When the lights went up, he observed that many members of the American and British delegations were also indignant. Afterward, he could not help wondering at the Soviet’s motive in showing them such a “crass nationalistic movie.” Was it intended as an “intentional insult”? If so, what were the Russians playing at? “And no one, literally no one, is on a basis with Russian officialdom to say, ‘That was a bit thick, you know,’ ” he noted in his diary, adding, “This little episode shows a lot.”
Equally disquieting was the Soviets’ refusal to grant them permission to make Stalin’s tribute to Conant and the atomic scientists public. It was a matter of protocol: what was said in the Kremlin, stayed in the Kremlin. Stalin’s recognition of America’s technical prowess could not be reported to the world. Despite all the talk of friendship between their two countries, the Iron Curtain was as tightly shut as ever. At the time, Conant was chiefly annoyed by the fact that there seemed to be no channel by which they could communicate their frustration to their hosts. Someone cynically suggested the best way to get word out would be to write down a list of their complaints and toss it in the wastebasket—it was certain that the next morning their message would be read in Molotov’s office in the Kremlin.
Despite all the “unfavorable evidence” he accumulated during his eleven days in Moscow, Conant remained convinced that the Russians would eventually see reason. Logic dictated that continuing their wartime alliance was the best way to proceed in the interdependent postwar years. If they did not act together to stop the manufacture of atomic bombs before it became widespread, the means of atomic destruction could find its way into the hands of an unexpected and reckless enemy.
In a speech he gave in late November, which was reprinted in the Boston Globe shortly before he departed for Moscow, Conant had predicted the Russians would soon get the bomb, giving a rough forecast of between five and fifteen years. He cautioned that the time estimate meant little, as the United States’ monopoly on this power was only temporary. There was “time, but not too much time” to evolve a plan for the exchange of scientific knowledge and the creation of an international inspection system. Without inspection there was no way to ensure their protection. Without it no one was safe. Conant startled his audience with this ominous injunction: “There is no defense against a surprise attack with atomic bombs.”
One thing has been as clear as daylight to me ever since I first became convinced of the reality of the atomic bomb; namely, that a secret armaments race in respect to this weapon must at all costs be avoided. If a situation were to develop where two great powers had stacks of bombs but neither was sure of the exact status of the other, the possibility of a devastating surprise attack by the one upon the other would poison all our thinking. Like two gunmen with itchy trigger fingers, it would only be a question of who fired first. Under such circumstances, the United States might be the loser.
Conant’s estimate was slightly off. Exactly four years and one month after Hiroshima, the Soviet Union would explode an atomic bomb, and two countries would be locked in a cold war struggle.
Years later, looking back on that extraordinary Christmas Eve in Moscow, Conant found it hard to believe that as 1945 came to a close, he could have had such faith in the future. He had hoped that the difficulties would disappear and they could proceed to work out a plan to preserve the peace instead of continually preparing for war. “My ascent into the golden clouds of irrational hope can only be explained by my honest appraisal of the worldwide catastrophic consequences of a failure to attain international control,” he later reflected. “Some scheme just had to work. And who is prepared to say my basic belief was wrong?”
He wrote those lines in 1969. Toiling over his memoir, safely ensconced in his wood-paneled study in Hanover, New Hampshire, he observed the perilous state of the world, “with American and Soviet aircraft and missiles poised to strike on a moment’s notice.” America was more vulnerable than ever before, and Conant had lost much of his old certainty, but none of the cold, clear-eyed Yankee pragmatism. A chemist, statesman, educator, and critic, he had had within his grasp all the elements to help forge the new atomic age. Supremely confident, he had acted upon his convictions to shape the kind of world he wanted to live in. He was, first and foremost, a defender of democracy. He had helped design and manufacture weapons of mass destruction in two world wars to protect liberty. He had fought for an open and fluid society, for a fairer system of higher education, for free discussion, a competitive spirit, and a courageous and responsible citizenry. He had occupied the presidency of Harvard as a bully pulpit, and had never hesitated to take daring stands on contentious issues, applying his reason, morals, and high ideals on matters of national import. As a “social inventor,” his term for the half century spent in public service, he had tried to find new formulas to keep alive the precarious American political experiment known as democracy.
