John J. McCloy; the Manhattan Project’s military chief, General Leslie R. Groves; Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze; Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey. To represent the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent his scientific adviser, Donald F. Hornig, a Los Alamos veteran who had been with Oppenheimer at “Trinity,” the test on July 16, 1945, of the first atomic bomb. Sprinkled among the scientists and Washington’s power elite were men of literature and culture: the poet Stephen Spender, the novelist John O’Hara, the composer
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