Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Whatever the psychological effect of the atomic bomb, General Spaatz was “taking no chances,” he told reporters, keeping up the pressure on Japan by hitting it with another American secret weapon: napalm. At approximately the same time as the Nagasaki strike, thirty-eight thousand tons of “napalm bombs” were dropped on military installations in southern Kyushu. The previous day, 385 Superfortresses had carried out conventional bombing raids on another four industrial cities—having already laid flame to sixty—taking out chemical and steel factories in Wakamatsu, Tobata, Kurosaki, and Kokura, and, in what Spaatz described as a “mopping-up operation,” leveled a major aircraft plant and arsenal in Tokyo. The new firebomb attacks were part of an intensified aerial assault meant to make the enemy yield, with fighter pilots vowing to “finish off” the murderous Japs. Conant winced at the bloodthirsty, racially tinged rhetoric, but he knew that for the combat forces, the pursuit of complete victory was more than justified by the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, the infamous Bataan Death March, and the brutal battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Pacific commanders were hell-bent on getting the job done and getting it done quickly, determined not to have to take on the tenacious Japanese soldiers, with their willingness to fight to the death, on their home turf.

  On Thursday, August 9, Truman put out a special call to his top scientific and military advisors to attend a meeting at the White House to discuss what the public should be told about the bomb. Stimson postponed his Thursday morning press conference in order to attend, and Byrnes hurried over from the State Department building. They were dealing with what Groves described as a “royal foul-up” in the handling of the news stories from the Pacific, to say nothing of Spaatz’s ill-advised comments on his mission. They had not adequately anticipated the enormous pressure from the newspapers for information about the atomic bombs, the impossibility of imposing restrictions on the coverage, and the difficulty of “clearing” all the dispatches from the large number of war correspondents in Guam. In short, they had been deluged, and chaos quickly ensued.

  They were better prepared on the domestic front, thanks to Conant’s foresight in having Henry Smyth’s official report on the Manhattan Project ready for public consumption, edited carefully with an eye to security considerations, and giving credit where credit was due. One thousand copies had been printed using the Pentagon’s production facilities and were locked in Groves’s safe awaiting the president’s approval.

  From the beginning, Conant’s argument in favor of issuing the Smyth Report was that the sudden revelation of the bomb would generate tremendous excitement and, along with it, all kinds of reckless and irresponsible statements by unrestrained scientists. Presenting the basic scientific facts would provide a basis for rational discussion, and the gesture of openness would make it easier to hold the line on important military secrets. At a meeting on August 2, Conant had persuaded both Groves and Stimson, along with their reluctant British allies, that publishing the document would appease the critics and possibly avoid further political agitation, with relatively little sacrifice. As to Stimson’s concern that they might be divulging data that would assist the Soviet atomic effort, Conant had replied frankly that Time magazine could probably discover its entire contents in short order. After listening to all the arguments, Truman approved its immediate release.

  The Sunday newspapers carried lengthy excerpts of the Smyth Report. Conant, who oversaw the writing and editing of the book at every stage, clearly had a hand in composing the preface that placed the “ultimate responsibility” for the nation’s policy on its citizens, and trusted their ability to discharge their responsibilities wisely if informed by “a substantial group of engineers and scientific men who can understand such things and who can explain the potentialities of atomic bombs to their fellow citizens.”

  During the war, security requirements had meant that the decisions had to be made by only the scientists, the president, and a few advisors. In the postwar years, the nation would still face momentous decisions. If anyone was in a position to lead the way in the nuclear age, and grapple with the new dangers, Conant believed it was knowledgeable “scientific men” such as himself and Bush. While the bomb posed a serious threat, in the immediate future it would shift the balance of power substantially in favor of the United States. It was up to them to take advantage of the opportunity and find a way to achieve an international understanding to avert the catastrophe of nuclear warfare. He was eager to start shaping an atomic policy that might prevent the evils of his age from being repeated, even though privately he was less than sanguine that the weapon he had helped to create would lead to a world more fit for human habitation.

  * * *

  At breakfast time on August 10, Washington learned from Radio Tokyo broadcasts that Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration provided that Emperor Hirohito could remain as sovereign ruler. This first word was unofficial, but Truman convened his military advisors for a nine o’clock morning meeting. Stimson wanted to make it as easy as possible for the Japanese to acquiesce and argued that retaining the emperor, a revered symbol of authority, might work to the Allies’ advantage in the occupation. Byrnes was adamantly opposed and held out for unconditional surrender. While they debated a middle road, Truman decided against dropping the third atomic bomb—Los Alamos was already prepping another plutonium core—but ordered the Twentieth Air Force to continue its intensive firebombing campaign. Any concern Truman might have had that the American people would oppose retaining the emperor, whom the New York Times had only ten days earlier compared with Hitler, was erased by the overwhelming reaction of the troops in the field: “GIs in Pacific Go Wild with Joy,” read the Times headline on August 10. “Let ’Em Keep the Emperor They Say.”

