Leslie Groves (17 August 1896-13 July 1970) was a US Army Lieutenant-General who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project during World War II.
Biography[]
Leslie Richard Groves Jr. was born in Albany, New York in 1896, the son of a US Army chaplain. He graduated from West Point in 1918 and served in the US Army Corps of Engineers in Nicaragua during the 1920s and 1930s, taking over Managua's water supply system after the 1931 earthquake and being awarded the Nicaraguan Presidential Medal of Merit for his work. After graduating from the Army War College in 1939, he was posted to the War Department General Staff, and, in August 1941, he was appointed to create the gigantic office complex for the War Department's 40,000 staff, a building nicknamed the "Pentagon". In September 1942, Groves took charge of the Manhattan Project, and he participated in the selection of sites for research and production at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington. Groves oversaw the construction of a town of scientists at Los Alamos in conjunction with J. Robert Oppenheimer, directed the collection of military intelligence on the German nuclear energy project, and helped select Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets for the nuclear bombings at the end of World War II. After the war, Groves headed the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, but he received several complaints against him for his rudeness, arrogance, insensitivity, contempt for the rules, and maneuvering for promotion out of turn, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower made it clear that Groves would never become Chief of Engineers. Groves decided to retire in 1948, and he was promoted to Lieutenant-General a month before leaving the Army. He went on to work for the Sperry Rand equipment and electronics firm and move to Darien, Connecticut in 1948. He retired in 1961, and he moved back to Washington DC in 1964 and died in 1970.