Brigadier General Leslie Richard Groves was perhaps the most talented engineering and organizational military officer in American history. Having overseen the construction of the Pentagon, he was assigned to a project so secret that most of the people who worked on it did not know what they were building. Groves initially sought a combat assignment in the European theater, but he set aside his personal ambitions for the needs of the nation. That decision, unglamorous and uncelebrated, was itself an act of civic virtue.

Worried that Nazi Germany was significantly ahead in developing an atomic weapon, Groves wasted no time. On September 17, 1942, his first full day in command, he secured 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore; the following day he acquired a processing site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He worked against significant obstacles with relentless and uncompromising purpose. Together with the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, his efforts produced the first atomic bomb in less than three years, on time and under budget.

Groves’s way of working left little room for sentiment. In the classic leadership binary of concern for people versus task achievement, Groves was decidedly focused on the latter. Brusque and widely unpopular, he had earned a reputation since his days at West Point for getting things done. His wartime aide, Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, described him bluntly: “He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic….He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions.”

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