  Meanwhile, the militarists in the Japanese Cabinet were also dissatisfied with the terms and staged an unsuccessful palace coup to prevent the broadcast of the surrender. But by then, even the emperor recognized that the time for face-saving had passed. The reality was the country was already defeated: fifty-eight major cities had been laid to waste, nine million were wounded or homeless, and more than two million had died.

  At noon on Tuesday, August 14, in a radio address to his subjects, who had never before heard his voice and could hardly understand his formal manner of speaking, the emperor stated that he had resolved to end the war “by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” In his speech, Hirohito acknowledged the “new and terrible weapon” that had forced him to succumb:

  “Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save millions of our subjects, or to atone before the hallowed spirits of our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.”

  At seven o’clock, Truman announced to the public that he had “received that afternoon a message from the Japanese government.” It was as if the whole country had been holding its breath waiting for the news of surrender. In Washington, the first reaction brought a sudden hush, and then buildings began emptying of people as they poured into the streets and pushed through Lafayette Park in their rush to reach the iron fence outside the White House. The reaction grew in intensity as the exuberant crowd formed an impromptu parade up Fourteenth Street, accompanied by blaring automobile horns, backfiring trucks, ringing bells, and the growing roar of human voices raised in triumph and exultation. It was a bright, warm summer evening, and every restaurant and bar was packed with sailors, soldiers, Wacs, Waves, and government girls toasting the hard-won peace. The raucous celebration carried on until dawn. In the morning, the streets of downtown Washington were littered with broken bottles, tossed hats, and torn paper. Scattered everywhere were trampled copies of the late edition of the Washington Star, bearing the banner headline “The War Is Over.”

  Conant could not s
hare in the unconditional jubilation that swept the nation. Tragically, peace in the Pacific did not come soon enough to spare his son, Jim, from harm. While attacking a Japanese convoy in the Luzon Strait, his submarine was spotted and driven down, and subjected to a depth charge assault of savage and sustained ferocity. Badly mauled, her position known to her attackers, the Halibut’s crew endured hours of desperate maneuvering before the enemy gave up, and the crippled sub finally surfaced in the dark and crept to the recently captured island of Saipan. Battered beyond repair, the Halibut was relegated to the scrap yard, but instead of being relieved of duty, her young deck officer was assigned to a new boat and ordered back to the war zone.II Just after he learned the bomb had been dropped, Conant received news that Jim had “cracked up” before going out on his sixth consecutive patrol and was in a hospital in Pearl Harbor. He was afflicted with what the doctor described as “a severe case of combat fatigue” and was being sent to a treatment facility on the Treasure Island naval base outside San Francisco.

  “Coming just at this time, the news was a kick in the teeth,” Conant wrote to his old friend Grenville Clark on August 17 in response to his letter congratulating him on the success of the bomb. “These psychoneurotic cases are bound to be long and distressing for all concerned,” he noted resignedly, though he hastened to add that it was “nothing” compared with what others had suffered. Conant had already confided in Groves, who advised him that the “mental condition of being shell-shocked” was quite characteristic for anyone caught in the midst of an explosion, as was a certain lingering nervousness, and complete recovery could take as long as two years.

  Stuck in Washington on official business, Conant telephoned Ted, who was on a layover in the Bay Area, and asked him to go see his brother. Unable to bring himself to discuss Jim’s condition, Conant did not let on about the nature of his wounds. Nineteen-year-old Ted strolled into the hospital carrying a book and a bar of chocolate for the patient, and was directed down long corridors, and through heavier and heavier steel doors with reinforced glass, until he was surprised to find himself at the locked psychiatric ward. The desolate, hostile, hallucinating figure he saw in the padded cell bore almost no resemblance to the elegant, white-uniformed lieutenant who had proudly showed off his sub to him eighteen months earlier, giving him a playful thump as he clambered onboard. Jim saluted him and then began raging. He was spewing profanities—every foul word in a sailor’s lexicon—all his fury and fitful accusations aimed directly at their parents. Shocked, Ted backed out of the room. It would be many years before he would forgive his father for sending him on a get-well visit without warning him that his brother was “stark-raving mad.”

  Every doctor’s letter—and there were many—describing Jim’s breakdown—and there would be more to come—was systematically shredded and discarded. Patty blamed his frayed nerves on the war and would not hear of any other cause, though she knew from her days as a hospital volunteer that the stress of prolonged combat could inflame existing neuroses. More than one psychiatrist would attempt to point out the history of mental illness in her family, to no avail. Denial was her way of coping. Conant went along with it, instinctively trying to shield her from any diagnosis that might add to her woes. He could barely cope himself. His personal stoicism ran too deep to countenance such a complete loss of self-control. He had pinned all his hopes on his firstborn, his favorite son and namesake. How could someone with such promise, with such a first-rate mind, become so emotionally unhinged? He simply could not fathom it. One psychiatrist would later remark to Ted that while he considered the Harvard scientist to be a brilliant man, he had never met anyone so obtuse about the complexities of the human brain.

