Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory Lecture: Richard Hewlett- Part 2

              
HISTORY OF OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
Presented by Richard Hewlett
Transcribed by Jordan H. Reed

[Note: This was a video marked Oak Ridge National Laboratory Lecture given by Richard Hewlett. It was provided by the American Museum of Science and Energy. The presentation date is unknown.]

 
ANNOUNCER:  Well, good morning ladies and gentlemen. It’s an honor and privilege for me to be able to introduce today’s speaker.  Since this involves some aspects of the history of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I would like to point out… 
[Break in audio]  
…Alvin. Must still be outside. Ok and Herman Postma. There is Herman. I am frequently asked to introduce physicists with whom I have worked or engineers with whom I have worked, about whom I know a great deal because of personal contact experience. This is a new experience for me because I have not introduced a historian before. So I don’t have the kind of sure and certain personal knowledge that allows me to do it in an extemporaneous way that calls attention to facts that are not normally in a resume. So with your, with apologies I would like to read a very impressive resume for today’s speaker. Richard Hewlett is senior vice president of the board of History Associates, Inc. He is an emeritus individual. He received his Ph.D. in modern history from the University of Chicago in 1952, and served as chief historian…
 [Break in video] 
… 1980. He is coauthor of The New World, 1939-1945; The Atomic Shield, 1947-1952; and The Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-61. It’s a three volume history. Many of you have taken advantage of purchasing a copy at the bookstore and brought your copies with you and had Richard sign it. The second volume received the David D. Lloyd Prize in 1970, for the best book published during 1969 and 1970, from the Harry S. Truman Library Administration. The third volume won the Richard W. Leopold Prize, presented by the Organization of American Historians, and the Henry Adams Prize presented by the Society for History in the Federal Government.  In 1994, it received the Franklin D. Roosevelt award from that same organization for distinguished service and establishing and supporting history programs in the Federal Government. He is also the coauthor of Nuclear Navy, 1939-1962, published by the University of Chicago Press. 1973, received a distinguished service award from the Atomic Energy Commission for his… 
[Break in audio]
… historical programs. Serves as consultant for many corporations, government organizations, historical archives matters…
[Break in audio] 
… in history of science and technology University of California, 1982. Before allowing Richard to begin talking I would like to present to him a memento from us that does go nicely on a coffee table. It is a copy of the Tennesseans, which is a photographic collection that I find very entertaining. Please welcome Richard Hewlett who will tell us something about Oak Ridge’s history.
[Applause]
MR. HEWLETT: Thank you very much. Now then, it is a privilege to be here at Oak Ridge again. I think the first time I came was in 1955, when we arrived by train and we stayed in the Guesthouse, which I was able to discover again last night with Kay Johnson’s help. I don’t know, talking to many of you before this lecture I realized that this is bringing coals to New Castle. Here I am talking about the history of the Laboratory and many of you know it first-hand [break in audio], but today I thought I might talk a little bit about the origins of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We have a great world class- multidisciplinary Laboratory here today, with an operating budget of more than a half billion dollars and 5000 employees. It is a very impressive institution. I think for some people, they may forget that ORNL [Oak Ridge National Laboratory] was not simply created whole beautiful, a presentation from the Atomic Energy Commission. But it emerged after years of struggle and disappointment. 
