Jennet Conant > Quotes

“For the first few weeks in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer and his key staff worked out of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the early mornings and made daily trips up to Los Alamos to inspect the progress of the construction. "The laboratories at the site were in a sketchy state, but that did not deter the workers," Dorothy wrote of those hectic early days. "In the morning buses, consisting of station wagons, sedans, or trucks, would leave 109 and pick up the men at the ranches and take them up the Hill. Occasionally, a driver would forget to stop at one or another of the ranches and the stranded and frustrated scientists would call in a white heat.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“One popular story had it that Los Alamos was a wartime plant that made windshield wipers for submarines. Others insisted that workers were actually assembling submarines in a factory. This theory persisted even though there was no deep water for hundreds of miles around: against all reason, people actually believed the army had cut a secret passage to float the subs down the Rio Grande.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“one of the first to provide poor invalids with a level of care that had previously been available only to the rich. In”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park

“There is no great trick to doing research,” Ogilvy later observed. “The problem is to get people to use it—particularly when the research reveals that you have been making mistakes.” Most people, he found, had “a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost—for support, not for illumination.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“Lindbergh’s America Firsters, and the Nazi-run fifth columnists”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“Our best information is that the forces of isolationism, a front here for Nazism and Fascism, is gaining, not losing ground…. We feel there is German money and German direction behind the America First movement, though many of its followers may not know it and would in fact be shocked to know it. If we can pin a Nazi contact or Nazi money on the isolationists, they will lose many of their followers. It might be the deciding factor in America’s entry in the war, if the American public knew the truth.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“Greenglass was arrested in June 1950, six months after Fuchs, and received a thirty-year sentence. His case might only have been a footnote had it not blown the lid off the far greater treachery of the Rosenbergs and triggered the events that would lead to the most infamous espionage trial of the century. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“He had been very moved by a story he had recently heard about an old Scottish dowager who had lost three sons in the war. All three had been in the RAF. She was the sort of “fossilized” creature with a centuries-old manor house that one would normally stear clear of, but this Lady MacRobert, upon being told of the death of her last boy, gave a tremendous sum of money to the RAF to pay for the construction of a new Sterling bomber. When the plane was completed, she asked them to paint on its side, “Lady MacRobert’s Reply.” It struck Dahl as “something really dauntless, really indomitable,” and he remembered thinking, “You really cannot defeat such people.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“Love," as he now conceived of it, involved "slow growth, many slowly formed bonds, tests by vicissitudes as well as pleasure, mutual sharing of esthetic experiences, humor, sensory things from food through music to passion, etc." Any truly lasting relationship, he concluded would necessitate "a lengthy apprenticeship.”
― Jennet Conant

“her sisters die and then falling under the same shadow”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“But after a sojourn in the Adirondacks restored his health, he became persuaded of the curative powers of the mountain air and devoted himself to the study of respiratory problems. He”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park

“probably the most enduring rumor about Los Alamos, no doubt prompted by Dorothy’s scavenging scarce baby clothes and cribs for new mothers on the Hill, was that it was a home for pregnant WACs.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“Loomis was not any easier a father than he was a husband. He set the bar very high when it came to his three sons. After he cashed out of Bonbright, he awarded each of the three boys a substantial share of their inheritance - roughly $1 million - on the theory that it was never too early to begin charting one's own course. The youngest, Henry, was only fourteen when he was given complete financial independence.”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

“In the Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad Gita, it says, “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“They now had a technical advantage over the Germans that they had to exploit immediately...According to Cockcroft, right then and there Loomis proposed the idea of establishing a large central microwave laboratory. The British enthusiastically seconded the idea, and it was quickly agreed that it should be a civilian rather than military operation, staffed by scientists and engineers from both universities and industry, based on the British model of successful research laboratories, and, not coincidentally, Loomis' own enterprise.”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

“a gaudy beacon of hope amid all the uncertainty.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“Loomis was largely responsible for the committee's wholehearted sponsoring of microwave radar research. The army was skeptical, believing that microwave radar was 'for the next war, not this one." The army had already worked to improve its transmitting tubes so that the wavelength could be reduced to 1 1/2 meters and thought anything much shorter than that could not be perfected anytime soon. Given how slow they had been to capitalize on new technology in the past, Loomis regarded the army's attitude as more a reflection on their own bureaucracy than those posed by the research challenge.”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

“Groves’ refusal to allow key project members to travel by air meant that the British had to come by train, and the Super Chief, which would be bringing them west after they changed trains in Chicago, was so chronically late that when it actually pulled into Lamy on time one afternoon no one was surprised to discover it was the previous day’s train.”
― Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

“his deeply ingrained belief that the rich should repay their debt to society. Throughout his life, Alfred Loomis would feel that moneymaking alone was not a satisfactory existence.”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park

“the Carnegie money was only a drop in the bucket. He believed it was vital that science and technology were broadly mobilized for the war, which would provide him with a way to address what he saw as by far the most pressing military problem—the need to rapidly improve the country’s air defenses.”
― Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park