WWII : when Massachusetts ran the whole world

The secretive team that ran the OSRD and ran the Manhattan Project and ran America's go-it-alone atomic bomb foreign policy that ruled the postwar world were not elected officials of course.

(We are talking America , after all.)

They were instead five white protestant native-born well paid male scientists, further linked together in a consensual intellectual circle jerk by all having very strong Massachusetts-based academic connections.

The most powerful figure in wartime America vs an unknown dying doctor

It wasn't a fair fight : the unknown dying doctor won.

It was a classic Hollywood-type story of powerless, selfless , agape-good triumphing over all-powerful evil of the most banal kind.

Janus Manhattan 1945 , part 2 : FDR's WPB restores the human fabric ...

If is not just ordinary Americans who find America's political system 'inside the Beltway' to be overly complex and confusing.

Outsiders - some as presidents with hands on nuclear red buttons and some as terrorists with hands on cellphone detonator buttons - find the daily mass/mess of signals coming out of the Beltway totally confusing.

Perhaps never more so than during FDR's 12 year reign when he closely mimicked Adolf Hitler's policy of setting up competing powerful bureaucracies and letting the strongest and most determined claw and elbow its way to the top.

Janus Manhattan 1945 , part 1 : FDR's OSRD rends the human fabric ...

Memo to basic scientists :

General Leslie Groves doesn't deserve your bad press, for the same reason that Vannevar Bush doesn't deserve your good press.

It was Bush, the head of the wartime OSRD (and reputed to be the most powerful un-elected man in Washington) who carved in stone America's selfish postwar determination to keep the atomic bomb and atomic energy a secret American monopoly -- General Groves was merely following Bush's orders.

I repeat - it was a scientist, one of your own, who carried on the old Republicans' policy of selfish Isolationism (albeit in a new guise).