How to Hide the Manhattan Project
How to Hide the Manhattan Project
"Certain activities the CIA does are just not written into the budget"
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In 1944, Congress authorized $800 million for the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. In today’s dollars, that would be roughly $12 billion. But Congress didn’t realize it was funding the bomb at all: the money was hidden in an innocuous clause, hidden from all but eight legislators.
Early this year, New York Times Congress reporter Catie Edmondson described her obsessive attempts to find out how this was possible. How could such a massive, world-changing project be hidden from the people funding it? Today, we talk to Catie about Congress, then and now.
What You’ll Learn
Is it harder to keep secrets on today’s Hill?
How common is the use of the “black budget?”
Can Congressional leadership stop backbenchers from talking to reporters?
How does the Congress of the mid-1940s look different from the Congress that you cover in your day-to-day?
I'll start with one big similarity, which was one of the driving forces behind wanting to do this story in the first place. A lot of members now complain about how top-down and leadership-driven legislation is, the idea being that in the past lawmakers, committees or committee chairs in particular, had much more power to cut deals that brought legislation to the floor.
When you talk to lawmakers who are leaving Congress, that's often one of their major complaints. They feel they've been shut out of the actual legislative process. That’s true empirically, I think, but one important through line between the Congress that I was looking at with Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX) and the current Congress is that this gambit to pass this $800 million dollars secretly was entirely a leadership-driven exploit. Only a handful of lawmakers were brought into the loop on it. When I saw Oppenheimer, I was really interested in the fact that only seven or eight lawmakers in the entire Congress knew about it.
The other anecdote in the story that I get asked a lot about now was one Speaker Rayburn told a historian. He saw one of the seven members who had been briefed on this talking to a reporter. He sees the congressman clock, “Oh, there's Speaker Rayburn.” He sees this face of guilt immediately pop up on the congressman, and Rayburn pulls aside the reporter who apparently has been told this secret about the $800 million that they're smuggling. Rayburn tells him, “If you're a good American, you're not going to write about this,” and the reporter doesn't.
It ends up being fine. I got asked a lot, by both people on the Hill and other journalists, whether or not I think that could happen today, if a reporter would be confronted by the Speaker and basically swallow this secret.
I heard a lot of people on the Hill saying that they didn't think anything like this could happen because of the way media incentives work. They thought even a lawmaker briefed on it would want to rush out and get the media attention, or, in a more virtuous lens, tell people about this. The connotation I got from people on the Hill was more negative, that they would want to use this as an opportunity to grab the spotlight.
As somebody on the other side of that, listening to secrets and water cooler chat, do you think that's true? Is it harder to hide something today purely because the incentive to go public is stronger?
I don't know. Put yourself in that reporter's shoes and imagine one congressman has told you some scandalous information, but the Speaker of the House, immediately comes up to you and says shut up about it.
Even if you wanted to defy the Speaker, are you going to run a single-source story in wartime saying that the United States is coming up with this top secret weapon? Also, the press was subject to far more censorship during wartime from the government than anything we would imagine today. I do think it is a simplified story. From a journalistic ethics standpoint, it would be a huge debate.
The way that Congress is structured right now, a big secret like this probably would not be widely shared with most members, right? I always joke that I don't love staking out House member briefings because “Here's Afghanistan on a map” is the level of detail I'm expecting out of those briefings. So it becomes a question of if you think some of the very senior lawmakers on these committees – Intel, Armed Services – do you think they would start to leak it out?
When you start thinking about just how winnowed down the groups that this information would reach actually are, then it does become a much trickier calculus.
Of course, some blabbermouth attention-seeking congressman could leak this out. My personal view is that once these lawmakers get to these very sought-after committees and they have seniority on them, they tend to keep things closer to the chest.
The thing that came to mind as you were talking was the debate over Biden's age; there's been a lot of pushback from Biden camp folks saying, “If it was true that he was aging or deteriorating rapidly, you'd hear it from the press.” And the response in corners of the right has been, “It's not clear that you would, there might be strong pressure on you to not report how he was in your private conversation.”
