Truman Committee's Attempt to Investigate Hanford Works

The Truman Committee's Attempt to Investigate Hanford Works was an effort to examine a vast, secret wartime undertaking whose scale and unexplained expenditures aroused suspicions of waste. The episode revealed the tension between Truman's responsibility to oversee military spending and his agreement to protect an exceptionally sensitive project: the committee sought information, but ultimately honored the limits placed on its inquiry without learning how the weapon was being made.

A secret project under scrutiny

For some time, investigators on the Truman Committee had encountered scattered clues about a project larger than the Canol pipeline scheme. The expenditures were enormous, their purpose unexplained, and the name attached to them was the Manhattan Project. The earlier Canol experience offered a reason for suspicion: a major military project had proceeded with little consultation or scrutiny, while secrecy kept civilian agencies from intervening. At Hanford, the combination of vast spending and restricted access raised the possibility that secrecy might again shelter waste.

The land acquisitions sharpened the questions. Near Hanford, a remote railroad town on the Columbia River, DuPont Company had been involved in condemnations affecting nearly half a million acres. Lewis Schwellenbach, by then a federal district judge in Spokane after leaving the Senate, wrote to Truman with concerns about the scale of the real-estate transaction. Senator Elbert Thomas of Oklahoma also wanted the situation investigated. A committee staff member privately reported that complaints of waste and inefficiency had become chronic, and worried that the secrecy around Hanford might be concealing another failure like Canol.

Disclosure and the limits of knowledge

Truman had already received a warning about the project’s exceptional secrecy. On June 17, 1943, he telephoned Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Stimson told him that only a very small group knew about the secret development and described it as important and unique. Truman accepted this assurance, indicating that a specific, justified purpose was enough for him at that point. The exchange established the basis for restraint, but did not end his curiosity as reports about Hanford continued to arrive.

By July, Truman knew the essential nature of the undertaking. In a letter dated July 15, he reassured Schwellenbach that the land deal was for a plant intended to produce a powerful explosion as part of a secret weapon, and expressed hope that the effort would succeed. The disclosure was a serious lapse: Truman dictated the letter to Mildred Dryden, so the information passed through an ordinary piece of correspondence and was shared with someone beyond the small circle entrusted with the secret. Yet, as far as the record shows, neither Schwellenbach nor Dryden revealed what the letter said, and the breach did not become public.

The attempted inquiry and its retreat

The committee's scrutiny persisted despite Truman's understanding with Stimson. Under pressure to learn more, Truman told Thomas on November 30 that he had sent an investigator to look into the matter and hoped to find what was wrong. The investigation encountered a direct barrier. A few weeks later, Fred Canfil sent Truman a telegram from Walla Walla, Washington, reporting that Colonel Mathias, the plant's commanding officer, had said the Secretary of War and Truman had agreed that no committee member would enter the facility. Canfil also reported that a confidential War Department letter instructed Army officers and senior civilian engineers not to provide information about the project to senators or anyone connected with the Senate.

The message conveyed more than a practical obstacle: the committee's access was being restricted in the name of an agreement that Truman himself had accepted. Canfil, whom Truman regarded as doggedly efficient, was relaying the boundary he had encountered, not a resolution of the committee's concerns. After the telegram arrived, committee interest cooled, and the understanding with Stimson was honored again. The evidence does not establish that the committee inspected the plant or obtained the information it had sought; instead, its attempt ended without an open confrontation over access.

Oversight, secrecy, and what remained unknown

The retreat left important limits on what Truman and the committee knew. Although Truman understood that Hanford was connected to a secret weapon, the record offers no indication that he learned about the separation of plutonium from U-238 taking place there, or understood how the immense explosion would be produced. His recognition of the project's broad purpose did not amount to knowledge of its scientific and operational details.

In February 1944, Stimson, General George Marshall, and Vannevar Bush privately briefed congressional leaders in Speaker Sam Rayburn's office, revealing the crash effort to develop an atomic bomb before Germany could do so. They described the scale of the program and requested an additional $1.6 billion without a trace showing how the money had been spent. That later disclosure to a small group on Capitol Hill underscores the narrow channel through which information about the project moved; it was not the same as the committee's proposed inquiry into Hanford. The episode therefore records neither a full investigation nor a simple absence of oversight. It shows Truman trying to reconcile scrutiny of public expenditure with wartime secrecy, and the practical consequence of that balance: the committee's questions subsided while the workings of Hanford remained beyond its view.