[Break in video]
The opportunity to create a major research laboratory at Oak Ridge was missed. In some cases, it was people just didn’t see why would anybody think of building a laboratory here. Or maybe someone suggested a laboratory, but it didn’t, they didn’t want to do it. For instance, many of the math lab scientists didn’t want to come down here to Dogpatch. And the third was that in some cases, it looked as if what was already created here, Clinton Laboratories, was disappearing and it looked as if there wouldn’t be a laboratory at Oak Ridge. I thought it might be interesting to review some of this because it helps us and it helps me too, to appreciate the efforts of hundreds of people at all levels who made Oak Ridge National Laboratory what it is today. But what I think even more important than that, the origins of ORNL are a part of a much larger story in the development of science and technology since World War II. We must remember that before the war there was no such thing as a National Laboratory as we know them today. There had been government labs such as the National Bureau of Standards, and there had been private industry labs like the GE Laboratory at Schenectady [New York], but nothing like the partnership of government industry and universities, that is an essential part of the National Laboratory concept as we know it today. And of course in the beginning, there wasn’t even any Oak Ridge. Seven months before Fermi’s experiment a group of scientists from the OSRD [Office of Scientific Research and Development] came down here to what they called the Elza Site to look for a place to build a production plant to produce uranium-235 and plutonium. And this is the first missed opportunity. There was no thought, no thought at all of building a laboratory down here. The research was all being done at university laboratories; Columbia, University of Chicago, and University of California at Berkley. So research and development was being conducted at University laboratories by scientists who had university backgrounds. They weren’t ready for this kind of operation. In the summer of 1942, Arthur Compton and others at the University of Chicago were trying to figure out how to design a reactor which would produce plutonium for the bomb. And they were considering various designs. It’s very interesting they thought, “Well, we could build little 100 watt piles under the stadium next to Fermi’s reactor and produce enough plutonium maybe to help Los Alamos develop the bomb”.  And then the idea was that he could build this small of a reactor right on the university’s campus, but by the fall it was decided that maybe that wasn’t too safe a place to build it. So we could build it, maybe, out at the Argonne Forest Reserve, or maybe out at the Indiana Dunes. So, this was a very, seems a bizarre idea as we look at it today. They were thinking of building what they called a “Pile” because after all it was a pile of graphite such as Fermi’s reactor. This was before the Fermi experiment. But then in September 1942, General Groves came into the picture and he made decisions that had been hanging around for eight months in a matter of days. Groves decided, first of all, that the Tennessee site had to be acquired and it was immediately, and the idea was that the production plants would be built here at Oak Ridge.  At that time, Arthur Compton realized that the Pile, in the small plant to separate the plutonium from the uranium, would have to build at this new site, at the Clinton Engineer Works. Now there is an opportunity, you know, maybe we are going to get some scientists at Oak Ridge. Once Groves had seen Compton’s plans, he presented for the Plutonium Production Complex, he realized that there was no way they were going to build production reactors down here in Tennessee. He quickly moved to acquire the Hanford Site for the production of Plutonium out there. So, here is the second opportunity lost. Compton said, “Well, if they’re going to build the reactors at Hanford, we don’t need the pilot plant at the X-10 area. All the R and D [research and development] work can be done here at the MET Lab” [Metallurgical Laboratory or University of Chicago].  So, that would take care of it, no need for a laboratory down at Oak Ridge. By this time, Groves had already been negotiating with DuPont to do this at Oak Ridge. To me looking back on it now, I think this is a very important moment in the evolution of the National Laboratory idea. That is, that DuPont’s entry into the project and the organizational concepts the company brought to the project were a great significance for the future, because DuPont insisted on applying the same structure to this project that it used in developing its own products. The MET Lab scientists were, in DuPont’s view, considered to be no different from a research division attached to one of the companies engineering departments. In other words, the research team existed only to serve the department. The research team neither dictated policies on plant design or operations and they did not determine independently their own research program. They were slaves of the engineering department. The MET Lab was expected only to provide research data for design of the production plant and the SED Works [Special Engineering Detachment].  At the same time, of course DuPont realized that they needed scientists to help them in the design and they had to develop a working relationship with them. So, here the scientists at the MET Lab for the first time, were facing the idea of a new type of laboratory one not resting on the traditional patterns of university research, but one requiring a joint effort of scientists and engineers focused on a specific goal so that you weren’t drifting off into basic research on very interesting topics. This was one of General Groves’ great peeves, if he saw scientists moving in that direction, the idea of a laboratory in which scientists were working as part of a team under the direction of an industrial contract. And that was to become a permanent feature of laboratory organization at Oak Ridge. Maybe that will change in the future, but up to this time that has persisted. DuPont insisted on a dominant role in the Pile Project and its conclusion that the SED Works would have to be built at the Clinton Site seemed to scotch any idea that there would be research, a research laboratory here. So, I flag that as number three of a missed opportunity.
