The mood in the room during the Senate hearing had changed. Six months before, the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program was a sleepy, under-budgeted endeavor, a political backwater of a junior senator from Missouri. It was to be feared more than any other place within Washington.
Senator Harry S. Truman stood at the dais, his countenance no different. He remained a man who spoke straightforwardly, who wore a bowtie. But his new committee, though, now did have some teeth. Sharp, steel teeth.
The perspiring, obese, and decorated general from the Army Quartermaster Corps buttoned his collar, which felt two sizes small under the hot lights. The hearing, which should have been a routine grilling to go over a M1 helmet contract, was by no means so routine to him.
"General," Truman replied, his own voice a flat, unimpressed drawl, "your department's contract to Blevins Steel specified a minimum manganese content by weight of no less than twelve percent to be included within the helmet shell. That's correct, wasn't it?"
"Yes, Senator, that's the standard specification," said the general, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.
"Then, explain to me," Truman said, taking a report from off his table, "why our independent metallurgic analysis shows that over sixty percent helmets shipped from our Blevins plant have a manganese content up near eight percent, rendering them extremely fragile from shock?"
The general stuttered, his own face reddening further. "Senator, our inspectors on site—"
"Your field inspectors, General," Truman cut in, his tone icy, "somehow managed to overlook that Blevins Steel was deliberately using a substandard alloy to save money, something that would have been apparent were anyone to slow down long enough to do proper spectrographic analysis." He slid a second report across the table. "This has a detailed analysis of their bottlenecks within their plant and raw material acquisition. It shows a pattern of shortcuts stretching back months. The Army did not know this?"
The general was surprised. It wasn't an accusation; it was a scalpel analysis, complete with facts he himself had not known to seek. The Truman Committee was no longer approaching hearings with questions. It was approaching hearings with answers already.
The source of this new authority was presiding from a small office in New York, reading from the tapes with a satisfied smirk. Ezra's fifty-thousand-dollar "contribution" had bought them out. It had given Truman a chance to assemble a larger team, a team of aggressive, hardball new lawyers and, more importantly, professional financial and industrial consultants who knew where to look to find skeletons.
Ezra had established a secure, plausibly deniable backchannel to Truman's chief of staff, a gentleman named Matthew Connelly. It was via this channel that a steady stream of higher-level intelligence slowly wended its way from Ezra's world to the committee's hearing room. If Ezra became aware, through his corporate sources, that a competitor industrialist, say, such as Blevins, the steel tycoon who had buttonholed him outside the Yacht Club, was cutting corners on a U.S. contract, an anonymous tip, complete with supporting data, found its way to Connelly's desk.
Not knowing where the tips were coming from, but knowing that he was receiving amazingly accurate tips from "concerned industry patriots," Truman employed them to expose real wastage, corruption, and company wrongdoing. The press loved him. He was national hero material, a new-age David to take up cudgels against Goliaths of wastage and corporate greed. He was, albeit unknowingly, to Ezra, also being an ideal tool with which to subtly hurt his own business rivals.
After the dramatic meeting with the general from the Quartermaster Corps, Truman himself called up to Ezra's personal line.
"Prentice," grunted a personal call from the Senator, "I just wanted to call and say thanks. That headline about the levels of manganese included in the Blevins agreement was spot on. We just saved the Army millions and possibly saved a few lives, to boot. You're a damn fine patriot."
Ezra accepted the flattery with a grace. "I'm just a businessman who believes in good government, Senator. Glad to do my part." This was his moment. He had accumulated a storehouse of trust and credibility. It was time to draw down a little.
"But, sir," Ezra continued, his own tone shifting to a darker one, "as vital as your committee's work is to ferreting out wastage in those contracts into which we have entered, I fear that just as grave a wastage pervades elsewhere. It pervades within those very crucial questions of strategy with which we are failing to cope, questions which are frustrated by nothing so much as bureaucratic deadweight within the War Department."
"What projects are you referring to?" Truman asked, his curiosity raised.
"It can't be discussed over the telephone," replied Ezra, giving a much-needed injection of seriousness and discretion. "But I can tell you my sources relate a vital, high-level research facility, one our long-term national security hinges upon. The land to be bought for it is to be found in a very isolated Tennessee area. But the project's entire trajectory exists stagnant, entangled by ridiculous, inter-agency wrangling between the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior over land rights and appropriations authority. It's a travesty."
Ezra knew all about this from his covert membership on the Uranium Committee. He knew that the future home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, industrial heart of the Manhattan Project, was being slowed by red tape.
Across the wire, Truman fell silent. Then Ezra could listen to the senator's fist strike his desk. "Goddammit!" Truman exclaimed. "That's exactly the kind of bureaucratic bullcrap that get my goat. A critical project, you say?"
"Perhaps the most important work this country will ever undertake," said Ezra softly.
Truman, already well trained to trust Ezra's strategic brilliance and exacerbated by this latest tale ofgovernment failure, was roused. The man who, just days before, publicly reprimanded a general regarding defective helmets, suddenly found himself with a fresh, larger target.
"Thank you, Mr. Prentice," Truman said, his voice icy now with purpose. "You've been very helpful."
The Washington bureaucracy was greeted with a rude awakening by the Truman Committee's new teeth the very next day. There were a series of formal, combative letters dispatched from Senator's office. They were to the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, to Chief, Army Corps of Engineers, and to Interior Secretary. The letters requested a full account of the "unacceptable delays" within the Tennessee strategic infrastructure project, and were concerned with "gross mismanagement and potential national security threat." The letters declared that a new, high-priority, and immediate investigation into the matter was being launched by the committee.
The bulldog of government excess, Truman, became loose. Unaware, he just became political battering ram to the Manhattan Project and was summoned to sweep away bureaucratic obstacles to building the secret city where the atom was to be harnessed. And Ezra Prentice, halfway around the world, was holding his leash.