Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

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  By mid-August, Nazi Germany’s long-awaited assault on England had begun in earnest. “Mass airplane attacks,” Conant noted in his diary, adding with guarded optimism, “so far British doing well.” Many experts had predicted that the Luftwaffe would make quick work of the Royal Air Force as a prelude to a September invasion. Day after day, German planes bombarded Britain’s shipping centers, air bases, factories, and, finally, its cities. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the RAF frustrated Hitler’s hopes for a quick victory. The Luftwaffe was beaten back by the tenacity of the British fighters as well as their advanced Chain Home air-warning system. The US Army and Navy were only just becoming aware of the crucial role of what would soon be known as radar—radio detection and ranging—in securing Britain’s triumph over Germany in the skies. Bush and Compton knew already that British scientists had developed a means of detecting enemy planes, and in early summer had organized a secret project and commenced research on a portable microwave detection system for night fighters and antiaircraft guns. The NDRC had scored its first victory. “The importance of physicists for weapon development was rapidly recognized,” recalled Conant. “From then on, there was no chance of Dr. Bush’s committee being ignored.”

  Conant responded to the growing urgency of England’s plight by shifting his NDRC activities into high gear. He galvanized the Cambridge chemists, and began assigning research projects. He assigned his Harvard protégé Paul Bartlett to lead the unit investigating new methods of manufacturing lewisite, the poison gas he had pioneered in World War I, commandeering a laboratory in Wolcott Gibbs so he could keep close tabs on his progress. Both he and Bush were vexed by the delays in security clearances caused by “the stupidity of the FBI.” Despite still suffering from a very bad back—heat and massage treatments were providing little relief—Conant made repeated trips to Washington to meet with army and navy research groups, lay the foundation for a constructive working relationship, and review the problems they would be sending his division. With explosives everyone’s first priority, he arranged a conference at Carnegie to discuss a “fundamental physico-chemical study of high explosives (the atom bomb in miniature).”

  When not occupied with scientific problems, Conant was increasingly involved in formulating political strategies to circumvent domestic opposition to the war, while at the same time converting it through a process of education. He spent hours a week consulting with members of White’s committee devising tactics—some quite devious—to deal with the isolationists. He went to see Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state, about their “next moves,” and afterward wrote up five or six points of revision of the neutrality laws to be pushed after England proved it could ward off a frontal attack. He helped Grenville Clark in a relentless four-month propaganda campaign to build support for the Selective Service Act, which was finally signed into law on September 16, and which military historians later credited as one of the most important of America’s defense measures prior to Pearl Harbor. Conant lobbied hard for, and won, a provision granting deferments for men in certain scientific and medical fields, as well as language protecting students training for those professions in colleges and universities.

  At the same time, he was also working on a private scheme of his own to provide emergency relief to Britain. While “pretending to be away from Cambridge for the summer,” Conant was actually busy raising money and making plans to send a Harvard Public Health unit to England to open a field hospital and fight the spread of disease in the bombed-out cities. Motivated by his “almost overpowering emotional reaction” to the blitz attacks, Conant maneuvered around the legal obstacles posed by the neutrality acts and eventually pooled his resources with the American Red Cross for maximum effect.

  With the Battle of Britain in full fury, Conant felt the time had come to try to sway the defeatist sentiment. The climate of opinion was changing. With every Nazi attack, public opinion polls showed that American admiration for Britain in its “finest hour” was growing, along with support for a military rescue effort. He was determined to build on that momentum and try to unite all shades of interventionist opinion—whether pro-Roosevelt or anti-Roosevelt—in a unifying “aid to allies” message he would deliver at the opening of the college year. “I certainly put my heart into the preparation,” he noted of the speech that emphasized his belief that the American way of life was worth defending, and chided the country for its lack of courage.

  “What is the worst possibility which confronts us—war?” he demanded, deliberately working to strike a responsive chord in the crowd of fresh-faced young men determined this was not their fight. “So many people think, but I venture to disagree. War is not the worst possibility we face; the worst is the complete triumph of totalitarianism.”

  On October 2 he dined at the Cosmos Club in New York with Bush, who looked inordinately pleased with himself. He divulged that at Loomis’s Tuxedo Park laboratory that weekend there had been a secret meeting with the British Technical and Scientific Mission, led by Sir Henry Tizard, an influential defense scientist. After weeks of tense negotiations, Churchill had secured an agreement for the British and Americans to swap military secrets after the US Navy’s reluctance to share its new weapons had finally been overcome. It had been “a real exchange of information,” Bush reported, a grin splitting his long, leathery face. The haul of secret developments, which far exceeded expectations, showed that the United States was “five years behind on detection of planes.”

  The British scientists had unveiled a resonant cavity magnetron, a small device that could generate extremely short radio waves. The magnetron, emitting radiation in the ten-centimeter, or microwave, region, would increase the power available to US technicians by a factor of a thousand. “Navy and Army faces very red when they learned this!” Conant exulted in his diary, adding, “Very important. A special lab exclusively for the NDRC should be set up to speed this research.”

