He spent mornings writing at home in his study. He had two unlisted phone numbers, one reserved for calls to the Princeton office of the Educational Testing Service, over which he spent hours dictating drafts of the chapters of his book, and another so that he could talk “uninterruptedly” to various VIPs, as Patty put it to a friend. He did not like to go into Carnegie’s New York office because he had “too many visitors.” He felt better but tired easily, and to Patty’s dismay, he cut back on their social engagements in order to conserve his energy for work. He refused to return to Randolph now that hiking was off-limits. “He can’t bear to look at those peaks,” she confided, “and be condemned to the one easy walk in our neighboring woods, which bored him to extinction last summer.” When John S. Dickey, the president of Dartmouth, offered him a chair, they sold the remote cottage and looked for some place to buy in the college town of Hanover, New Hampshire. Cautious to the end, Conant bought a neat white house a quarter mile from Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital and around the corner from his cardiologist.
The further he got with his memoir, the more dubious he found the enterprise. One of his Harper & Row editors urged him to risk enough of himself to write “an autobiography with my heart on my sleeve instead of the history which I started out to write,” he reported to a colleague at Carnegie, which was underwriting his latest effort. “Whether she or I will win this struggle remains to be seen.” He was honest enough with himself to know that his strictly factual account left out a great deal—most of his work on the Manhattan Project, except where he felt obliged to address published accounts of certain incidents—and skimped on a number of Harvard scandals.
The book, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor, came out in early 1970 and was reviewed widely. The general consensus was summed up by one headline, “Good Man, Dull Book.” One reviewer saw beyond the exhaustive account of accomplishment—fighting three wars, two hot, one cold; transforming Harvard; rearming Germany; reforming the education system; and authoring twenty-one books—to something the author himself might have missed: “Mr. Conant called his book the memoirs of a social inventor. In fact, his major social invention may turn out to be the invention of himself as a social influence.”
In the preface, by way of an apology for the immodest hawking of his achievements, Conant wrote: “The White Knight in Through the Looking Glass is the model for all egotistical inventors.” He went on to explain that the Lewis Carroll novel had a special significance in his life: the night before he was born, his older sisters, eager to know whether their new sibling would be a brother or sister, had made their aunt promise to leave their favorite book open on the table to the telltale page. So it happened that he was born “under the sign of the White Knight.”
This was the story he recounted to his grandchildren when he read aloud to them from the book, the same dog-eared first edition in its frayed red cloth cover that had been his as a boy. It would require little imagination to believe that Conant, in his later years, was also driven by the desire to embody the nobler definition of the white knight: the beleaguered champion who rides to the rescue. He spent the last decade of his life trying belatedly to fill that role for his family. He struck a fragile truce with Ted—strained at times by fierce arguments over Vietnam, which he publicly supported along with Eisenhower and Truman—helping his son’s career in educational television, offering financial support, and reveling in the role of “Grandpa.” He found it easier to relate to his grandchildren than to his own children, flying all five youngsters—sans parents—to Hawaii to celebrate his eightieth birthday and tour Pearl Harbor in 1973.
He tried, and failed, to reconcile himself to Jim’s disturbed state, put off by his Puritan fatalism and a kind of squeamishness. In the end, he distanced himself, relying on a growing list of doctors and lawyers to perform what Ted called the necessary “triage.” Jim’s latest doctor attributed the manic depression to a hereditary chemical imbalance, and prescribed a new drug called lithium, which had proven effective in Europe in cases of treatment-resistant depression. Jim was started on the experimental psychiatric medication before it was legally available in the United States, but the huge doses had debilitating side effects. His condition stabilized, and he was able to hold down a job as chief editorial writer for the Baltimore-News American, though he still suffered manic episodes that led to relapses, hospitalizations, a second divorce, and declining health. Compounding the tragedy, both of Jim’s biological children would be diagnosed as bipolar, continuing the sad saga into the next generation. When Jim died at the age of fifty-seven on a rundown ward of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Washington, his cousin noted that in his later years, there had been “flickers of bitterness” at the perceived neglect. “What Jim would have liked is some affirmation of caring,” he said, “for all he promised and tried so hard to be.”
A few weeks after his memoir was published, Conant had an unexpected reunion with Bush and Groves in Washington, when the three pillars of World War II received the Atomic Pioneer Award for their contributions to the development of nuclear weapons. The current chairman of the AEC, Glenn Seaborg, felt that the honor was long overdue and that some of the unpopular stands they had taken with regard to postwar nuclear development may have prevented them from getting the recognition they deserved. On February 27, 1970, President Nixon bestowed the gold medals. During an informal conversation in his office, the president asked, “Were you all convinced before the first device was set off that it was going to work?” The question elicited an amused response. “Oh no,” Bush said, grinning. Conant agreed, adding with a mischievous nod at his colleagues, “These two gentlemen were going to get the blame.” After teasing Bush and Groves for not having run out to buy his book, Conant gave them each a signed copy with the fond inscription: “With grateful memories of the days we worked together so pleasantly and effectively.”
