Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  —Vannevar Bush

  AM SAILING FOR ENGLAND TOMORROW VIA LISBON ON OFFICIAL SCIENTIFIC MISSION AT THE REQUEST OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES RETURNING EARLY IN APRIL AM DELIGHTED AT THIS ASSIGNMENT NEWS WILL BE RELEASED TOMORROW PATTY IS A GOOD SPORT.

  Conant cabled his sister Marjorie at the last possible minute, waiting until just before he kissed his wife good-bye and boarded a train bound for New York. The following morning, Saturday, February 15, 1941, he made his way to the New Jersey pier where the American Export liner Excalibur was docked. He was accompanied by two NDRC associates—Carroll Wilson and Frederick L. Hovde—who would be sailing with him, as well as his assistant, Calvert Smith, who had come to see them off. The terminal was packed with holiday travelers. Most of his fellow passengers were embarking on a two-week voyage to Lisbon via Bermuda, and Conant was amused by the “gala” atmosphere—“might well be the gay 20s with everyone off on a Mediterranean Cruise.” Just as he stepped onto the gangplank, relieved to be getting away unnoticed, a swarm of reporters appeared out of nowhere and chased on board after him. Dismayed, Conant and his companions decided on a “dignified though conservative policy of ‘laisser-faire,’ ” he noted in his travel diary, “[We] would neither seek nor avoid the flash of the photographic bulb.”

  They were quickly cornered on the ship’s deck and inundated with questions. It turned out the White House had blown their cover, issuing a press release the previous evening announcing that Conant had been ordered to England and would be reporting directly to Washington “recent scientific information of importance to national defense.” It was all in the morning papers, one of the reporters told him, flourishing a copy of the Sun with the banner headline “Conant Heads Mission to London.” Their curiosity piqued, the newshounds demanded to know the exact nature of his expedition. Would he be studying all of Britain’s defensive and offensive weapons, including its long-range bombers, blind-flying technology, and newly developed devices to curb night raids? Conant, dressed in a heavy wool coat, his dark felt homburg at a rakish angle, attempted to retain an air of mystery. “As president of Harvard University, I’d love to talk to the press,” he replied, “but as head of a government mission, my mouth is closed.”

  The Nazis, who had targeted the Harvard chemist for his widely publicized pleas to stop Hitler, put out the story that he had been dispatched by Roosevelt to help the British start a gas war. Like most propaganda, it was no less effective for being untrue.

  Conant had managed to steal away from Cambridge unobserved, having disclosed his impending departure to only a handful of deans. The members of the Corporation had greeted the fait accompli with a dumbfounded silence, and when they recovered showed “little or no enthusiasm” for his presidential errand. A few days before he left, the Crimson was informed of a scheduling conflict and printed the standard announcement canceling the open house at 17 Quincy Street: “No Conant tea: President and Mrs. Conant will be unable to be at home to students on Sunday.”

  On the following Monday, the paper reprinted the same announcement with the witty addendum: “Winston: ‘One lump or two, Jim?’ ”

  Conant was thrilled to be charged with such an important and prestigious assignment. He had been angling for the job since November, when he heard that Vannevar Bush was planning to dispatch a member of the NDRC to establish a London office, and mounted a strenuous argument as to why he possessed both the wisdom and finesse to head the liaison mission. “I feel very strongly that the person chosen should not be too young,” he wrote Bush, “and must have had sufficient ‘worldly experience’ to be able to get on with our strange British friends and find his way around what must be a pretty distracted atmosphere.” Aware that the NDRC chairman believed it “ill-advised” to send a senior member of the committee across the submarine-infested Atlantic to a city under siege from nightly bombing raids, Conant made a strong case that he was uniquely qualified to carry on the complicated negotiations:

  I feel that this may be very vital in one area with which I am particularly concerned, namely, chemical warfare. If either side should suddenly start to employ this weapon, it would be very important that we obtain information rapidly. I have, I am afraid, grave misgivings as to the proper functionings of regular channels in this regard. So, whoever is to be the permanent officer, I feel that he should be accompanied initially by a member of the committee itself and one who knows his way around England and has sufficient standing to be able to make the initial contacts and make them “stick.”

