Uncovering how U.S. kept atomic bomb funds secret

As I sat in a dark, cavernous movie theater in Berlin watching the film Oppenheimer, my mind was thousands of miles away.

Like many other people who turned out to see the biopic, I was captivated by Christopher Nolan’s portrayal of the Trinity test and Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the singularly ambitious, then morally conflicted father of the atomic bomb.

But as I watched images of the sprawling nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos flash across the screen, I couldn’t stop wondering: How did the U.S. government pay for the $2 billion project? Did Congress approve the money? And if so, how did lawmakers keep it a secret?

These arguably thoughts nagged at me thanks to my job as a congressional correspondent focused on federal spending. The assignment requires me to wade through dense legislative documents — sometimes on the order of thousands of pages — in search of projects and earmarks that lawmakers would rather taxpayers not know they are paying for. This was secrecy on a whole other scale.

I Googled but all I found was a snippet from a textbook published by the National Counterintelligence Center. It mentioned Roosevelt administration officials had sought in 1944 to smuggle money for the bomb into a military spending bill, and were assisted by Congress.

How could they have possibly hidden so much money? Was there really no resistance from legislators? I knew Los Alamos was built in 1943, a year before congressional leaders secretly approved stand-alone funding for the bomb in 1944 — so how had the administration gotten the money for the project in the first place? What followed, under the guise of what I pitched to my editor as a “fun historical memo,” was an obsessive search to find out the history of how Congress secretly funded the atomic bomb.

Over the next six months, I would visit the Library of Congress’ reading room, politely but relentlessly bug an archivist at the Sam Rayburn Library in Texas, and mine the diaries and memoirs of top congressional and military leaders, as well as the declassified history of the Manhattan Project commissioned by its director.

Those documents and interviews tell a story of presidential pressure, congressional complicity and a touch of journalistic self-censorship. When Congress voted to fund the bomb, there was no debate and no discussion. Only seven lawmakers in Congress had an idea they were approving $800 million — the equivalent of $13.6 billion today — to create a weapon of mass destruction that would soon kill and maim more than 200,000 people.

Money trail

Scrolling through the archives of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s library, I began to understand the lengths to which war leaders had gone to keep the Manhattan Project a secret — and how much they worried about paying for it. In a one-sentence memo in June 1942, Roosevelt wrote to Vannevar Bush, who led the early administration of the project: “Do you have the money?

F.D.R.”

Paging through memos and letters between Roosevelt, his top aides and the Manhattan Project’s administrators, it was clear by 1944 they had grown more anxious about Nazi Germany’s strides toward building an atomic weapon. To build their own, they concluded, they needed a bigger infusion of funds.

I knew from a pair of government-issued textbooks some of those officials, including the war secretary, Henry Stimson, met with a handful of lawmakers — once in the House and once in the Senate — to brief them on the Manhattan Project and secure their commitment to secretly slip in hundreds of millions of dollars for the bomb.

Crucially, the books named the lawmakers who attended each meeting — just seven, including the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. I wanted to understand what the senators and congressmen invited to those secret conferences were thinking — especially because I could see the administration was telling one story to Congress and another internally.

For instance, Stimson told lawmakers the administration confided in them in a spirt of openness and collegiality.

Emails to Austin

Somewhere, I thought, there must be a contemporaneous account of the meeting where lawmakers learned about the bomb. My first hope was I could find one in letters or memos in the archives of Sam Rayburn, the legendary Texan who served as speaker at that time. That’s how I made the acquaintance of a reference intern named Dion Kauffman at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where Rayburn’s papers are kept. Kauffman told me there were numerous documents pertaining to the atomic bomb but that the earliest dated to 1945 — in other words, a year after that the pivotal meeting.

The only first-person account I could find from Rayburn, a 1957 interview from his home in Bonham, Texas, with historian Forrest Pogue, gave the kind of clipped summary that I was hoping to avoid. But it did explain how lawmakers, who are famously bad at keeping their mouths shut, managed to keep this secret. The answer is that they didn’t.

Rayburn said he once saw one of the congressmen who had attended the meeting talking to a reporter. The congressman, Rayburn said, “looked funny when I saw him.”

“I talked to the newspaperman later and said, ‘You are a good American, aren’t you — you love your country?’ ” Rayburn recalled. “He said, ‘Of course.’ I said, ‘Then don’t print anything about what he just told you.’ He didn’t, and it was all right.”

My other lucky break was Stimson was avid diarist. At the end of most days, Stimson would record his feelings.

I got access to those diaries thanks to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and learned it was Roosevelt himself who gave Stimson the go-ahead to brief a few members of Congress.

A lawmaker’s memoir

As I started searching for biographical information about the lawmakers I knew attended the meeting, I learned one of them — Sen. Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, the chair of the Appropriations subcommittee on military spending — had published a memoir that mentioned his involvement. The book, Forty Years a Legislator, was in the Library of Congress.

I got a Library of Congress card and navigated my way through the building’s labyrinthine basement hallways.

As soon as I began paging through, I realized I need not have worried. Thomas, after all, was an appropriator, a revered title reserved for lawmakers who have the power to dole out the nation’s dollars. Even now, lawmakers take this responsibility with a seriousness sometimes bordering on pedantry.

Not only had Thomas carefully recorded his recollections of that secret meeting — he wrote Stimson said the bomb could “do as much damage as 10,000 tons of any explosive known at that time” — but he had also included the budgetary tables of money spent on the Manhattan Project. He had even written to Stimson and the Senate Appropriations Committee secretaries who served on the panel for on-the-record versions of their stories.

One jumped out at me. Thomas seemed incredulous that, in his memory, the secret had never been shared with Congress outside those two meetings. Could that have been true? Appropriations aides wrote back to him: “At no time during the consideration of appropriations dealing with the prosecution of the war, either on the record or off the record, was the atomic bomb ever mentioned. During the war years, we had no knowledge in the committee as to what appropriations were available and used for this purpose.”

Both Thomas and Rayburn, who were in separate meetings and gave separate recollections of the briefings, recalled the military requested $800 million; the official accounts written by the military say it was $600 million — a housekeeping difference of about $3 billion in today’s money.

Gadfly From Michigan

It also answered another question I had. I had found textbooks saying a congressman from Michigan, Albert Engel, had gotten wind there was something amiss going on with respect to the Manhattan Project and had privately made a fuss about it. Thomas provided the backstory.

Engel apparently made a habit of visiting military installations to look for instances of government waste and became suspicious in late 1943 when his requests to visit the military construction at Oak Ridge — where scientists were enriching uranium for the bomb — were denied. He was assuaged years later when, with Roosevelt’s approval, the War Department invited five select congressmen, Engel included, to finally visit the facility.

Only one question remained: Where exactly in the budget had the administration hidden the money for the bomb?

After a number of creative searches, I pulled up a record of a Senate hearing examining the bill. Attached was a report breaking down the legislation.

I paged through, stopped and smiled when I saw it. There it was, the innocuous phrase that hid an $800 million secret: “expediting production.”