As a war scientist, however, he knew he had much to answer for. Atomic energy’s “potentialities for destruction” were so awesome as to far outweigh any possible gains that might accrue from America’s technical triumph in the summer of 1945. Writing as an old man, he acknowledged that these new weapons of aggression had added to the frightful insecurity of the world, and he did not think future generations would be inclined to thank him for it. Yet the nuclear standoff had continued for years—no mean accomplishment given the number and variety of armed conflicts—which suggested that the stakes had become too high and the risks too great. Perhaps there might still be time to moderate the vicious arms race, though that remained for history to decide. “The verdict of history,” he wrote, “has not yet been given.”
CHAPTER 2
* * *
A Dorchester Boy
He is manly, reliable, and in Physics & Chemistry perhaps the most-brilliant-fellow we ever had.
—Letter of recommendation for a scholarship to Harvard
Unlike most who claim to be descended from one of America’s first families, James Bryant Conant was not a snob. If anything, he was guilty of a kind of reverse snobbery.
The Conants were an old family, to be sure, with deep roots in New England that stretched back to the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They lived in old towns, hung old portraits of beady-eyed ancestors on their walls, and were buried beneath old stone graves in older cemeteries. Their souls were stamped with those legendary Yankee traits—chilly reserve, frugality, firmness of character—that have been featured in countless high WASP novels and today seem rather quaint, like the outsized footprints of an extinct tribe. Throughout his life, however, Conant resisted being categorized as a true Bostonian or, more pompously, a “proper Bostonian.” It is the first assertion, and second sentence, of his remarkably impersonal autobiography, following the bald statement that he was born on March 26, 1893. After all, he would tell people with a smile, the most distinguished Conant was Roger, the founder and first governor of Salem, Massachusetts, who “missed the boat.” Roger came to America in 1623, three years after the Mayflower, forever denying the family that social distinction.
The Puritan disdain for anything that smacked of aristocracy was apparent early on. A friend remembers visiting Conant when he was a young chemistry professor at Harvard, and finding him in his laboratory busy over a beaker of bright blue fluid. “I’m studying the bluest blood in Boston,” he announced, the gleam in his eyes unmistakable behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. As it turned out, the fluid in question had not been extracted from the city’s wealthy Brahmin elite, whose indifferent offspring populated Harvard in those days, but rather from several hundred horseshoe crabs, whose blood achieves its distinctive color because it contains copper as an oxygen-carrying pigment. It was a characteristic pose: the man of science, clinically removed from dynastic Boston’s exalted self-regard. The sly, dry one-liners were part of the act, Conant’s way of skirmishing with the Beacon Hill worthies who never let him forget that he was not quite “their sort.” He seldom, if ever, le
t the cool analytical façade slip. “He had a chip on his shoulder about his background,” observed Martha “Muffy” Henderson Coolidge, a cousin by marriage, “so that he was almost allergic to pomposity and pretension of any kind.”
Clubby, insular, and impossibly smug, turn-of-the-century Boston had a way of making even its native sons feel like outsiders. Good society, in Conant’s youth, was preoccupied with matters of birth and breeding, a legacy of the English colonists that a revolution and over a hundred years of independence had failed to eradicate. Proper Bostonians held vehemently to the notion that there were the “best people”—descendants of a clutch of first families whose names appeared in the Social Register—and “everyone else.” It was a world so small and well defined that it excluded hundreds of thousands of families as undeniably Anglo-Saxon as Conant’s own, at least another million of Irish descent, not to mention all the Italians, Jews, and Poles who peopled industrial Massachusetts. But the snub, in his case, did not take the form of an inhibition so much as an incentive. No matter how firmly planted his family tree, Conant knew ancestry would only get him so far; he put his faith in empiricism. Science was the way to invent a new future, with the promise of change, discovery, and dazzling possibility. “Ever since he was eight years old, he has applied science to everything,” his mother told the first reporter who called with the news her son had been tapped to be the next president of Harvard. “Everything, to him, works out by formula.”
