On the Other Side of the Moon

(See Cover)

Just after dawn, the lights which flooded the white marble building on Constitution Avenue flicked off. A few minutes later the armed sentries patrolling the terraced grounds were relieved. By the time the first visitors began arriving, there was little but its name to distinguish the building from scores of other Government offices. Above the entrance were the words: "United States Public Health Service."

But inside the difference was immediately noticeable. Admonitory signs were everywhere. "Have you locked your safe?" Guards checked each visitor's name against a calling list, escorted him to & from his appointment, meticulously examined each employee's special tamper-proof pass. There were no exceptions.

At 9:30 a black sedan with Government license plates pulled into the rear parking lot. Out stepped a tall, tanned man with a brown manila envelope under his arm. At the basement reception desk he dutifully presented his rectangular badge, bearing his picture and name: David Lilienthal, Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Man on a Horse. It has been a long time since Washington's Public Health Service building has had more than a remote connection with public health. During the war it had been headquarters for the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Last week, as the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Commission, the connection was remoter than ever.

In his pine-paneled, second-floor office, surrounded by statues of the horses he loves, David Lilienthal was doing his best to sever the connection once & for all. He was trying, with every hope of success, to create the most destructive weapon in the world--an atomic bomb even bigger than the bomb which had wiped out Nagasaki and Hiroshima just two years ago.

That was the essence of AEC's second biennial report last week. Besides staking out a new atomic testing ground somewhere in the Pacific (see The Nation), the commission had started a tremendous new construction program in the bomb works of Hanford. It was the beginning of a second major effort in the field of atomic weapons, an effort as great as the stupendous wartime job.

The U.S. had by no means abandoned all hope of international accord. In the U.N., U.S. Atomic Representative Frederick Osborn would continue to press the U.S. plan for international atomic control. But as long as Russia continued to block that plan, it was David Lilienthal's job to build the most destructive atomic weapon known to mankind.

Atomic Age. As he faced the job, no one knew better than Lilienthal the extent of the uncharted wilderness that surrounded him. It was the strange, other-side-of-the-moon wilderness of the Atomic Age. He was not alone in that world. With him were four others: Robert Bacher, Lewis Strauss, William Waymack, Sumner Pike. In innocence and earnestness they had entered their eerie world together on the day last October when President Truman nominated them to be the gods of the atomic mountain, the Commissioners of AEC.

They had started last November by exploring the clearing that had already been made in the wilderness. They held their first official meeting at Oak Ridge. There they were escorted through the 59,000-acre restricted zone which feeds the uranium piles. They went on to Los Alamos, birthplace of the first atomic bomb, and inspected the laboratory. They arrived in Berkeley for the unveiling of the huge new cyclotron at the University of California. They flew back to Washington, awed by what they had seen, and a little scared and airsick from a bumpy passage.

In Washington a horde of critical observers watched their every move. From Congress, it was Senator Bourke Hickenlooper's 18-man Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. From the White House it was Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer's nine-man General Advisory Committee of presidential-appointed scientists. From the armed forces it was Lieut. General Lewis H. Brereton's Military Liaison Committee.

The Bright Fog. The immediate job of Lilienthal & Co. was to take over the whole enormous, compartmentalized Manhattan District. It was a maze of contracts, documents, libraries, factories, laboratories, whole towns. It was shrouded and obscured in the bright fog of military security. It was jealously guarded by the Army's Major General Leslie Groves, then the District's chief, now a disgruntled member of the Military Liaison Committee, embittered by the lack of kudos for his wartime stewardship.

Groves feared that civilian control would mean dissolving the security screen. AEC asked for a complete inventory; the Army refused it. There was more than a suspicion that last month's atomic-secrets scare (TIME, July 21) had been deliberately planted by men who still hoped to discredit the civilian commissioners and get Army control over AEC.

