Rosenthal, Murray

              
ORAL HISTORY OF MURRAY ROSENTHAL
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
July 25, 2012
 
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is July, 25th, 2012. And I'm at the home of Murray Rosenthal here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Rosenthal, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I'm happy to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning. Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I was born in Greenville, Mississippi, which you may not know, but is in the middle of what is called the Delta. In those days, it was cotton country. And it was a marvelous place to grow up. 
MR. MCDANIEL: What year was that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: 1926. My parents were small town merchants. It was mostly during the Depression, and we moved around from town to town. So, I actually lived in a number of small towns, all in the same area.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you moved around a lot.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Within the small area in Mississippi. I was there until I finished high school, and went into the Navy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: That was 1943.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1943. So you finished high school, went into the Navy. Did you have brothers or sisters?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No, neither, but I had a lot of first cousins.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. So, you went into the Navy. What did you do? Where were you?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I went in with a commitment from the Navy to teach me how to fly and be in the Naval Air Force. They sent me off to the University of North Carolina for nearly a year. Then they said, it will take a while for you to get through and fly, but if you would like to, you can go to mid-shipman’s school for four months and get a commission. I realized later that the naval war in the Pacific was going tell by then and the Navy had more flyers than they needed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: So I received a commission and got on a train to the West Coast to go out to the Pacific. And when I was on the train, the war ended!
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: But they kept me in. I was very young, the youngest officer on my ship, and I didn't have any personal responsibilities. There was a rating system and I was at the bottom of the list, so they kept me in for a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay, so after you got out of the Navy, did you go to college?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, I'd started LSU [Note: Louisiana State University] while waiting for the Navy to call me up. It was just six weeks, but that made it easy to get back in. I studied chemical engineering there for three years, and importantly, I got married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. ROSENTHAL: When I finished LSU, I went to MIT [Note: Massachusetts Institute of Technology] where I spent four years and got a PH.D. in chemical engineering, and then I came here. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, why were you interested in chemical engineering?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I was interested in engineering because my family had talked me into it. When I was a kid, my grandfather had an old clock, and I took it apart and put it back together again. It didn't work, but they were impressed and said you’re going to be an engineer.  I heard that all my life, and at that time, chemical engineering looked like one of the most promising fields.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure and I guess at that point in our history, chemical engineering was kind of on the up tick--
MR. ROSENTHAL: It still is.
MR. MCDANIEL: Very popular. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: So I was fortunate in making that decision, but it wasn't based on a lot of knowledge.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you came directly to Oak Ridge. And what year was that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: 1953.
MR. MCDANIEL: And so you went to work at the Lab I would imagine.
MR. ROSENTHAL: At the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me a little bit about your work history.
MR. ROSENTHAL: First, I want to tell you about one thing that is amusing. I knew about nuclear reactors in Oak Ridge because a lot of people at MIT had spent the war down here. We heard about it all the time, but what we most heard was about was how muddy it had been. So, when they wrote and offered me a job without an interview my wife said, “I want you to go down and see that place”. I got in touch and came down, and by that time the Garden Apartments had been built and they were luxurious compared to what it was like in school. I told her Oak Ridge was beautiful, and she agreed to come.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I guess there weren't too many muddy streets at that point.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I had worked on heat transfer for a distinguished professor and they hired me because they needed a specialist in that. When I got here, I decided that if I was going to be here, I ought to be in the reactor business. And I asked if I could go to Reactor School to learn about it. Well, after they thought about it a while they said no, but you can go over there and teach!
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Everybody always says the best way to learn something is to teach it, but it didn’t work because I was teaching what I already knew. But after a year I got into the reactor business and that's what I was engaged in for the next 20 years. 
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess, if you’re coming to Oak Ridge in the 50's, the reactor business was the business to be in.