I wonder if you see parallels in more partisan questions, that there is still pressure not to run certain stories in the interest of the country.
You're talking about a self-censoring instinct?
Or an instinct to preserve access. This was a debate during the Trump presidency too, “Is [NYT reporter] Maggie Haberman not reporting the juiciest things about the Trump admin because she loves the access?” They're equivalent accusations.
I tend to think that most reporters can't really help themselves once they've found out exclusive or pressing information.
There's always a calculus as to what we think is newsworthy to publish, right? I don't want to write that off entirely. But when it comes to this particular discussion about the ways in which secretive information is shared on the Hill, the way that I thought about it was more from the perspective of the decision-makers in the room choosing to share information and how it trickles out through there rather than what we as reporters choose to report.
You flag that once Congressmen and women get to plum positions on committees they may be more tight lipped; conversely, what are the kinds of things that Congress people are very likely to blab about?
I remember lawmakers being very angry coming out of the briefings on the Soleimani strikes back in 2020. They felt like they had not been given sufficient information and that they were getting patted on the head by the Department of Defense (DoD) officials who were briefing them.
I remember Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), for example, storming out and just spilling straight to the C-SPAN cameras, “This is what they told us, these are the questions that I asked, and these were their answers.” He wasn't sharing classified information, but he was giving us more of an overview than you generally get of how those briefings go, because he was so dissatisfied with it.
Obviously when lawmakers feel they're not being told the whole story or the briefing they have received is insufficient, they are often inclined to share more about what they've heard. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) often comes out of briefings and says, “They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.” That’s pretty much his line. But often what they choose to share is an effort to force more information their way, or it’s politically motivated.
I got a question during a previous interview about whether there was any debate along partisan lines around approving this money for the bomb. Typically, the people who are placed on these national security committees are not super partisan to begin with. There are a handful of exceptions, but generally they tend to be hawkish national security types. Sometimes, depending on the subject matter, depending on the president, you will certainly see those partisan lines emerge, but historically on those committees, you see less sniping along partisan lines.
Let me have you do a little Congress explaining to me and to our readers. On The Daily, you say, “Initially, the way that Roosevelt officials were getting the money for the research to create the bomb was they were actually just taking money that Congress had appropriated under different line items, and they were funneling it to the Manhattan Project.”
Do we know by what mechanism they were doing that, and what changed that made them say they needed formal appropriations?
They would get a pot of money for the Army Corps of Engineers, for example, and then they would spend some of that money on whatever they needed at Los Alamos at the time. I don't know exactly the way that they were able to do that.
By 1944, there was a lot of concern among Roosevelt administration officials, among DoD officials, that the United States was not moving fast enough in our pursuit of the bomb. There was concern that the Germans potentially were moving faster. They decided it was no longer sufficient to suction or siphon money from these pools where technically it was supposed to be going to other things. They went to Congress and asked them to appropriate money specifically for creating the atom bomb.
Walk us through the appropriations process.
Congress for Dummies: Congress has the power of the purse. They set the top-line number of how much the federal government is going to spend on the things that it decides it wants to spend money on, including the functioning of the government. They will also choose how much money to spend on each program.
That is a power that is vested with a specific committee, one in the House, one in the Senate. Those are the appropriators. That is a very sought-after committee: who doesn’t want to be the person who gets to say how the government's money is spent? Theoretically, they're supposed to pass twelve spending bills every year that govern how much each program gets to spend. It doesn't always work that way. In fact, recently, it has not worked that way, but that is how it is supposed to work.
So they hide it in this line item, which has this incredibly anodyne title of “expediting production.” You talk about finding the hearing report write-up of this text, although not the bill itself. That hearing report has a paragraph of euphemism about the bomb: that it's important to provide modern equipment to the armed forces, etc.
If someone comes along later and claims that Congress didn’t appropriate that money, is the intent of that language that the folks in Los Alamos could point back at that clause: “expediting production”?
Is there a legal issue here with establishing the intent of Congress?