  Conant said nothing to Patty of his “conspiracy” to go to London as he continued to lobby stealthily for the job. He had read accounts of wartime London from returning newsmen and listened to Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcasts, but longed to be closer to the action. He wanted to see for himself what the “war from the skies” was really like—“a whole nation not literally under arms but participating in a strange way in a continuous air battle.” Unlike many of his chemical warfare colleagues, he had never been sent to the front and as a result always felt he had not pulled his full weight in World War I. He was determined that this go-around he would not miss confronting the reality of war firsthand. A letter of commiseration from Frank Jewett, who had also been kept stateside during the Great War and sympathized with his frustration, provided little solace, especially since he sided with Bush against the Harvard president taking such a hazardous assignment.

  Conant replied at once in a letter downplaying the danger—“probably not more than one in a thousand of my being put permanently out of the picture”—and insisting that he could not let this opportunity pass. “I believe actions speak louder than words,” he argued. For months, he had urged a belligerent policy on the country’s young men, and it was time to back up his position by showing he was “willing to take risks.”

  In the end, he got his way. Roosevelt, pleased that the head of his alma mater had been selected as his special emissary, expressed his confidence that Conant would do a “grand job.” FDR trusted Conant, and thought his endorsement of collaboration with British war science was bound to have great impact. Even the Globe approved, tipping its hat in an editorial congratulating Conant for demonstrating to his young students that he, for one, had the “courage of his convictions.”

  On the morning of February 1, he went to the White House to meet with the president and obtain his formal approval and any last-minute instructions. He had expected to discuss the details of the upcoming scientific interchange, which had begun haltingly with the Tizard mission the previous September, but could hardly get Roosevelt to focus on the trip, as he was preoccupied with the congressional brawl over Lend-Lease. “He was very anxious to outline the political strategy,” Conant griped in his diary, annoyed to find himself being coached by FDR on the “important points” of the bill rather than what needed doing in England. On several occasions, the president’s secretary poked her head in the door to announce that the next visitor had arrived, and it was only with difficulty that Conant finally interjected that perhaps the president should invite him officially to undertake the mission. “Yes, of course, I shall be glad to do that,” Roosevelt replied distractedly. But when Conant left the Oval Office an hour later, he still did not have a letter of introduction to Churchill—or any scrap of “proof” empowering him to share US military secrets with the British.

  In the weeks prior to his departure, Conant had become conspicuous on the national scene, proving a tough, authoritative, and fearless foot soldier in the president’s campaign to send vast amounts of weapons and war materiel to Britain. After Roosevelt introduced his Lend-Lease legislation to Congress in January 1941, Conant fought valiantly to get the arms program passed despite furious opposition from the isolationists. His metamorphosis into the champion of the interventionist movement was so complete that it was widely rumored that he would become the new head of the White committee, the bipartisan pressure group. Pointing out that he was the first to call for all-out aid to England, and the fi
rst to call for universal conscription, the New York Times observed that the crisis had brought out the best in Conant, and his role as captain, organizer, and catalyst had made him the rearmament camp’s D’Artagnan, the youngest and most formidable of the musketeers: “He has made some of the most forceful speeches of the year,” the paper observed, “and often these have been psychological shock troops that made holes through which the administration has driven to attack the inertia that is presumably behind the majority of the country’s isolationists.”

  The America Firsters mounted a massive effort to defeat Lend-Lease, lining up an imposing array of prominent figures who attacked the measure before the House and Senate committees and kept the debate going full blast for nearly two months. The opponents of the bill claimed Lend-Lease would only prolong the eventuality of British defeat. “It is like granting a man who is sinking money with which to buy a lifebelt,” declared Luther Johnson, a congressman from Texas. Some critics repudiated the bill as simply another attempt by Roosevelt to seize dictatorial powers. Calling it a “dictatorship-war-bankruptcy bill,” Representative Hamilton Fish contended that it was a “slick device to further regiment America” and a “betrayal of constitutional power.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, the head of the opposition, ratcheted up the political invective, assailing “the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy” as likely to “plow under every fourth American boy,” and attacking Conant personally as “one of the same old crowd . . . who are too old to go to the front line trenches” yet “urge a war that somebody else is going to have to fight.”

