Leslie Groves
Leslie Groves ran the Manhattan Project and was disliked by almost everyone who worked for him. Born in 1896, the son of an army chaplain, he graduated fourth in his West Point class in 1918 and joined the Corps of Engineers. He supervised construction of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, which he brought in at speed and under scrutiny. He was given the atomic project in September 1942 and was bitterly disappointed, having wanted an overseas combat command. He was promoted to brigadier general first, on the reasoning that scientists would not take orders from a colonel. He moved fast. Within days he had secured the highest procurement priority and bought the site at Oak Ridge; he acquired Hanford and Los Alamos within months, and the project eventually employed some 130,000 people at a cost of about two billion dollars. His most consequential decision was appointing Robert Oppenheimer as scientific director — a theorist with no administrative experience, no Nobel Prize and a long record of Communist associations that security officers wanted disqualifying. Groves overruled them and wrote the clearance himself. He ran the project on compartmentalisation, so that few knew more than their own task, which the scientists hated and which held the secret against everything but Soviet penetration, which succeeded anyway. He selected the targets in Japan and removed Kyoto from the list. He testified against Oppenheimer in 1954. He retired in 1948, and died in 1970. He had insisted throughout that the project was a construction job with some physics attached.
- Lived: 1896 CE – 1970 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: military, administrator