Oh, interesting. I have no idea. That’s also not something I am aware of having happened previously. I don't know if there's a precedent for people coming after the fact and saying that money was misappropriated. But one of the reasons I thought “expediting production” was such a great phrase, it's just such good vague terminology. I would not have batted an eyelash if I was the reporter back in 1944 tasked with reading through this report to see what we were spending our money on.
That’s how these bills are written generally. This is what I do when they drop spending bills that are actually spending bills, not just stopgap bills that extend current levels of funding: I go through and I look for programs that sound interesting or off. It's not a science, it's very much vibes, right?
It's reading the table of contents and thinking, “Oh, that sounds interesting. What exactly are they talking about when they say that?” Congress, both then and now, does use these super broad terms to describe certain activities.
It is really hard to understand exactly where that money is going sometimes. It is something that constantly nags at me as the reporter for our team in charge of doing this. I'm always wondering if I missed something.
Something massive hidden under a small euphemism.
That’s right. I get asked a lot if something like this could happen today, not just in terms of keeping it a secret, but also actually fitting it into the spending bills. It's a subject I'm trying to learn more about, but we do have black budgets, right? There are certain activities that the CIA does which are just not written into the budget. I don't know if there's anything to the level of creating an atomic bomb, but there certainly are activities nowadays that are just not in the spending bills, or they are hidden.
Tim Weiner, a reporter who worked at the Times, did a lot of work on covering the black budget back in the day. He writes that the Air Force used a lot of its budget as a shell for these secretive activities. It illustrates that where there’s a will there’s a way for some of this stuff.
When did the practice of using a black budget start?
It is actually Weiner’s theory of the case in his book, Blank Check, that this 1944 “expediting production” line item was the first iteration of the black budget. Of course, it was extremely narrow; it was for one specific thing. Then as we went into the Cold War, it just ballooned into hiding many different activities under many different line items.
So his view is that, prior to this massive tech development project, there aren't things that the administration feels the need to hide from the public and your average congressman?
Or at least that this was the seed that started it all.
Talk to me about budget hawks at the time. Albert Engel is the one who comes up in your research. What were the politics of fiscal responsibility like at this point?
Engel was a side character, but a great one. In some of the official records that the army kept, they kept referencing this guy, Albert Engel, a Republican from Michigan, and he was always on the DoD's back, asking about government waste at various military sites around the country.
He was always showing up at military sites to do these ad hoc investigations himself. I read in the Elmer Thomas memoir later that he was self-funding these trips to military installations, and the way he realized something was happening at Oak Ridge was that he was not allowed to visit that military facility. He kept asking and was told repeatedly no, but they couldn’t tell him why he wasn’t allowed there. He finally wore them down enough that Roosevelt personally approved a field trip for Albert Engel and a handful of other congressmen to go visit Oak Ridge.
I think that Roosevelt actually passed away before the trip happened, and then Truman had to approve their field trip, but they finally went down to Oak Ridge. Unfortunately there aren’t any records that I could find of what Engel himself thought when he went there.
Leslie Groves wrote that the congressmen were so impressed by what was happening at Oak Ridge that they actually asked if they needed any more money for the site. I've since found that you have to take certain things that Leslie Groves said at the time with a grain of salt.
There's this great press photo of Engel shivving a Democratic candidate for president. Apparently McNutt is floating a trial balloon for president, but while he's high commissioner of the Philippines, he's building his commissioner's palace. Engel does a whole press blitz highlighting how obscenely lavish this guy’s palace is. He’s clearly a committed budget hawk.
Yes, and he wasn’t the only one. Harry Truman, a senator at the time, also had some sort of panel that was looking into government waste and he had gotten suspicious about what was happening with these appropriations. The war secretary, Henry Stimson, basically said, “Trust us on this one, Harry”, only to have to tell him two years later. “Oh, Mr. President, about that thing you asked us about two years ago…”
But those were the only instances I could find of people raising an eyebrow. I went back and looked at the congressional record for the floor debates, both in the House and the Senate, for when this military spending bill was passed, just to see if anyone raised any questions about what was in the bill or complained about the bill moving too quickly and they really did not. There was one senator who objected to the inclusion of some provision he thought was extraneous to military spending, but there wasn’t a real debate about the contents of the bill.
