The Shadowy Story of Oppenheimer and Congress

Today, Katie describes how Oppenheimer sent her on a quest to find the secret story of how Congress paid for the bomb. And what that reveals about the inner workings of Washington.

It's Tuesday, January 23rd.

Katie, you cover Congress for the Times, as our listeners, of course, know. But you join us today to talk about something a little out of the ordinary, a story which many of our listeners may not immediately associate with a Times congressional reporter. And it has everything to do with the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer. So tell us how you ended up reporting this very unusual story.

We're at war, Hans. Which is, of course, about J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Physics and New Mexico, huh?

My God. Which is this base that Oppenheimer and the military built up out of the desert, really out of nothing. This way, gentlemen. This huge, sprawling base where scientists from across the country came. To figure out how to build the bomb.

Did Congress approve the money for that? And if so, how much were they told? Because another big theme of this movie was that this was a very secret project. That the number of people who knew about what was really happening at Los Alamos was extremely restricted. And so I was thinking, if that was true, how do you get Congress to approve what has to be a nuclear bomb?

How do you get Congress to approve what has to be a huge tranche of money to fund this thing?

It was very much an intrusive thought that kept poking in throughout the movie.

And as I was reading just these few kind of breadcrumbs, I just kept thinking, what do you mean? What do you mean? Congress secretly passed this money and not a lot of people knew about it? Because, look, this is my job currently is to go through the spending bills to look for things that are peculiar. I also know that lawmakers are really bad at keeping secrets generally.

And so the idea that this happened, this huge secret, was smuggled through Congress without really anyone knowing it. Just I just didn't see how that could be true.

And so I pitched to my editor, well, why don't I do like? it'll be a fun historical memo that I'll write about this. And she agreed to let me do that. And so that really set off this kind of obsessive search to figure out the answer of exactly how Congress was able to secretly pass eight hundred million dollars for the atomic bomb. Katie, I love your nerdiness.

C. I'd come back from Berlin. And this ended up becoming very much a side project, because there was actually a lot of spending drama happening here in D.C. in real time that I was having to cover, of course. But it took me through the digital archives of a lot of different libraries, former President Roosevelt's archives.

And so it just kept happening that you would kind of get close to some sort of answer, some sort of document that seemed like it would unlock the secret of this. And you would get a few pieces. But I was particularly obsessed with trying to get the account of one of the lawmakers who was physically in the room when these discussions were happening, who was in the room when the decision was made, because to me, that was just going to give me the most direct, the sharpest perspective of exactly how this worked. Right. So I had a list of the seven lawmakers who were brought into this secret.

I knew that one of the lawmakers in one of these secret meetings was Sam Rayburn, who was the Speaker of the House at the time, in 1944, considered one of the most famous, one of the most legendary House Speakers of all time. And so I contacted the library where his papers are kept in Austin, Texas. And I found out that those documents have not been digitized.

They were sitting in folders, in boxes. And so well, and so I struck up an acquaintance with a reference intern there, a very intrepid man named Dion Kaufman, who I'm so indebted to him for this, because I kept saying, well, what about this folder and what about that folder? And he would go and he would look, and it just did not yield anything. But at least I could sort of rest knowing that someone had physically caged through those folders.

So I was still looking for a lawmaker in the room, and then I found that one of them, a senator, Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, who had been invited to a secret briefing in the Senate about this whole gambit, had actually written a memoir.

And it turns out his memoir, 40 Years a Legislator, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not in wide circulation. Really? I did learn that there was a copy actually at the Library of Congress.

So I got my Library of Congress library card and on a quiet day, I went over there actually tunnels that connect the Capitol building to the Library of Congress.

I kept getting lost. And so around the third time that I was trying to find the room where this book was, I was thinking, like, this is a lot of time now that I'm spending on this book that your.

I opened it up and it was all there.

Does everyone know where that first aid kit is? We arrive in a military position. I get out of the car. I look at my watch. You know, I set a timer, no more than an hour.