MR. ROSENTHAL: It was at that time, and this was the place to be. But in 1973, the program I ran, the Molten Salt Program was pulled by the Atomic Energy Commission. We began to get into other activities and I became heavily involved in many of the things the Lab is doing now- the fusion program, the energy conservation program, and others. Very exciting things. And I stayed in them as an Associate Laboratory Director until about 1988 where I became Deputy Laboratory Director.  I remained in that job until I retired in 1994.  I left here twice during those years.  Once MIT invited me to be a visiting professor, and I went back for a year. And at one point, the then Deputy Director of the Laboratory went up to Washington to lead all the Reactor Programs, and in a short while he said, I need a friend up here. So I became his technical assistant for a year. Otherwise I've been here the whole time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let’s go back. I want to go back and talk a little bit more about your work here. You came here in '53, with your wife and I guess you didn't have children.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Didn't then, but in a few years we had two.
MR. MCDANIEL: So tell me about life in Oak Ridge over the last 60 years or so. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: Oh, gosh, that can be a long one. When I was at MIT, I taught a bit, and I loved teaching. And I thought -- and many of my friends say the same thing, then go somewhere and teach. I'd come down here, spend a few years and get some experience, and we, Mimi and I both realized after we'd been here a year or two we'd never leave. I loved the Laboratory and we loved living in Oak Ridge. I think it's changed, but back then it was a marvelous place. Most of the people were about our ages. We had a lot of close friends, and of course this is a marvelous area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, and you see that's one of the things about Oak Ridge is that people like you, you had been to Paris.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And that's the way it was. It was just a marvelous place to be, with marvelous people. The only thing we didn't have was restaurants, and so we dined at other people’s homes all of the time. And there were a lot of great cooks among our friends. Mimi put together a cookbook that was sold by an organization she was in. The first, I think, was produced in Oak Ridge.  They thought they would sell a few copies, but they had to get it printed two or three times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Who was the group that did that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: The National Council on Jewish Women.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, was that right? That would seem like a great thing to do, is to kind of have visiting dinners at somebody's houses on a regular basis. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: As we grow older, it's harder for people to cook for a crowd and it's possible to go to Knoxville to a good restaurant, so I don't know that people do that now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Not like they used to, I imagine. So did you get involved in any social activities, organizations things like that over the years?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I got somewhat involved in politics. In those times, the county was badly corrupt. The sheriff was believed to run the bootlegging business. Some of us had been involved in the campaign believed Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower. And Stevenson said to us when he lost that we need to go out and get involved in local politics. Lots of people responded to that, and we did here. A number of us organized to elect a sheriff. And, by gosh, we did. We missed the first time, but the second time we elected him. And by then we had enough influence to change the whole county government.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what time period was this?
MR. ROSENTHAL: That would have been late 1950's. What we did was to include endorsement ads in the paper with the names of prominent people. Alvin Weinberg would let me include his name-- The voters in Oak Ridge would follow our recommendations and it worked. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Well that's great! Y’all were young and full of vigor and--
MR. ROSENTHAL: We learned that reform organizations normally make a change, and then it reverts back to the way it was after they get out of it. We were fortunate it didn't revert. Some of the participants in our movement ran for various boards and commissions and that helped keep it going.
MR. MCDANIEL: So how long did you stay active in politics like that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: That went on for four or five years. Then we were moving towards forming the city government here, and I got involved in that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I participated in writing the charter, and later ran for the first elected Charter Commission and became Chairman of it. And I had some other involvement with city government, not all successful.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Were you involved in any civic groups? You know Rotary--
MR. ROSENTHAL: I joined Rotary after I retired. Earlier, I just didn’t have time. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? Well, that's good. Yeah, Rotary's a big time commitment.
MR. ROSENTHAL: If you’re younger and you’re active it is, but by that time, nobody expected me to do much. However, Rotary is a very satisfying organization because it does lots of good things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, and you get to see your friends at least once a week--
MR. ROSENTHAL: And make lots of new friends.
MR. MCDANIEL: And make lots of new friends, that’s true. That is true, Rotary is very active in Oak Ridge, you have three--
MR. ROSENTHAL: Three clubs.
