Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World

Elected to federal office as the Vice President of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman became president after Roosevelt’s untimely death on April 12th, 1945. Truman was born and raised in Missouri and as a young man would fight in the trenches in World War I. After the war, he dabbled in multiple industries before deciding to get into public service. He was elected as a Jackson County judge in 1922. After twelve years of judicial service, he was elected to the Senate in 1934. After serving as a senator for more than a decade, he served a mere four months as vice president before taking over the presidential office.

Truman was known for being a serious and thoughtful individual. Rather than immediately attempting to make sweeping changes or to implement a personal agenda, he was content to lead the nation through the presidential transition as calmly as possible. He was notoriously efficient in his cabinet meetings and grew tired of spending time in Germany at the Potsdam Conference when he discovered that Churchill spent too much time talking and Stalin would barely talk at all. While Truman’s administration was criticized upon his leaving office, more recently his time in office has been reevaluated and looked upon much more favorably, taking into account the unprecedented times and circumstances into which he was thrust.

Oppenheimer was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists alive at the time the team for the Manhattan Project was assembled. He was a known polymath—" fluent in six languages and well-versed in classical literature and Eastern philosophy” (7-8)—and there was nobody else in the country who had the intellectual and organizational skills to lead the Manhattan Project the way that Oppenheimer did. While brilliant and witty, he also had a more melancholy side that would serve him well in the moments when the novelty of the research and development for weaponized nuclear power called for sober reflection.

The son of immigrant parents from Germany, his friends and colleagues described him as the most brilliant man they had ever met. Graduating from Harvard in only three years, he studied for his PhD in physics at one of the best schools in Germany at Gottingen, and was quickly hired onto two major faculties in California: UC Berkely and the Cal Institute of Technology. A uniquely charismatic figure, he seemed “as comfortable at a cocktail reception as he was in the lecture hall” (9), weaving “poetry and literature through lofty mathematical concepts” (10) into his lecture hall monologues. In addition to his brilliance, he was very aware of the possible consequences of his research, eventually coming to question his participation in the creation of the atom bomb.