In a radio interview, Conant admitted that as an old man his thoughts often strayed back to the early days, but not to the Manhattan Project. “I do not look back on that with any pleasure,” he said. “It was a tough job. What I look back on with pleasure is when I was a young carefree professor of chemistry doing my own research.” When asked about the difficult decisions he was forced to make on the wartime committees, the seventy-seven-year-old scientist became querulous, almost but not quite acknowledging there were some that still gnawed at his soul.
“Well, the whole fact that the atomic bomb turned out to be what it was, and all the arguments about whether it should have been dropped,” he said wearily, his voice trailing off, “I’m never free from that.” The power and influence thrust on him by the government he had tried to use as a force for good by becoming an apostle for education. Having changed the subject, he was off again, lecturing his interviewer about financing elementary education in New Jersey, which he predicted would be a major problem in the next ten to twenty years.
Conant was philosophical about all the criticism, writing to George Kistiakowsky in the spring of 1972 that he was not discouraged by the “negative voices about science.” Progress could not be stopped, and most nostalgia for a less complicated time was, in his view, misplaced. “A lot of people think they would rather live in the 18th century than today,” he mused, using the slightly mocking tone he always employed when pointing out the hypocrisy of the establishment. What they usually had in mind “without admitting it” was being one of the privileged few with their own farm and a retinue of servants. “But if one lists all the technological changes since 1800,” he added, “I think not one of us would be willing to go without.”
The letter echoed what he wrote in his book On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach, shortly after the war:
The natural tendency of people to recoil with horror from all thought of further scientific advance because of the implications of the atomic bomb is to my mind based on a misapprehension of the nature of the universe. As I watched the secret development of the atomic bomb through four
years of the war, I often thought of the work being done at the same time . . . of the then-secret research on penicillin, on DDT, on antimalarial drugs, on the use of blood plasma, and realized how much these scientific advances meant for the future of mankind. I often thought of Emerson’s famous essay on the Laws of Compensation:
“With every influx of light comes new danger . . . There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem there is always the vindictive stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.”
Over the next few years, Conant became increasingly frail. His deafness made conversation difficult, and he spent his days reading, becoming increasingly silent and withdrawn. He was in the middle of Theodore Sorensen’s biography of Jack Kennedy, making meticulous notes in the margins in a shaky hand, when he suffered the first of a series of strokes in the summer of 1977. For a man of his exacting intellect, the confusion that descended was the ultimate indignity. He died at the age of eighty-four in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire, on February 11, 1978.
Despite Patty’s protests, Conant had insisted on a private burial with no religious service, so he was quietly interred in the Richards’ family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Whether he wanted to spend all of eternity surrounded by her crazy relatives is open to debate, but he lost that battle. At a small, decidedly unostentatious service at Harvard in April, George Kistiakowsky, among others, paid tribute to the soft-spoken man who had made an indelible mark on the century, and said good-bye to a “cool Yankee who could be a warm friend.”
In the weeks that followed, Patty received hundreds of letters and telegrams from scientists, educators, politicians, and heads of state mourning the loss of an American original and the end of an era. But among the handful she saved, and treasured, was a brief note from their old friend the patrician lawyer and novelist Louis Auchincloss, who had been part of a monthly “round table” discussion group with Conant in New York, and knew the private man who was accessible to only a chosen few. “Never again,” he wrote, “can we expect to find the same combination of humor and wisdom and gentle kindness with a seemingly infinite knowledge of the hard old world and its ways.”
After Conant’s death, a New York Times editorial noted that “to say that he was the last of his breed would be too defeatist a view of America’s future. But it is only realistic to acknowledge that a vacancy exists. There is not now at any major university a leader concerned with the whole of American education. The nation could use a successor in the line that led from Jefferson to Eliot to James Bryant Conant.”
The title of the editorial was “The Conant Vacancy.”
1 James B. Conant, Harvard’s newly elected forty-year-old president, poses solemnly with a slide rule for the reporters clamoring for a first glimpse of the obscure young chemist who had emerged as the university’s surprise choice.
2 By his senior year of high school, Jim Conant had distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant boys in his class and had won a scholarship to Harvard.