MR. MCDANIEL: In a town this size that is very unusual. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: I think the most important thing I did after retirement was organize ORICL.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, tell me a little bit about ORICL. I mean, how that came to be. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: We had some friends from Oak Ridge who moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And we would visit them. One time we were there for a birthday party for a friend, and I noticed everybody was talking about what they were doing in an organization called DILR. So I asked about DILR and learned that it was the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement. Next time we went to Chapel Hill, our friends took me to DILR and introduced me to the person in charge to learn more. So I came back here and went to Sherry Hoppe, who was at the time president of Roane State.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year was that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: That was '97. I got in touch with Sherry and said would you do something like this, and I sent her some information. So she had Loretta Friend, the Dean, get in touch with me. I gathered some friends and went down to meet with Loretta. A friend had told me that when you to meet an official, bring along a couple friends so you look like a committee. 
MR. MCDANIEL: That's exactly right. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: Four people went with me to meet Loretta at the Roane State Campus. I described what we had in mind and said to Loretta, “If you'll do it, we'll help”.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. ROSENTHAL: She replied, “If you will do it, we’ll help.”  So, our group withdrew to another room and talked about it. We decided we'd do it and that's what we did. Then we began to expand our group with others we knew could help, growing to about a dozen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Loretta suggested that we ought to make sure that people would be interested in what we proposed. So we decided to have a public meeting. We thought if 30 or 40 people came, that would be enough. To our delight, 256 people showed up. With that support we talked to Sherry the next day, and signed an agreement, and she lent us $1,600 to get started. Three or four months later, we had our first set of classes. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how many classes did you start with and how many do you have now?
MR. ROSENTHAL: We started with 17, and we had some good teachers. Alvin was one of them, as was Gene Pickle, a famous teacher at the High School. That was in the spring, and we thought, okay, we'll shut down for the summer, but people pressed  us so hard we continued with a summer semester, and in a couple years we built up to where we were offering 56 classes per semester. We also added tours, which have turned out to be the most popular thing offered.
MR. MCDANIEL: How many people now are participating?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Close to 600--
MR. MCDANIEL: It's the College of Oak Ridge that finally came to be.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, it is in fact. I take about five classes per semester. Sometimes the courses are two lectures, and sometimes as many as 10.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I sign up for 5 per semester, but a lot of people, (somewhat illegally, I think) take more than that. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course they just show up, I understand.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, but I think it's a marvelous thing. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, and what is the average age? Do you know the average age?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No, because we decided we didn't want to pry. But it must be in the upper 70's.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I would say, at least in the 70's, something like that. But it's great. I mean you know, it's well respected and everybody knows about it and it's a wonderful part of our community, especially for retired folks.
MR. ROSENTHAL: We realized it was really going to take when a couple people told us they had been planning to move away from Oak Ridge, but they couldn't leave ORICL.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And I think that's true for many of us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: And while the average age is way up there, we had some teenagers who came and took a camping course. But it's mostly around my age.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly. So you’re still active.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I'm not active in the management--
MR. MCDANIEL: But you take the classes.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I'm one of the most active students.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, how many hours do you personally have from ORICL? Do you know?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Do I take per semester?
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, have you taken over the course of the 15 years?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Oh gosh, at least five a semester, three times a year for fifteen years.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, at least a couple of more doctorates, right then? At least enough for that.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I’ve taken a lot of science courses about things I didn't know anything about. I’ve taken a lot of history courses. I love those. And a lot of other things.
MR. MCDANIEL: We interviewed Dave Hobson, Monday, and Dave gave me the thirty-eight page document that he used to teach the course.
MR. ROSENTHAL: He gives marvelous courses. Have you seen his model of the Nelson Ship?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yes, we were in his living room and we saw that.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Dave manages to bring that to the class he is giving! He is just typical of the people who teach.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let’s go back and talk about your children. I want to talk about your children a little bit.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, my daughter, Elaine lives on St. George Island, Florida, which she thinks is heaven.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And my son Douglas, who has an industrial psychology degree, has a company of his own in Alexandria, Virginia. And they are both doing very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: So they grew up and went to Oak Ridge High School and--
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: And there were lots of activities for them, I imagine.
MR. ROSENTHAL: There were.
MR. MCDANIEL: When they were here.
