Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Conant was apprehensive that the house cleaning might include the GAC scientists who were now out of step with official presidential policy to develop the Super. He wrote Oppenheimer on February 14, warning him the H-bomb lobby was up to no good, and enclosed a copy of a letter a reporter had slipped him disclosing that a Republican senator on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) was spreading the story that the GAC had voted negative on the H-bomb “on moral grounds.” What neither man knew was that on February 6, in a secret JCAE hearing, the subject of Haakon Chevalier’s wartime approach to Oppenheimer to pass secrets to the Soviets had come up in the course of a general discussion of security matters, and a thorough review of the thick Oppenheimer file had begun.

  By then, McCarthy’s noisy antics had so convulsed Capitol Hill that any reasoned debate or discussion was impossible. Conant, whose expertise and judgment were still required as the nuclear program ramped up, was finding it increasingly difficult to function as an advisor and express an independent opinion in such a frantic, topsy-turvy environment. “When I am in Washington, it seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum,” he wrote Bernard Baruch. “However, I am trying to keep my sanity and will do what I can with the others.”

  In the spring of 1950, Conant received an unexpected—and—bitter blow. The head of the nominating committee of the National Academy of Sciences had contacted him and asked if he would be willing to replace the retiring Alfred Newton Richards as president of the prestigious organization. Conant had been approached three years earlier, but he had only just returned to Harvard then, and the timing was bad. He was delighted to be asked again. The idea of being anointed leader of national science policy and ascending to such an honored and influential seat had fresh appeal. But at what he had been led to believe would be a pro forma meeting on April 24 to approve his nomination, a California chemist suddenly took the floor and drafted Detlev W. Bronk as a candidate for president, and was quickly seconded by another chemist. The unprecedented move outraged Conant’s friends, who registered their protest. After a heated debate, a vote was taken: the tally was 77 to 71 for Bronk. While everyone at the meeting waited, Bush phoned Conant at William Marbury’s Baltimore home, where he was dining, and explained the situation. Caught off guard, and humiliated, Conant told Bush to withdraw his name.

  “They ganged up on him,” was how George Kistiakowsky put it years later, still angry that the double cross came without warning. “They were a small but secretly well organized group of little men who resented Jim’s wartime leadership. The rest of us were unaware of what was being organized and thus were unable to demonstrate in good time the strong support which, in fact, would have been his.” The “revolt” was staged by a handful of West Coast chemists who had nursed a grudge since what they regarded as the NDRC chairman’s “excessively authoritarian” reign and, in recent years, had grown jealous of his close ties to Oppenheimer.

  Aware of the “sensitive personality” that lay beneath his friend’s brisk, businesslike façade, Kistiakowsky was one of the few who knew how deeply wounded Conant was by the betrayal, recalling it as “the most painful incident of Jim’s life as a science leader.” Conant tried to put a good face on it, telling people he was “too busy to give the position the attention it deserved.” He would go on to become chairman of the National Science Foundation and play an important role in developing policy and procedures in support of basic research, but the experience soured him on the scientific community, now so riven by internal battles that he no longer recognized it. The “old guard” was changing: the postwar divisions had been deepened by the acrimonious debate over the H-bomb, and a new, rising militarist faction was drowning out the voices of the dissenting atomic scientists.

  * * *

  On June 22, 1950, Conant presided over Harvard’s commencement exercises, repeated his usual hopeful sentiments about society’s transcendent values, and went home to pack for a much-anticipated trip to Scotland. The following morning, he woke up with a sharp, throbbing pain in his abdomen. Patty called the family physician, and the next thing he knew he was on the operating table and “in the hands of the surgeons.” The fifty-seven-year-old Harvard president was suffering from acute diverticulitis, and doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital opened him up and removed six inches of his large intestine.

  Three days later, North Korea’s People’s Army marched across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea. The Korean War was nearly a week old before Patty would allow her husband to see a newspaper, giving him her own cursory summation of the surprise Communist attack. Trying to make sense of what had happened, Conant could suppose only that the Soviets never expected North Korean aggression in such a faraway land to incite such a swift American response. Instead, the State Department had requested a special session of the UN Security Council, which unanimously condemned North Korea’s action. The next day, June 27, the UN endorsed military aid to South Korea, and Truman ordered US forces to assist as part of what he termed a “police action” in order to avoid acknowledging that he had gone to war. On June 30, with the South Koreans in full retreat, Truman dispatched American ground troops.

  To Conant, sitting in his hospital bed, it was as if “the whole international situation had altered” in the space of a few days. For the first time in history, the United States was defending terrain not vital to America’s self-interest. He worried that Washington had made a much more irrevocable commitment than it realized, setting itself on a course that could bring the United States into direct confrontation with both China and Russia. Although he had never had a chance to form an opinion “unbiased by the fait accompli,” Conant cautiously approved the president’s action as the “right decision.” He dispatched notes of support to Truman and Acheson, who earlier that week had sent telegrams expressing concern for his health. Patty shooed away all visitors, amazed by “the number of relative strangers who want to get in and sit by his bedside!” She blamed Truman’s telegrams, writing her mother that they “so impressed the nurses that nothing is too good for Jim.”