The necessities of security, real and imagined, swirled around AEC like a nightmare. On one side was the need to protect U.S. secrets; on the other was the danger that security would deepen to the point where even U.S. explorers would be cut off from each other to grope and stumble in futile confusion. The fear of being misinterpreted, of being pilloried for an act of forgetfulness, had a paralyzing effect on AEC employees.

Security complicated recruiting. AEC needed engineers and industrial technicians, schoolteachers, carpenters, lawyers. But top-notch men were reluctant to subject themselves to constant surveillance--and the cries of Red-eyed Congressmen--for the stingy salaries AEC could offer. Scientists, who thrive on the free interchange of ideas, were also reluctant. They saw atomic development being returned to military control. In that case, they told AEC, they would rather retire to count the dots on butterfly wings.

Other problems hovered like swarms of insects: finding land for atomic reservations; cajoling industry into speculative, non-profit-making projects; the buzz of Congressmen, concerned about prospector's rights in the hunt for atomic ores.

Men & Tools. But the jungle would not wait. The first tentative trails blazed into the wilderness had already grown over while AEC had sweated out the long delay in congressional confirmation. Time was running out; Dr. Vannevar Bush, wartime head of the Office of Scientific Research & Development, warned: "If we can't do better than we have since V-J day, Russia will beat the tripe out of us."

By last week AEC had only hacked through its first chores. But it was working with smooth unanimity. It had assembled the force for the assault. It had the nation's $2 billion atomic empire, a $175 million half-year appropriation from Congress, an army of over 40,000 employees under hundreds of contractors and subcontractors. It had an able chief of staff: young (36) Carroll L. Wilson, former executive assistant to OSRD's Vannevar Bush. The framework of the organization was just about complete (see chart).

Its tools were Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, the plutonium pile at Hanford, Wash. Behind that were five national laboratories: Argonne, for instrument development, near Chicago; the secret laboratory at Los Alamos; Clinton Laboratory at Oak Ridge, where radioisotopes are produced; the new Brookhaven (Long Island) and Knolls Atomic Power (Schenectady) laboratories, both still under construction. Scores of universities were participating in research. Other work was farmed out to colleges, private research institutes, industry. Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp. was trying to apply nuclear energy to powering aircraft.

The Pioneers. Advance expeditions were already in the field. Behind AEC, but ahead of the rest of the world, the 7,500 men, women & children of Los Alamos were also moving into the Atomic Age. It was a social revolution in miniature. It was no Utopia.

Last week the atomic pioneers lived, worked and amused themselves atop a long volcanic mesa, an ugly, sun-baked plateau shaped like a giant salamander. The colony's dominating feature was a high cyclone fence surrounding the secret area which, from the beginning, had established the social structure of the atomic world. Behind it the few men of science disappeared each morning, leaving the thousands of soldiers and workers outside.*

Life in Los Alamos took some getting used to. The houses were Quonset huts, tar-papered dormitories, prefabs. Everyone had to obey orders: the best the AEC manager could promise was to explain every veto of the town council before he made it. There was no free enterprise. The Zia contracting company (whose name and symbol is Pueblo Indian for the sun) ran Los Alamos on a cost-plus-fixed-fee basis. Operating on a $12 million annual budget, it handled the financial administration of schools, utilities, buildings, dormitories, a bus system, the Los Alamos Times and Station KRS (which does not broadcast, simply pipes its programs into the town's electric circuits).

But there were compensations. The weather was wonderful. The town was being improved. For the first time in all their days on "The Hill," men & women whose existence was geared to work on both sides of the fence could see the first permanent houses under construction, see ditchdiggers digging foundations for two big community centers in the heart of town. Zia was starting on plans for a bank, beauty shop, drugstore, bowling alley and new theater.

The Horseman. The High Command chosen by the President to lead the way into this wilderness consisted of five men, because no one man alone could be expected to bear such responsibilities. Four of them might have been picked at random from the leaders of U.S. society: a Midwestern editor, a scientist, a banker-philanthropist, an industrialist. Their salaries were $15,000 a year.