MR. ROSENTHAL: They were very active. My son was a top tennis player when he was here, which he doesn't have time to do much anymore. My daughter was active in Campfire and other things. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Well let’s go back and talk some about your work and Alvin Weinberg.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Alright.
MR. MCDANIEL: Your relationship with Alvin. You can do this however you want to. If you want to combine both together, I want you to talk specifically about your work and what you did. Or you can talk about that then talk about Alvin or you can put them together, however you want to do it.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, I remember when I first met Alvin; I had been here for four or five months and was doing some experimental work that relates to the safety of light water reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was he the Lab Director at the time?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No, he was called Research Director.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay right.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And my section head brought him to my lab to learn about my work. As I described what I was doing, Alvin was very courteous, but as people well know, he soon began to ask me questions. Not only about my work, but also its importance to reactor safety, how significant it would be. I didn't know a lot of answers, but after he left I went and learned. And over the next twenty years, I learned to look up a lot of things right before seeing Alvin because I knew he was very likely to ask about them. 
Big organizations at the Lab would have regular meetings at which researchers described what they were doing. Alvin would often come to them and lots of others would come because they wanted to hear Alvin’s comments and questions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I'll tell you a story. Because I wanted to hear Alvin, I would sit right behind him in the second row. As I was sitting there one day when he started asking questions, everybody began to laugh. A microphone was coming down from the ceiling over Alvin's head. He heard the laughter and turned around, and everybody pointed at the microphone. He grimaced, and that was the only time it was there. It was a good idea because hearing him was why people attended. 
MR. MCDANIEL: They wanted to hear him, wanted to hear his questions.
MR. ROSENTHAL: That was Alvin's characteristic. He would ask a lot of questions, relative questions that often went beyond what had been considered. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: But backing up, after my year at Reactor School, people were very nice to me and put me in places where I could learn the reactor business, and I stayed in it for 20 years. It was the right time and this was the right place to be, and I really enjoyed it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I imagine twenty years, especially in that specific twenty years, there were lots of new discoveries and you know new advancements made and reactor technology.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, lots of organizations got into the reactor business, but the Lab was particularly influential at the beginning. Many people got trained at the Reactor School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, and it was the only Reactor School in the country, wasn't it?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No, one was also started at Argonne, but it was somewhat different. One of the key things that happened here was Hyman Rickover came down, then Captain Rickover, coming to Reactor School with a bunch of Navy people. While they were here they began to design, a submarine reactor. And as I understand it, Rickover had in mind making it a gas-cooled reactor. Alvin persuaded him to pursue water cooling, which was a very important decision.  At the time, the Laboratory was designing a water-cooled reactor that ended up being built in Idaho.  
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And Rickover's time here was important because much of the world’s nuclear power industry sprung from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because everything's water cooled reactors now.
MR. ROSENTHAL: The reactor built in Idaho, the Materials Test Reactor, was mainly designed by Eugene Wigner and Alvin did the physics for it. You can't do better than that. The Materials Test Reactor was followed by the aqueous homogeneous reactor aimed at breeder reactors that would generate more fuel than they consumed. Next, the Laboratory got into developing a reactor to use on nuclear powered airplanes. I was on the aircraft program until I attended a meeting where an Air Force Colonel told us about how they were going to use the airplanes. After hearing him, I asked my boss if I could get off that program, it was never going to go anywhere. And transfer me to one of the other programs.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you were right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, but the work done on it here helped build the Lab because it created a lot of technical capability.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, it was kind of like, kind of like the way NASA did, they had to make everything highly efficient and super small so the Lab was kind of doing the same thing weren't they?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, the reactor had to be very hot to propel the plane, and it had to be compact and lightweight.
MR. MCDANIEL: Lightweight.
