By the spring of 1946, Groves’s view that the atom should remain a military secret was commonly accepted, even proclaimed on March 5 when Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, journeyed with Truman to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, to deliver his stirring Iron Curtain speech against Soviet aggression. Three days after that speech heralded the cold war, the army announced that it would ban Communists from all “sensitive” positions. Also on March 8, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory and the most famous of the atomic scientists, was quoted in a newspaper as opposing the May-Johnson bill—a shift from his position the previous fall.6 And in Washington that day, Time magazine reporter Frances Henderson interviewed both Groves and Szilard, separately, for an article about the Manhattan Project scientists and their fight for the McMahon bill.
Sen. Brien McMahon had led his colleagues in forming a special committee to deal with atomic energy. He was widely respected as a thoughtful and creative lawmaker, but in the interview with Time, Groves called McMahon a “fool” and sniped at Szilard, criticizing his influence on other scientists, questioning his loyalty, and disputing his motives.7 Groves was gruff and candid with Henderson throughout the long and rambling interview, then caught himself and ordered her not to quote his remarks about “any of the scientists.” But the general’s anger was irrepressible, and he kept talking, obsessively, about one scientist in particular.
“Do you know his background?” Groves asked, and not waiting for her reply, said, “Well, Szilard was born in Hungary” and “served in the German army—or rather the Austrian army.” Groves continued:
Anyway, after the [First World] War he studied—didn’t teach, or so to speak ever earn his way. . . . In this country he was at Columbia, here and there, never teaching; never did anything really you might say but learn. Everywhere he went, from what I hear, he was hard to work with. The kind of man that any employer would have fired as a troublemaker—in the days before the Wagner Act [a 1935 law granting minimal employee rights].
At that thought, the general grinned. Henderson said that it was Szilard who had initiated research that led to the Manhattan Project, and Groves had to say: “Yes, as a matter of fact, I might even go so far as to say that if it hadn’t been for Szilard, it would never have reached the president.” Then, realizing he had complimented Szilard, Groves added: “Only a man with his brass would have pushed through to the president. Take Wigner or Fermi—they’re not Jewish—they’re quiet, shy, modest, just interested in learning.”8
Then “why was Szilard kept on the project?” Henderson wondered.
“Well, he was already on it,” Groves snorted, “transferred from Columbia out to Chicago when we came in on it. Frankly, we would have let him go except we didn’t trust him loose.”
Still unable to stop thinking about Szilard, Groves rambled on and on.
He made a lot of security breaks. Nothing important, but he violated security a dozen times or more. . . . Oh, we’ve had quite a time with him—he keeps the young men all stirred up. And I wouldn’t have a bit of trouble with Wigner (and the Princeton people) or Chicago [scientists] if it weren’t for Szilard. If there were to be any villain of this piece, I’d say it was Szilard. . . .
The scientists were “not practical,” Groves complained. Szilard, for example, wanted the scientists to manage construction of the huge plutonium-production reactors at Hanford. “Said they would have gotten it done sooner,” Groves intoned in a mocking way. He also complained about the “trouble we had” with those reactors, trouble that “a bunch of impractical scientists” would only have compounded. But he failed to note that the scientists quickly recognized the reactor problems once they occurred.9
By contrast, Groves praised Oppenheimer as “a real genius” who “knows about everything—he can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly, I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”10
The general also admitted to approving Oppenheimer’s security clearance, even though Groves knew he was “reddish-pink in his youth,” just to get the job done. “I just had to say—after all, it was wartime—they’re cleared.” Security would have been much stricter, Groves said, if only he had had his way. “If this were a country like Germany, I should say there were a dozen [scientists] we should have shot right off. And another dozen we could have shot for suspicion or carelessness.”
Answering the charges Szilard had made before Congress and in the press that compartmentalizing information had slowed the scientists’ work on the bomb, Groves insisted, “It was the only way to get the thing done. Otherwise [the scientists] would have spent all their time talking. . . . This way we made them work. . . .” With compartmentalization, Groves said smugly, “only one person knows everything,” and “I was more interested in accomplishment than learning.” But he admitted that by continuing to compartmentalize atomic-energy information well after the war “we’re having trouble keeping the scientists.”
His own “idea of an atomic commission,” Groves said, would have four military members, four businessmen, and engineers; only two scientists and one lawyer-statesman—all serving part-time. McMahon “thinks serving on the commission would be like being on the Supreme Court . . .” Groves said, adding, “Incidentally, you might want to write that he [McMahon] has never worn a uniform himself.”
Mention of McMahon sparked a familiar anger. “Do you know who wrote the McMahon bill?” asked Groves. “I couldn’t swear to it, but I’ll bet it was Szilard. It’s badly drafted by somebody who knows nothing about it but yet has legal knowledge.” Groves’s angry monologue continued.
Of course, most of his ideas are bad, but he has so many . . . you know no firm wants him for a consultant. Why, he’s the kind of guy that advises a company one way and after they’re half way through that says, “no, let’s try this way.” Of course, he isn’t paying the bills.
And I’m not prejudiced. I don’t like certain Jews, and I don’t like certain well-known characteristics of theirs, but I’m not prejudiced. . . .
