“Oppenheimer” is one of the biggest films of the year, with its meticulous and dramatic story about the development of the atomic bomb and the bruising politics that accompanied it. But one question nagged at New York Times Congressional reporter Catie Edmondson: how did the government pay for the $2 billion secret without anyone finding out? She spoke with WAMC's Ian Pickus.
Were you surprised at how hard it was to find out how this project got funded?
You know, I was and I wasn't. On one hand, I was surprised because there is so much wonderful academic work out there, so many studies about exactly how the atomic bomb came to be. But I also wasn't surprised because I was thinking as I was watching the movie that the likelihood that someone else was thinking, ‘How did Congress pay for all of this?’ is probably pretty slim. But it ended up being a much more complicated endeavor than I was expecting. I thought, surely, there would be some sort of article or Wikipedia page that would give me the answers. And instead, I ended up getting to look through a lot of primary sources, a lot of memoirs of congressional leaders, top Roosevelt, military officials, as well as some of the congressional records from 1944. That ended up telling this really fascinating, at least to me, story about how top Roosevelt officials essentially conscripted a very small number of members of Congress, about seven in total including in the House and the Senate, into concealing $800 million of funding for the atomic bomb without anyone else in Congress knowing about it.
How did they do it?
So that was the question that I kept asking. I kept reading these little snippets saying, ‘Well, they smuggled $800 million into the bill.’ And that left me incredulous because I cover federal spending on Capitol Hill for The New York Times. And I was thinking it can't be that easy to smuggle such a huge expenditure for such a literally explosive project into legislation. And it turns out that the way they did it was that they used a really innocuous sounding line item in the spending bill to hide the fact that the money was actually going to the atomic bomb. And that line item was called expediting production. And what that showed me really was that you could, at least back then, during the war time, hide a huge secret with the will of seven lawmakers in the entire Congress.
Hard to imagine something like that happening today.
You know, it is and it isn't. There were a number of participants in this entire gambit who later gave interviews to historians saying, ‘I think it'd be impossible to do something like this.’ To hide a secret of this magnitude now, or at least not in wartime. The idea that there was a sense of patriotism, a sense that everyone wanted to bring an end to the war. People wanted to make sure more American lives weren't lost abroad. And that really drove, I think, a lot of the secrecy around this. But at the same time, because I do cover the spending process on Capitol Hill currently, I can tell you the spending bills that are passed into law, they are often thousands of pages long. They are written in this extremely esoteric legislative language that’s really hard to parse or at least can be difficult to parse. And so when these bills pass into law, I always try to scrub them, give them a read, see if anything jumps out at me in particular. But what this whole saga showed me was, again, that if there is a will to do so, it potentially is possible to hide little secrets, hide little projects in these bills.
Isn't it also the case that, as you found out, the historical record is somewhat cloudy? Because, you know, after the fact and years later, some people were claiming to have been in the inner circle who weren't and there were some apocryphal stories told about these discussions.
Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that up because one of the anecdotes that I think you're alluding to really gave me a good chuckle when I read it just because it shows the nature of members of Congress. It's really human nature, right, to want to place yourself in the room where something exciting happened, particularly because the bomb did end with a U.S. military victory. But we see it all the time now, is that victory has a thousand fathers, right? And so in this particular anecdote, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, a very important role on Capitol Hill back in the day, was from Tennessee. And there was a story that went around saying that President Roosevelt, in fact, had come to him, specifically had come to him directly to say, ‘I need you to hide money for the bomb in the spending bills,’ and that Senator McKellar replied, ‘Well, of course I can, President Roosevelt. But where in Tennessee are we going to hide it?’ And he was referring to or implicitly in that story taking credit for the creation of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is where scientists were enriching uranium for the bomb. I later came across an account, an extremely detailed account, from one of the senators who actually was in that secret conference with the war secretary when the Roosevelt officials did in fact ask the lawmakers to hide this money. And he said, not only was the chairman of this committee not in the room but, in fact, he had previously confided to us fellow senators that there was some kind of crazy secret construction happening in his state at Oak Ridge plot. And he didn't know what it was and he was afraid maybe it was going to become just a huge example of government waste. And I got a great laugh out of that story because I do think it really shines a light on human nature to want to overexaggerate your involvement in big victories.
Does this research project of yours make you wonder if there are current projects that the American public might not know about but are getting the full backing of the government in some way?
Yeah, I mean, as a spending reporter, it's always something that I worry about. I will say that a number of years ago, the phrase ‘black budget’ came into sort of the public awareness. And that is that even right now, there are certain programs, certain government activities, that we don't exactly know what they are, but we know how much funding is going towards them. And these are programs ostensibly that involve American intelligence agencies. But at the end of the day, Congress has given a top line. They're sort of briefed in a more in-depth matter as to what is happening but the American public doesn't know, hence, the term ‘black budget.’ And that is something that has come up a number of times, just as readers have been reaching out to me about this story and about how it might apply to our day.
Should it be easier to find out information like this? I mean, you're a top tier congressional reporter who had to spend many months chasing down this story and going to the Library of Congress and calling archives in Austin. The average person might not be able to find out this information so easily.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of two parts there. One is some of this was made more difficult by the fact that it happened in 1944, right? The people who are in the room, you can't give them a call anymore in the same way that I might be able to go up to a senator in the hallway now and say, ‘Hey, what about that line item and that spending bill that you guys just passed?’ So certainly the fact that this all happened before sort of the digital age has complicated things greatly, at least from my perspective in trying to find out some answers on that. Although it was helpful that back then people kept things like really detailed diaries. The war secretary kept a really detailed diary, which he later donated to a library at Yale, which was an enormous help for this research. But I think, you know, looking to the current day as a reporter, I'm always going to vote in favor of more transparency, rather than less. But I think also, if you would have talked to the lawmakers who were involved in this entire gambit in the ‘40s, they would have made an argument that this is a huge issue of national security, perhaps there was no bigger issue of national security at the time that they were in a war and that in those circumstances, there is a greater level of secrecy that is perhaps warranted. I can imagine that would be the argument that they would make. So it does become a balancing act to some degree.
So just while I have you, Congress has approved a new short term spending gap, the current Congress 2024, to take us into March. Do you think that it's possible the lawmakers and the White House will be able to agree on an actual full-year budget before the elections or are we going to keep seeing a lot more short-term extenders?
Yeah, it's a great question and I love that you have related this to what I'm currently covering. I mean, that is really the question. It is an enormously difficult feat because what lawmakers are trying to accomplish right now is something that they have not been able to achieve for years, which is funding the government by passing 12 individual spending bills that each cover a handful of agencies. And the reason that they've been unable to do that is when you get into those nitty gritty fights over specific policies, activities and you don't have huge majorities in either house, it can become a real dogfight. So they're attempting to do something that has not been successfully done in a really long time. Certainly the appropriators who are working on this, I think, are expressing confidence that this is something they all really want to get done. None of them want to put another band-aid on government funding. No one wants another stopgap bill. That being said, they did not give themselves a very long time to accomplish this. The stopgap bill that was passed only goes for about six weeks so that is a pretty tall order in a pretty short time.