MR. ROSENTHAL: So out of that came the Molten Salt Reactor, which we then turned into a civilian power reactor.  I led that program after a while. Alvin put me in charge of it in 1966. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Backing up to eh reactor built in Idaho, it turned out to be very important because off shoots of it were built around the reactor to use in research programs. The HFIR reactor, it’s most advanced descendent is still used at the Laboratory today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right now.  And your, and then you eventually became Deputy Director, is that right, of the Lab.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, in 1973 the AEC finally killed our Molten Salt Reactor Program. Dixie Lee Ray became head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the President directed her to do a study to determine how the U.S. could be made independent of imported oil. That led the AEC into a lot of other energy things: solar energy, geothermal energy, energy from coal and such. I was sent to Washington to help and spent most of a summer there learning about various energy sources. After returning to the Laboratory, I worked with others to start new activities at the Laboratory. Of these, the Energy Conservation Program was probably most important. I was mad associate Laboratory Director for Advanced. Herman Postma came by and said I also want you to oversee the Fusion Program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Herman Postma who was Lab Director at the time
MR. ROSENTHAL: I knew nothing about that. It's hard to imagine how little I knew about it--
MR. MCDANIEL: Fusion.
MR. ROSENTHAL: The Fusion Energy Division assigned someone to teach me.  I ended up spending much of my time on it. It was the most exciting thing I ever did. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Very highly demanding technically, and a lot of bright people. It was great fun. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I'm sure he put you in charge of it because he trusted you to make sure it did what it was suppose to do. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: That sounds good but the fact is that when I was in Washington that summer, I'd come to know the guy who was the head of the fusion program up there, and I believe he suggested to Herman that I be put in charge of it. And so I stayed as Associate Lab Director until 1988 when Herman left and Alvin Trivelpiece became Lab Director and I became Deputy Director. In that position I had to do a lot of things I hadn't done before.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure I understand. Let's talk about Alvin, Dr. Weinberg specifically. One of the questions that I had was Weinberg’s relationship with Wigner. Tell me about that, tell me about them.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, it began in 1942. Alvin was studying at Chicago and had received a Ph. D. in biophysics. He started out to be a chemist, but was no good in a laboratory, he said, and changed to biophysics. He stayed on as a post-doc and was studying the way that nerve signals move through the system. That turns out to have the exact mathematics as diffusion of neutrons in a reactor. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Work on the atom bomb program at Chicago had begun.  Carl Eckerd was looking into how neutrons behaved in beryllium and need somebody who knew mathematics, and he sort of drafted Alvin to work on that. Eckerd left for other war work, but just as he was leaving Eugene Wigner came to Chicago and picked up Alvin for his group. And Alvin became his physics assistant. He was 26 at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where was Wigner?
MR. ROSENTHAL: He was in Chicago. When the bomb program started, some of it was centered in Chicago, and a lot of people collected there in what, for security reasons, were called Metallurgical Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Wigner won one of the leading experts on the physics related to nuclear reactors, and he became the Head of Design for it. With Alvin as his physics assistant and they developed a marvelous relationship that lasted their entire lives. Alvin moved to Oak Ridge in 1945, and Wigner came about 6 months later. Wigner’s goal was to create a research laboratory that would work on nuclear reactors, and he ended up leading to the construction of the Laboratory’s first reactor. But after a couple of years he wanted to get back to more basic physics and returned to researching. Later he received a Nobel Prize for his fundamental works on physics. Clarence Lawson became Lab Director and Alvin became Research Director. Then Clarence left the lab and Alvin became Director. Eugene used to come down here on occasion and Alvin would have him look into things and give his advice. There are stories about how quickly he could group something.
MR. MCDANIEL: And sure would figure it out.
MR. ROSENTHAL: A remarkable, remarkable man. I was very fortunate. When I was Associate Director, there was a civil defense program in which he was interested that was still going on in one of my divisions. He would manage to discuss that each time he would drop by to talk to me. You already knew of Wigner’s reputation for courtesy. My secretary said he would open the door, look in, and say is there a chance that I can see Dr. Rosenthal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: She would clear out anybody there--
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. ROSENTHAL: --and he would sit and talk to me for a while. And he did that a number of times during that period, which was marvelous for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. I'm not, I've never really talked to anybody that knew him, you know.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I hadn’t known him well before.
