David Eli Lilienthal (July 8, 1899 – January 15, 1981) was an American attorney and public administrator, best known for his presidential appointment to head Tennessee Valley Authority[1] and later the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

[11] After a summer job in 1920 as a reporter for the Mattoon, Illinois, Daily Journal-Gazette, Lilienthal entered Harvard Law School.

[12] Although his grades were average until his third and final year at Harvard, he acquired an important mentor in Professor Felix Frankfurter, later an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

[17] Prominent in labor law, Richberg gave Lilienthal a major role in writing his firm's brief for the appellants in Michaelson v. United States, 266 U.S. 42 (1924), a landmark case in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of striking railroad workers to jury trials in cases in which they were charged with criminal contempt.

[23][24] As the commission's leading member, Lilienthal expanded its staff and launched aggressive investigations of Wisconsin's gas, electric and telephone utilities.

[29] It was a massive project controlled by a public corporation designed to modernize the rural, Southern communities within the Tennessee Valley.

On the national scale, opponents led by Wendell Willkie said the TVA was a form of state socialism, and the other utility companies it competed against were also against the project.

He thought that the Kashmir dispute was intractable, but there were other areas of mutual concern of the two nations were agreement could be found - such as the allotment of the water of the Indus River.

[30] Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II and victory by the Allies, Lilienthal was fascinated and appalled by the information he soon absorbed about the power of the new weapon.

[32] Lilienthal described the purpose of Acheson's request: Those charged with foreign policy -- the Secretary of State (Byrnes) and the President -- did not have either the facts nor an understanding of what was involved in the atomic energy issue, the most serious cloud hanging over the world.

[33][34] Lilienthal quickly found out even more about the atomic weapon, and wrote in his journal: No fairy tale that I read in utter rapture and enchantment as a child, no spy mystery, no "horror" story, can remotely compare with the scientific recital I listened to for six or seven hours today.

I feel that I have been admitted, through the strangest accident of fate, behind the scenes in the most awful and inspiring drama since some primitive man looked for the very first time upon fire.

Released in March 1946, it proposed that the United States offer to turn over its monopoly on nuclear weapons to an international agency, in return for a system of strict inspections and control of fissile materials.

[39]) Subsequently, the United States established the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to provide civilian control of this resource.

Lilienthal was appointed as chair of the AEC on October 28, 1946, and served until February 15, 1950, one of the pioneers of civilian control of the American atomic energy program.

[41] As chairman of the AEC in the late 1940s, during the early years of the Cold War, Lilienthal played an important role in managing relations between the scientific community and the U.S. Government.

[46] (Lilienthal ended up appearing to support the recommendation on the surface while trying to register a dissent as well, a confused situation that only became more so with additional memoranda filed after the fact and with conflicting recollections among the participants in years to follow.

[43] He was concerned that after years of relatively low-paying public service, he needed to make some money to provide for his wife and two children, and to secure funds for his retirement.

[citation needed] After undertaking a lecture tour, he worked for several years as an industrial consultant for the investment bank Lazard Freres.

D&R focused on overseas clients, including the Khuzistan region of Iran, the Cauca Valley of Colombia, Venezuela, India, southern Italy, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, and South Vietnam.

He later recalled that the lawyer noticed how seriously I was looking at life in general and suggested as a remedy for this and as a source of amusement and self-cultivation the keeping of a diary of a different sort than the "ate today" "was sick yesterday" variety, but rather a record of the impressions I received from various sources; my reactions to books, people, events; my opinions and ideas on religion, sex, etc.

Lilienthal wrote to Cass Canfield at Harper & Row; the company eventually published his journals in seven volumes, appearing between 1964 and 1983.

[53] Lilienthal's other books include TVA: Democracy on the March (1944), This I Do Believe (1949), Big Business: A New Era (1953) and Change, Hope and the Bomb (1963).