Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  In his speech, Conant posed the “ugly question” that had haunted him since the black day he was drafted into weapons work as a young chemist: “how to reconcile the doctrine of military force—killing men in war—with a moral purpose?” The only way to make sense of this apparent paradox was to understand the distinction between the ethics of war and the ethics of peace that must be the “fundamental postulate” of their democratic society. “The citizens of the United States, while abhorring war, nevertheless believe it is not always wrong,” he told his military audience. “They have a deep-seated conviction, however, that war is always totally different morally from peace.”

  It was true, of course, that history was full of examples of freedom being gained by the successful use of force: the liberties of the early settlers of New England had been secured by Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers, who overpowered the church and the king. But once won, Conant maintained, freedom “can be protected only by adherence to those moral principles which were repudiated in its achievement.” The moment society failed to adhere to this moral distinction, it fell prey to Communists and fanatics, “men so dedicated to a cause that they did not scruple to use violence as an adjunct to political action.” Presenting a reformulated version of his ends-versus-the-means doctrine, he contended that initiating an air-atomic offensive against Russia would be no better than waging a holy war: “only those who believe they are divinely led or that history is on their side can maintain that the issue between themselves and their opponents demands the rules of war should operate even in time of peace.”

  America, Conant argued, had to deliberately refrain from such desperate measures. What was really needed in response to the Russian threat was conscription, a buildup of conventional forces, and the courage to walk “a perilous knife edge” between providing the nation with adequate military protection while preserving the strength of America’s unique free and open society.

  Forrestal was so impressed with Conant’s critique of the preventive war movement that he urged him to prepare a version of his talk for the Atlantic Monthly, and personally contacted the editor, Edward Weeks, about publishing it. Flattered to have the Pentagon chief as his patron, Conant agreed and arranged to have it declassified. “Force and Freedom” appeared on the cover of the January 1949 issue, featuring an artist’s imaginative rendition of Conant, a fiery atomic blitz under way in the background, pondering the nation’s chances of survival in World War III. Forrestal, who was sent an advance copy, raved about the article. The Washington Post reprinted it in full, accompanied by a large photograph of Truman pinning the service medals on Conant while a beaming Bush looked on. The article was read and extolled at the highest levels of government, enhancing Conant’s reputation as an intellectual leader and moral guide in what he called “these confused and gloomy days.”

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  Between January 1949, when Truman announced his intention to provide military aid to Western Europe, and April 4, when the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, it was as if every competing faction of the army, navy, and air force was using the press to promote its atomic delivery system and convince the public and Congress that it deserved a hefty increase in funding to defend against Soviet aggression. From Conant’s perspective, the disclosures about nuclear weapons—including an alarming leak in March of a presentation to the Joint Chiefs of Staff showing that seventy strategic targets in Russia were within range of the new B-36 bombers—were the most distressing.

  When, in the midst of this mess, Forrestal asked him to chair a panel of eight prominent civilians charged with reexamining the government’s nuclear secrecy policy, Conant agreed with alacrity. At the heart of the matter was the delicate question of what information about weapons of mass destruction—atomic, biological, chemical, and radiological—the public was entitled to know for the purposes of education and approving national policy, and what was not suitable for release. Forrestal had been prodded into action by the growing press criticism of excessive government secrecy, specifically the suppression of a report on the Bikini tests, and renewed pressure for the United States to articulate an official statement on employing atomic weapons in the event of war.

  On April 7 Conant convened the first meeting of the “Fishing Party,” as his top-secret committee was known, the code name serving as an apt comment on the Truman administration’s leaky ship. The high-powered group—which included Dwight D. Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, and John Foster Dulles, a New York lawyer with political ambitions, and several industrialists—met at the Pentagon a few times that spring and summer, but was sharply divided about what information should be released, with the ultraconservative members convinced that neither the American public nor Congress could be trusted with the facts of these new weapons and their operational use. Adept as he was at battling military bureaucracies, Conant, who was in favor of a more open information policy, could not overcome the entrenched secrecy. He had been especially concerned about the closed-door debate over the hydrogen superbomb—which Teller and others had pushed since 1942 and which he opposed—and felt that it merited public release as it was more sensitive politically than technically. He was overruled. The H-bomb, still on the drawing boards, would remain classified. Truman, who insisted that everything connected to America’s nuclear arsenal be as closely held as possible, did not intend for it to become an issue of public discourse.

  The Fishing Party’s final report, submitted to Compton on October 15, 1949, was a poor compromise that protected the H-bomb from public discussion and careful, responsible criticism, and continued, in the words of Conant and his pro-release colleagues, “the present haphazard methods of keeping the American people informed whereby the public receives its information on these critical matters through a process of osmosis involving intentional or unintentional ‘leaks’ to the press by individuals with access to classified data.” Although he earned high marks for his handling of the difficult assignment, Conant wrote Compton that he was “not very proud of the results,” feeling he had failed to make the positive changes Forrestal had mandated.

