Mods, if this doesn't belong here, by all means move it to where you think it would be best.
Newman’s Own
The secret he took to the grave.
By William Tucker & Stephanie Gutmann
Paul Newman, who died last week, took a carefully guarded secret to his grave — something that would have disgraced him in Hollywood.
Did he have a secret mistress? (No, that wouldn’t bother anybody.) Did he have a clandestine fleet of SUVs? (Now that’s more like it.) Was he addicted to McDonald’s hamburgers?
No, Paul Newman was a cautious but increasingly open supporter of nuclear power.
Newman’s journey from garden-variety left-wing environmentalism to nuclear advocacy began in 1992 when he played the role of General Leslie Groves, supervisor of the Manhattan Project, in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy. Richard Rhodes’s book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, was a primary source for the film, and Rhodes had just written Nuclear Renewal, making the case for a revival of the technology.
Rhodes and Newman both lived in Connecticut and became friends. Over the next few years the two men discussed nuclear power, and Newman gradually became a convert to the technology. Through Rhodes, Newman met Denis Beller, a professor of engineering at the University of Nevada, also an expert on nuclear energy.
I usually post only four paragraphs, but this story is fascinating to me, so I aded the fifth that I'm allowed. The rest of the story is at:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTQ2ZWY2YzQ1YWU4YjZlYjQyMWFjZTMyODkxYmQ1Zjc=Big thanks to Michelle Malkin's blog, which had the link to the
National Review story.