  Compton appointed Loomis head of the new radar laboratory. On November 1 Loomis moved his operation from Tuxedo Park to MIT’s campus in Cambridge and went to work developing the magnetron into an airborne intercept system that would transform England’s defenses. The secret enterprise was named the Radiation Laboratory, like Lawrence’s cyclotron lab at Berkeley, in an attempt to mislead any German spies into thinking that MIT’s physicists were engaged in something as academic and remote from the war as nuclear physics. In short order, Lawrence himself was drafted to help Loomis get the “Rad Lab” under way with all due speed.

  In a desperate bid for the isolationist vote, Wendell Willkie began to assail the president as a warmonger. He criticized the conscription bill and destroyers-bases deal, protesting lamely in the latter case that FDR should have sought Congress’s approval. When that did not work, he accused the president of trying to secretly lead the nation into World War II, forcing FDR to make the rash promise “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Willkie’s partisan shots at the administration’s foreign policy did not do him any good. Disappointed by his candidate, Conant decided at the last minute to cast his vote for Roosevelt, noting in his diary that not even his wife knew, “thus preserving political neutrality!” FDR won by a clear margin, but the country was more divided on the war than ever before.

  On November 20, following the German bombing of Birmingham, Conant addressed the nation by radio on behalf of White’s committee. He had been sick as a dog the previous day, but this could not be postponed, so at ten at night he went straight from his bed to the WEEI radio station in Boston. Worried that Willkie had set back the interventionist cause, he went even further than he had at Harvard, arguing that America’s free way of life could be preserved only by defeating the Axis powers, which now included Japan. Speaking again as a “private citizen,” he explained that the opinion of the experts was that such a defeat could be achieved only if America pledged all its resources, including men, to the Allies “without reservation.” It would then be purely a matt
er of strategy when, and if, that aid would take the form of direct military assistance. He had heard the younger generation’s reservations and now responded with a plea for definite action he hoped would dispel their doubts:

  “We shall be rightly condemned if we needlessly become involved in a war and squander life and treasure. But we shall be yet more guilty in the eyes of the descendants if we fail to preserve our heritage of freedom—if we fail because of timidity or lack of farsighted resolutions. The decision is momentous. Those who feel as I do believe the future of human liberty is at stake.”

  Conant’s militant speech incensed Harvard students and sparked a number of angry protests. In the six months since his first “aid the allies” radio broadcast, undergraduate opposition to the war had grown in both size and decibel level. The Crimson accused Conant of dangerous folly—“the best we can hope for is a stalemate victory”—and the Lampoon ran a cartoon of him beating war drums. On November 23, during halftime of the Harvard-Yale football game, three students rushed onto the field and staged a skit portraying the college president engaged in a solitary military drill, driving boys away from their books and into battle with a wooden-bayoneted rifle. Conant was spared the embarrassment of sitting through the burlesque by a bad cold, but he summed up the animus directed at him with the terse diary entry “No fan mail.”

  No other college president so candidly and forthrightly identified himself with rearmament, though many agreed with him. “So large a proportion of President Conant’s constituency feels that he is going too far in his advocacy of immediate participation in the war,” wrote Dartmouth College’s president, Ernest M. Hopkins, an interventionist and fellow Centurian. Such strong talk disturbed people. Privately, Hopkins was in line with the Harvard man but took the view that he was out front of most Americans on the issue, and that his attitude could not be “advantageously insisted upon at the present time.” But Conant was done weighing the risks and would not remain silent.

  In December he wrote a personal note to Roosevelt urging him to warn the nation that total victory now lay within Germany’s grasp. In the postelection slump, the White House had been strangely silent. Worried that Britain’s defenses were on the point of cracking under the strain, and an all-out assault by the Germans in the spring would finish England, Conant beseeched the president to step up aid to Britain. “I am much disturbed by the lethargy,” he began, “and defeatist attitude in certain quarters which asserts that nothing we can do can be of assistance in the critical months ahead.” He suggested a series of nationally broadcast “radio addresses” to alert the public to how the defeat of Britain would “jeopardize the future of free institutions in this country.” Hoping to persuade the president that he must act decisively, Conant implored, “But for your bold stand during the crucial days of last spring and summer, Great Britain now would be in the position of France. I believe the American people will respond as readily to your leadership at this time as they have in the past.”

  Another letter would soon follow bearing the names of a great many eminent fellow citizens: “168 signees more to come,” he noted in his diary. The interventionist circular, drafted with Lewis Douglas and dubbed the “Conant-Douglas round-robin,” would be endorsed by those of the White committee who had moved beyond the position of all aid to Britain “short of war” and now believed that military assistance by the United States would be necessary—and, at a minimum, would involve the use of naval convoys. America had to maintain the “lifeline” that was the sea route from the Western Hemisphere to England. As for White, who still clung to his original slogan—“aid to the Allies short of war”—and thoroughly opposed intervention, Conant recommended he be “muzzled.” But he used his influence to persuade other committee members against removing their namesake, who was tired and ill, and run the risk that their internal row became public and weakened their objectives.