Compton became even more convinced of this when he learned that DuPont was to build the SED Works at X-10. He assumed that if there was going to be one here at least the scientists, that the MET Lab would do it. Scientists at the MET Lab now became deeply concerned that DuPont was taking control of the project. And they were. They were going to design the reactors in Wilmington with John Wheeler working as the liaison man. DuPont’s engineering team in Wilmington would set the general specification for the Pile as well as many of the mechanical specifications.  DuPont would then turn to the laboratory for detailed dimensions of the Pile, the lattice arrangement and those interior configurations that Wigner and Weinberg were working on. Still doubtful that DuPont could build a workable SED Works, they couldn’t see how this industrial engineering contractor could do this involving a completely new science much less the full scale Piles at Hanford, but at least the MET Lab scientists could feel relief that they would have no responsibility for producing the plutonium samples from the SED Works.  They might be out of the picture. Thus, Compton and his colleagues were shocked when they learned that DuPont expected the MET Lab to operate the SED Works. Here they hadn’t had any part in building it and they would have to operate it. Only after weeks of negotiation in early 1943 did the University of Chicago finally agree to accept the contract to operate the SED Works. So this decision brought in the reality the new role for the MET Lab, directed by DuPont’s operational philosophy. The MET Lab at X-10 would now be engaged in industrial engineering rather than in basic laboratory research. The scientists would now be working outside their familiar surroundings of an academic laboratory in an industrial environment. 
Before the end of 1942, just a few weeks after Fermi’s field experiment, the MET Lab sent Mark D. Whittaker from the MET Lab to Oak Ridge with a small staff to prepare, to watch, observe the construction of the pilot plant and to prepare for its operation. When it was completed, DuPont sent several hundred engineers to help with the industrial and management functions and the project grew during 1943, from 64 people to over 1000 by the end of the year. And now we have what we could actually call Clinton Laboratories. It does exist by the end of the year, and it’s turned out to be a successful cooperative venture.  The Pile went critical in November of 1943, and the separation plant soon thereafter and the first plutonium samples were shipped to Los Alamos in the spring of 1944. And then the war ended. And everything was thrown again into confusion. 
The University of Chicago had taken the project with the idea that as soon as the work was done and the war was over, they were out. So, General Groves had to bring in a new contractor to operate the Clinton Engineer, Clinton Laboratories and he turned to the Monsanto Chemical Company to take over the contract. And I think this was largely because Charles Thomas, an industrial chemist at Monsanto, had seen and caught the atomic bug and he saw the great possibilities for developing a nuclear power in the post-war world, particularly reactors and he wanted Monsanto to be a part of this. Whittaker was still here as the director of the laboratory under Monsanto and so we still had the partnership between science and the industrial side which had taken place during the war.  