After Henderson thanked Groves for his time, she left to join Szilard, finding “a short, chubby man who likes to meet his luncheon companions outside of restaurants so he can enjoy an extra moment of fresh air.” Szilard, too, was angry and candid that day, but unlike Groves, he was eager to be quoted.
“We’re working according to the methods of 1940,” Szilard complained, slighting Groves’s management. Uranium and plutonium production methods are now “obsolete” and far too costly. In the United States, Szilard said, the first-rate scientists are leaving the project, stressing the point just made to her by Groves.11
Szilard used this interview to complain about Time’s earlier description of the atomic scientists as “befuddled.” It is unique for thousands of intellectuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and political views to find themselves in practically unanimous agreement about the atom’s civilian control, he said. And over lunch he restated the points that the scientists were then making to senators, congressmen, and anyone else who would listen: that compartmentalization had cost the United States at least a year’s time building the bomb; that the Smyth report about how the bomb was made should have been withheld “until a policy was set” for international control of the atom; that secrecy works because the scientists want it to work, not because the military enforces it. But scientists who continued government work could be dismissed without a stated cause, Szilard warned, leaving them defenseless against the military bureaucracy. “All a scientist has is his reputation,” Szilard said, sounding vulnerable and no doubt reflecting on his own encounters with Groves’s hostility. “Destroy that and you destroy him.”
In the interview that morning, Groves had told Henderson he knew what some of the scientists were saying about him, “but I won’t throw mud.” Publicly, he kept his silence by preventing her from using his quotes. Privately, however, Grov
es was quick to seek revenge. Within two weeks, Groves traveled to Chicago, where he made a show of presenting medals of merit to “key figures” in the Manhattan Project. Harold Urey, Enrico Fermi, Samuel Allison, metallurgist Cyril Smith, and the project’s health director, Robert S. Stone, were present. Szilard was not.12 Later that spring, Groves struck again. On May 7, the nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons wrote in the New York Post about Groves’s anger with Szilard—the source, apparently, was the general himself. In part, the column read:
Maj. Gen. Groves, head of the Atomic Bomb project, in his private discussions of the Army sponsored [May-Johnson] bill and of the opposition to it by the scientists, makes no secret of his dislike for Dr. Szilard, who first interested Roosevelt in the bomb. If the Army bill passes, Szilard—because he was born in Hungary and served in the German Army in the first World War—wouldn’t be allowed to work on the project. . . .13
A few days before this column appeared, Farrington Daniels, director of the Met Lab in Chicago, had praised Szilard’s contribution to the Manhattan Project in a letter to the army, urging that he receive a commendation. And on May 27, responding to Daniels’s letter, the army’s Decorations Board recommended “that a Certificate of Appreciation for civilian war service be awarded to Dr. Leo Szilard. . . .”14
But before the paperwork for a certificate was complete, Groves learned about the award and sent the district engineer at Oak Ridge a secret memo with “certain facts with which the [Decorations] Board was not familiar and which were unknown to Dr. Daniels that prevent the approval of the Board’s recommendation” of a certificate. Groves mentioned difficulty over Szilard’s patents “and also his failure to devote his full energies to the work that he was assigned to do.” Groves also wrote that “it was quite evident” Szilard “showed a lack of support, even approaching disloyalty, to his superiors, particularly with respect to Dr. Compton, director of the Metallurgical Laboratory,” although Compton and Szilard were friendly and sympathetic colleagues during and after the war. No doubt aware that these falsehoods might be traced to him, Groves cautioned that “this disapproval will be kept secret, but Dr. Daniels will be informed verbally by General Nichols.”15
Still not content to snub Szilard, Groves plotted behind the scenes to bar him from further work on the government’s nuclear research. To lobby in Washington for civilian control of atomic energy, Szilard had taken an unpaid leave from the Met Lab in November 1945, and when he returned to Chicago in late April 1946, he heard from friends on campus that Groves was trying to block his rehiring, whether or not the army’s May-Johnson bill passed. The Lyons column in May had only confirmed Groves’s animosity, and two days after it appeared, Szilard confronted his fate by asking Daniels in a letter “whether it was suggested to you by some representative of the Manhattan District that my contract shall not be renewed. . . .” Szilard asked Daniels directly if he would be receiving a reemployment offer. “It is my continued desire,” Szilard wrote, “to work in the field of atomic energy and to do this, if possible, for the United States Government rather than for some private corporation.” Szilard also praised Walter Zinn’s decision to direct the new Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, the entity that would replace the Met Lab for federal nuclear research programs.16
From this and other correspondence, from his later enthusiasm for the peaceful uses of nuclear power, and from his occasional work as a consultant, it is clear that Szilard did not renounce nuclear physics after Hiroshima. Instead, he was barred from it by Groves, as Daniels confirmed in a letter on May 10. “I feel it is only fair to tell you now that the Area Engineer of the Manhattan District . . . has requested me not to offer you a position in the new [Argonne] laboratory,” Daniels wrote, adding praise for Szilard’s “valuable contributions” to the bomb project’s success and paraphrasing the recommendation he had written a week before to request the army’s Certificate of Appreciation:
Your foresight and initiative were largely responsible for obtaining support for the original atomic energy program and your work on piles [reactors] and your vision for new types of piles have been important in the development of the research program of the Laboratory. You have made important contributions to the patent structure of the Manhattan District and you have been vigorous in pointing out the political and social implications of the atomic bomb.17
Angry and sad but not surprised, Szilard accepted the rejection stoically, for he could rarely admit pained feelings or disappointments to others. In a letter to his friend Trude Weiss, Szilard reported it was now “certain” that his contract would not be extended. “I shall hang around for a couple of months more here to determine if other possibilities will materialize,” he wrote in a style more formal than the punchy prose he usually dashed off to her. But in three weeks nothing did materialize, and on May 31, a month before his Met Lab contract expired, Szilard sent his resignation letter to Daniels, effective the next day.18
For Szilard, his last fight with Groves was over. But Groves’s obsession with Szilard persisted until after his death. When testifying at a security-clearance hearing on Oppenheimer in 1954, Groves dwelled on Szilard’s behavior. Groves recalled his efforts in 1942 “to intern a particular foreign scientist” because “intuition” convinced him this “alien” was a spy. On the witness stand Groves recounted in detail a visit to Secretary of War Stimson’s office. “I didn’t accuse [Szilard] of disloyalty or treason, but simply that he was a disrupting force and the best way out of it was to intern him,” Groves recalled.