  Conant hid his grief and worry as best he could and threw himself into the problems of peace, campaigning for national and international atomic energy policies to protect the country from the hazards of nuclear warfare. Haunted by the proof of the almost limitless destructive force he had helped unleash, his worldview darkened. Truman had told the nation that the bomb was “too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world,” and that was why America and Great Britain, who alone possessed the atomic “secret,” must act as “trustees of this new force.”

  Conant could not have said it better, but he worried that the new administration failed to appreciate the far-reaching implications of the weapon, and lacked the moral vision and political maturity to plot a wise course. The president had made only a guarded mention of the bomb to Stalin at Potsdam, and the decision not to enlist the Russians in collaboration and control did not augur well for postwar cooperation. The abiding faith in the future that once led Conant to observe of the Manhattan Project that “only optimists would have willingly entered this Alice in Wonderland area of exploration,” now gave way to new skepticism and distrust that there was any way to safeguard such great power. “The world is changed,” Stimson had stated at the Pentagon press conference on August 9. “The result of the bomb is so terrific that the responsibility of its possession and its use must weigh heavier on our minds and on our hearts.”

  In the fall of 1945, responsibility for the bomb weighed very heavily on Conant. Returning to Harvard, and the pulpit of Memorial Church, at his greatest moment of personal triumph, he spoke in somber tones of the challenges of the postwar world. “For military courage, we must substitute civic courage,” he explained at the opening day ceremony, addressing a student body filled with veterans. “Easy attitudes of complete cynicism on the one hand or Pollyanna optimism on the other are equally disastrous; it is a narrow and perilous knife edge [we] must walk.”

  There was a danger, which he had pointed to in a speech in 1943, that the principle “the end justifies the means,” applied in a time of war to ensure a speedy victory, “could engender such conditions in our minds that we would be unable to preserve liberty when the time of peace had come.” In the heat of struggle, a free nation might be forced to preserve its existence by measures that contradicted its founding principles—just as a battalion commander might have no choice but to resort to a ruthless human calculus to save his men, deciding to sacrifice a scouting party for the sake of the regiment. But in a time of peace, democratic countries had to repudiate the doctrine of the end justifies the means. America had to “reorient its sights” and struggle to find a way through the “shifting muddy ground” to the bedrock below—the basic ideals of equality and individual freedom it fought to preserve.

  While Conant cautioned against “fear, panic, and foolish, short-sighted action” in his public speeches, privately he was wrestling with his own post-atomic jitters. The reverberations from the two bombs dropped on Japan were still rolling in from around the world, but the lesson driven home was that they had changed forever how war was waged. Doleful columnists were predicting “push-button wars” and pilotless “robot planes” that trivialized transoceanic distances and made American cities and industry vulnerable to a “hail of atomic charges.” The significance of the atomic bomb as a military weapon lay in its compactness, in the tremendous power inherent in small volume. One B-29 carrying an atomic bomb was the equivalent of one or two thousand B-29s loaded to capacity with TNT. One plane could now do the work of an armada. “There was no defense against a surprise attack with atomic bombs,” he warned.

  Abandoning his usual cool detachment, Conant allowed himself to be caught up in the growing national paranoia. Only weeks after victory, he wrote War Department officials that atomic weapons were so effective they had to expect their use in the coming wars and begin paying serious attention to preparing for them. Inasmuch as laboratories and factories held the key to technical superiority, they would become the primary targets and would need to be defended. This “revolution in warfare” necessitated not only a change in military strategy but also a complete rethinking of postwar urban industrial planning if they wanted to survive an atomic attack, especially “the important problem of location of civilian industry and the nature of American cities.”

 
; The extent to which the scientist had come to fear his Frankenstein creation was evident to Harvard’s chief librarian, Keyes DeWitt Metcalf, when Conant summoned him to his office in September and presented him with a strange, almost fanciful proposal to protect the crown jewels of knowledge that sounded like something straight out of H. G. Wells’s World Brain.

  “We are living in a very different world since the explosion of the A-bomb,” Conant began, addressing the problem of what could be done in the event “much of our present civilization” was threatened with extinction. “We do not want to lose permanently a large part of civilization, as happened when Rome fell fifteen hundred years ago,” he continued, noting that the “greatest disaster” associated with its downfall was the loss of a wealth of information that was then recorded only in manuscripts that were destroyed or lost. “It has seemed to me that in the world’s present situation, it might be advisable to select the printed material that would preserve a record of our civilization for one we can hope will follow, microfilming it and making perhaps ten copies, and burying these in ten different places throughout the country.”

  Metcalf, who was married to Patty’s first cousin Elinor, listened in astonishment to Conant’s apocalyptic scenario and the secret precautions he was planning for the benefit of the survivors of World War III. “How many volumes would have to be copied, and what would it cost?” Conant asked. “How should the material be selected?” “How should it be organized?” Would Metcalf please look into the matter and get back to him in two weeks. Swallowing his dismay, the Harvard librarian did as he was asked and returned with a list of figures. In order to “preserve the material on which our present civilization is based,” he reported straight-faced, they would need to film 500,000 volumes, averaging 500 pages each, or a total of 250 million pages. Ten sets would amount to 2.5 billion pages in all. He did not attempt to go into the huge costs.