Now, General Groves of course expected that very quickly after the end of the war the Congress would adopt the legislation that the Army had drafted to set up an Atomic Energy Commission which would have a group of part-time commissioners up here to sort of look at general policy while the Army ran the project. That is the way it had happened during the war. As we all know that did not happen and Congress ended up in it.  The Army draft was rejected and ended up in a bitter political controversy over whether the new commission was to be controlled by the military or the civilians and this drifted on into 1946. So Groves and Colonel Nichols realized that something had to be done to keep these laboratories alive during this interim period where they were going out of business and this Atomic Energy Commission or whatever it was going to be had not come into existence. Colonel Nichols came up with the idea that maybe we should have an advisory committee to look at the program at all the laboratories and see what they can come up with to fund for the fiscal year, 1947.  So Groves agreed to this and he appointed a committee of seven prominent scientists who met in March of 1946 to look at the whole program and these were many of the people had come out of the Manhattan Project. They concentrated in the Ivy League schools, the Big Ten schools, and the West Coast. The committee looked things over and they recommended that the government labs should continue to do further research and development on better processes for production of plutonium and uranium-235 and begin to look at the possibility of atomic power. The universities and the private laboratories should be encouraged to engage in basic unclassified research. And the national laboratories, which this is where I think the first idea of the national laboratories comes up, they were to do research which the universities and private organizations couldn’t fund themselves. Big equipment, big science. And in all of this the only mention of the Clinton Engineer Works, there was no mention of the Laboratory, it just said that the Clinton Engineer works should do, I guess, the dirty work, they should work on cleaning up the SED Works at X-10, and working in other things that involved hazardous activities. Each national laboratory was to have a board of directors from the universities and labs in the participating laboratories. They were to draft proposals together and submit them to General Groves and he would approve them for the coming year’s budget. There were two regional, national laboratories in this plan. One was Argonne, which had already existed, and the other was to be in the Northeast, and the people who eventually created Brookhaven hadn’t even started to think about it and it never proceeded during the Manhattan period at all.  Clinton was left here, not a national laboratory, they were to continue to work on the Daniels Pile. Farrington Daniels idea of a gas cooled reactor quick start jump from the graphite reactor all the way to nuclear power with the help of industrial contractors. So the only way Clinton was getting back into this was in 1946, William Pollard got the idea of an organization of universities in the Southeast which would work with the Clinton Laboratories and it proposed to assist Monsanto and to use the laboratories for research. So, in a way it was sort of getting at an equivalent of a national laboratory, but there was no national laboratory as such. There was no thought in this advisory board that there would be any need for a laboratory in the southeastern United States. This was just a place where apparently there was no science. The Clinton Laboratories at this time now were operating and were able to bring Eugene Wigner back as Director and he agreed to come for a period of time with help from Monsanto, and it brought James Lum down to do the administrative work. They replaced Whittaker who had gone off back to academia. Clinton of course concentrated on reactor design, a lot of it on the Daniels Pile. They also began some biomedical research with the help of the Public Health Service and this was the beginning of the great program of biomedical science in Clinton and ORNL. And then Monsanto began a technical training school here for engineers and military people. Most important of course at Clinton in those days was the production of radio isotopes in the X-10 Graphite Reactor and a national committee under Lee DuBridge from Caltech recommended an international program for the distribution of radio isotopes at cost. This was something that would underlay; it gave some ground for a laboratory here at Oak Ridge. Although it seemed likely that Clinton would eventually become a national laboratory with the status of Argonne, Brookhaven, Los Alamos, and Berkley, that outcome was no, by no means certain when the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] took over in January 1947. In the new AEC, Clinton faced many imponderables. Wigner and his colleagues would have to work with Carroll Wilson, the new general manager who was an engineer, came out of MIT, and was a close protégé of Vannevar Bush.  