I was told that this man [on Stimson’s staff] didn’t want to take it up with the Secretary. I insisted on it. He came back and said, “General, the Secretary said we can’t do that. General Groves ought to know that. I told the Secretary, of course General Groves knew that would be your answer. He just still wanted to make a try.” I think that is essential to realize.
When the transcript of Oppenheimer’s hearing was published in 1954, Szilard bought a copy and marked this passage, no doubt amused by the efforts the general had made against him.19
Those efforts continued even after Szilard’s death in 1964. Responding to an obituary of Szilard by Eugene Rabinowitch, Groves dictated a memo-to-file that begrudged Szilard’s “brassiness” as the reason for early government funding of atomic research, but complained that his approaches to the White House and to Byrnes “were violations of his oath of secrecy.” Szilard was “such a disruptive influence” at the Met Lab, Groves recalled, that after their strained meeting over patents in December 1943, Groves thought of a way to rid the project of Szilard. Groves asked Conant if he would offer Szilard a faculty position at Harvard, for which Groves would cover his salary and expenses. Groves thought “this would be perfectly proper use of Government funds as he was such a deterrent to the successful operations of the Manhattan Project.” But Conant refused, Groves recalled, “even if I paid him 1000% profit on the deal.”
In a critique of atomic-energy entries in the Encyclopedia Americana in 1965, Groves attacked Szilard again by saying the biographical sketch about him was “unnecessarily long” and “overemphasizes Szilard’s importance.” Groves complained that Szilard “was not particularly interested in the saving of American lives in the war against Japan” and said it was “untrue that Szilard played any prominent part in the development of the atomic energy legislation which led to the creation of the AEC.”20
When Groves read historian Margaret Gowing’s Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945, he added angry comments to the text almost everywhere he saw Szilard’s name in print. “Szilard was not the leader” of American scientists who tried to withhold publications on uranium fission, Groves wrote, “nor did he lead any other activity. He was a parasite living on the brains of others.”21 Groves could not believe that Szilard and Wigner had drafted the 1939 Einstein letter to FDR, because “it was too cleverly written and indicated a knowledge not only of international affairs but also of what would appeal to President Roosevelt.” Grov
es thought that Alexander Sachs had written it.22
“Szilard was not the most distinguished scientist,” Groves noted later in Gowing’s text. “Certainly he contributed nothing, in fact much less than nothing to our success. He had seized an opportunity to push government aid for atomic research while at Columbia. He was an entrepeneur [sic] not a scientist.”23 Around the description of the scientists’ petition, Groves noted: “From the moral standpoint [of dropping the A-bomb], Szilard had never displayed any evidence of having any.”24
Finally, Groves belittled Szilard in marginal notes made in his copy of The Decision to Drop the Bomb, a book based on a 1965 NBC News White Paper. “He was completely unprincipled, amoral, and immoral,” Groves wrote by Szilard’s name. He “was an inveterate troublemaker and not a great physicist.”25
CHAPTER 21
A New Life, an Old Problem
1946–1959
In 1946 an investigation was conducted by [the Federal Bureau of Investigation] concerning Dr. Szilard based on his association with known “liberals,” his activities as a member of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, his outspoken support of internationalization of the atomic program, and his constant influence on other scientists concerning the support of this international program.1
With that report, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover summarized Leo Szilard’s ambitions and actions in the years following World War II. When barred from working on the government nuclear program that he had helped to create, Szilard took up biology. As a novice in a new field, his scientific whimsy proved useful, although he never dominated the discoveries as he had with the nuclear chain reaction and its consequences. For the first time in a dozen years, Szilard found himself without a single focus and purpose for his life, without a fear to drive and define his furious mental energies.
Genius in the Shadows Page 43