Summary

Lewis describes his conversation with John MacWilliams, a former high-ranking employee of the DOE. He sums up MacWilliams’ multi-faceted career (law, finance, novelist). He also outlines how MacWilliams was recruited by Obama’s Secretary of Energy, nuclear physicist Ernie Moniz, to define and manage the many and varied risks faced by the Department. It took MacWilliams, according to the author, more than a year to come to an effective, working understanding of what the Department did, how it operated, and the reasons things there were the way they were.

The author then sums up the conversation he had with MacWilliams, a conversation which, the author adds, is the first time in the five years since he left the DOE that anyone has asked what he knows. The author then says that he decided to ask the sort of questions that a representative of the...