Wilson brought with him James B. Fisk, his roommate at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], who had come out of the Bell Laboratories as Director of Research, and they in turn reported to this five member commission, only one member of which knew anything about nuclear technology. That was Robert Bloucher and that was headed by David Lilienthal who knew something about this area who had been here at TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority], but Lilienthal was an idealist and didn’t think much in technical terms. And then in 1947, the Commission had no way to get at this. They had no way to make decisions on important things like what should you do with the laboratories, Los Alamos. How do you keep the weapons program alive. So, they depended on the general advisory committee which consisted of many prominent and influential men, including Robert Oppenheimer and James B. Conan, who very much set the style of research in the first year of the Commission’s existence. Furthermore, during the first half of 1947, Wigner also had to contend with the Army Engineers who still represented MED [Manhattan Engineering District] at Oak Ridge. People think, you know, the Commission came in in January that was the end of MED. No, they were here through the summer of ’47. This was a very complex and uncertain environment, and a far cry from the wartime period when the orders came from Groves or Nichols.  You had to deal with this complex organization. So as I see it, the GAC [General Advisory Committee] right from the beginning had a very dim view of Clinton. They didn’t think of it really as a research laboratory at all.   It was just a place where some work had been done during the war. They were not impressed with it. So they decided to send someone down here to look at the project. Oppenheimer chose John Manly, who he had worked with in Los Alamos. Manly came down in February 1947, and he reported back the working conditions down here were just abominable. The place was a bunch of Army buildings, ramshackle temporary buildings. The organization was very poor. Monsanto hadn’t pulled together the various elements in the laboratory. The scientists were impatient to get to work again on real research. Weinberg and others wanted to concentrate on the High Flux Reactor which they considered absolutely essential for any further development of reactors. And they weren’t interested in, what they considered “power stunts” like the Daniels Pile. On the other hand, Monsanto engineers wanted to concentrate around the Daniels Pile. Thomas was putting all his cards on the Daniels Pile. Manly thought…
 [Break in video]
… got in a terrific fight with the Army because he assumed that when the AEC took over, the Army regulations on control of experiments had expired and he went ahead and approved some that the military officers called him on.  Many people were talking about leaving here; there was even some talk of merging with Brookhaven, and forgetting all about Oak Ridge. So I think I am down to about six lost opportunities now. The result of Manly’s report in the GAC was that Clinton was just not really a possibility…
[Break in video]
… AEC might yield to the GAC’s, this was largely Compton’s, Conan’s idea, pressure to create a central laboratory. The idea was that you don’t want to have all this research just scattered all around the country. Bring it together all in one laboratory where there can be good communication, keep track of what is being developed, but this the idea of a central laboratory, meant a death now for the Clinton Laboratory. So things didn’t look good, but Alvin Weinberg and others saw the High Flux Reactor as a high priority, something that the Commission couldn’t ignore and it would give Clinton, begin to give Clinton some of the stature of a national laboratory. Of course the Isotope Production Program was still a project of international interest and the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology was training people in various groups. Perhaps the most notable for the future was Richover’s group down here who learned what a reactor was here in Oak Ridge. Weinberg was also courting the interests of the Armed Forces. He talked with Richover and got him interested in the pressurized water reactor so that Oak Ridge was moving in the development of nuclear propulsion for submarines and air craft propulsion, hoping that these projects would be at Clinton. 
New uncertainties of course come back again. In May of 1947, Wilson in Washington began negotiations with Thomas to renew the Monsanto contract which would expire at the end of 1947. The AEC wanted Monsanto to continue isotope production, work on uranium recovery, shut down the SED Works and operate the regional research center which had been created with a consortium of universities in the southeast. As a move toward national laboratory status, but they weren’t promising anything. Wilson made clear to Thomas that there weren’t going to be any reactor programs at Clinton. The High Flux and Navy programs are going to go elsewhere, probably to Argonne, both the GAC and the AEC considered the Daniels Pile was off on its own direction and they killed that. Well, Thomas didn’t like this proposal at all. He wasn’t going to accept this kind of a proposal. He would consider it only if Monsanto would build the High Flux at Dayton where they already had the Mon Laboratory that had already produced initiators for weapons. Thomas, I think, thought that he had a strong hand because he realized that GE had worked this. When they needed to replace DuPont at Hanford, they got GE to do the job, but they promised the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory near Schenectady, for GE. I think Thomas thought,  “Well, if they can do it, I can force them to give me the High Flux at Dayton”. Wilson and Fisk just rejected this outright. This was impossible and they began to look elsewhere for a contractor. And this decision was just another uncertainty into Clinton, but there were some encouraging signs when the AEC approached the University of Chicago to operate