There’s a lot of debate in the hearing report over other things, like the ratio of officers to maintenance personnel in the Air Force, the training of cadets, etc., but nobody grabs the “expediting production” line. It’s a total nothing-burger.
Yeah. I don't know. That was part of the ask that Stimson, the war secretary and the other government officials made to the appropriators and the Congressional leadership. They said, “We need you to hide this money and then we need you to tamp down any questions or discussion or debate about it.” It’s not clear to me whether there was any pre-hearing work that went into that, or if it truly just didn’t catch anyone’s eye.
That description makes sense if you’re reading it: of course we want to try to speed the flow of munitions to Europe.
The other thing that was very frustrating for me was that the members of Congress who were involved in this gambit seem to have really labored to keep any word about this out of contemporaneous documents. One of the senators invited to the secret meeting was not even invited on a piece of paper. It's a phone call placed an hour before the meeting, and he's told, “Don't even tell anyone on your staff where you're going.”
Another thing that surprised me was in an interview Rayburn gave, where he says he’d never heard of Vannevar Bush before the meeting with him and Stimson. There’s a contemporaneous quote from someone in the military establishment: “At this point in the war effort, after President Roosevelt, the biggest loss we could have is if Dr. Bush was killed.”
It’s striking to me that research scientists like Vannevar Bush were so well regarded by the military, but legislators had never heard of him until the atomic bomb meetings.
It’s a good point. Also, they brought General Marshall to the House meeting. Stimson writes in his diary about how disappointed he was, almost gutted, that Marshall had some sort of obligation and couldn't come to the Senate meeting. In the House, it made such a big impression on lawmakers when they brought Marshall in to ask for the money.
Part of that is just how these meetings on the Hill work, even today, but it did really make me think about these guys going in. “Theatrics” might be too strong of a word to use, but they were asking for a hefty sum of money, they were asking for it to be kept a secret, and they clearly were thinking about the visuals of the presentation and what impression they wanted to leave these lawmakers with. It does remind me of bringing Zelensky to the Hill, right? Every time there needs to be a new aid package, you bring in your best representative, someone who has the name, the popularity, or the recognition.
Marshall had a remarkable reputation at the time. Rayburn later says he's up there with Robert E. Lee. He also says Eisenhower was the wrong military man to end up as president: it should have been Marshall. Marshall was a statesman and Eisenhower was a blinkered army engineer type.
One of the reasons why I was so happy to read this memoir from Elmer Thomas was I wanted to experience one of these meetings through the perspective of one of its members. In some of the tellings of the administration officials it was very clear that in these meetings with members of Congress, they were being super deferential. They were saying, “Of course we must invite our equal co-branch of government into these discussions.” Privately they were more like, “We need some money and I guess we have to tell the guys in Congress about it.”
Elmer Thomas was a senator so Marshall was not in the meeting with him, but even so he describes being absolutely floored at the magnitude of this secret. He writes that he had never even heard of the term “fission” or “fusion” before this meeting. The idea of being told we're creating this bomb that we're going to drop from a single plane that has tens of thousands times the power of TNT just put his jaw on the floor.
Rayburn says, “If a man dissembles before the House of Representatives, he is ruined. The Committees have no respect for that kind of man.” Would you say this about the committees’ level of tolerance for dissembling today?
I would, yes, and it is potentially worse or more performative now, because it's a great fundraising tool to say, “Patriot, let me show you a video of me absolutely taking it to this bureaucrat, send $5 today.”
I want to go into the kind of archival work you were doing. You found the description in the report of the hearing, but you couldn’t find a copy of the bill itself. Does it exist somewhere?
