itch. Mood-swept
and arrogant, yet insecure. A brilliant and charismatic man, a genuine heavyweight of personality, he was a gifted theoretical
physicist at Berkeley named Robert Oppenheimer. Famed for his genius, Oppenheimer was the object of admiration and jealousy
by colleagues.

The grandson of German Jewish immigrants, Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904. He grew up in a large apartment at
Eighty-eighth Street and Riverside Drive alongside the Hudson. A van Gogh painting graced the family dining room, and they
summered at a comfortable cottage on Long Island Sound. Oppenheimer stood apart from other youths in more ways than just his
family’s wealth. He collected minerals, read poetry, and studied languages as well as a great deal of science. Although tremendously
gifted intellectually, Oppenheimer was weighted down by his mother’s demanding expectations and his Jewishness—both of which
he carried as a personal burden. “He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldn’t make
up his mind whether to be president of the B’nai B’rith or the Knights of Columbus,” said I. I. Rabi, who came to know Oppenheimer
well. “Perhaps he really wanted to be both, simultaneously.”
²⁷