MR. MCDANIEL: I thought you knew him.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Only slightly before that, but on one occasion he probably got me a promotion. Alvin arranged for several of us to tell him about things we had been doing, and my part was about an assessment I had made of the reports for the molten salt reactor. When he reported back to Alvin he made some favorable comments about it that got Alvin’s attention.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: So, later I was put in charge of the Molten Salt Program. 
MR. MCDANIEL: That's alright, go ahead that's fine.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Wigner was one of those amazingly intelligent Hungarians. He continued to have a lot of influence on Alvin, and who often would consult him about important decisions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well he was probably, Alvin was his protégé and Eugene was Alvin's mentor probably. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes. You probably know that together they wrote the leading book on reactor physics. I don't know how they found time, but they did.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. Now is it correct, is my understanding correct that the two of them hold the patent on the power reactor, is that correct, do you know that? Cause I've heard that, that the two of them.
MR. ROSENTHAL: They did own a patent of some sort on water-cooled reactors as I remember, but I don’t recall its name. Fermen and Szilard applied for a patent on reactors back in '42, I think, but because it was classified they didn’t get it until after the war. 
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was thinking, the water cooled reactor.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, I had forgotten that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I think so, I'll find out for sure about that but I think that's what is overheard.
MR. ROSENTHAL: I wouldn't have remembered had you not asked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, what was Weinberg, what was his relationship with you like? I mean tell me some good stories about things that happened.
MR. ROSENTHAL: You know if you want to describe Alvin, it takes a lot of adjectives. In fact I'll tell you a story about Alvin and adjectives. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ROSENTHAL: When Alvin was Director a writer for the New Yorker came to Oak Ridge to write an article on reactors. Alvin asked me to show him around the Lab. When he finished the article, he mailed me a copy to review. I started reading it and there in typical New Yorker style he described Alvin with a series of adjectives. They were “short” and “vernacular” --I don't remember the rest. When I took it to Alvin, I looked at Alvin, and I said, “Gosh Alvin, you are short!” It had never occurred to me before.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL: When I left his office I dropped into the office of several of his associates and asked, “Did you know Alvin is short?” They each looked startled and said, “No, it had never occurred to them”. He was a giant to us and we didn’t notice his height.  The New Yorker didn't publish the articles -- too technical, I imagine – and, unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, exactly.
MR. ROSENTHAL: At one point, Alvin was someone to push the molten salt reactors and to my surprise, maybe because of Wigner’s comment, he chose me. 
MR. MCDANIEL: And he was very interested in that. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: That was perhaps his greatest interest, and as a result, I spent a great deal of time with him. He would regularly call me in to ask me about it, push me on it. Alvin typically was by things that could affect the United States, or the world. Once he asked me to look into something and after a while he called me over and said, “You don't seem to be getting very far at it”. I said, “I'm getting to it, but we're very busy right now”. And he replied, “We must find time for the important things”.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: He wanted the Lab to work on “the important things” and paid less attention to things that didn’t fit that category. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I was fortunate that I was usually engaged in stuff that he thought was important.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I guess that kind of where that term Big Science comes from.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Oh, he originated that in his writing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah tell me about that. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: I don't remember what he was writing about but Alvin created a number of terms, most notably “Faustian Bargain” and “Big Science”- that are used frequently. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right exactly. When I tell people that I'm working on this project and they may not know who he was but may know his name, but don't know anything about him, I say well in the nuclear business he was a “rock star”.
MR. ROSENTHAL: That is correct. 
MR. MCDANIEL: You know he really was.