The editor was friendly, shaggy William Wesley Waymack, 58, who looks more like a farmer than a Pulitzer-Prize-winning editor of the Des Moines Register. The scientist was Robert Fox Bacher, 41, cool, deliberate, diplomatic, the head of nuclear research at Cornell University and one of the scientists who assembled, the first atomic bomb. The banker was Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 51, a mellow, courtly, impeccably dressed philanthropist, partner in New York's Kuhn, Loeb & Co. The industrialist was tall, rangy Sumner Pike, 55, a bachelor and adventurous industrialist with a shrewd, twangy Yankee humor.

The fifth member of the team was Chairman David Lilienthal. He was a man who had roused bitter controversy. He was a vigorous personality and people felt strongly about him.

To men like Bob Taft, he is the symbol of the New Deal, of Big Government, of hostility to business. To his friends he is a public servant of the highest order. His ability is cited by his friends as an argument in his favor, by his enemies as a proof of his danger. On one point everyone is agreed: Lilienthal, who loves horses, is a hard rider of men and ideas.

Public-Power Man. David Eli Lilienthal was born in the little town of Morton, Ill., the son of Jewish immigrants from a village near the old Austro-Hungarian city of Pressburg. He spent his boyhood in Valparaiso, Ind., where his father was a small merchant, went on to De Pauw University, where he was twice president of the student body and an editor of the school paper. He turned into a promising light heavyweight boxer, and met a girl named Helen Marian Lamb.

When he went on to Harvard to study law, Helen Lamb went along to study at Radcliffe. After they both took their degrees in 1923, they were married.

Lilienthal headed for Chicago and a law job with Donald Richberg, then counselor for the railway brotherhoods, now for Standard Oil. In three years Lilienthal branched out on his own.

As a special counsel for the city he helped win a Supreme Court decision ordering a $20 million refund to Chicago telephone subscribers. On the side he edited an impartial digest of legislative and court decisions for utility men and their attorneys. He built a brilliant legal reputation and a $20,000-a-year practice.

Public Servant. Then in 1931 Wisconsin's Governor Phil La Follette asked him to join the state's public service commission. Lilienthal walked the streets of Madison all night, turning the offer over in his mind. Next morning he telephoned his wife, asked her advice and accepted the $5,000-a-year job. La Follette said that that night Dave Lilienthal decided to make public service his career.

In Madison, Dave Lilienthal was known as tough, stubborn, ruthless. "It was that driving and brushing aside," one of his associates recalls, "that irritated most of us so." But Lilienthal reorganized the Wisconsin utility statutes, which became the models for half a dozen states.

In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was casting around for a man to help fulfill George Norris' old dream of a Tennessee Valley Authority, he called on Lilienthal, then only 33. As much as any man, Lilienthal made TVA.

The Fighter. He fought for it. He fought TVA Chairman Arthur Ernest Morgan, who saw TVA as an instrument for a paternalistic government to impose on the valley. That was not Lilienthal's doctrine. "Congress sent us down here to cooperate, not to dictate," he declared. But he fought the private utilities too. He fought the interference of Congress and Washington bureaucrats. He fought, in the main, to give the people of the valley plentiful power at low rates.

He won most of the fights. Chairman Morgan was fired in 1938 and Lilienthal took over. He bought out Wendell Willkie's Tennessee Electric Power Co. for $78 million. He brought electric power to industry. He brought power to 700,000 users, through 140 cooperatives.

TVA was a social-industrial-agrarian revolution. TVA's 27 dams* brought new lakes, new industry, new forests, new farming methods to a sick, infertile land. When war came, TVA fueled Oak Ridge and the valley became an arsenal.

To the six million inhabitants of the Tennessee Valley, David Lilienthal was the symbol of the valley's industrial revolution.