  Conant increasingly became a target of isolationist broadsides, indicted alternately for being a “stooge” of the British government and a captive of the college’s wealthy Jewish benefactors. He kept a cool head and never wavered, despite the venomous assaults on his character, and proved such a loyal defender of the president’s program that the administration chose him, along with Wendell Willkie and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, to be one of three final rebuttal witnesses before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Charles Lindbergh, who filled stadiums with tens of thousands of flag-waving “Fortress America” fans, would be the isolationists’ star witness.

  At ten o’clock on the morning of February 11, Conant strode purposefully to the front of the ornate marble caucus room, took his seat at the witness table, and addressed the assembled senators and representatives, and a packed gallery of more than 1,200 raucous and profane spectators, the largest turnout in history. His testimony, which tilted toward a hostile audience, took direct aim at the isolationists’ wish for a compromise peace, and gave heart to Americans and their allies who wanted to vanquish Hitler.

  Taking the contentious issue and breaking it down into plain, simple terms, Conant proceeded to give a ninety-minute lesson in why there could be no compromise with the Nazis. “Hitler’s soldiers are proponents of a literally soulless creed,” he explained, taking pains to emphasize that this was not an imperialistic war in the old sense but more closely resembled a “religious war” being waged by fanatics. “They are well armed by modern science,” he warned. “They are hard to stop by force of fighting; impossible to stop by fair words or bribes, by talks of trade, or by a negotiated peace.” The argument between the isolationists and interventionists, he concluded, “comes down to this diagnosis of the Nazi state. If those of my belief are right, our only hope as a free people lies in a defeat of the Axis powers.”

  “Suppose it required us to go to war to do it,” countered Michigan senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, an ardent isolationist. “Would you go that far?”

  “I should,” Conant replied without hesitation, “if it were absolutely necessary as the last step.”

  Conant withstood a barrage of questions from senators eager to impugn his testimony. He calmly parried the queries and warmongering insinuations, and reiterated again and again that Germany, with its philosophy and armed might, must be defeated to preserve America’s “free way of life.” When he finally left the stand, the crowded committee room gave him an ovation so prolonged that it brought a warning from the chairman that if such a demonstration was repeated, he would have the room cleared.

  * * *

  Three days after the hearings, Conant embarked on his mission. The only route to London in the winter of 1941 was by air from neutral Lisbon. There were only six planes a week to the embattled island, carrying only eight passengers at a time, and they were constantly overbooked. Snagging a seat on the KLM flight was a matter of priorities, controlled tightly by the RAF. Through the usual sort of mix-up, the paperwork for his companions, Hovde and Wilson, had not come through, and they were stranded temporarily. Conant decided to go on ahead and found himself on a plane carrying the new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, John “Gil” Winant, and his advisor, Benjamin V. Cohen. Winant, a former governor of New Hampshire, was replacing the defeatist Joseph Kennedy, who had resigned following a series of disastrous newspaper interviews in which he declared “Democracy was finished” in England, praised Lindbergh, and vowed to spend all he had to keep America out of the war. Kennedy had many fans in Boston, but Conant, repulsed by his talk of appeasement, was not one of them.

  Whether Winant had arranged for his seat on the British ferry plane because of a note Conant had sent to his hotel in Lisbon, he never knew, but he felt lucky to be traveling in the diplomatic party. The flight was swift and smooth, though a German Fokker swooped by on its way to Switzerland. He felt luckier still when they landed in Bristol and learned there was a special train waiting to whisk them to London. When it stopped for an hour at Windsor Castle, he watched as the rather rumpled-looking Winant, his hat clenched nervously in one hand, was welcomed by King George VI, spiffy in the full dress uniform of a field marshal. The king dispensed with protocol and greeted the new envoy on the station platform with an outstretched hand—reportedly the first time he had ever done such a thing—and then took him home for tea with the queen.

