"...He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this..."
An old letter, recently disclosed, from the late Robert Oppenheimer highly recommending a young Richard Feynman for a position in the physics dept. of UC Berkeley back in 1943 (Feynman opted to go elsewhere):
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/he-is-second-dirac-only-this-time-human.html
An old letter