“Exploring History In Situ: A Between the Lines First-Person Account of Berkeley’s Loss of Fermilab”

Catherine Westfall (Michigan State University)

In my career as a historian, I wrote about one particularly sensitive subject: the choice of Weston, Illinois as the site for what came to be called Fermilab. This was a surprising and dismaying decision for many physicists, particularly those at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After all, following in the tradition of Ernest Lawrence, managers and a world-class group of accelerator builders obtained initial funding and created the first design for the facility. To add further insult and injury, the loss of this particle physics laboratory signaled the end of the era when Berkeley housed the world’s largest, most prestigious accelerators. When recently contemplating untold stories I would like to tell before retirement, I realized I am bothered by insights left out of my previously published work on the Fermilab decision, in particular what I discovered in my interactions with two key participants in that saga, Glenn Seaborg, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Edwin McMillan, then director of Berkeley Lab. It is not that this missing information changes my published assessment or conclusions in my previously published traditional historical narratives. Instead, I present this “between the lines” story of my experiences with Seaborg and McMillan to show case the dilemmas and joys of writing in situ history. These include the difficulty of dealing with and sorting through the emotions that arise when gathering information from history makers, the discomfort that comes with telling a story people don’t want to hear, and the misunderstandings that arise with physicists as well as historians about the work I do.