Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Bored and unhappy, Teddy’s chief form of entertainment was upsetting his parents by engaging in some form of monstrously bad behavior. With a child’s discernment, he homed in on their preoccupation with keeping up appearances and took undisguised glee in embarrassing them at every turn. Sitting in the president’s box at the all-important Harvard-Yale football game, he brazenly unfurled a huge blue-and-white Yale banner and waved it for all to see. He relished the Nation’s description of his father as a “tool of Wall Street” and quoted it so often at the dinner table that Conant finally took a hairbrush to his backside. During the height of the faculty uprising, Teddy frequented a radical bookshop on Dunster Street and brought home armloads of prounion pamphlets. The local papers caught wind of his “Commie” activity and tattled on the Harvard president’s baby insurgent. Annoyed by the unwanted publicity, Conant reamed out his son for the foolish prank, calling the stories “bad for business.” When the twelve-year-old protested that his father was encroaching on his free speech, Conant was forced to compromise, and in exchange for the boy’s vow to steer clear of the Bolshevik den, he paid for a subscription to the Daily Worker. It was delivered to the door of 17 Quincy Street, Patty recalled, much to the “horror of the housekeeper.”

  Teddy’s misdemeanors escalated. He had been given a handcrafted shortwave radio set by his uncle Bill (Richards), and soon being a ham operator became a full-blown obsession. He quickly discovered he could put his new technical skills to use in his quest to cause more trouble. With the aid of an 80-watt transmitter, he could sit in the cellar and relay naughty songs like Groucho Marx’s “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” into the radio in the front parlor, startling visitors. On one occasion, he fixed the large brass horn of a gramophone under the heating vent of the ballroom and interrupted a reception for the crown prince of Norway by blasting Kay Kyser and His Orchestra’s novelty tune “Three Little Fishies (Itty Bitty Poo).” More sessions with the belt followed; more meals alone in his room.

  Satisfied that this was a surefire means of getting attention, Teddy continued his sabotage campaign. He established his own amateur radio station and broadcast speeches by the notorious pro-Nazi propagandist “Lord Haw-Haw,” featured on the radio program Germany Calling which he picked up on his shortwave from London, proudly writing his grandmother that it could be heard “all over the Yard and fairly well at MIT.” The last straw was his presentation of a medley of “Hitler’s favorites.” Lowell had installed a small electrical lift in the house, and Ted lowered the car halfway between the basement and the first floor and began blaring “Deutschland Über Alles”—the German national anthem—just as the dinner guests were arriving. “Ted has been living in melodrama for nearly two weeks,” Patty reported to her diary. “For a while a real scandal seemed imminent.”

  At the recommendation of her mother, Patty took Ted to see Dr. Arlie Vernon Bock, director of the university’s Department of Hygiene, who served as Harvard’s house shrink. Dr. Bock, who had treated her brother, Bill, thought that Teddy was suffering from an “inferiority complex,” Patty informed her mother, his incorrigible behavior a form of retaliation against his distant and formidable father. He was also examined by Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie, a leading New York psychiatrist whom Conant had first met as an undergraduate at Harvard. Kubie recommended sending the lad to Boston’s McLean Hospital, where he could receive intensive treatment. Conant, who had little faith in the relatively new science of psychiatry—for the most part, he regarded it as “quackery”—rejected the idea.

  Conant believed that mental illness resulted from imperfect self-control. Depression and other psychological disorders were a form of weakness that could be overcome by a disciplined mind. His son’s problem was that because he had been so sickly, he had been mollycoddled and overindulged almost from birth. His wife’s “intense and continuous solicitude about T’s health and happiness” had robbed the boy of any chance to develop normally. What Teddy needed was a rigorous intellectual and physical regimen. Overruling the doctors, Conant sent the “spoiled imp” off to the Dublin School in northern New Hampshire, a rugged academy whose educational philosophy included manual labor as an essential part of the curriculum.

