There was, finally, a working Uranium Committee, with a new sense of urgency thanks to political pressure evoked by Ezra, who had set matters afoot. The research was going on. But the project as such was a splendid, pulsating engine with no chassis or driver. It consisted of a conglomeration of loose geniuses and prudent bureaucrats. It did not possess a central, driving force.
From his history, Ezra could see that such a rough, intellectual era was doomed to failure without two central egos. The project called for a double leadership, a strange, explosive combination of military engineering and theoretic physics. It called for a builder and a thinker. A hard-eyed administrator and a visionary scientist.
He knew exactly who they were.
The first was a man who already headed the single-largest construction project in the nation's history: building a new War Department headquarter, a gigantic five-sided building that would come to be known as the Pentagon. He was Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves. Groves was a genius, a gruff, morbidly obese man with a terrible, unstopping will. He was an engineer, not a combat man, a logistics and supply man who measured success by tons of concrete raised and miles of wire installed. He was, Ezra assessed, the only man in the U.S. Army who could by himself meet the titanic industrial effort that the atomic bomb represented.
The War Department, though, already possessed a man it wanted to head its newly assigned "Manhattan Engineer District." He was a veteran, highest-ranking general with a spotless record, a man who was cautious and by-the-book. Ezra knew that man to be completely ill-suited to the job. His caution would be a lethal deadweight on a project which emphasized extreme speed and originality. He had to engineer Groves' promotion.
Ezra requested another secret meeting with Harry Hopkins at the White House. He came this time as an apprehensive industrialist, a "friend to the administration" worried about a high-level project's efficacy.
"Harry," said Ezra, taking license with Hopkins's permission to speak in an informal manner. "That Tennessee project's just going to get off the ground, thanks to those questions from Senator Truman. But the kind of leadership the War Department's proposing is a recipe for disaster. General McCarthy's a good soldier, but he's a man of tradition."
He explained it to Roosevelt's right-hand man. "This is not an issue of digging holes or mobilizing divisions. This is historically, by a wide margin, the largest and most difficult construction and engineering project. It requires a master builder, not a field commander. It requires a son-of-a-bitch," he deliberately used exactly the kind of language he knew Hopkins, a pragmatist, would comprehend, "who can build things within schedule and within cost, regardless who he has to step over. It requires the man who's pushing the Pentagon up the throat of Arlington marshes. It requires Groves."
Hopkins, who himself entertained doubts over the lethargic War Department, listened intently. The argument was impeccable.
Meanwhile, Ezra turned his thoughts to scientific direction for the project. The committee was a rowdy bunch of brains. There was Fermi, the master experimenter, Szilard, the excitable prophet, but neither had the temperament nor depth of knowledge to unify the entire enormous enterprise. The conventional candidate among scientific establishment men was Arthur Compton, a Nobel Prize recipient at the University of Chicago—a sure, solidly dignified candidate.
Ezra knew that Compton was the incorrect man. The project needed a renaissance man, a man capable of talking with facility one morning in the idiom of quantum mechanics, with a knowledge of the metallurgy of uranium alloys one afternoon, and discourse with authority during evening on explosive hydrodynamics. It needed a vibrant, aspiring, and sometimes aggressive intellectual extrovert capable of being a catalyst to, and demanding the reverence from, a thousand talented, selfish scientists.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that the man was a young theoretical physicist from Berkeley, California. A man who happened to be known to be brilliant, arrogant, and emotionally complex. A man by the name of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The scientific establishment did not trust Oppenheimer. He had no Nobel Prize. He never had headed as small a unit as a university department. His political allegiances to the left were a concern. He was, to them, a high-risk candidate. To Ezra, he was his only candidate.
Ezra used the money from the Endowment to arrange an invitation to New York to a "private consultation concerning a future for theoretical physics in America." Oppenheimer, intrigued by the summons from their powerful and secretive sponsor, agreed.
They interviewed each other in a special dining room of the University Club. The meeting was to be an hour; it, however, lasted four. It was no consultation, but a grueling, spirited battle of wits. An audition.
Oppenheimer envisioned a gentlemanly discussion with respect to funding. He was instead interrogated by a man who appeared to possess a blood-curdling encyclopedic memory. Ezra did not just question him about quantum mechanics. He tested Oppenheimer about practical challenges to be faced during isotope separation. He asked his opinion concerning the cross-section of a lump of plutonium-239. He probed his thoughts concerning a spherically-shaped shockwave's hydrodynamics, a solution to a particular implosion challenge. He questioned his techniques concerning acquiring rare materials, and his difficulties with large, interdisciplinary groups of mutually competitive scientists.
Oppenheimer was utterly floored. He was being tested by a master surgeon on every branch of his hospital. This businessman, this money man, was discussing with him the darkest, deepest,most taboo aspects of nuclear physics with a depth and a practical expertise beyond any conversation he had ever been privileged to be a part of. He was being interviewed to succeed into a job he did not even know was offered, a job of unimaginable scope and gravity, by a man who obviously knew its underlying conditions even better than himself.
"The depth of your knowledge is... incredible, Mr. Prentice," Oppenheimer finally said, his customary calm assurance worn away.
"It's my business to know the fundamentals behind my investments, Doctor," said Ezra calmly.
Events were finally put into motion. The culmination to his plans happened, a week later, in two simultaneous but concurrent events.
Back in Washington, D.C., under overwhelming pressure from the White House, politely but forcefully urged by Harry Hopkins, and by an incessant formal inquiry by the Truman Committee, nervous War Secretory Henry Stimson signed a directive. He did so unwillingly to relocate his prized Pentagon project's Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves to oversee a new, clandestine Manhattan Engineer District.
Groves was fit to be tied. He considered it a demotion, a career dead-end. He had been plucked from the center of military might and exiled to a scientific boondoggle, a madman's fantasy being developed by a bunch of longhaired European refugees.
Back in New York, Ezra made a single, deciding telephone call to Lyman Briggs, the formal chairman of the Uranium Committee.
"Dr. Briggs," declared Ezra, his voice carrying the heavy earnestness of a command, not a suggestion. "After a long conference with leading authorities in the country, it is my very strong recommendation, as sponsor of the Endowment and its financial backing to this project, that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, of Berkeley, California, be appointed Scientific Director, to have full operating authority over all laboratory sites."
He did it. He cast his leading parts into what would be the greatest scientific epic of man's history. He had cast two of America's hottest, brightest, and most competent leaders into their historically correct roles, so the project could have the ruthless, get-the-job-done management and the combined, visionary science it would need to be a success. He was no longer a sponsor; he was a puppeteer, with strings to pull that would assemble his team to build his ultimate weapon.