The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”

Alexander Sachs intended to read aloud to the President when he met with him. He believed busy people saw so much paper they tended to dismiss the printed word. “Our social system is such,” he told a Senate committee in 1945, “that any public figure [is] punch-drunk with printer’s ink. . . .1195 This was a matter that the Commander in Chief and the head of the Nation must know. I could only do it if I could see him for a long stretch and read the material so it came in by way of the ear and not as a soft mascara on the eye.”

To a person finding himself at the beginning of an era, its simple fundamental structures may become visible like a distant landscape in the flash of a single stroke of lightning. But the path toward them in the dark is long and confusing.