It did not take the genealogical sleuthhounds on the Boston papers long to figure out that Conant was from the wrong side of the tracks. “Dorchester Boy Will Be President of Harvard at 40,” the local rags crowed when his nomination was announced on May 8, 1933. Imagine their astonishment when they learned that someone so young and utterly obscure would assume the throne of the country’s oldest and most important university, which its alumni—mostly old Bostonians—had up to then regarded as almost a family concern. That the majestic cloak would now rest on the narrow shoulders of a scholarship kid from an ignoble working-class suburb was unimaginable. Less than five miles from campus, Dorchester “may as well have been a thousand miles from Cambridge,” said John B. Fox Jr., a longtime Harvard dean from an old Dorchester family. “Culturally, it was a world apart.”
Compared with Milton, a manicured suburb of Boston where wealthy families once rode to city churches on Sundays in carriages, Dorchester was a semirural hinterland where, as one scribe sniffed, “only the most intrepid ventured to escape the summer heat.” Though Dorchester had undergone a transformation in the decades since Conant’s birth, and could no longer be considered a sleepy backwater on Boston’s border, it was still far from fashionable. By the turn of the century, the railroad had created pockets of gentrification known as “country seats,” and soon after the trolley brought an influx of workingmen and their families, crowding out the fields and farms and turning Dorchester into a lively commuter neighborhood. While the new “streetcar suburbs” were predominantly working class and heavily Irish, Roman Catholic, and Democratic, the Victorian businessmen who inhabited the older, more bucolic enclaves like Ashmont, where Conant grew up, were solidly middle class, Protestant, and Republican.
Still, in the eyes of Boston’s rich, educated ruling class, Conant was a complete unknown, a stranger in their midst. The old guard, whose universe was defined by the Beacon Hill–Back Bay–Cambridge axis, could only shake their heads at the prospect of this new president and mutter disconsolately that he was “a Boston man, but no Brahmin.”
His predecessor, A. Lawrence Lowell, an imposing figure who had presided over Harvard for nearly a quarter century, was a member of the eminent Boston family of whom it was said, “The Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.” Generations of Lowells had beaten a path to Harvard, all serious gentlemen of sound morals and high ideals. Conant’s name did not summon the same ancient nobility, nor did his accent—with its missing r’s and elongated a’s—have the same mellow patrician ring. He was not a product of Groton or St. Paul’s. At college, he did not “make” the Porcellian or any of the other clubs that played such an important role in ushering select undergraduates into Boston’s tight society. To make matters worse, it was revealed that a search of the college records turned up not “a single Harvard sheepskin” in the family prior to his, which suggested that both the Conant money and cultural endowment were new.I As the Boston Sunday Post concluded a week after his nomination was announced, “For Harvard to ‘marry’ this president was almost as sensational as for the Prince of Wales to join in wedlock with the commoner daughter of a commoner Mr. and Mrs.”
From what he wrote and said to family members, Conant was mortified by all the press attention. He had expected a certain amount of handwringing and indignation at his appointment, if not the “boiling” anger expressed by some diehard Lowell loyalists, who did not consider him fit to shine the great man’s shoes. Nothing, however, had prepared him for the condescending newspaper stories about his Dorchester childhood. He loathed the drummed-up “color” pieces about his public school days, playing scrub football in vacant lots with kids named “Skid” and “Spike,” and cringed at the thought of how the tales would be received on the sunny side of Commonwealth Avenue. Infuriated by the onslaught of prying reporters, Conant wrote his two older sisters, Esther and Marjorie, warning them to circle the wagons. After too many “intimate details” ended up in the Globe’s six-part series on his early life, he ordered a stop to all interviews. His sharply worded letter demanding that his relations refrain from gossiping to the press elicited a droll response from Esther, nine years his senior. “You may be sure wherever the family are concerned in publicity in the future—mum will be the word,” she responded lightly. “On the other hand, no one anybody knows socially reads the old Globe—and the Roosevelt family have been painted quite as unappetizingly.”