When the storm broke in Congress last winter over his appointment to the Atomic Energy Commission, Lilienthal held his ground under a torrent of criticism and vicious innuendo. His accusers belabored him with all the old charges: that he was a power-hungry zealot, that he fought against private enterprise, that he had ignored Congress. Led by Tennessee's ancient Kenneth McKellar, who could never forget the patronage TVA had withheld, his enemies accused Lilienthal of being a befuddled weakling who could not tell a Communist from a Founding Father. They even stooped to behind-the-hand antiSemitism.

Through the weeks of hearings, Lilienthal sat quietly under the spotlight in the jampacked committee rooms, patiently answering his enemies. Comparing him with raging old Kenneth McKellar/- one newsman commented: "Neanderthal Mart v. the Atomic Age."

Man of Faith. Lilienthal's final confirmation was a tribute both to his dignity and his record. In the nine months since he was confirmed as AEC chairman, he has turned the early suspicions of most of his congressional and military watchdogs into frank approval.

David Lilienthal thinks of himself as a "craftsman in public affairs." As such he has no patience with politics and political intrigue. He feels more comfortable under the Truman Administration than he did under Roosevelt's because there were always too many men around Roosevelt "who would rather talk out of the side of their mouths than the front."

He makes no bones about his belief in strong government, but he draws a sharp distinction between centralized policy and decentralized administration. He has faith in the ability and wisdom of common people. During the congressional hearings he answered one goading question with an eloquent impromptu definition of the kind of democracy he believes in:

"I believe in--and I conceive the Constitution of the United States to rest, as does religion, upon--the fundamental proposition of the integrity of the individual; and that all Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and to protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual."

"People Relax Me." At 48, he is a smiling, relaxed man with a knack of getting along with his fellow workers, most of whom call him Dave. He is a voracious reader, with a lightning mind, makes notes in clean, clear Gregg shorthand. He has not smoked since he lost his voice chain-smoking three packs in a row during an all-night conference with Wendell Willkie. He drinks sparingly: occasionally one Martini, rarely more.

People are his hobby. "People relax me." For exercise he pitches horseshoes and, a little shamefacedly, plays croquet. He misses the rides he used to take through the Tennessee Valley on his bay gelding, "Mac." He misses gardening. Though there is plenty of room on the five-acre farm the Lilienthals have rented at Rockville, Md., he no longer has time for that kind of gardening.

"Hopeful & Affirmative." He has time for only one thing: to hack at the wilderness, to forge the weapon. David Lilienthal is sure that the U.S. can produce the weapon. But he is also "hopeful and affirmative" that reason will prevail, despite "iron heads and iron curtains," and that the weapon will not be needed. If he is wrong, the U.S. can look forward to an atomic arms race that will plunge the U.S. into an even deeper jungle. If he is right, the U.S. will traverse at least the wilderness' first range.

That there are other ranges ahead was of no immediate concern to the members of AEC last week. Their terms will be over in August, 1948. After that it will be up to the President and the Senate whether they continue. Other men may have to scale the next range.

Atomic Adventure. The U.S. already knew a little of what lay beyond. Speculation about the establishment of atomic power plants for peacetime uses ranged from five years to 30. But no one had yet discovered a safe, effective shield against atomic radiation in industrial use. No one was sure how much uranium was available for it. There were tremendous peaks of social, economic, technological forces. Some of the revolutionary forces were already in beneficent use: radioisotopes, byproducts of the bomb, for medicine and scientific research. Others could be roughly charted.

To control the impact of the revolution would be the second great challenge for the U.S. But meanwhile AEC's first job was to make bigger & better atomic bombs.

At 7 p.m. every evening David Lilienthal leaves his office, checks out at the basement desk and steps into his black sedan, a manila envelope of homework under his arm. Around the Public Health Service building the floodlights flick on. Along the terraces, the armed sentries take up their patrol.

*In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the social structure was more elaborate; descending from grey-clad Alpha Plus Intellectuals (World Controllers) to black-clad Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons.

*With two more dams still to be built, TVA's total cost: $810 million; annual return from sale of power: $35 million.

/- Lilienthal's favorite movie actor was the late W. C. Fields, "and not because he looks like Kenneth McKellar."

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