MR. ROSENTHAL: During his later years, Alvin couldn't drive and I would often take him places. And I walked into his house to pick him up one day and he was sitting by a wastebasket with a lap full of mail and throwing one after another into the wastebasket.   I said, “Alvin, what are you doing?” He replied, “I have received 27 honorary degrees and all of them keep me on their mailing list. So I get lots of mail all the time”.  That was an indication of how widely recognized he was. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, back then there were a lot of young folks, what we would consider young folks now that had, were doing important work and had positions of importance. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: Yes, Alvin had a remarkable ability to understand all sorts of things, and if something came up, you could assume that he would understand it and know a lot about it. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Were people afraid of him? Was he approachable?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No, not afraid of him at all. He was very warm and kind. But we were all in awe of him. Once he was at my house when my children were around, and he talked to them for some time. I asked them afterwards what they talked about, and they said he had asked them a lot of questions. So he was interested enough to find out what even young people thought of things.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess that was one of his, one of his ways to get people to think about what they were doing.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And his attending questions at the big meetings were one way he inserted influence on the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, I've had several people tell me that when they were talking and at meetings, he'd be sitting in the front and would raise his hand and start asking questions.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Right and everybody would be quiet and listen.  That continued all the time that he was at the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: I know that the industry at that time was fairly small. How was he thought of in the industry outside of Oak Ridge?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Not as much as you might think. Because Alvin’s interest was in advanced systems that could breed or could be ultra-safe, and that isn't what the industry was doing. But he had a lot of influence on the scientific and laboratory community through his speeches and publications. And in the earlier days, he was influential with the government agencies as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ROSENTHAL:  But I don't think his influence with the industry and the utilities was that strong.
MR. MCDANIEL:  I bet that really helped him to draw talented people to Oak Ridge didn't it?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Oh it certainly did. In earlier years, Alvin had a lot of influence in the senior community of scientists. After the war, there was sort of an old boy network among the people that had been involved, and Alvin had strong relations with them and sometimes his influence would enable the Laboratory to do things we otherwise wouldn't be able to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was his relationship like with the Washington folks?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, you know he got fired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ROSENTHAL: And in his later years, was not so good. There were friends that Alvin pushed to things that they didn't want to or couldn’t do. And then when the Molten Salt Reactor came along, he was really pushing. The AEC didn’t mind much until the rest of us wrote and spoke pushing the molten salt reactor. But they were more sensitive about Alvin, particularly when it came to the importance of the molten salt reactor, which resulted in a faster reactor.  I think that caused him a lot of problems and then, near the end of his term here, he got involved in a safety issue that made it worse. Some ORNL people had done experiments that indicated the light water reactors might not be as safe as thought. The experiment seemed to show that fuel passages could plug up in an accident. A big hearing was held about it.  Jim Schlesinger, who was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was personally involved in it. He and Alvin discussed it on the phone several time; sometimes heatedly. That’s what got Alvin fired, not the Molten Salt, if you read things you think he got fired ‘because he was pushing Molten Salt reactor. I think he got fired because he disparaged the fast reactor and he got in some trouble with Schlesinger. One time, I was in the office of Floyd Culler, Alvin’s deputy, and Alvin came in really looking troubled. He said he had been talking to Schlesinger about the safety issue and had to acknowledge he had been wrong about something. He said Schlesinger got very angry about it. My take is that the safety issue plus Alvin creation of fast reactors were more important at the time in getting him fired than the support of the molten salt reactors. But it had been building up for some time.  
MR. MCDANIEL: Somebody told me once that Alvin just did whatever he wanted, and they finally just got tired of it. They couldn't control him.
MR. ROSENTHAL: That’s somewhat correct. There were other issues besides the molten salt reactor. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I understand. What did he do after he left the Lab, tell me about that. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well without any announcement that he had been fired, he took a leave and spent a year in Washington, initially at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, I think, where he did some writing I guess. Sometime in there ORAU created a program for him on energy studies, but just as it was starting the oil embargo occurred and Alvin went to Washington to head the Office of Energy Research, with a big office in the Executive Office Building by the White House. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: After a year or so he returned to Oak Ridge and took up his position at ORAU. There he worked on ideas for safe reactors and into carbon dioxide build up and the global warming problem, and probably other areas that I can’t recall at the moment. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Anything else you want to tell me about him? Anything else you want to talk about?
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, having the opportunity to work with Alvin was really a marvelous thing in my life. He was constantly interested in what was going on. And even after we were retired, when I met with him I could expect questions about reactors and other things. And I realized that just as at the Laboratory, I had some time to do some studying before I talked to him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just to study to go visit him. 
