Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century

Follows the life and career of one of the twentieth century's most politically and economically influential engineers and inventors, from his defining role in the rise of America's military-industrial complex to his outspoken criticism of it. 12,500 first printing.

Disproving Vannevar Bush's claim that any biography of him would be terrible, Zachary (Show-Stopper!, 1994), a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, deftly follows the life and career of the single most important scientist working for the US during WW II. Zachary relies heavily on Bush's writings as well as on interviews with coworkers and family to construct a portrait of the genius who helped create the military-industrial complex when he served as director of the Office of Scientific research and Development during the war. From Tufts University, where as a student Bush registered his first patent, to Los Alamos and the explosion of the first atomic bomb--a project with which he was intimately involved--Zachary offers a vivid portrait of his subject, warts and all. Given that Bush was arrogantly technocratic (he even questioned whether a postWW II America could still function as a democracy), Zachary wisely takes a coldly objective point of view. This is not to say that Zachary's portrait of Bush dehumanizes the man. Such details as his apparently chronic nightmares as a result of having engineered the carpet bombings of Germany and Japan, his struggles with failing health and loneliness late in life, and his growing belief that the Allies had won the war but lost the peace, are all noted here. Clearly, Zachary sees Bush's defense of Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy-era investigation of the Manhattan Project's principal scientist as his most noble moment. Even under the liberal administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, Bush was revered as an American institution but kept at a safe distance from the White House in a not-always- successful attempt to avoid the controversy that inevitably followed the iconoclastic scientist. Of particular interest to today's technocrat will be Zachary's discussion of how Bush's memex and rapid selector inventions prefigured today's Internet. Bush remains, as this biography demonstrates, a complex, deeply controversial, and profoundly influential figure. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bush's seminal essay "As We May Think," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, may seem quaint today, but not too long ago it was required reading for budding library and information scientists. In it Bush envisioned automated information retrieval and a complex device called the Memex, and for that he has gained a place in history. Zachary is a Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Show-Stopper (1994), an account of Microsoft's efforts to create Windows NT. He has been researching Bush's life for more than 10 years, and his effort has paid off here. Zachary calls Bush "the most politically powerful inventor since Benjamin Franklin." He documents Bush's many inventions and patents and his contributions at MIT and the Carnegie Institution. He details Bush's roles with the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, where Bush helped create what has become known as the military-industrial complex by heading the research effort that united science with the military and helped win World War II. David Rouse

FDR's director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, a gifted mathematician and engineer, a prophet of the Manhattan Project and the Internet, a founder of the Raytheon Company, soul of the modern organization man?Vannevar Bush firmly established and maintained the seminal linchpin between the resources of the civilian scientific community and the needs of an ever-hungry military backed by the largesse of the federal government. Zachary, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, labors extensively to reconstruct the prodigious life of this "patron saint of American science, 'one of the most important men in America,'" in light of the puzzling truth that his subject is virtually forgotten today. Cloyingly praiseful, Zachary uses extensive detail to create an apotheosis of a hero who brought science and the centralized organization to bear on winning the war and establishing the modern public-private partnership. With over 70 pages of end notes, bibliography, abbreviations, and index; recommended for academic and large public libraries.?Robert C. Ballou, Atlanta
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.