3 A Dorchester boy, Conant, shown with his parents and two older sisters, grew up in a streetcar suburb of Boston that Harvard’s Brahmin governing class regarded as being on the wrong side of the tracks.
4 When the United States entered World War I, Conant was recruited by the Chemical Warfare Service to make mustard gas and a new, more dangerous toxin to be manufactured in a top secret military facility.
5 In the 1920s, Conant quickly made a name for himself as an innovative, pioneering chemist, winning awards and international acclaim at the same time American chemistry was on its way to achieving parity with Europe.
6 Conant’s mentor, the Nobel Prize–winning Harvard chemist Theodore William Richards, was a gifted experimentalist who drove himself hard, brooked no compromise, and suffered from bouts of melancholia and a “dark prospect.”
7 It took nerve to court his famous mentor’s daughter, but Conant was determined to marry the lovely, blue-eyed Grace “Patty” Richards despite her father’s reservations.
8 Miriam Richards, a frightful snob, achieved her ambition of becoming queen bee of Harvard and was socially ambitious for all her children.
9 Patty and her brothers, Bill (standing) and young Thayer, were all expected to be exceptional. The Richardses were a high-strung, overstrung, family, and both boys would suffer from depression and commit suicide.
10 Throughout her marriage, Patty struggled to live up to her husband’s high standards and was dogged by morbid fears and “an overwhelming sense of unworthiness.”
11 Conant told his fiancée that he had three ambitions: to be the greatest organic chemist in America, to be president of Harvard, and to be a senior public servant in “some Cabinet position.”
12 Conant—shown here with Albert Einstein, a victim of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany—took every opportunity to condemn the repressive regime in Germany and affirm his commitment to academic freedom and individual liberty.
13 At Harvard’s tercentenary celebration in 1936, both presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt (far left) and Conant (front row)—sat stoically through the rain. One attendee quipped that it was the reform-minded Conant’s way of “soaking the rich.”
14 The young couple found the social demands of the Harvard presidency trying: Patty was terrified of putting a foot wrong, and Jim, who was not the hearty type, loathed receiving lines.
15 Conant, on the summit of the North Palisade in California, could only relax when far from Cambridge.
16 Patty had little time for their two sons, Jim (right) and Teddy (left), who were relegated to the third-floor nursery of the president’s mansion.
17 Convinced America had to join the fight against Hitler, Conant took to the airwaves in the spring of 1940 to urge “immediate aid” for the allies, and became a leading interventionist.
18 When Conant headed a scientific mission to London during the blitz in 1941 he met Winston Churchill. The British prime minister showed his gratitude by later paying Conant a visit at Harvard.
19 Patty, whose two sons were serving in the Pacific, found volunteering on the psych ward of a Boston hospital upsetting and had to quit.
20 Conant (front center) at a meeting at the Radiation Laboratory, where some of the country’s leading scientists agreed to support Ernest Lawrence’s (far left) giant cyclotron, aware they might soon be at war. Also present are Arthur Compton (left), Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and Alfred Lee Loomis.
21 The leaders of the Manhattan Project: (left to right) Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, and General Leslie Groves on a trip to inspect the Hanford, Washington, plutonium production site.
22 J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, looked on Conant almost as a father figure and depended on him for advice and support.
23 Anxiety was high as the “gadget” weathered a storm during its last hours atop the Trinity tower prior to the first detonation of an atomic bomb on July 14, 1945.
24 Conant, lying on the sand seventeen thousand yards from point zero, saw a burst of white light that seemed to fill the sky “like the end of the world.”
25 At a loss for words, Conant and Bush acknowledged the test’s success with a handshake, and they later reenacted the moment for a March of Time newsreel.
26 At the White House in May 1948, a beaming President Truman awarded the Medal for Merit and the Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster to Conant and the Medal for Merit to Bush for their work on the bomb.
27 After the war, the leading bomb scientists became atomic statesmen and President Truman’s principal advisors on the nation’s nuclear future. Conant and Oppenheimer opposed a crash program to build the Super, or hydrogen, bomb.
28 Conant and Oppenheimer on a trip to Los Alamos with members of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee, the agency tasked with overseeing the peacetime development and control of atomic energy. Standing next to them on the tarmac at the Sant
a Fe Airport are General James McCormack, Hartley Rowe, John Manley, I. I. Rabi, and Roger S. Warner, Jr.
29 Conant and Bush at a press conference, alerting the public that it will take more than the atomic bomb to deter Soviet aggression and calling for the mobilization of a large army and universal military service.
30 Conant, who feared the country was on the brink of World War III, wrote an article arguing against a “preventive war” with Russia.
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