  Conant was not keen on royalty. He was naturally suspicious of the British Empire and opposed to the long-run objectives of its colonial policy. Early in the war, his “New England caution” about their overseas cousins had separated him from the unabashedly anglophile members of the Century Group. Even now he felt a certain wariness of the “subtle flattery” of which the English aristocracy were “masters.” But these reservations quickly gave way to admiration for their grit and courage during his first few days in the rainy, blacked-out British capital. He had never seen such devastation: the destroyed buildings, streets pocked with bomb craters, and whole neighborhoods obliterated. An evening visit to an air-raid shelter revealed the horrors of the murderous blitz, with the city’s poor crowding into narrow, fetid, underground corridors for protection. “I saw a stouthearted population under bombardment,” he recalled. “No one could tell you how the British proposed to survive as free men. But the will was there; there was no talk of negotiations, no faltering, no whimpering. Whenever I feel depressed about the quality of human beings, I recall with emotion the picture of England under fire.”

  He could not help but be deeply moved by the warm welcome he received from the inhabitants of the beleaguered nation. Everywhere he went, people expressed gratitude for his belligerent speeches and Lend-Lease testimony, grasping his hand and shaking it as if they would never let go. The warrior educator was feted at banquets, invited to address the House of Commons, given honorary degrees from Cambridge and Bristol universities, as well as the keys to the village of Southwark—from whence John Harvard had emigrated. Bush was pleased to see that he had sent “the ideal emissary.” Conant’s reception signified far more than just an exchange of technology: “To the sorely pressed British,” Bush wrote, “he symbolized the might of America pausing on the brink before plunging in to aid a struggle to suppress an assault that threatened all of life as it had been built up over the centuries in the two countries with a common speech and common ideals.”

  From the moment he arri
ved, Conant was hailed as a “messenger of hope.” It made him feel all the more keenly the burden of responsibility to make real progress and get meaningful projects under way. “The job is really important, and I’m sure I was the one man to undertake it,” he wrote Patty at the end of the first busy week, adding that he was “embarrassed” by the effusive praise and attention. “It is a comfort to be able to do something besides talk to senators!”

  His lunch with the prime minister in the bombproof basement dining room of 10 Downing Street on March 6 was a success, despite getting off to a bumpy start. Churchill was late, so Conant had a chance to air his strong views in support of the United States becoming a full partner in the fight against Hitler, ingratiating himself with the other guests, including Mrs. (Clementine) Churchill; Charles Eade, editor of the Sunday Dispatch; and Frederick Lindemann, a leading physicist and science advisor to the British government. When their host finally arrived, he was “obviously tired and grumpy,” and Conant surmised his bad temper stemmed from the uncertain future of the Lend-Lease Bill. It had passed the House on February 8 by a vote of 260 to 165, but was getting hammered in the Senate and had sustained a number of damaging amendments. The hopes of those pushing the bill were reportedly at their “lowest point.”

  Churchill rather “let himself go” on the subject of Lend-Lease, his irritation rising as he spoke. “This bill has to pass!” he bellowed. “What a state it would leave all of us in if it doesn’t; what a state it would leave the president in; what a failure he would appear before history if this bill is not passed!” he exclaimed, working himself up into quite a lather. “What would happen in the United States if the bill was rejected? Would the president resign?” And if so, “Who would become president, the vice president?”

  Conant was taken aback by Churchill’s vehemence. Could the prime minister really have “such a profound ignorance of the American constitutional system?” Tactfully as possible, he pointed out that the United States did not operate under a parliamentary system, and an American president, unlike a British prime minister, was not obliged to resign after a major political setback. Emboldened, he suggested that perhaps something more than an arsenal of democracy was needed. Perhaps America needed to send troops? “We don’t want your men,” Churchill grunted. “Give us the tools, and we shall finish the job.” Conant recognized the phrase, having already observed the PM’s “habit of quoting from his own speeches even in casual conversation,” but was unpersuaded by the facile disclaimer.