After this story was published, a grad student in London emailed and found the bill for me. I was so thrilled to find it. I would like to improve my search skills, but typically you've got congress.gov for more recent bills. Something that was passed in the 1940 is very difficult to find. I was going into the congressional record a lot to try to pick up bill numbers and to see how this military establishment appropriations bill was moving through Congress. There’s lots of extraneous material.
Lars Schönander just digitized a database of every Hill hearing going back to a certain date: previously they weren’t searchable. In your day-to-day work covering today’s Hill, how much time are you digging for a document, vs. camping out outside a meeting room door? What’s the relative breakdown of the Congress reporter’s time?
It really depends, I would say my work is probably more documents-based than some other Hill reporters, because it is covering these very specific bills. If you're covering political dynamics, then it's more worth your time to chat with members in the halls. Because of the ways in which these bills are written, it is really important to talk with the people on the committees who are passing these bills: they're going to know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. I would read “expediting production” and not have any alarm bells go off, but someone on the committee potentially would know — Although of course, in this case, they actually wouldn't.
When these short-term spending bills have been passed, the bill text is like ten pages, because you've just been extending current funding levels. It’s really more the foreign aid supplemental, or bills of that magnitude, where you have to get into the trenches and start reading page after page.
I used to cover the NDAA, the defense policy bill that Congress passes every year, and every year I would dread getting that bill. I covered the CHIPS bill as well, so I was excited to read your newsletter on that, and that was a real beast to have to go page by page through but I did because I really wanted to understand the totality of what was being passed.
You have to be talking to the authors of the legislation, because otherwise you probably will miss certain things.
About a third of the official history of the Manhattan Project, the one authored by Leslie Groves, is still classified. Help me understand why that is, 80 years later?
I don't know. Someone suggested to me that maybe it's sources and methods, as opposed to an actual play-by-play of how they established Los Alamos. The legislative history is the portion that I used for this story and clearly there would be no good reason to classify it.
I’m currently working on a story looking at this effort by Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) to reauthorize a law that allows victims of exposure to nuclear radiation to seek federal compensation. So I've been thinking a lot about the overall health legacy of the bomb and the Cold War that followed. [Edmondson’s story on the bill, which passed the Senate after our conversation, is here.]
This is pure speculation, there's nothing factual about this, but part of me wonders if maybe some of what is still classified could be studies on the health impact of what was being done at Los Alamos. But there's a lot of things it could be.
You had this project running in the background for six months. How do you balance Hill coverage with these long term projects? Do you feel guilty when you go off to the archives?
Oh, no. I do not feel guilty at all, because what's actually happening comes first. During some weeks, if there was nothing happening, I’d go a little bit early over to the library of Congress and read. There were also weeks at a time, really that month of October after McCarthy was deposed, and there were three weeks in the wilderness when they were trying to elect a Speaker, and then they finally got Mike Johnson, and then Johnson got hit with trying to keep the government open. That was a month when I didn’t really touch any of this, and it's endlessly frustrating. Just elect a Speaker so I can go back to the Library of Congress to read my book!
Any pieces of advice about archival work you'd give journalists or other researchers who are trying to tell stories about past administration decisions?
One is to be really nice to the archivists and to the reference staff at libraries because they will help you figure out where to look and in some cases go through the pages for you when you cannot be there. I really wanted to go to the Rayburn Library myself, but I could not bear the idea of coming back without finding anything, having spent the company's money on a trip to Austin, of all places. The reference intern there was hugely helpful in doing some of that legwork for me.
I relied so much on Stimson's diaries, right? And no one keeps diaries anymore. No one sends letters. You're not going to harvest public officials' texts and store them in a library somewhere. They'd rather die than have that happen, as would I. But I don't know how much of this will be recreateable.
They’re so personal. Stimson's diary was like, “I felt pretty bum all day. Talked to Roosevelt about the eventuality we may have to drop the bomb. Went for a long swim at the club with Doris and Eileen.” It was just such a great little snippet.
Thanks to Chloe Holland for her judicious edits of the interview transcript.
Tl;dr version?
Marshall thought very highly of Eisenhower, and was a big factor in his rapid promotions in the 40's