MR. ROSENTHAL: If something would appear in the news, I knew I should read all about it ‘because he is going to be asking me. Wigner gave the Laboratory its mission and form, be he left it early, and after that it was Alvin who shaped it. He influenced everything. He wasn't just interested in reactors and energy; he was interested in biology and the environment and on and on. 
MR. MCDANIEL: What do you think, years from now when people look back and they study about it, what do you think his legacy is going to reveal? What do you think people are going to connect with Alvin Weinberg?
MR. ROSENTHAL: First, his pioneering role in nuclear energy. Alvin was granted 26 honorary degrees, he received several top nuclear energy awards, he was elected to both the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering (a rare thing), and wrote eight books including with Wigner, a widely used text on nuclear reactor theory. So that role is already recognized. I would add that ORNL, which he helped create and then shape, is a legacy that has and is continuing to make major contributions to the United States and the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, exactly. You know I had the opportunity to interview him on camera for, I guess it may have been a year before he died and I didn't get, it wasn't a very long interview maybe 20 min or so. But he, you know he answered my questions was very polite and then he said, “You know if you were to ask me”, and I'm sure you've heard this, “If you were to ask me the most important thing that we ever did, that would have been the radioisotope, medical radioisotope program”. You know, did he ever talk to you about that? Or did you all ever have a discussion about that.
MR. ROSENTHAL: His statement about that has been quoted many times. I can’t remember when I first heard it. But the most striking place is probably in connections with stamps issued on the 50th anniversary of the first radiation production. 
MR. MCDANIEL: No, tell me about that.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well I wasn't involved and I can't remember much except that when they printed, the Post Office created what I believe stamp collectors call a "first day cover”, printed on it is Alvin’s statement. I have one of them. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? What, let's get back to you a little bit. What do you feel like, obviously you stayed here, you came and you stayed basically. And you know your work seemed very satisfying. You know, why do you think it was important what you were doing and what the work was being done at ORNL while you were there.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, when I came here and afterwards, I thought nuclear energy was going to be more important than it has been so far -- that it would change the world. In the early days, we talked about energy too cheap to measure, and we expected nuclear reactors to be everywhere. Well that's not turned out to be true so far. But eventually there will be many more nuclear reactors driven by global warming as well as for the need for energy. So being a part of that is very satisfying. 
When nuclear energy work began to go down at the Laboratory, the things I got into as an Associate Director helped change the direction of the Laboratory. I think that may have been one of the most significant things I did. When I became Deputy Director, I had to get involved in a lot of things I had not done before. That was a period at which safety and environmental issues at laboratories were being reexamined. Plutonium had been found all around the place at Rocky Flats. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ROSENTHAL: As Deputy Director, I spent a lot of time worrying about safety--nuclear safety – and about environmental contamination that had built up over the years.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year, about what time was that?
MR. ROSENTHAL: I became Deputy in '88, and stayed at it for five years.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that was during the time Joe LaGrone was manager of the Oak Ridge Operations.
MR. ROSENTHAL: That was the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: I've interviewed him and he talked pretty extensively about that.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, the Laboratory was often unhappy with Joe required of us, but he was always personally very kind to me. Up to that point I had spent all my time managing with Development Programs, which I always enjoyed, and I suddenly had to do a lot of things I would have preferred not doing.  
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet, I know, I understand. How do you think the Oak Ridge National Lab, and I'm sure it's changed over the years, stands as far as its significance in the scientific research, you know, world.
MR. ROSENTHAL: Well, from what I can see, it is among the top laboratories of the world. It is certainly is one of the top Department of Energy's laboratories, both by the breath of activities, and by their quality. Some very outstanding things are going on. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Alright is there anything else you want to talk about?
MR. ROSENTHAL: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: We've talked, we've gone about an hour I guess or so. Well thank you so much for taking the time--
MR. ROSENTHAL: Your welcome I hope it turns out to be useful for you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]
[Editor’s Note:  At Mr. Rosenthal’s request, this transcript has been edited, resulting in some slight differences from the video corresponding to it. Sections of this transcript have been removed.]