Back in Washington by late July, Lilienthal and Oppenheimer stayed up until the early hours talking in Oppie’s hotel room about the opportunity that had been missed. Lilienthal thought the physicist transformed from the self-confident, even ebullient figure of the previous spring.
He is really a tragic figure; with all his great attractiveness, brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad: “I am ready to go anywhere and do anything, but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.” It was this last that really wrung my heart.55
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Lawrence was conspicuously absent from the ranks of atomic scientists who had trooped up Capitol Hill the previous fall to lobby for international control. Since the chastening experience of Neylan’s mock cross-examination, Ernest had refused all appeals for public appearances and political endorsements.56 “In fact, my own feeling is that this political activity of many of our atomic scientists is unfortunate in many ways,” he told a reporter.57
The fame that had come to Oppenheimer for his work on the atomic bomb translated for Lawrence into financial opportunity, as well as closer association with those whom Ernest most envied and admired.
By mid-1946, Lawrence was a paid consultant to several corporations, including General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and American Cyanamid—which, in addition to a monthly retainer, provided an annual $10,000 supplement to Loomis’s research fund.58 One unadvertised perquisite of serving on the Board of Directors of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company was the opportunity to obtain a new Cadillac at cost. Ernest could now afford to replace his favorite baby blue convertible almost annually, selling the car back to the dealer for what he had paid the year before.59
With his consultancy fees and the money he received in fall 1945 for the Wheeler award—given annually to “Berkeley’s most useful citizen”—Ernest and Molly bought a small beach house on Balboa Island, near Los Angeles, as a summer retreat. Lawrence also purchased a bigger boat, a 30-foot cabin cruiser, to replace the vessel built by Alvarez’s uncle.
That summer, Neylan arranged a personal visit to San Simeon, the castlelike villa that William Randolph Hearst built between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the California coast. The experience of meeting Hearst “turned out to be even more fabulous than expected,” Ernest gushed in a thank-you note.60
Among those used to the penurious academic life, Lawrence’s social climbing inspired no small amount of envy. William Knowland, editor of the Oakland Tribune, was among the prominent Californians attending a reception and dinner that Neylan hosted for Ernest at the exclusive Pacific Union Club. Following a long weekend spent with the Lawrences at Del Monte Lodge, Neylan and Loomis arranged for a mutual friend and fellow Bohemian Grove campmate—San Francisco attorney Rowan Gaither—to become Ernest’s investment counselor.61
After Neylan and the regents approved purchase of the Wilson Tract, the land above the giant cyclotron that Lawrence had tried but failed to acquire during the war, Ernest’s empire also had more room to grow.
By spring 1946, Lawrence’s earlier $l-million-a-year budget for the Rad Lab had doubled and now included funds for, among other things, a new radiochemistry lab on campus for Seaborg and a medical physics clinic for John and his physician colleagues at University Hospital.62
Even so, the future was not entirely unclouded, for either Lawrence or his laboratory. Early in the year, a Pentagon advisory committee had recommended that university laboratories focus on unclassified research and fundamental science, leaving secret military research to government-run national labs.63 Although the report considered Lawrence’s Berkeley an exception—“a special type of national laboratory”—it left the future of army funding for the Rad Lab in some doubt.64 One longtime rationale for the accelerators at Berkeley—the production of radioisotopes for medical research—had already been reassigned to DuPont’s reactors after the war. Most of the $75 million that Groves had approved for annual postwar “nucleonics” research was earmarked for two new federal laboratories, potential rivals to Berkeley: one at Argonne, outside Chicago, and the other at a site in the Northeast yet to be determined.65
That April, the army promised Lawrence the full $2 million he requested. But Groves—fearful of plutonium spills in populated Berkeley—balked at Seaborg’s “hot lab” and at John’s medical physics program, which the army saw as having only a tenuous connection to defense. Groves was also still dragging his feet on Alvarez’s Linac, pending a fuller accounting of costs. Yet Lawrence was confident that these funds, too, would ultimately be approved. As Cooksey reassured Loomis at the end of the month, “we can see nothing to hold us back.”66
Indeed, the only real obstacle was the university. As Lawrence was keenly aware, future army funding was contingent upon the relationship between the university and the government continuing. Sproul, however, remained eager to relieve himself of the wartime burden. Nichols had warned Groves that the intercession of Secretary of War Patterson might be needed to persuade the university president to renew the two army contracts.67
Underhill, anxious to avoid another fait accompli like Groves’s choice of Bradbury, had begun insisting upon personally approving all personnel appointments at Los Alamos.68 With the June 30, 1946, termination date looming, Underhill urged Sproul to call Lawrence, Groves, and others together for a “roundup and showdown on the New Mexico project.”69
Instead, the deadline passed uneventfully. Groves once again persuaded the university to extend the contract on a temporary basis.70 Meeting with the finance committee that fall, Sproul observed in frustration: “If we get rid of bomb making, plutonium, and New Mexico, I would be very happy.”71
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The logjam over the McMahon bill had finally broken that summer, following an amendment that created the Military Liaison Committee to serve as Pentagon watchdog over the civilian Atomic Energy Commission. The MLC disarmed those critics who objected to the exclusion of a military voice in