  As usual, Patty went along with the plan despite her misgivings. In any “conflict of claims,” she admitted in her diary, she put her husband’s needs and wants ahead of her children’s. While aware that her sons loathed the showy, “tinsel” quality of their Quincy Street existence, and that it was the cause of considerable estrangement, she could not tear herself away from the glamorous social whirl. In recent years, her calendar was so full she had been reduced to little more than “checking up” on the boys, “too busy with place cards,” as Teddy once reproached her, to read a bedtime story. “You have definitely changed to the children since this new job began,” Patty wrote in one of her frequent, self-lacerating moments of introspection. “You ‘lost’ them when it came.”

  Even Miriam Richards could not help notice the scant attention her daughter and son-in-law paid their offspring, confiding her concerns to Dr. Bok. “I think none the less of them for what you have said,” the doctor demurred. “They have no private lives.” He “understood it all,” Miriam wrote in her diary, “the lack of emotion, the attitude which has caught Jim and Patty.” But he also confirmed her basic belief: “children do need affection.”

  Part of the reason Patty did not object to sending her sons away was her deep sense of inadequacy. Just trying to keep up with her demanding husband and do her part in running the presidential mansion—this “mean machine,” as she called it—was a “struggle.” When it all got too much for her, she “relapsed,” just as her mother did before her, retreating to her bed with what she quaintly termed a “spell of the vapors.” These bouts were “entirely negative in their effect,” she knew, but she could not help taking a “masochistic pleasure” in flagellating herself afterward for her nervous weakness and uselessness. She needed to watch out, she remonstrated herself in her diary, if only so her “unworthy, selfish, self-deluding, dishonest thoughts” did not contaminate “subtly but surely the children’s thoughts and actions.”

  In a moment of painful self-reckoning, written in the summer of 1938 while racked with fears that her husband might “never come back” from an ice-climbing trip to the Canadian Rockies, she gave vent to the misery and corrosive insecurity that made her begrudge her young sons any hint of freedom or happiness. “There’s poison in my will to power,” she confessed:

  I inject a little bit of poison in the conversation, in the advice, to darling dear Jimmy who is much too sweet and tempts me to walk on him; I “pick on” Teddy too often (he deserves it, goodness knows, but if I nag he will learn bad tricks from me). I am almost never the quiet well of love that a mother ought to be . . . They can’t retort—but Jim unconsciously—both more or less consciously—store up an impression of grudgingness and bitterness. There is a bitter taste in me—I seem to have given up self-pity and romantic reveries for aggressive tactics—persecution of the subtle sort that matriarchs indulge in.

  Conant was aware of his wife’s temperamental troubles, writing to her from Jasper Park Lodge that he hoped she would try to take some “vicarious pleasure” in the boys’ enjoyment and promising that things would soon look “rosier than they have seemed.” He did everything he could to keep her on a “plateau of contentment,” urging her to avoid unnecessary “emotional indigestion.” Although he tried to bond with his sons, as they grew older and more willful, he blamed them for upsetting their mother. Patty was delicate, and the expense of the angry scenes too great. He never spoke of her condition, giving only a cursory reply to inquiries from concerned colleagues and friends. He tried to keep her close, where she would be under his watchful eye. He thought he could ward off trouble. But the Richards family’s virulent inherited infirmities would thwart him again and again. When tragedy struck at the start of 1940, followed by the fall of France in June, Conant’s life was again forced off co
urse. “The war engulfed all of us,” he wrote, “one way or another.”

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  A Private Citizen Speaks Out

  It is not too late, but it is long past time to act.

  —JBC, nationwide address, May 29, 1940

  Conant was on a skiing holiday in Saint Sauveur, Quebec, when he received word of Bill Richards’s suicide on Wednesday, January 30, 1940. He caught the last train out that night and returned to Cambridge at once.

  Bill had been found dead in the bathroom of his New York apartment on East Eighty-Third Street. He had been living in the dingy three-room flat since withdrawing from his teaching post at Princeton to devote himself to an intensive course of psychotherapy, supporting himself by working part-time as a chemical consultant. His body had been discovered earlier that evening by the superintendent of the building after he noticed a bottle of milk delivered that morning had remained in front of the door all day. When there was no response to his knocks and repeated phone calls, the police were summoned. They contacted Conant’s home in Cambridge after a search of the premises turned up letters mentioning his name. In his absence, Patty took the call. The detective in charge of the investigation told her there was no question that it was a suicide. Bill, dressed in his pajamas, had stepped into the tub, placed a pillow behind his head, and severed the arteries in both wrists with a razor blade.

