They followed him down a corridor to the library, where decanters of whiskey, a bottle of R6my Martin cognac, and a silver ice bucket had been laid out on a table so Roosevelt could play the host and make the drinks.
“As your Commander in Chief, I grant you immunity from the regulation which proscribes drinking on duty, Commander Doug-lass ” Roosevelt said.
:,The commander is on duty?” Hoover asked.
“Yes,” Roosevelt said. “And I really think he needs a little liquid courage before he tells you what he has to say.”
“I always thought Edgar was unshockable, like a clergyman,” Donovan said.
Hoover ignored that.
“You’re ONI*, aren’t you, Commander?” he asked.
Hoover took some pride in knowing who was involved in intelligence, and he was not reluctant to let the President, and for that matter Donovan, see again that there was very little that escaped his professional attention.
“No, sir,” Commander Douglass said. “I’m now with COU’ Hoover could not conceal his surprise.
Commander Peter Stuart Douglass, USN, was a sandy-haired, freckle-faced, pleasant-looking man of forty-two who had spent his Navy career moving between deep water (his last assignment had been as commanding officer of a destroyer squadron) and intelligence.
“Take a stiff belt, Commander,” Roosevelt said. “Give it a moment to warm you, and then get going.”
“Yes, sir,” Douglass said.
“Let me lay the groundwork,” Roosevelt said, changing his mind. “Some months ago, Alex Sachs came to me bearing a letter from Albert Einstein and some other eggheads at that level. They believe it is possible to split the atom.”
Hoover looked at Roosevelt, not understanding.
“What does that mean, Mr. President?” Hoover asked.
Roosevelt motioned for Douglass to speak.
“It means the potential release of energy from matter at a rate a “Office of Naval Intelligence. thousand times that possible from present energy-release rnethods@” Douglass said.
“I don’t think I understand that either,” Hoover confessed.
“I don’t want to insult your intelligence, sir, by-2″Douglass said.
“You go right -ahead and insult my intelligence, Commander,” Hoover said.
“Sir, you understand that explosives really don’t explode? An explosion is really a process of combustion? The ‘explosive material bums?”
Hoover nodded.
“If the atom can be split Douglass said, “it might be possible to extract a thousand times more energy than from combustion.”
“A super bomb?” Hoover said.
“Yes, sir ‘ ” Douglass said.
“We don’t know that yet Roosevelt said. “After my first visit with Commander Douglass, I had Jim Conant for dinner and discussed it with him.”
It did not surprise Hoover that Roosevelt had gone to James B. Conant, president of Harvard, for advice. The Roosevelt administration was heavily larded-far too heavily larded, in Hoover’s opinion-with members of the Harvard faculty. Roosevelt was a Harvard graduate. “And what did he say?” Hoover asked.
“”Yes,”‘ Roosevelt said, “and ‘no.”‘ He waited for a laugh that did not come. “Yes, it is possible,” the President said. “No, not now. Maybe fifty, a hundred years from now.”
“And you think he’s wrong?” Hoover asked. “I think he underestimates both his own academic community and American industry” Donovan said. “In other words, you think a super bomb like this is possible9” Hoover asked. “It sounds like Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth cen-tury-”
“I think so too,” the President said. “But I at least believe it’s worth the gamble : to try and find out. If such a weapon were possible, it would considerably change the odds of our losing a war should war come to usas I believe it must.”
“They’ve already split the atomi” Donovan said. “What they have to do is learn to make it a continuous process, what the scientists call a chain reaction.”
“An Italian physicist named Fermi is doing some work at the University of Chicago,” Roosevelt said. “He hopes for some positive results by the first of the year.”
“Who knows about this?” Hoover said.
He just thought of that, Donovan thought, somewhat unkindly.
“A handful of scientists; the chief of naval intelligence; Bill; Commander Douglass; an Army colonel named Leslie Groves; and now you,” Roosevelt said.
“What will be required from the Bureau?” Hoover asked formally.
“Secrecy,” Roosevelt said. “Secrecy. Absolute secrecy. This thing, if it works, could decide the war. We have to build a wall of silence around it.”