Clinton. Well this had some advantages. William Harold, the business manager of the University of Chicago, had a lot of experience working with the government on all their hard cane procedures during the MET Lab days and now at the Argonne National Laboratory. He had lots of experience in negotiating contracts. He knew all about personnel policy and reimbursable costs and fee calculations and most important of all the questions of how you establish who controls the research programs in the laboratory. Is it the university or is it the AEC? So, while Harold did very well on these matters, the University of Chicago and as an alumnus I can understand this, showed very little interest in Clinton. This was applied research, this was plumbing, this isn’t the high theory that Chicago is interested in. Chancellor Hutchins at the University of Chicago had very grave philosophical doubts about the whole atomic energy program all together. In the meantime, here we’re going through 1947 and Chicago, they wanted to come back to Clinton, but they can’t find a director and several people have turned it down. We get toward the end of the year and they still haven’t applied for any security clearances. In the meantime, Clinton was getting bogged down. They couldn’t expect anything from Monsanto. They knew they were going out at the end of the year. Thomas was turned off by the whole experience. Great disillusionment down here and obviously Monsanto wasn’t going to take any initiative. Furthermore, David Lilienthal began to have doubts about the Chicago contract. He didn’t like Hutchins attitude. He thought  he was not supporting this project. Lilienthal thought that the labs were beginning to get too much of an academic orientation anyway. So he happened to be down in Knoxville to give a speech. So, he decided to come out to Oak Ridge and talk to Clark Center who was directing the Carbide work at K-25 and X-10. Center showed an immediate interest at the possibility of running Clinton. It would give Carbide a broader role in the project, and Center also liked it because it might solve his labor problems down here. The problem was that Carbide operated K-25 and Y-12, and their union was the CIO. While Monsanto worked with the American Federation of Labor at Clinton and there was some feeling that the unions were playing off one against the other and there were some serious strikes later, threats of strikes later in 1947 here. And Lilienthal too was concerned that Carbide might leave Oak Ridge if Chicago came back in. I never understood just how he came to that conclusion, but he was concerned about that.  There were meetings in Washington at Lilienthal’s home out in Rockville, the day before Christmas, and it was decided that Chicago was out and they were going to bring Carbide in to run the Clinton Laboratories. So, there were calls to Monsanto to ask them if they could hold on for a few more weeks until after December 31 until we can get Carbide in here. And Fisk came down to Oak Ridge to tell Weinberg and his staff the terrible news at the moment that Carbide was coming in and worse of all that all the reactor programs were going to Argonne. This was called Black Christmas at Oak Ridge and I think the 50 year quotes the jingle of the holly and the ivy that was sung in the Laboratory in those days. 
So the one consolation that seemed to have seep out of all this dire pessimism that hit the laboratory was that the Commission in Washington decided, “We really hit these people really hard, so why don’t we…”  In January 1948, they decided to make this Oak Ridge National Laboratory. So that emerged from all this and of course as it turned out it wasn’t the end of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, not even reactor development could be centralized at Argonne. Weinberg soon worked out with them that Oak Ridge would be responsible for design of the High Flux and Argonne would be responsible for the Reactor at NRTS [National Reactor Testing Station] in Idaho. 
So the road ahead for the new Oak Ridge National Laboratory would be difficult, but Oak Ridge now was a national laboratory. It had a relationship with the universities in the area. It had a strong industrial contractor. And it would grow over the years as the scientists and engineers here proved there exceptional ability to develop new concepts for national defense and national welfare. When I read the reports from the various laboratories, I seem to be on the mailing list for most of them, always impressed with the outstanding work that all the national laboratories are doing, in all sorts of areas, many of them far removed from nuclear science and technology. I think, if more people and members of congress understood what the laboratories were doing they would realize how important they are because Oak Ridge and the other national laboratories, I think, have now become a part of the fabric of American life.  They are a priceless heritage that the nation should support and sustain in the future. Thank you very much.
[Applause]   
ANNOUNCER: Thank you. That was a very fascinating talk. I would suspect that there is probably a question or two in the audience. Richard has given many talks, and I suspect he is also capable of fielding questions from the audience. So, I won’t interfere, but I will call halt to it at some point when it is becoming pestiferous. Richard, please.
MR. HEWLETT: Steve, you have a question?
STEVE:  When the Lab was known as X-10 from the earliest time, do you know where the 10 came from in X-10?
MR. HEWLETT: No, I don’t, I don’t, and I don’t know where K-25 came from unless it was Keflex site. 