Conant was not ashamed so much as protective of his family. Plain, honest, and hardworking, his Puritan forebears had labored with their hands to make their way in the new world. They were artisans, carpenters, tanners, and cobblers. That he derived his independence and integrity from them he had no doubt. There was also the fierce determination—and doggedness. When he made up his mind, he was absolute in his convictions. “Science and Puritanism merged in Jim Conant,” observed one of his closest friends, the Harvard chemist George Kistiakowsky. “His scientific rigor replaced the Puritan vision of an austere God; his human straightness kept the colonists’ sense of equality.” But there was an unyielding quality to his character, the atavism of his ancestors’ blood reasserting itself, so that for all his wit and warmth it was the cold certainty that people remembered—the arrogance of a prophet. “No matter what he was doing,” said John W. Gardner, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, whether it was running Harvard, overseeing the massive structure of the Manhattan Project, serving as high commissioner to Germany after World War II, or reforming the nation’s public school system, he was always “a lone eagle.”
* * *
The family patriarch was certainly a figure of heroic piety, judging by English sculptor Henry Kitson’s massive cloaked statue of Roger Conant that stands atop a boulder facing the Salem Common in Massachusetts. When it was first erected in 1913, the giant bronze pilgrim loomed portentously, though in his later years James Conant—the eighth of Roger’s descendants born in America—secretly nursed an interest in genealogy, intrigued by the idea that something of the man’s indomitable will may have been handed down the generations. For an educator and statesman for whom the founding fathers were both a reference point and a continuing influence, there was no way to avoid the recognition that his own beginning was located in the past. He had little interest in his English antecedents, however, and began his research with the founder of the American line. He was too much the hardheaded scientist to believe in any nobility of birth, only in biology and the “natural aristocracy” of talent that was, in Thomas Jefferson’s words,
a “gift of nature.”
In the first of several family trees he undertook in an effort to understand the hereditary forces that had helped make him who and what he was, Conant determined that apart from Roger—the immigrant—his kinsmen were not inclined to the “pioneer life.” Once they settled in Plymouth County, they never strayed far. Roger Conant was born to a fairly well-to-do English family. His father, Richard Conant of East Budleigh, Devonshire, was a prominent farmer, and his mother, Agnes Clarke, was the daughter of a leading merchant. All the Conant boys were well educated and ambitious. Raised Church of England, they were imbued with religious feeling and joined with the Puritans in their endeavor to simplify the liturgy. The youngest of eight, Roger had no hope of inheriting his father’s estate. Eager to make his fortune, he followed an older brother to London, completed an apprenticeship, and was made a freeman of the Salters’ Company. After six years, Roger packed up his wife and baby, braved the perilous ocean voyage, and struck out into an unknown wilderness on the opposite side of the world. Together with his brother Christopher, they set sail on the Anne, the second ship after the Mayflower, arriving in Plymouth in 1623.II
Roger did not stay in Plymouth long, however, owing to the differences between his Puritan beliefs and those of the Pilgrim Fathers. In 1625 the Reverend John White of the Dorchester Company invited him to join the company’s fishing settlement as governor “for the management and government of all their affairs at Cape Anne.” The following year, the Dorchester Company, disheartened by a series of setbacks, decided to relinquish the enterprise and offered free passage to England to all who desired to return. But Roger was not a man to abandon a project he had set his heart on. He led his remaining followers to a more favorable site, known to the Indians as Naumkeag. Roger continued to serve as governor, and his tenacity and commitment are credited with making the new settlement a success. His “prudent moderation” in dealing with the new contingent sent over by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628, and willingness to sacrifice his own interests for the public good, even after they replaced him as governor, led the colony to be renamed Salem, or “city of peace.”
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