POWER June 2012 - 81

NUCLEAR POWER
a decade before, that Lilienthal was a member
of a TVA communist cell. McKellar also reportedly
raised anti-Semitic arguments against
Lilienthal behind the scenes.
The hearings so disturbed Lilienthal that, according
to historians Richard Hewlett and Francis
Duncan, he seriously considered withdrawing his
name from the nomination. But Clark Clifford in
the White House prevailed on Lilienthal, arguing
that most of what had been occurring was just
for show. Neither Taft nor McKellar, no matter
how vitriolic their rhetoric, were members of the
joint committee (they appeared at the hearings
as a matter of Senate courtesy and custom), and
would have to save their fire for a floor vote, a
more difficult proposition.
Lilienthal and Clifford assiduously worked
the committee and firmed up the votes. Neither
McKellar nor Taft seemed to have much
influence. Republican Bourke Hickenlooper
of Iowa, the chairman, was a solid vote for
Lilienthal, as was the revered Vandenberg.
On March 10, 1947, the Senate component of
the joint committee voted 8-1 to approve the
nomination. The confirmation hearings had
begun on January 27.
While Lilienthal's opponents, led by Taft, tried
to mount a Senate floor fight against the AEC
nomination, that rear-guard action collapsed
after Vandenberg, who succeeded McKellar as
president pro tempore in the Eightieth Congress,
delivered a strong rebuttal to his fellow Republicans
on Lilienthal's fitness to lead the AEC. The
vote on Lilienthal was 52-38 in favor.
What Lilienthal inherited from a reluctant
Leslie Groves represented an unprecedented
administrative challenge. By the end of the
war, the Manhattan Project was a vast enterprise,
run from a remote site near Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, which also housed a giant factory
for separating uranium and drew large amounts
of electricity from the government's Tennessee
Valley Authority. The nuclear weapons empire
included New Mexico's Los Alamos; a huge
weapons factory in the desert on the Columbia
River near Hanford, Washington; an assembly
plant near Denver, Colorado; a plutonium fabrication
factory in Texas; and a reactor testing
station in the eastern Idaho desert.
Time magazine in 1947 described the scope
of the endeavor that the AEC took over from the
Manhattan Engineering District: " it was a maze
of contracts, documents, libraries, factories,
laboratories, whole towns. It was shrouded and
obscured in the bright fog of military security.
It was jealously guarded by the Army's Major
General Leslie Groves, then the District's chief,
now a disgruntled member of the Military Liaison
Committee, embittered by the lack of kudos
for his wartime stewardship. "
On the lists of land, men, and equipment
the Army transferred to the AEC in 1947,
were thirty-seven installations in nineteen
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states and Canada. The manpower included
254 military officers, 1,688 enlisted men,
3,950 government civil service workers, and
some 38,000 contractor employees. At least,
that's what the Army listed on the material
it provided to the AEC. Time noted, " Groves
feared that civilian control would mean dissolving
the security screen. AEC asked for a
complete inventory; the Army refused it. "
In any case, it was an enormous undertaking.
This mind-boggling venture represented
an investment of over $2.2 billion, and the
agency's first-year budget was $300 million-a
vast sum by 1946 standards.
Lilienthal was well suited to get the new
agency moving under civilian control. He had
shown in taking control of the newly created
TVA that he could build a massive federal agency
from scratch. Of course, the new problem he
faced was not starting from nothing, but taking
an enormous existing structure and getting it
headed in a different direction. Lilienthal relished
the task. He described himself as a " craftsman
in public affairs. "
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