STEVE: That would be the Keflex K in 45 [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT: Yeah it could be and no one knows where Y-12 came from. No, I haven’t run across that.
ANNOUNCER:  [inaudible] … who was of course the director of the Laboratory arzamas, arzamas-16 and according to somebody who had talked to him at one point said that he was asked why it was arzamas-16 so that you would continue to look for one through 15. (laughter)
MR. HEWLETT: Yes. Alvin.
ALVIN: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT:  Well that is very interesting. Must have been a very difficult relationship for people at the MET Lab here they are working with an industrial contractor who knew nothing, in the beginning of the learning experience when you are trying to produce something in a hurry. Anything else? Well, thank you very much. Oh, you have something?
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT: No, I didn’t think so, but I don’t think it was on the basis of my interviews. (laughter) They were very interesting. I spent a lot of time on that for our third volume. We spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the old Oppenheimer case and I thought the way Louis Straws treated Oppenheimer was despicable in many ways, although I do believe that Straws did not initiate the investigation of Oppenheimer. In fact it was very interesting when Mr. Straws was on his death bed he asked Dixie Lee Ray to come down to his hospital room. Dixie was chairman of the AEC, always chairman, not chair. And Straws said, “Would you please tell Hewlett that I did not initiate the security investigation of Robert Oppenheimer”.  I never had an opportunity, I don’t know at the time, we made a decision about that, but later I could say that I agreed with him. It came out of the Eisenhower Administration, but once it happened, then Straws jumped the other way and this was terrible thing and I have often said that I know many of the people who were involved in the whole Oppenheimer affair and I think it changed all our lives. Some people really destroyed him and I think it affected Mile High too. It was a very painful experience.
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT: I don’t think that Straws wanted it. I think he thought it would be very upsetting and have that effect on the program. He didn’t wasn’t to get into that kind of problem, but he had no choice.
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT: I think Hutchins, out of a classical background wasn’t too keen about science and technology. This may be a dangerous way in which the world is going and that sort of thing. And again, he didn’t like applied research. I know many years later, I was asked in the ‘70’s, I was asked to come out to the university of Chicago and talk to the professors in the social science department about what they could do. There was great concern at that time that historians were becoming irrelevant in our society that historians couldn’t get jobs. They were turned out Ph.D.’s and they were driving taxi cabs. Well, some of them still are, but very concerned about this. I said, “Why don’t you people think about getting into the modern world? You’ve got Argonne National Lab out there and it is a part of University of Chicago. Why don’t you work with the Laboratory? You can do social science research. You can write the history of Argonne National Laboratory. There are many ways in which you can interrelate with the larger community and with the scientists”. And they just sat there. No way, that’s not independent scholarly research. So I think its part of the University. 
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT:  Well, today is a completely different situation the world that people in DOE [Department of Energy] and the DOE historian’s office living today is one I know nothing about and I would be terrified to get involved in. (laughter) I don’t know how much I would change. When I look back on it, I think that we realized we had an opportunity. We didn’t know whether we could do it or not. We just forged ahead and, I know, I told Ed Anderson, who was my first coauthor, I said, “Ed, this is a suicide project. I don’t know what will ever come out of this. We may get fired in three week”. We started getting in because we had complete access to all the classified information and I knew whether we had it because I had been working before I became the historian at AEC in an operation that involved all the top secret documents, the most sensitive things. So I knew what was there and there was no way they could keep me out of it. And they never tried to keep me out of it. And then there was the great question, “Will you be able to write about it once you have seen all this material?” We were able to work that out by being careful and reasonable to present the story without getting into the national security problems and so I don’t know.  When I say do something different, I don’t think we had any plan really when we started we wanted to write the first book and we did it really quickly. I can’t imagine how we did that first book in three years and at the end we were trying to, we knew that General Groves’ book was going to come out. Our publisher at Penn State University Press wanted to jump General Groves. They didn’t want his book to come out and kill ours. So they put on great pressure to get that printed and Ed and I had to come down to Kingsport, Kingsport Press was publishing the book. We did the whole index for that book in one weekend. Working 16 hour days and we came down here and fed it into the press and it was published on the same day as General Groves and he was absolutely livid. (laughter) After he read the book then we became very good friends and I enjoyed meeting with him quite often.