I'm listening for drones, jets, checking with the team. Is everyone comfortable? And if they are, then we proceed. Frontline reporting is dangerous, but I think nothing is more important than talking to the people involved. You know, hearing their stories and being able to connect that with people thousands of miles away.

Anything that can make something like this more personal, I think, is well worth the risk. New York Times subscribers make it possible for us to keep doing this vital coverage. If you'd like to subscribe, you can do that at NYTimes.com slash subscribe.

Right. And so Roosevelt gives the word to really his point. man on this was Henry L. Stimson, who was then the secretary of war. And he says, I need you to tell a very small group of lawmakers exactly what's happening here.

I need you to get them to agree to pass this money. And, crucially, I need you to get them to keep it a secret.

And so Stimson heads up to Capitol Hill. He has two separate secret meetings, one in the House, one in the Senate. In one particular meeting in the House, he actually brings George Marshall, the incredibly famous general, to the meeting to kind of impress upon lawmakers just the seriousness of what he is asking them to do. And we know from Senator Elmer Thomas's memoir what their pitch was. He writes that he received a call from the Senate majority leader saying, I'm inviting you to this secret meeting.

You need to come to my office in an hour. You cannot tell anyone where you are going or that you are going to a meeting at all. Keep it under wraps. Wow. OK.

So Elmer Thomas goes an hour later to the Senate majority leader's office. It's just him, a couple other senators and the war secretary and a couple of his officers. And in the meeting, Henry Stimson, the war secretary, tells these senators that the United States has been working on creating a bomb that can, quote, do as much damage as 10,000 tons of any explosive known at that time. And he writes that he recalls Stimson saying that the Germans are working on a weapon just like this and that whoever is able to create this weapon first is going to win the war.

Wow.

I wasn't able to find a copy of the bill, but I did find a report from the hearing where they considered the bill. And when you look through all of the different line items for the spending bill, I mean, they had the horses that they were going to use over in Italy, horses and donkeys. And then there was this one line item that said expediting production. And that was the shell that they used to conceal this 800 million dollars for the bomb, expediting production.

And he said the congressman, when I saw him, looked funny, at least in Rayburn's interpretation, the congressman had been leaking the contents of this secret meeting to the newspaperman.

I mean, if I were that reporter now, this would be something that I would escalate up to our highest editors and probably would be the subject of a really fierce debate at our newspaper.

S. atomic program in shocking detail when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. What was it like, Katie, to be doing this congressional historical sleuthing, you know, uncovering all of this maneuvering in the 1940s while at the same time covering Congress over the past year? Any conclusions you draw from the comparison?

But look, I currently cover federal spending and I do read through the spending bills that are passed into law. And these are bills that are typically hundreds, if not thousands of pages long. They are written in extremely archaic, dense legislative language. And I look through trying to see if there's any programs that seem peculiar or strange or warrant sort of greater investigation as to what they're doing in that spending bill. But the phrase expediting production, I mean, it's so innocuous.

If I were a reporter back in 1944 coming through that bill, I don't think it would have caused me to raise any eyebrows. I think I would have read it and thought, yeah, that makes sense. Of course, we're trying to send weapons more quickly over to Europe. And so I do think kind of the moral of that story, if there is one, is that just a few lawmakers can hide something like this if there's the will to do so.

Here's what else you should know today. On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration, allowing federal authorities to cut or remove parts of a concertina wire barrier along the Mexican border that Texas erected to keep migrants from crossing into the state. The ruling, by a five to four vote, was a temporary measure that lifted a lower court's ban on removing the wire. While it considered the case, the justices gave no reason for their decision, which is typical when they act on such emergency applications. The ruling was a victory for the Biden administration in the increasingly bitter dispute between the White House and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, an outspoken critic of President Biden's border policy.

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Ricky Nowetzki. It was edited by Mark George and Lexi Diao, contains original music by Rowan Nemus Stowe, Dan Powell and Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

That's it for the daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernissi. See you tomorrow.