POWER June 2012 - 82

NUCLEAR POWER
More to Come
In the next installment of Too Dumb to Meter, in the frenzy to manage atomic power after
the war, Congress created an executive branch agency that threatened to be too independent,
too powerful, and too isolated from the rest of government. This blurring of the lines
between executive and legislative authority caused no end of problems for the nation's
nascent atomic energy venture.
Time commented on Lilienthal: " To men like
Bob Taft, he is the symbol of the New Deal, of
Big Government, of hostility to business. To
his friends, he is a public servant of the highest
order. His ability is cited by his friends as an
argument in his favor, by his enemies as a proof
of his danger. On one point everyone is agreed:
Lilienthal, who loves horses, is a hard rider of
men and ideas. "
Born in a small Illinois town in 1899 to Jewish
immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire,
Lilienthal was largely raised in Valparaiso, Indiana,
where his father was a small-town, marginally
successful merchant. Lilienthal graduated
from De Pauw University (a school associated
with the Methodist Church) in Greencastle, Indiana,
where he was school newspaper editor and
twice elected student body president. He then
attended Harvard Law, where he came under the
tutelage of legendary lawyer Felix Frankfurter,
who helped his career along the way.
Lilienthal settled into a career in law in Chicago,
where he built a reputation as a fine lawyer
and established a successful practice, which
Time said was bringing him twenty thousand
dollars a year. In 1931, Wisconsin Republican
Gov. Phil La Follette named him to the five
thousand dollar per year job on the state public
service commission, which regulated utilities.
In 1933, Roosevelt named him to the threemember
TVA board. He became chairman
in 1941, where he was serving when Truman
picked him for the AEC chairmanship (a job
paying $15,000 annually).
Despite the partisan attack against Lilienthal
and his success with two Democratic presidents,
he was not a traditional Democratic operative.
He began his political life as a Progressive Republican,
when he received the appointment
from La Follett. Lilienthal described himself
as an " independent " who loathed conventional
politicians. As he gained experience regulating
private businesses and running a larger government
enterprise, Lilienthal's view evolved such
that his biographer refers to him as a " statist " but
not as a partisan.
Truman, whose partisan juices often ran
blood red and true blue, did not view the new
atomic agency as a potential pot of patronage.
The president paid no attention to party background
when he picked the first commissioners
for the new agency. Lewis Strauss was a
well-known Republican who had been Herbert
Hoover's personal secretary after World War I
(and had a distinguished Navy career in World
War II). William Waymack, editor of the Des
Moines Register and Tribune newspaper, was a
Republican and deputy chairman of the Federal
Reserve of Chicago when Truman named him
to the AEC. Sumner Pike of Maine, another
Wall Street success story, had been a Republican
member of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
appointed by Roosevelt. Only nuclear
physicist Robert Bacher, the youngest member
of the commission at forty-one years old, identified
himself as a Democrat. But Bacher had no
political background to speak of, although he
had advised Bernard Baruch on technical matters
at the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission
while serving on the Cornell faculty.
Of the five initial members of the AEC, only
two, Lilienthal and Strauss, would significantly
affect the future course of the agency. Lilienthal,
who served until February 15, 1950, viewed
himself primarily as a public administrator, a
bureaucratic fixer who valued executive power
and administrative efficiency. The assessment
by biographer Steven M. Neuse of Lilienthal's
approach to management and administration
at the TVA fit as well for his time at the AEC:
" In spite of thinking administratively, Lilienthal
had little inclination for, or interest in, traditional
management. In 1937 he admitted being bored
with detail and frustrated by slowness, both traits
antithetical to day-to-day managerial practice. "
Lilienthal's lasting legacy on the AEC
Bringing together two of the most innovative
and trusted bolt securing technologies
was to get the organization upright, on its
feet, and marching forward. He delegated
the day-to-day operations of the atomic bureaucracy
to an able hands-on administrator,
Carroll Wilson, who served as general manager
from 1946 to mid-1950, coinciding with
Lilienthal's tenure. Lilienthal was what one
of his TVA subordinates aptly described as " a
rhetorical administrative leader. " He and Wilson
got the commission stumbling forward;
where it went and what happened when it got
there was often out of Lilienthal's control-
and that of the Truman administration-in
part because of an additional governing
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82
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POWER | June 2012
structure Congress created in 1946. ■
-Kennedy Maize is a POWER contributing
editor and executive editor of MANAGING
POWER. Too Dumb to Meter is available on
Amazon.com and is serialized by permission.

http://www.nord-lock.com http://www.superbolt.com http://www.Amazon.com http://www.powermag.com

POWER June 2012

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