The wartime profits from the arsenal were extraordinarily bountiful, a verification of his policies to the nation. But they were to him merely short-term tools for the achievement of more important things. The true front on the two-front war was not on the assembly lines nor on the corporate boardrooms but on the classified laboratories he was furtively supporting.
One afternoon in autumn, there arrived at Kykuit a sealed personal letter addressed to him. It came on an envelope from Columbia University but with the return label simply 'L. Szilard.' His secretary was dismissed and the door to his study was closed before he carefully opened it with a silver letter opener.
The letter was not from some business man. It was the long, rambling four-page missive from the Hungarian physicist, the great anxious genius, a distracted mixture of report on science and barely restrained alarm. It was written in obscure technicalese, discussion of "unexpectedly high yields of neutrons" from the "fission of the isotope 235" and "secondary emissions greatly beyond initial estimates."
To outsiders, it would have been gibberish. To Ezra, walking around with the next hundred years of scientific history in his head, the data were as clear and as startling as the bell at midnight on the fire alarm. Szilard and his partner, Enrico Fermi, on a small scale had performed the test of the nuclear chain reaction. Their experiments demonstrated beyond conceptual ambiguity that it was not just the delusion of physicists to construct an atomic bomb. It was an engineering problem.
And then there was the sentence that raised the hair on the back of Ezra's arms. "I have learned through my contacts in Copenhagen," wrote Szilard, "that Heisenberg's group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin has requested the entire reserve of uranium oxide available from the mines in the Belgian Congo. They know. They must know. We can't rely on being ahead."
Szilard folded the letter, his mind racing. He knew this time would come. In the real timeline, this was the moment when the panicking Szilard, hoping to prewarn the American government, recognized his own obscurity as the hindrance. He sought the one man on the planet whose name carried enough weight to get the attention of the President: Albert Einstein. The eventual Einstein-Szilard letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt was the incremental, hesitant first step to the Manhattan Project.
It was the turning point. But to Ezra it was too slow, too unclear, too chancy. A letter could get lost, swallowed up in the administrative bureaucracy, its ominous message neutered by bureaucrats and commissions. The process must quicken. And more importantly, it must be controlled. By him.
A week later, the Rockefeller Foundation sent a small delegation to Princeton University's vaunted Institute for Advanced Study. Junior would typically have led the delegation but had been convinced by Ezra to attend some crisis philanthropic confab back in Boston himself. It was the type of maneuvering that came all too naturally to him.
His true agenda was not to tour the installations but to see one man. He used the guise of his organization's activity to schedule a "chance" personal audience with Professor Einstein.
They met in the famously messy office of Einstein. The great man with the ring of white hair and sad, gentle eyes greeted him cordially, expecting him to be just another rich benefactor, someone to be won over to the support of the sciences. He invited Ezra to tea.
Ezra didn't just walk up with the letter of Szilard. He walked up to the battle of wits armed.
"Professor," he said, his voice deferent but matter-of-fact. "I am here today because of research done by your old group back in Germany, and your newer group at Columbia. Dr. Szilard and Dr. Fermi, for instance."
The cordiality of Einstein vanished, his face set into an expression of keen, wary attention. "You are well-informed, Mr. Prentice."
"I've made it my business to be," he answered. Then he did something that could not have been possible for any non-professional. He talked with Einstein about his own life's work, but with the terrible practical detail. He didn't just refer to E=mc². He talked about its horrid application. He spoke about the specific isotope separation challenges of the specific problem of the future of centrifuge technology as against the particular isotope separation problem of the then-specific problem of gaseous diffusion. He spoke about the concept of critical mass, and the challenge of reaching the supercritical state with its resultant engineering challenge to making it part of a weapon. He took from his jacket jacket notepad the essential sketches of a "gun-type" assembly device against an "implosion" device—weaponization concepts that were, when discussed in 1939, years ahead of even the best theoretical work.
Einstein stared at him with the teacup trembling slightly in his grasp. The gentle old professor was gone and the giant of science regarded him with eyes that had seen into the soul of the Almighty and were terrified by the glance. He was faced with a man who was not a scholar, with the detached flat voice of a moneyman, but with the knowledge of how to assemble the atomic bomb as a pure thing of engineering with the intuition that was simply not within the limits of possibility.
"Who... are you?" he questioned at last, the phrase heavy with profound, half-fearful awe.
"I am a man who does not wish Adolf Hitler to possess this power," said Ezra unperturbed. "Dr. Szilard recommended the letter, and I happen to have it on me." He produced the now-famous paper. "It is a good start, Professor. A necessary one. It will get read with your signature. But a letter can get lost and forgotten. A warning might get ignored."
He sat forward, his voice dropping. "What is needed is a standing advisory committee. One with the President's ear on a daily basis. One with access and with influence and above all one with the means of support that does not get caught up in the slow, suffocating grind of government bureaucracy and congressional approval."
The second step was swift. With the gravitas of Einstein, the hysterical urgency of Szilard, and the enormous clout of the Rockefeller name to back him up, Ezra didn't exactly dash to the office of Roosevelt. That would have been publicity. He requested instead for an off-the-record, secret appointment with one man he knew to be one of the most solid and powerful of the Roosevelt aids, the keen, practical man called Harry Hopkins.
At a townhouse in Georgetown, he laid it all out. He didn't display a scientific curiosity, but an existential threat to the United States. He presented the signed letter of Einstein as Exhibit A.
"Mr. Hopkins," he concluded, "the unofficial opinion of the country's foremost refugee scientists is that it is possible to build this weapon, and it is likely that the Germans are doing so. The President should know this, and there must be set up some means of countering this menace at once."
Hopkins, a seasoned expert at managing emergencies, was visibly agitated. "What are you proposing?"
"I urge the instant setting up of a small, secret presidential advisory committee," announced Ezra. "Let us call it the Uranium Committee. It will have just one job to do: to investigate the feasibility of this enterprise and to coordinate the research needed." He paused and played the final card. "An enterprise of this secrecy and dimensions cannot possibly be financed through the normal budgetary procedure, not at first, at least. It would provoke undesirable publicity. Perhaps, to get quick action and complete secrecy, this committee must be privately financed for its startup costs."
He let the offer drop on the ground. "My family's new Endowment for Advanced Scientific Inquiry would feel honored to continue the Committee's work with the initial seed money. It is our civic responsibility."
He had done it. He had hijacked the historic event—the Einstein-Szilard letter—and accelerated it, sponsored it, and now he had ensconced himself right at the heart of the embryonic Manhattan Project. He was seated not simply as observer or patriot but as its chief backer and unofficial controller, a position of power so enormous it existed beyond any unofficial flowchart of the government. He would have access, control, and a hand on the tiller of the largest scientific enterprise the world would ever know.