David E. Lilienthal

• Name — David Lilienthal • Office — Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission • President — Harry S. Truman • Term Start — November 1, 1946 • Term End — February 15, 1950 • Predecessor — Position established • Successor — Gordon Dean • Office2 — Chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority • President2 — * Franklin D. Roosevelt • Harry S. Truman • Term Start2 — September 16, 1941 • Term End2 — October 1946 • Predecessor2 — Harcourt Morgan • Successor2 — Gordon Clapp • Office3 — Vice Chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority • President3 — Franklin D. Roosevelt • Term Start3 — January 27, 1939 • Term End3 — September 16, 1941 • Predecessor3 — Harcourt Morgan • Successor3 — Harcourt Morgan • Office4 — Member of the Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors • President4 — * Franklin D. Roosevelt • Harry S. Truman • Term Start4 — June 23, 1933 • Term End4 — October 1946 • Predecessor4 — Position established • Successor4 — Gordon Clapp • Office5 — Member of the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin • Governor5 — Philip La Follette Albert G. Schmedeman • Term Start5 — March 25, 1931 • Term End5 — June 23, 1933 • Predecessor5 — Philip Porter • Successor5 — Fred Hunt • Birth Name — David Eli Lilienthal • Born — 8 July 1899 • Birthplace — Morton, Illinois, U.S. • Died — 15 January 1981 • Place of death — New York City, New York, U.S. • Education — * DePauw University (BA) • Harvard University (LLB) • Awards — Public Welfare Medal (1951)

Born in Morton, Illinois in 1899, David Lilienthal was the oldest son of Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary. His mother Minna Rosenak (1874–1956) came from Szomolány (now Smolenice) in Slovakia, emigrating to America at age 17. His father Leo Lilienthal (1868–1951) was from Hungary, serving several years in the Hungarian army before emigrating to the United States in 1893. Minna and Leo were married in Chicago in 1897, then moved to the town of Morton, where Leo briefly operated a dry goods store. Leo's business ventures took the family several places. Young David was raised principally in the Indiana towns of Valparaiso and Michigan City. Although he spent part of his sophomore year in Gary, he graduated in 1916 from Elston High School in Michigan City.

Lilienthal attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1920. There he joined Delta Upsilon social fraternity and was elected president of the student body. He was active in forensics and won a state oratorical contest in 1918. He also gained distinction as a light heavyweight boxer. After a summer job in 1920 as a reporter for the Mattoon, Illinois, Daily Journal-Gazette, Lilienthal entered Harvard Law School. Although his grades were average until his third and final year at Harvard, he acquired an important mentor in Professor Felix Frankfurter, later an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. While at DePauw, Lilienthal met his future wife, Helen Marian Lamb (1896–1999), a fellow student. Born in Oklahoma, she had moved with her family to Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1913. They were married in Crawfordsville in 1923, after Helen had completed her M.A. at Radcliffe while David was a law student at Harvard. They had a son, David Eli Lilienthal, Jr. (1927–present), a journalist and writer best known under the pseudonym David Ely.

• Illustration — David E. Lilienthal listens to testimony at a Congressional hearing in 1938 called to investigate charges brought against the TVA by its former chair, Arthur E. Morgan. Lilienthal was one of the first directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). He earned his credentials for the appointment working under labor lawyer Donald Richberg and as an appointed member of the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin under Wisconsin's governor Philip La Follette. His TVA appointment was also aided by the persistent lobbying of his old law professor Frankfurter.. The TVA was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 for flood control and locally controlled hydroelectric power on the Tennessee River. It was a massive project controlled by a public corporation designed to modernize the rural, Southern communities within the Tennessee Valley. The TVA also established extensive education programs, and a library service that distributed books in the many rural hamlets that lacked a library. The TVA was locally and nationally controversial. On the national scale, opponents led by Wendell Willkie said the TVA was a form of state socialism, and the other utility companies it competed against were also against the project. Local people were both apprehensive but also hopeful about the changes the TVA would bring. In his role as one of the TVA directors, Lilienthal was skilled at administration and at creating supporters for the project. In part due to his experience at the TVA, Lilienthal was often sent abroad to work on water development projects. Lyndon Johnson dispatched him to the Mekong River to oversee development of a project there. He was also sent to India and Pakistan to report on the dispute between the two nations, for Collier's magazine. He thought that the Kashmir dispute was intractable, but there were other areas of mutual concern of the two nations were agreement could be found - such as the allotment of the water of the Indus River. He reported this idea to the World Bank, and its president, Eugene R. Black, agreed with the assessment. This led to the Indus Water Treaty, which continued to govern water allocation between India and Pakistan, till it was officially suspended and placed in abeyance by India on April 23, 2025.

Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II and victory by the Allies, Lilienthal was fascinated and appalled by the information he soon absorbed about the power of the new weapon. In January 1946, U.S. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked Lilienthal to chair a five-member panel of consultants to a committee including him and four others, who were to advise President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes about the position of the United States at the United Nations on the new menace of nuclear weapons. At the time, the US held a monopoly on these weapons. Lilienthal described the purpose of Acheson's request: Those charged with foreign policy -- the Secretary of State (Byrnes) and the President -- did not have either the facts nor an understanding of what was involved in the atomic energy issue, the most serious cloud hanging over the world. Comments...have been made and are being made...without a knowledge of what the hell it is all about -- literally! Lilienthal quickly found out even more about the atomic weapon, and wrote in his journal: No fairy tale that I read in utter rapture and enchantment as a child, no spy mystery, no "horror" story, can remotely compare with the scientific recital I listened to for six or seven hours today.... I feel that I have been admitted, through the strangest accident of fate, behind the scenes in the most awful and inspiring drama since some primitive man looked for the very first time upon fire. The result of the panel was a 60-page Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, better known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. Released in March 1946, it proposed that the United States offer to turn over its monopoly on nuclear weapons to an international agency, in return for a system of strict inspections and control of fissile materials. It was a bold attempt to formulate a workable idea for international control (and implicitly assumed that the United States was far ahead of the Soviet Union in atomic weapons development and could remain in that position even if the Soviets violated the agreement). However Truman then decided to appoint Bernard Baruch to present the plan to the United Nations; Baruch changed some provisions of it, ending up with a proposal that the Soviets could not accept and that was vetoed by them. (As it happened, the Soviets were determined to proceed with their own atomic bomb program and were unlikely to accept either plan.) • Illustration — David E. Lilienthal (right) met with General Leslie R. Groves (left), Director of the Manhattan Project, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on October 1, 1946, to discuss the transfer of responsibility for atomic energy to the new Atomic Energy Commission, which President Harry S. Truman nominated Lilienthal to chair. Subsequently, the United States established the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to provide civilian control of this resource. Lilienthal was appointed as chair of the AEC on October 28, 1946, and served until February 15, 1950, one of the pioneers of civilian control of the American atomic energy program. He intended to administer a program that would "harness the atom" for peaceful purposes, principally atomic power. Lilienthal gave high priority to peaceful uses, especially nuclear power plants. However coal was cheap and the power industry was not interested. The first plant was begun under Eisenhower in 1954. As chairman of the AEC in the late 1940s, during the early years of the Cold War, Lilienthal played an important role in managing relations between the scientific community and the U.S. Government. The AEC was responsible for managing atomic energy development for the military as well as for civilian use. Lilienthal was responsible for ensuring that the Commander-in-Chief would have the use of a number of working atomic bombs. Lilienthal did not have as much enthusiasm for this task as some in Washington, and in particular he received steady criticism from Senators Brien McMahon and Bourke B. Hickenlooper, the chairman and ranking member of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, for not pursuing the task with sufficient vigor. Indeed, in 1949 Hickenlooper raised charges that Lilienthal had engaged in "incredible mismanagement" and tried to have him removed as chairman; Lilienthal was cleared of wrongdoing but was left politically weakened within Washington. Once the Soviet Union had successfully tested its own atomic bomb, Lilienthal became a central figure in the August 1949–January 1950 debate within the U.S. government and scientific community over whether to proceed with development of the hydrogen bomb. President Truman appointed a three-person special committee, composed of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson in addition to Lilienthal as head of the AEC, to formulate a report to him on the matter. Lilienthal was opposed to development, stating among other reasons that the proposed weapon lacked a clear political or strategic rationale and that being overly dependent upon nuclear forces (rather than maintaining strong conventional forces) was an unwise security posture. But Lilienthal failed to marshal bureaucratic support for his position, in part due to the limitations of secrecy preventing him from finding allies and in part due to his repeated arguments losing their effectiveness. The three-person committee made its recommendation to proceed to Truman in a meeting on January 31, 1950, and the president so ordered. (Lilienthal ended up appearing to support the recommendation on the surface while trying to register a dissent as well, a confused situation that only became more so with additional memoranda filed after the fact and with conflicting recollections among the participants in years to follow.) In his 1963 book, Change, Hope and the Bomb, Lilienthal criticized nuclear developments, denouncing the nuclear industry's failure to have addressed the dangers of nuclear waste. He suggested that a civil atomic energy program should not be pursued until the "substantial health hazards involved were eliminated". Lilienthal argued that it would be "particularly irresponsible to go ahead with the construction of full scale nuclear power plants without a safe method of nuclear waste disposal having been demonstrated". However, Lilienthal stopped short of a blanket rejection of nuclear power. His view was that a more cautious approach was necessary.

Lilienthal's resignation from the Atomic Energy Commission took effect on February 15, 1950. He was concerned that after years of relatively low-paying public service, he needed to make some money to provide for his wife and two children, and to secure funds for his retirement. After undertaking a lecture tour, he worked for several years as an industrial consultant for the investment bank Lazard Freres. Later he wrote about this period in his journal: A serene life apparently isn't the thing I crave. I live on enthusiasm, zest; and when I don't feel it, the bottom sags below sea level, and it is agony, no less. In 1955, he formed an engineering and consulting firm called Development and Resources Corporation (D&R), which shared some of the TVA's objectives: major public power and public works projects. Lilienthal leveraged the financial backing of Lazard Freres to found his company. He hired former associates from the TVA to work with him. D&R focused on overseas clients, including the Khuzistan region of Iran, the Cauca Valley of Colombia, Venezuela, India, southern Italy, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, and South Vietnam.

His company D&R struggled financially during Lilienthal's final years. A promised infusion of capital from the Rockefeller family was not fully realized. The company was dissolved in the late 1970s. Lilienthal resided in Princeton, New Jersey during his final years. In 1980, Lilienthal had two separate serious health problems. He had a bilateral hip replacement and cataract surgery in one eye. He needed crutches and a cane at various points. The recovery period from the eye surgery forced him to neither read nor write aside from his final journal entry on January 2, 1981. He died on January 16, 1981. News of his death, and his obituary, appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

* • Hewlett, Richard G., and Oscar Edward Anderson. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: The New World, 1939-1946. Vol. 1. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962. • * Hewlett, Richard G., and Oscar Edward Anderson. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: Volume II, Atomic shield 1947/1952 (1969) * * * • Neuse, Steven M. "David E. Lilienthal: Exemplar of public purpose." International Journal of Public Administration 14.6 (1991): 1099–1148. * * * *

* * • Lilienthal, David. (1944). TVA: Democracy on the March.