Groves, Leslie Richard

(1896-1970)

   Born in Albany, New York, to a military family, Leslie Groves went to the University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and finally West Point, where he graduated in 1918. He was commissioned into the Army Corps of Engineers. He held a series of positions during the 1920s before joining the Office of Engineers in Washington, D.C., in 1931. Groves was involved in overseeing the construction of the Pentagon building for the War Department in 1941. In 1942, he was appointed brigadier general and military director of the Manhattan Project. It was Groves who selected J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1945, Groves recommended that the atomic bomb be dropped on Japan, and he played a part in choosing the targets. He was appointed chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project in 1945. He retired in 1948 and became vice president of the Sperry Rand Corporation until 1961. His account of the Manhattan Project, Now It Can Be Told, was published in 1962.