Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  There was no adequate reply. Whatever words Conant muttered were forgotten in the hours that followed and the terrible realization of the massacre to come. All he could remember later was the “intensity of my feelings as I left London.”

  He was filled with an overwhelming sense of urgency. Conant’s “immediate objective” was to go home and tell all his friends—everyone he knew in a position of influence—of Britain’s desperate predicament. Everything he had seen and heard only confirmed his belief that America had to intervene at once. He despaired not of England’s will but her ability to survive. An American delay of even a month, he feared, might be too late. It might mean the war “could not be won at all.”

  * * *

  On April 25 Conant met with the president and provided an overview of the mission while they ate lunch on trays in the Oval Office. Roosevelt was particularly encouraged by what he had to say about British advances in radar. Conant seized the opportunity to obtain approval for the scheme he had pitched to Harriman about sending American reserve officers to Britain to gain practical experience in the “radio magic” apparatus to detect enemy aircraft. Astonished to discover that the commander in chief was “almost totally ignorant” about the functioning of radar, Conant found himself tutoring him on the fundamentals of the war-winning technology that had played such a critical role in the Battle of Britain. FDR was so pleased with this bit of military know-how that he sailed into his Cabinet meeting that afternoon full of enthusiasm for the “marvelous progress” the British had made in “what was called radio but was not radio,” and ordered Secretary of War Henry Stimson to act on Conant’s proposal immediately.

  A few days later, Conant met with Stimson. He felt awkward about having gone directly to Roosevelt with his pet scheme, bypassing the secretary of war and placing him in the embarrassing position of hearing about the novel project for the first time from the president. Nevertheless, Stimson saw to it that Conant’s “Electronics Training Group” was quickly made operational. In August the first 350 Signal Corps officers—there would be 2,000 in all—were sent to England for radar apprenticeships. They would prove indispensable to their country in the months after Pearl Harbor.

  During his talk with Roosevelt, the discussion had inevitably turned to the pressing problem of the isolationists. Conant mentioned that at the annual meeting of Harvard Overseers the week before, he had been dismayed by the number of diehards in the group. “As one Harvard graduate to another,” he could not hide his contempt for the many prominent alumni who continued to insist the war might soon be ended by a negotiated peace if it were not for the stubborn and intransigent Churchill. With Britain on the brink of defeat, one muddle-headed individual had asked, “Why shouldn’t all of us urge them to come to terms with Hitler?” Conant, barely able to remain polite, replied that no one in Britain was in the mood to bargain with Hitler. The board members’ blasé attitude, he admitted, had been “difficult to take.”

  Roosevelt’s reaction surprised him. “The president in turn recounted the extreme neutralist sentiment of certain men we both knew well,” but did so “without the slightest rancor or other emotion.” Roosevelt was supremely confident of his salesmanship and believed he could move America in the direction he desired it go, if and when circumstances demanded it. In the meantime, he was waiting on events, “trusting to luck,” as his biographer James MacGregor Burns put it, and to his “long-tested flair for timing.”

  Convinced there was not a moment to spare, however, Conant was impatient with the administration’s dawdling approach to full involvement. On May 4 he gave another major radio address, this time on behalf of the Fight for Freedom (FFF) Committee, a new pressure group formed by the militant wing of the Century Group, which openly endorsed war as the quickest and surest path to peace. “If we would preserve our freedom,” Conant told his radio listeners in an impassioned speech, “the question before us is not ‘Shall America fight?’ The question before us is ‘When Shall America Fight?’ I believe,” he declared, his voice betraying his deep emotions, “we should fight now.”

  On May 27 the president gave a dramatic radio address declaring a national emergency and authorizing American ships to escort British convoys in the combat zone. Germany had dispatched its massive battleship Bismarck to the North Atlantic, where it had promptly sunk the British battle cruiser Hood, sending all but three of its 1,418 crew to a watery grave, and then skulked away. The German U-boat campaign had already been fearfully effective, and the crippling losses were sapping Britain’s strength. Americans could not allow the Nazis’ chief opponent to go under and let control of the Atlantic fall into enemy hands. The president presented the “cold, hard facts” to the country: the war was approaching the brink of the Western Hemisphere, would place portions in immediate jeopardy, and ultimately threaten the United States itself. To ensure friendly control of the seas, the United States would have to “give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, were resisting Hitlerism.”

  Roosevelt was inching toward war. He had made it plain that the Nazi threat was a threat to national security, knowing it was the only way to budge public opinion. The speech was largely symbolic, but it lifted Conant’s spirits like nothing had in weeks, and he wired FDR a message of support. “Friends of freedom everywhere rejoice,” he wrote. “The people have been overwhelmingly behind you in the steps which you have taken. I am convinced you will have their support in whatever steps you may find it necessary to take in the future.”