  Patty was devastated. By the time Conant arrived, she had brought her mother to the house and broken the news. Both women were reeling with shock. Stunned, grief-stricken, appalled at the idea of such a tragedy, they huddled together in the parlor of 17 Quincy Street like victims of a shipwreck. Compounding their misery, the New York papers had already learned of Bill’s identity, along with his illustrious family connections. The Times ran a ghastly story under the headline “W. T. Richards Ends Life: Relative Through Marriage of Harvard Head Suicide Here.”

  A small funeral was held at Mount Auburn Cemetery on Friday—“family only,” Conant noted grimly in his diary. The fewer people present, the less attention it was likely to garner. For his own part, Conant wanted Bill and the sordid details of his death buried as soon as possible. Although there was no denying that Bill “died by his own hand,” as reported in his Harvard obituary, Conant endeavored to hush up the more unpleasant aspects, and the Boston papers refrained from publishing the story.

  Bill’s death was all the more shocking to the family because they had celebrated Christmas together only a month earlier. He had appeared to be in good spirits at the time, almost his old self, a welcome change from the morose state he had been in that fall. Miriam had been so encouraged by his buoyant mood that she wrote to a close friend that he seemed to be making “real progress toward restored health,” so much so that “he was so happy and well that for fun he wrote a detective story.” Over the holidays, he had amazed them all by disclosing that he had submitted the manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, which had “at once accepted it.”

  It was no secret that Bill had battled dark patches and poor health for years, often self-medicating with alcohol. He used to joke that like every good Bostonian, he had “a card at the Athenæum, a pew at Trinity, a plot at Mount Auburn, and a gurney at McLean’s.” But no one ever imagined he would succumb to the scourge of depression. It brought back disturbing memories of his father’s untimely end, of the impossible demands he had lashed himself with and his private torment. Patty was inconsolable. The depth of her grief frightened Conant, who had come to accept the incongruity of the Richards family’s intelligence and psychological impairment, and regarded them as weaker beings. By then, he had concluded, as Ted would later observe, that there was “a fatal flaw in the genetic material.”

  Bill’s old college friends paid tribute to the thirty-nine-year-old physical chemist as “beyond any doubt one of the most brilliant members of the class,” but in the memorial notes they also recalled him as tragically uncompromising. “He had a mentality which could be called great,” wrote Leopold Mannes, a fellow musician and scientist. “In his attitude towards life, towards science, towards music—of which he had an astounding knowledge and perception—he was a relentless perfectionist and thus his own implacable judge. No human being could be expected fully to satisfy such standards.”

  Desperate to avoid any scandal, Miriam Richards penned a serene letter attempting to put her son’s sudden passing in the context of a decadelong decline, copies of which she sent to important friends. She implied his death was accidental, writing that he “died of an overdose of a sleeping draught,” though whether this was her attempt to draw a veil over his suicide or what she had been told is unclear. No one in the family ever spoke of it.

  For reasons he was not prepared to disclose, Conant was worried about much more than just the family’s reputation. At the news of Bill’s death, he had dispatched their uncle, Lawrence Henderson, accompanied by Patty’s younger brother, Thayer, to New York to tidy up any loose ends. A suicide note found beside the tub was promptly destroyed. Conant also arranged for all of Bill’s papers and personal effects be packed up and shipped directly to 17 Quincy Street before anyone could go through them. His immediate concern was that his brother-in-law might not have been entirely in his right mind during the last months of his illness. “They thought Bill was a bit gaga at the end,” said Patty’s cousin Muffy Coolidge. “I think Jim wanted to see what he had been getting up to.”