  By mid-August, after a month convalescing at his summer cottage in Randolph, New Hampshire, Conant was desperate to “trade ideas” about the international situation with someone other than his wife. A neighbor, the prominent Boston judge R. Ammi Cutter, invited him to dinner with Tracy Voorhees—until recently the undersecretary of the army—who also had a summer home nearby. Voorhees filled him in on the alarming state of affairs, implying that Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson’s budget cuts had stripped the American armed forces, leaving them woefully underequipped and understaffed and completely unprepared for war. Conant worried it was no exaggeration: the manpower shortage was a subject he had spoken out about again and again. He also knew that in this struggle, the United States’ nuclear arsenal was “irrelevant.” While it was “too secret” to discuss with Cutter and Voorhees, he thought “no sane man would advocate the use of the bomb now that the Russians had one of their own.”

  As the invalid headed back to bed at the end of the evening, he called over his shoulder to Voorhees to start organizing a “citizen’s lobby” along the lines of those they had all joined in 1940. “From what I have just heard, the country is asleep,” he told them. “You should wake it up.”

  A month later, the military situation had progressively deteriorated—along with Conant’s health, the onset of peritonitis requiring a second surgery. By the end of September, the UN army was hanging on to only a small bit of the Korean peninsula. The conflict in Asia terrified European leaders, who viewed the Communist invasion as a direct challenge to the United States, and worried it was the beginning of world anarchy. What was to stop the Soviets from taking advantage of the diversion and moving against the West in Europe? Conant believed the strengthening of ground forces in Europe was imperative to preserve the “global stalemate” and avoid a third world war.

  Unable to travel, he wrote letters and worked the phones, contacting as many people as he could to galvanize s
upport for greatly expanding the existing Selective Service System to funnel men into the armed forces. In early October he helped found the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), joined by Vannevar Bush and ten other prominent East Coast educators and former government officials, aimed at ratcheting up military spending, organizing emergency mobilization for war, and beating back the isolationist propaganda of Herbert Hoover and Republican senator Robert Taft. They sent their proposal to General Marshall, who Truman had pulled out of retirement and made secretary of defense after firing Louis Johnson. Marshall promptly responded by letter, acknowledging their initiative as “an undertaking of great importance,” and suggested a meeting.

  Three days after Thanksgiving, the Chinese launched a full-scale assault in Korea, forcing the US Eighth Army to retreat in chaos. The prospect of defeat in Korea motivated Conant to write a seven-page memorandum, published the following month as an article in Look magazine, warning of “the extreme peril the free world faces,” and demanding the immediate conscription of three and a half million men. Raising such a large army would require mandatory military service for two years for all eighteen-year-old men, with absolutely no deferments or exemptions, and large tax increases to pay for it. He submitted a plan for compulsory military service to Marshall, aware that the only thing less popular at the time with Congress was continuing aid via the Marshall Plan. He recognized that the sacrifice required to support such a huge increase in military spending could test the limits of public support. “The price is high, but it must be paid,” he argued—it was “the only chance of averting a war of world dimensions.” Eisenhower, the new supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, needed all the help he could get, and he sent Conant a note of encouragement: “Your memorandum rings the bell with me!”

  The Committee on the Present Danger made its public debut at a press conference at the Willard Hotel in Washington on December 12. A grim-faced Conant fielded questions from reporters, maintaining with measured toughness that despite the United States’ efforts at peace, the Soviets were intent upon precipitating World War III. “The bitter fact,” he stated, “is that our country has again been thrust into a struggle in which our free existence is at stake; a struggle for survival. We have no time to lose.”

  Scanning the next morning’s favorable headlines, Conant thought their timing was just right and the launch was “a success.” But the isolationist critics had heard the draft song once too often from the familiar peddlers of crisis: “same old salesmen,” they complained, convinced the Truman administration was throwing good money after bad in Europe.

  On February 7, 1951, following Eisenhower’s speech to the joint session of Congress on his return from a fact-finding mission to Europe, Conant gave a nationwide radio address calling for all-out mobilization just short of war to counter the Soviet threat. He opened with the dramatic declaration “Fellow citizens, the United States is in danger.” He hammered away at the Soviet Union and its insatiable appetite for expansion, citing the fact that its military power was mounting, both in terms of the bomb and most types of modern weaponry, and that its allies were ready to gain their ends by force.

  The “preservation of a free America,” as Eisenhower had put it, required that the United States defend Western Europe and furnish it with arms, military equipment, and men on the ground. Employing the martial rhetoric he had refined during the interventionist campaign a decade earlier, Conant tried to prepare the American public for “a new period—a highly disturbing and dangerous period,” one that would involve standing by Europe the next twenty to thirty years and would require a vast program of rearmament and mobilization. Consciously wrapping himself in “Eisenhower’s mantle,” as he put it, Conant echoed the general’s statement that these measures were necessary in order to “build a secure wall for peace,” hoping to create an atmosphere of intensity that would help win support for their expanded system of conscription and increased foreign aid.