  Meanwhile, the Republican rancor that followed Truman’s election had made Washington a treacherous place. Forrestal, exhausted and under constant venomous attacks in the columns—Drew Pearson imputed that he had been advising Dewey on foreign affairs and was disloyal—was forced to resign at the end of March. The muckrakers in Washington bore down, delving into his Wall Street background and personal life, hinting darkly about corruption and conflict of interest. Forrestal, who was undergoing treatment after a nervous breakdown, killed himself two months later, leaping out of a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital. Conant was appalled. It was the same hospital where his son had spent months recovering after the war. Jim had regained the balance of his mind and was doing better now, but it had been a close-run thing.

  Conant felt oppressed not only by the death of the vanquished defense secretary but also by the developments in his own backyard that signaled the ugliness was spreading to the academic realm. The conservatives in Congress, bent on domestic revenge, had decided the best way to undermine Truman was not to attack his global policy of “containing” the Soviet Union—both the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift were working—but to focus on the “fifth column” eating away at the heart of the United States. The exaggerated claims of Communist subversion that Conant had thought would be a “passing excitement” had not died down, and it now appeared that Truman’s second term would be plagued by an endless series of “Red Scare” scandals.

  HUAC had been busy: there was the espionage investigation into physicist Edward Condon, identified as “one of the weakest links” in the country’s atomic security; the probe of the motion picture industry and subsequent jailing of the “Hollywood Ten,” who refused to answer questions about their political affiliations, claiming immunity under the First Amendment; and allegations by Elizabeth Bentley that one of FDR’s aides, Lauchlin Currie, had been am
ong the purveyors of secrets to the Soviets. But none of these cases would impact Conant as directly as the cause celebre born of Bentley’s evidence, and that of her fellow Communist informer Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor, that a former high-ranking State Department official named Alger Hiss was a Russian spy.

  As soon as he heard the astonishing accusations against Hiss, a distinguished president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Conant felt a frisson of unease. While he had never crossed paths with the Harvard Law graduate, he knew of him and from the beginning was “certain that he was an innocent victim of a vicious Red hunt.” Not only had the tall, patrician forty-four-year-old Hiss clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the recommendation of Felix Frankfurter, but also his oldest friend and fiercest defender was William Marbury, the War Department lawyer with whom Conant had collaborated in drafting the May-Johnson Act in the summer of 1945. Since then, Marbury had become a close friend, and Conant had put the up-and-coming Baltimore lawyer’s name forward as a member of the Harvard Corporation, the conservative Brahmin inner sanctum he had vowed to infuse with new blood before the war got in the way. His nomination of Marbury—a non-Bostonian who had not even attended Harvard College—kicked off yet another of those consuming and prolonged battles that Conant despised. Though he prevailed in getting his choice confirmed, the fierce struggle damaged his relationship with the governing boards and added to his growing discontent with his old job. So when Marbury appeared at Hiss’s side before HUAC in August 1948, and Hiss categorically denied being a Communist and insisted he had never met Chambers, Conant cheered them on from Cambridge. Many Harvard alumni testified to Hiss’s character and helped cover the cost of his defense.

  When Hiss was called back for a second round of questioning, a relentless first-term congressman from California named Richard Nixon succeeded in shaking his story that he and Chambers were barely acquainted. Conant suddenly became very concerned. He and Grenville Clark, who was especially upset by Hiss’s crumbling credibility, summoned Marbury to a meeting at 17 Quincy Street on the evening of Sunday, September 12, to discuss the case. At first, no one had believed the rumpled, slightly disreputable journalist’s claims about the handsome, well-spoken Harvard lawyer who had been one of FDR’s valued advisors. It helped that Hiss had friends in high places, and that even Truman, who tended to regard all Communist smears as politically inspired, denounced the HUAC hearings as a “red herring.” But now they told Marbury the hearings had gone too far. Failure to refute Chambers’s allegations might be taken as an admission of guilt and, worse still, might open the floodgates to a torrent of similar charges against academic and political figures until, Conant warned, “nobody is safe.”

  Both he and Clark counseled Marbury to act aggressively to clear Hiss’s name and sue Chambers for libel. On September 27 Marbury filed Hiss’s defamation suit seeking $50,000 in damages. In response, Chambers led two HUAC investigators to the rear garden of his Maryland home and retrieved a cache of incriminating documents and microfilm hidden in a scooped-out pumpkin. The day Nixon displayed the “pumpkin papers” at a crowded press conference, Marbury knew the slander suit was lost. Hiss’s indictment followed, embroiling Marbury and Harvard in the lurid, melodramatic trial—which ended in a hung jury in July 1949—and retrial, which hypnotized the public, Congress, newspaper reporters, and radio commentators for months. In January 1950 Hiss was convicted on two counts of perjury. Still protesting his innocence, he was sentenced to five years in jail.