  A month later, the war suddenly veered east, in a new direction. On June 22 Hitler repudiated his nonaggression pact with Joseph Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Even though the prospect of Russia as an ally resuscitated the isolationists, Conant agreed with Churchill, who eagerly embraced “any man or state who fights on against Nazidom.” Despite finding Communism and Nazism “equally detestable,” Conant believed only the latter posed a real threat to the nation’s security. Not only was there no danger in lending aid to Russia in its war with Germany, such aid was vital, since “the major concern of the United States must be to secure the military overthrow of Nazi power.”

  But the great debate about isolationism seemed to lose steam that summer. With Senator Wheeler, former president Hoover, and others wanting no part of the death struggle between two totalitarian powers, and Lindbergh railing against the godless and barbaric Russians, public interest in foreign policy flagged. Americans seemed content to watch the two dictators duke it out on the Eastern Front. “The thing that worries me most,” Conant confided to Grenville Clark, “is that if we do not start shooting by September, the British-American relations will deteriorate rapidly and leave a long trail of bad feeling for the future.” Like many politicians, he had come to believe that only another major shock would impel the country to action.

  While most Americans waited resignedly for the inevitable, Conant radiated a martial spirit, and his constant clamoring for defeat of the Nazis continued to make news. “No voice is louder urging our entry into the war,” observed the Globe in late July. He was spending so much time in Washington—making on average two trips a week—and working so closely with administration officials that the New York Times reported the “persistent rumor” that he would be stepping down as head of the university to devote all his time to the national defense program. Harvard authorities had no comment. Conant, as usual, was out of town, and had his hands too full to respond to a reporter’s inquiries about his future.

  By the fall of 1941, his political views were conditioning his educational philosophy and found expression in the reasons he gave for wanting to review the undergraduate curriculum. When the faculty debated his modest modifications and then refused to make American history and “certain great authors” required subjects, Conant redefined his agenda, claiming that the central purpose of education was the “continuation of the liberal and humane tradition.” Compelled by the rise of Fascism, the masses of young men entering the armed services, an
d the critical role of a small number of scientists at work on advanced weapons, he pressed ahead with his reforms, convinced that the educational strength that would help them win the war would also win the peace. What America needed now, more than ever, was brains.

  Conant also sought ways to inculcate democratic values in the educational system that had as its first priority the identification and development of the talented few—what he like to call “Jefferson’s ideal”—the educated elite who would be the next generation of leaders. Arguing that a good grounding in mathematics and the sciences, combined with an ability to read and write, was not sufficient background in “our common heritage” to foster a strong sense of common citizenship, he urged a broad general knowledge of the arts, history, literature, and philosophy to create a coherent national culture. “The primary concern of American education today is not the development of the appreciation of the ‘good life’ in young gentlemen born to the purple,” he asserted in advancing what came to be known as a core curriculum, but rather to cultivate “an appreciation both of the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are American and free.”

  On the eve of war, he appointed his trusted advisor, Paul Buck, and a dozen faculty members to undertake a major study of the aims and content of undergraduate and secondary education across the country in anticipation of the future, calling it the Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society. But even as Conant moved to inaugurate his innovative ideas, the ominous developments in Europe drew his attention away from education to military defense and the increasingly pressing demands of public service.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  War Scientist

  You say you are convinced of the importance of these fission bombs. Are you ready to devote the next several years of your life to getting them made?

  —JBC to Ernest Lawrence

  Almost as soon as he returned from England, Conant learned he was being given a much more daunting assignment. It had all been arranged, and President Roosevelt signed the executive order before Harvard’s board was given a chance to protest—not that it really could have under the circumstances. There was a tacit understanding that, as a scientist, Conant felt duty bound to serve his country as best he could, and that his resignation was always on the table.

  In May 1941, with the country moving closer to war, Bush persuaded Roosevelt to establish a new, vastly larger agency to oversee the mobilization of science for military purposes: the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Bush would have the title of chairman and greatly enhanced powers—specifically, the authority to green-light the production of new weapons from preliminary model to prototype. As the defense work was fast outgrowing the president’s emergency funds, Bush would also be given direct access to the Treasury. Since he could not head two agencies at once, Conant would assume leadership of the NDRC, which would function as an advisory body responsible for making recommendations on the new developments coming out of the laboratories, and serve as Bush’s deputy at the new organization.

  It would prove to be an exceptional partnership. The two flinty New Englanders had forged a deep mutual respect while engaged in various battles as rival college presidents. Each had come to rely on and trust the judgment of the other, so much so that Bush would say later that he could not remember that they ever disagreed through five tense, tumultuous years. Together they were able to provide the united, tough leadership necessary to persuade a skeptical government and military to make use of their scientific knowledge, and the country’s technical resources, to create a modern organization for waging a modern war. Bush and Conant “won the confidence of President Roosevelt at the beginning of the national emergency,” Secretary of War Stimson noted in his memoir, and “set a standard of effort which in its combination of soundness and daring left open . . . no intelligent course but full and hearty collaboration.”