  Many people throughout the country were still in sympathy with the isolationists, and he was concerned that the America First Committee, founded that autumn by a group of Yalies, was gaining a nationwide following for its platform that a Europe dominated by Germany could peacefully coexist with the United States. Charles Lindbergh was its headline speaker. The most important thing was for their side to maintain a “united front,” Conant stressed, taking over the reins of leadership from White, who would resign shortly. “Publicly, I think the efforts of all of us should be to back the president,” he added, though “a certain amount of private pressure” should be kept on Roosevelt “to see that he goes farther still.”

  The day after Christmas, Conant wired their “round-robin” statement to the White House urging the president to “make it the settled policy of this country to do everything that may be necessary to ensure the defeat of the Axis powers.” But FDR, who had just received a desperate request for more ships, bombers, and munitions from Churchill, did not need any more prodding. On the very day he received Conant’s personal letter, he broached the idea of Lend-Lease at a press conference with a folksy parable about a man lending his garden hose to a neighbor to put out a fire. He approved of the Harvard leader’s counsel that he should “inform the American people concerning the grave implications of the present situation” and wrote Conant of his intention of making “a radio address along the line you propose before the end of the year.” But more important, Roosevelt added, he deeply appreciated the “tenor and spirit” of his advice.

  Just before nine o’clock on the evening of Sunday, December 29, Conant sat down in the opulent parlor of 17 Quincy Street—the Corporation had turned down his request to move to a more modest residence as a wartime sacrifice—and waited anxiously for Roosevelt’s “fireside chat” to begin. At that very hour, bombs were raining down on London, a night of terror planned to divert world attention from the president’s announcement of whether the United States would remain neutral or support the effort to defeat Hitler. In a moving speech, rounded and warmed by his familiar reassuring tone, Roosevelt called for the United States to become the “great arsenal of democracy.” America, he told his radio audience, would furnish the British with the weapons they needed, “the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.”

  Conant thought FDR’s speech was “magnificent.” Before he turned in for the night, he patted himself on the back for his part in keeping the country on the right track and advancing an idea that would become the basis of the Lend-Lease legislation to be introduced in Congress in the New Year. The president’s radio address was “very effective,” he noted with satisfaction, and while not going quite as far as he would have liked, it was “as far as he could go probably.”

  The press and popular response to the president’s speech was better than he dared hope. “I have been very encouraged,” he wrote “Grennie” (Grenville) Clark, adding that publicly FDR deserved their support until he had played his entire hand. “It takes time for a democracy to move, and we must be patient, or so it seems to me.”

  Conant’s confidence in the democratic process was matched by his faith in America’s ability to rise to the challenge ahead. He shared Roosevelt’s belief, expressed in his memorandum creating the NDRC, that “this country is singularly fitted, by reason of the ingenuity of its people, the knowledge and skill of its scientists, and the flexibility of its industrial structure, to excel in the arts of peace, and to excel in the arts of war if that be necessary.”

  Few of his academic colleagues shared his optimism. In a private conversation one rainy Saturday afternoon, Princeton’s president, Harold Dodds, admitted to being “pessimistic about the long as well as the short run.” Conant agreed that the next five years would be difficult but was confident enough of the future to offer to check in with Dodds in 1950. “Expressed my views on U.S.A. armed to the teeth, belligerent, and running the world,” he asserted in his diary. “A Pax Americana like the Pax Britannica of the 19th Century.”

  Conant knew exac
tly what he was doing when he stepped into the political arena and was committed to seeing his rearmament efforts through despite the naysayers on his own doorstep. By now, those with isolationist views among the alumni had already marked him as a “dangerous man.” He turned a deaf ear to the complaints about his extracurricular crusade against Hitler, as well as the carping about his appointment to the NDRC, frequent absences from Cambridge, and neglect of his academic duties. In spite of his critics—or perhaps to spite them—Conant was arranging to have his interventionist radio addresses published as a booklet. It would make “no reference to Harvard.” He began delegating administrative responsibilities to what he called his “heavy deans” and quietly made plans to appoint the historian Paul H. Buck as the university’s first provost. His actions might well put him at odds with some members of the Corporation, but the faculty uprising had sufficiently soured him on academe that he was willing to take the risk. He had already begun to “wonder” to his diary how he would be able to continue to juggle his war work “as well as Harvard and speaking as a private citizen.”

  For Conant, there was never any real choice. The world was again at war. And once again, a new kind of industrial warfare would yield deadly results. Chemistry beckoned, and he was going to answer the call whether Harvard liked it or not.

  CHAPTER 12

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  Mission to London

  To the sorely pressed British, he symbolized the might of America pausing on the brink before plunging in.