  Chastened by the outcome, Conant was no longer sure what to believe. It had begun to look like Hiss had been a party member and possibly leaked some documents, even if they were of small consequence. “After the conviction, it was hard to maintain that there was no possibility of Communists being in positions of responsibility,” he recalled. The ordeal convinced him that espionage, sabotage, and spilled secrets would be a fact of life under the armed truce. Reasonable precautions had to be taken. “Careful security checks,” he noted, “were certainly in order.”

  Long before he heard the final verdict in the Hiss case, Conant had begun to worry about the ramifications of radicalism abroad on universities and how they could “preserve their integrity during this period of warring ideologies.” He had been greatly influenced by Stimson’s argument against allowing Communists to teach, set forth in a 1947 Foreign Affairs article that concluded, “those who now choose to travel in company with American Communists are very clearly either knaves or fools . . . are either to be tolerated in an academic community?”

  At Harvard, Conant struggled to find a way to walk a middle line between protecting the “spirit of tolerance” he had long espoused, while maintaining that universities should not be “ivory towers” cut off from the problems of their age, and should be responsive to the government’s needs in perilous times. For the past three years, he had lobbied tirelessly for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and greater freedom of research, even renouncing lucrative classified government contracts at Harvard on the grounds that such a close partnership with the military, while necessary during the war, was in peacetime “highly inadvisable” for an institution dedicated to free investigation. Striving to make the university more relevant in global affairs, he founded the Russian Research Center, underwritten by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, to fill what he saw as the pressing need for Soviet experts to advise the State Department, military, and Central Intelligence Agency on their cold war adversary.

  Even as anti-Communist feeling intensified, he steadily, stubbornly championed free speech, defending liberal professors such as China expert John King Fairbank, under attack from the right for acknowledging Mao Tse-tung’s legitimacy, and the astronomer Harlow Shapley and literary critic F. O. Matthiessen, who were both maligned as “pinkos” for their involvement in Henry Wallace’s third-party campaign in 1948. Despite vehement opposition from the Overseers, Conant backed tenure and promotion for the iconoclastic young economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose Keynesian views and New Deal politics were particularly obnoxious to the conservative bankers on the board. For his trouble, Conant was condemned by the National Council of American Education for harboring what it called “reducators” at Harvard, singling him out along with seventy-six faculty members allegedly engaged in disloyal activities. The reactionaries in Congress piled on, pointing out other Communists with institutional ties to the “Kremlin-on-the-Charles.”

  Refusing to be intimidated, Conant argued that interference with academic freedom “as a consequence of panic” could have “most disastrous” effects on the universities. “There is no doubt,” he warned, “a dark shadow has been cast upon our institutions of advanced education by the unfortunate turn of events in the postwar world.” Free inquiry was “the bedrock on which the scholarly activities of a university are founded. No compromise with this principle is possible even in the days of an armed truce.”

  Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a young associate professor of government at Harvard, called on political and intellectual leaders to follow in Conant’s footsteps to stop the purges, praising the university president for his firm stand in defending the right of professors to hold unpopular ideas, and for having faith in “the value of our freedoms” and the willingness to do what was necessary to save them. “We need courageous men to help us recapture a sense of the indispensability of dissent,” Schlesinger wrote in his 1948 treatise The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, citing Conant’s opposition to the Massachusetts teachers’ loyalty oath bill twelve years earlier, “and we need dissent if we are to make up our minds equably and intelligently.”

  Like Schlesinger, Conant deplored the Communist witch hunt—and corresponding fear and paranoia—but at the same time felt they could not afford to underestimate the danger in the Russian threat. The list of organizations reportedly penetrated and manipulated by agents on behalf of the Soviet Union was expanding steadily, from the State Department and Foreign Service to labor unions and liberal-l
eaning publications. (In a headline-grabbing case, six people associated with Amerasia magazine had been arrested and accused of stealing documents for the Chinese Communists.) With the country increasingly polarized, and under pressure from right-wingers eager for even more repressive measures, Conant reacted with characteristic caution, on the one hand deploring “the overemphasis on ‘loyalty’ ” and vigorously criticizing the attacks on educators and academic freedom, while on the other acknowledging that as a country “we would be well advised to be on guard.” At the same time, however, he tacitly embraced the language of Truman’s loyalty regulations. “We must be realistic about the activities of agents of foreign powers,” he stated repeatedly. While the government should employ only “persons of intelligence and discretion,” it was important that “any steps we take to counteract the work of a foreign agent within our borders do not damage irreparably the very fabric [of democracy] we seek to save.”

  Disturbed by the headlines generated by the Condon espionage hearings, and widespread rumors that Manhattan Project scientists had passed secrets during the war, Conant urged Alfred Richards, president of the National Academy of Scientists, to act to nip the scandal in the bud. Conant recommended adopting tighter security regulations, especially a new, stricter clearance policy for personnel handling classified data. Those suspected of being a “poor security risk,” because they were either naïve or indiscreet, could not be trusted and should be transferred to a less responsible position. He also strove to provide procedural protections for those deemed temperamentally unsuitable, so they would not be unduly “penalized, stigmatized, deprived of livelihood, or exposed to public shame.”