  As soon as Conant’s appointment was official, Bush took him into his confidence about the sorry state of the government’s classified uranium research project. The Briggs Committee, which had been appointed by the president in October 1939 to fund further uranium research, had become hopelessly bogged down. For his part in jump-starting the program, Leo Szilard had been awarded $6,000 to continue his experiments, and various funds had been appropriated for further research, but overall there had been little progress. Meanwhile, Bush was being pestered with complaints from Ernest Lawrence and other leading physicists who were frustrated by the committee’s leisurely pace and increasingly anxious that the Germans were exploring the possibility of an atomic weapon.

  During the short two months Conant had been abroad, a great deal had happened in the field of nuclear physics in America, causing a considerable stir and a spurt of new activity. At Lawrence’s Rad Lab in Berkeley, a team of young physicists—Glenn Seaborg, Emilio Segrè, Joseph W. Kennedy, and graduate chemistry student Arthur Wahl—had begun experiments with U-238 in the cyclotron and in February demonstrated that, after bombardment with neutrons, U-238 eventually transformed itself into an isotope of element 94, soon to be called plutonium. By March, Seaborg’s experiments had confirmed that the new element, like one of the uranium isotopes, underwent spontaneous fission. The theoretical implications were striking: already physicists in the United States and England were whispering that the large-scale production of fissionable plutonium might prove the essential step in producing an atomic bomb. Lawrence, who was working on separating uranium by electromagnetic means, began pressing for a rapid expansion of the fission program and begged Conant, who had taken over its supervision when the OSRD was formed, to “light a fire” under the slow, conservative Briggs.

  Lawrence had made such a nuisance of himself that Bush enlisted Arthur Holly Compton, a Nobel laureate and professor of physics at the University of Chicago, and as highly regarded a figure as his older brother Karl, to review the uranium program. Conant’s reaction after reading Compton’s May 17 report was “almost completely negative.” The prospect of a bomb was “only hinted at,” and “nowhere in the document was there any specific statement about how one started an uncontrolled reaction,” which Lindemann had disclosed in London. Higher on Compton’s list of military applications was the possibility of radioactive materials for use over enemy territory, and atomic-powered ships and submarines, though even the latter was thought to be years off.

  In a private conversation with Bush, Conant voiced grave reservations about the uranium project. With no real military applications in sight, he questioned the assumption that achieving a chain reaction was “so important” that it warranted a large expenditure of both money and manpower. He advocated putting the uranium research project under wraps for the duration. They needed to concentrate all their energies on improving the immediate military power of the United States and Britain. “To me, the defense of the free world was in such a dangerous state,” he wrote in his memoir, “that only efforts which were likely to yield results within a matter of months or, at most, a year or two were worthy of serious consideration.” With the suffering he had seen in London fresh in his mind, Conant was impatient with arguments presented by some of the physicists who “talked in excited tones about the discovery of a new world” in which power from a uranium reactor would one day revolutionize industrialized society. “These fancies,” he recalled, “left me cold.”

  Bush, who had by his own admission the “rough job” of determining defense research priorities, rather welcomed Conant’s cranky opposition to a bomb—especially since it could prove to be a wild-goose chase. Between them, they tried to reorient the irrepressible Lawrence. For the present, they needed the prodigiously talented experimentalist to focus his “prime efforts” on the submarine antiwarfare program at San Diego, which interested him far less than the explosive potential of nuclear power. Lawrence had made that much abundantly clear when all three of them had discussed the matter a few weeks earlier at Harvard, where the Berkeley physi
cist had collected an honorary degree. He had been very exercised about the fact that the Germans were also working to release the atom’s power. They had no cyclotron, though both Bohr’s in Copenhagen and Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s in Paris had fallen into Nazi hands. There was also strong evidence the Germans were doing advanced work on atomic piles, using uranium moderated by Norwegian heavy water. If a plutonium bomb was feasible, and Germany developed it first, the outcome of the war would be decided. Lawrence, who was competitive under normal circumstances, was almost frantic at the idea that the enemy might have had a head start. Germany could not be allowed to win.

  Bush was aware of Lawrence’s enthusiasm for fission studies, but time was precious and good physicists few and far between. “I have been putting a lot of thought on the uranium matter,” he wrote Lawrence on July 14, adopting a conciliatory tone and complimenting him on his fine work in helping to launch the radar lab. By asking Conant to take charge of the Uranium Committee, he expected a more vigorous assessment of the problem and to begin moving toward a solution. The practical-minded Harvard chemist had already added two engineers to Compton’s panel to serve as a reality check. “I rather hope Conant will find it possible to make this one of his primary interests at the moment to get the whole thing fully on track,” Bush added, though “just how the matter can be worked out I am not at all sure.”