Engineer Memoirs
personnel setup--the so called OPO, Office of Personnel Operations. On the lst of July,
Mathe no longer worked for the Chief of Engineers. He worked for the Chief of OPO,
General Steve Hanmer, who, incidentally, was an engineer. But in any event, what
happened was that Mathe simply stalled me out on Ferd Anderson. Once he'd gotten
out from under the Chief, there was nothing I could do.
By and large, I got support. I got a lot of support from Bob Mathe on getting talented
people. Most of the civilians were people that had been connected with the Atomic
Energy Commission. The man I hired to do radiological safety and other safety aspects
of it had been working in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He came with us.
That caused a big furor--the notion that anybody that worked for the Lawrence
Radiation Laboratory would step down and work for the Army Corps of Engineers.
They got very mad. They said I had used unethical recruiting tactics--that I'd offered
to pay him far more than he was worth, and so forth and so on. I'm a little harsh on
these guys. They were great friends of mine. But when it came to this type of thing,
they could be something else again.
Q:
The first time we talked about tension between civilians and soldiers in the Manhattan
Project. But this seems to have been much more severe. Is that true?
A:
Well, no. I think it was much less severe. But the laboratory was very jealous of its
independence. They brought to this the sort of attitude that you run into in universities.
You're probably familiar with it. In the intellectual climate you have there, a lot of
disagreements are handled in a way peculiar to academics. The Army has its own
shortcomings of this type, its bureaucratic ways. There's an academic bureaucratic way
of doing things, and that was typical of the laboratory.
Q:
It's a different subculture, for sure.
A:
It's a different subculture. There wasn't a basic animosity towards the military. They
felt the same way, for example, about the management bureaucracy of the Atomic
Energy Commission, which was the source of all their money.
But they fiercely guarded their independence. This was the University of California.
This was not the government, and they didn't want anybody to forget that. I know
because I worked with them for years. I learned to respect these things. But down in
the trenches, there were occasions when it was a trial.
Q:
Was your chief operational focus still Panama?
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