  Just as Conant feared, Bill, who had always disdained authority and the narrow scope of his plodding academic colleagues, had been dangerously indiscreet. Among the documents found in his desk was the galley proof for his novel, Brain Waves and Death, which was to be published in a few weeks under the pseudonym Willard Rich. Although it appeared to be a conventional murder mystery—albeit with the unusual twist of being set in a modern laboratory where the scientists were working on an experiment to measure the electrical impulses sent out by the brain—Conant could see at a glance that the book was a roman à clef. It amounted to a thinly veiled account of Bill’s experiences working at the Loomis Institute for Scientific Research in Tuxedo Park, New York, which had conducted pioneering research on electroencephalography in the early 1930s.

  This was the same Alfred Lee Loomis, an immensely wealthy Wall Street tycoon, who had been helping the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Ernest O. Lawrence secure a whopping $1.15 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to build a new cyclotron—the great atom smasher he had invented—at his Berkeley laboratory, while Harvard struggled to fund its fledgling program. The same Loomis who had been raiding MIT and other top universities of physicists for the past year to work on a secret defense research project. Harold Urey at Columbia had just written to Conant complaining that Loomis’s microwave activities were single-handedly creating a dearth of physics professors to teach college courses. Conant had never met the man, but he had heard enough about his larger-than-life personality to know that no one could fail to recognize that the charismatic figure of Howard M. Ward in Bill’s novel was transparently based on the New York financier, who owned and operated a private scientific compound in Tuxedo Park. Loomis was the kind of deep-pocketed patron who had friends in high places and sat on innumerable important boards. The sort of notoriety the novel would bring would be the last thing Loomis would want, especially given the highly sensitive nature of the work in which he was involved.

  Conant knew little beyond the broad outlines of Bill’s relationship with the influential banker-turned-scientist. Not long after he had taken up a teaching post at Princeton, Bill had received a letter from the Loomis Laboratory inviting him to work at the lavishly funded facility. It was there that he had the opportunity to carry out some of the first experiments with intense ultrasonic radiation, work that inspired subsequent research in American and European laboratories. Bill had recruited his close friend and Princeton colleague, George “Kisty” Kistiakowsky, and both scientists worked as consultants to the Loomis Laboratory for a number of
years.

  Now a prominent member of the Harvard Chemistry Department—Conant had poached him in 1928—and close friend, Kistiakowsky was still in regular contact with Loomis. As the international situation worsened, he had turned to his old benefactor to help aid scientific colleagues fleeing the Nazi terror. Loomis found many of them jobs, and provided generous research stipends for others, most notably the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. (When he learned he had won the Nobel Prize in 1938, Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, left Rome with his family and $50 in his pocket and never looked back.) In the process, Loomis had earned the loyalty and respect of many in the scientific community. Kistiakowsky, a tall, urbane, immensely self-assured Russian émigré who had fought in the White Army in the Russian Revolution, had an instinct for trouble and shared Conant’s concerns about Bill’s book. While in the past he might have laughed at the witty satire of Loomis as a dilettante and wealthy collector of big brains, the war in Europe had changed everything. In only the past few months, Loomis had transformed his private laboratory into a research center devoted to the development of war-related technology, specifically the radar systems used to detect airplanes. The work he was doing was so secret, and of such fearful importance, that Richards’s parody of Loomis and his research laboratory struck Kistiakowsky as a reckless and ill-conceived prank.

  Sure enough, Loomis was furious. On the eve of the book’s publication, he was on the phone angrily demanding that Conant use his influence to have it recalled. He threatened to sue for libel. Conant did not care for the man’s bullying tone, but he bit back his anger. He assured him that he shared his distress, but the book had gone to press—nothing could be done. Loomis was an intensely private man and was justifiably outraged at the betrayal by a trusted colleague. Bill Richards was intimately acquainted with all the players and the goings-on at Tuxedo Park, including Loomis’s extramarital affair with his much younger secretary, caricatured in the novel as a “brazen hussy.” Much to Conant’s relief, when the book debuted in March 1940, it earned respectful reviews but attracted no additional attention. None of the critics was aware that the author was already dead or that, in a macabre twist, he had foreshadowed his own imminent demise, killing off a tall, arrogant young chemist named Bill Roberts.