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT:  Oh, I think it was important. You might, they could talk about moving research out of Oak Ridge, but you couldn’t talk about moving gaseous diffusion out of here. We didn’t have to do that portion of that time. I think it was essential and a broad picture. I have always said that the weapons program saved research for the Atomic Energy Commission. I can’t imagine that the Congress would have given the AEC the kind of money for research without the weapons program. 
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT:  I think that Groves had great doubts about Robert Oppenheimer, but he realized that he was essential to the project and he was willing to go along with it although he had questions about Oppenheimer’s associations in California and some of the people, some of his friends and his wife. But then after the war, when we got into the Oppenheimer case, I thought General Groves did a superb job because he went before the panel on the hearing and he explained this pretty much in the terms I am. He was honest about it, forward, came out and said what he really thought. And I think it was a fair assumption that there were some other scientists that testified there that did not tell the whole story. I admire Groves for what he did in that case. I think they had a good working relationship between, during the war. I think Groves held his breath a few times wondering what was going to happen, but it worked much to his credit.
AUDIENCE: [inaudible] 
MR. HEWLETT:  (laughter) You know it was lucky that I found eight. I didn’t note them all as I went through, but maybe you picked up most of them. I was glad that there were only eight. I had to keep the ninth to keep the thing alive. But no, I really don’t know enough about the Laboratory today. From what I read about it, I think it is still evolving, and you may be moving off in new directions in the future if you end up with a university type contractor. I don’t know what is going to happen, but even if it stays with your current contractor, I am sure that things will change and unless the Laboratory keeps evolving and looking for new opportunities, and developing in new ways which I think they have done marvelously in the past, it’s going to be here and I think it should be a permanent fixture.
ANNOUNCER: That would be a wonderful note to quit on, but we will have one more question.
AUDIENCE: [inaudible]
MR. HEWLETT:  I would think so. I wouldn’t be revisiting it, it would be other historians. And I’ve always thought that we did our books and then the way that scholarly process works, other people come along and refine this and add to it. I haven’t seen the Matrosen but I am very interested in the Verona Reports because if I tell this one short story about that. When we were doing volume three, we got involved in the whole question of espionage and the Fuchs’ role and Harry Golden and all of that we wondered just how solid the information was and I talked to, I can’t even remember what his name was, but in one of our interviews, I think he was with the Joint Committee staff, and I expressed this concern about how are we going to handle Fuchs and he said and I can assure you that they were. I know that the government had tapped into their information and really had information to nail them, but he said that is all classified you can’t use it. I said, “Well, that is going to be enough for me”. I mean if the government really has solid information about these people I can write it. I don’t have to say anything about that. I can take the position that this is a significant part of the story. Later on, we had to clear our manuscript not only with AEC but with DOE and we used FBI files and the FBI reviewed the book and I had a reference to this interview in there. It wasn’t just the manuscript we had to submit all our papers related to the FBI to them for review. When they saw that thing about the secret information, oh, this is terrible, this is the most secret thing, and you can’t use this. Ok, we won’t use it, they said but you have to turn this back into the FBI. We can’t allow you to have this. So I took a chance on this. I wrote back to the FBI, “You know, I can’t destroy this document because under the Federal Records Act it is a federal document I can’t destroy it and I think it should be preserved. I will assure you that we will seal it up. And we put it in double wraps and tape all over and said it couldn’t be opened by anybody but the Secretary of the Commission, or myself. Maybe it’s still there. Then when Verona comes out what I was worried about back there when we did the volume is now out in the open so you know you write that different, but somebody else will write it. 
ANNOUNCER: We have had a rare and unusual privilege today to hear from somebody who has had as he said unfettered and unrestricted information available to him on all matters relating to many of us have a strong interest in the history of. Let’s make a very warm appreciation applause for our speaker.  

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