  With the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, Conant became, as the historian Richard Norton Smith put it, “the coldest of cold warriors.” He fell in line with the Truman administration’s view that only a major military buildup could ensure the future security of the United States, a policy expressed in National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68), a secret document largely prepared by Paul Nitze, a wealthy forty-three-year-old Harvard-educated Wall Street banker who was George Kennan’s successor as the State Department’s director of policy planning. Nitze was convinced that the “Kremlin’s design for world domination” depended on “the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition,” and that it would work inexorably to achieve “sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us.” Acheson and Nitze, and Truman’s military advisors, were sophisticated and knowledgeable and were not drawn into what the historian Robert Dallek calls McCarthy’s “uncritical militancy”—a rabid, impulsive anti-Communist response. “But they were held in thrall by the experience of World War II and the failed appeasement policies that gave the Nazis and Japanese license to run wild in Europe and Asia—at least until they encountered a superior force.”

  Conant was more moderate than Truman’s military chiefs, but he was “deeply troubled by the unwillingness of American people to recognize the inherent threat in the international situation” and did not hesitate to remind them of the imminent danger to sell the public on the defense plan he thought the country needed to avoid “global war.” He was a persistent and energetic propagandist for the defense of Europe, cajoling an ever-longer list of East Coast luminaries to join his cause, including Oppenheimer, former OSS chief William Donovan, speechwriter Robert Sherwood, New York Times vice president Julius Ochs Adler, and CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. He went on the air with Murrow to push universal military service and to criticize Truman’s executive order of March 31, 1951, allowing deferments for college students, which Conant charged was “undemocratic.” He convinced other renowned nuclear scientists to make radio broadcasts about how the bomb was no longer a sufficient deterrent to the Soviet threat. On April 4 the Senate finally voted its approval of deploying troops to defend Europe, committing four divisions (a total of a hundred thousand men) to the Continent. The draft that Congress passed was nowhere near as universal as Conant had originally proposed, and it included many exemptions, but he always regarded the CPD’s role in arousing the country to the cold war crisis among his most “cherished” victories.

  By October, armistice talks were under way in Korea. The war had not spread to China, and the “present danger” was much less obvious than it had been when Conant founded the committee. He thought there was “a good chance” of avoiding World War III as long as Europe remained strong; only with a large offensive force as a deterrent to a Soviet advance could the global stalemate hold. “What we had to guard against,” he brooded, his gloomy outlook on the future convincing him of the need for continued vigilance against Communist aggression, “was a lapse of public opinion into the mood of complacency which had been present before the Korean War began.”

  When his five-year term with the GAC ended that summer, Conant retired from government service, ending his long run as one of the nation’s most influential science advisors. With Oppenheimer, another charter member, also leaving the committee at the same time, it was the end of an era. Meanwhile, the government’s crash program to build a thermonuclear weapon was nearing completion. Los Alamos was finalizing its preparations for the first full-scale test of a hydrogen bomb, based on a design by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, on November 1. Conant wanted no part of building an arsenal of H-bombs. He was relieved to be through with nuclear politics, noting in his diary: “10 1/2 years of almost constant official conversations with a bad business now threatening to become really bad!!!”

  * * *

  On November 4, 1952, Eisenhower, standing as a Republican, was elected president, with Nixon as his running mate. In one of the biggest landslides since FDR’s reelection in 1936, they
swept into office. Conant and his CPD colleagues had actively supported Eisenhower over his Democratic opponent, and many were being rewarded with positions in the new administration. On Sunday evening, December 21, he took the night train from Cambridge to New York for a meeting with the president-elect but was unable to sleep. “My mind was focused on one fact: I had been offered the post of the United States high commissioner for Germany and had practically accepted.”

  Actually, Conant, three months shy of sixty, was not quite sure where things stood. He had turned down the job when Acheson had first sounded him out about it a year earlier. John J. McCloy, the current high commissioner, had been anxious to retire and had recommended the Harvard president as his replacement. Although Conant had admitted to being ready to leave Harvard, he had hemmed and hawed to such a degree before finally declining that he doubted he would “ever hear of the matter again.” He had regretted his decision almost immediately and, after discussing it with Patty, made up his mind that “if by any chance the opportunity again arose, I should seize it.” Shortly after Eisenhower’s election, he read that the high commissioner’s job was open again, but it seemed unlikely that the incoming secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, would renew the offer. According to the newspaper speculation, anyone in any way connected to Acheson was seen as suspect. Still, as Conant prepared for the next morning’s meeting, he could not help wondering whether he would be asked to serve. “I could not entirely banish from my thoughts the bare possibility that fate might give me a second chance.”