Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  But his reformer’s zeal, combined with his desire to make certain the atomic program remained above reproach, drove him toward a dogmatism that he would later regret. “The government, in resolving doubts on these matters about employees, including scientists, must settle the case in favor of the government rather than the individual,” Conant asserted. “If a shadow of a doubt exists, the individual should be prevented from having access to confidential information.” The academy adopted the tougher standard on February 3, 1949, and Conant sent it to Truman with “the hope that you will find it of interest and possible usefulness.”

  By the spring of 1949, with the anti-Communist crusade extending to the classroom, Conant resorted to what Schlesinger and many of his liberal Harvard colleagues viewed as an “extreme measure” to protect the educational system from the pernicious investigations. HUAC had sent a letter to eighty-one colleges demanding lists of textbooks currently in use in the fields of literature, economics, history, political science, and geography. After working to defeat another Massachusetts loyalty oath bill proposed by State Assistant Attorney General Clarence Barnes the previous year, Conant now backtracked on that principled stand and gave in to the watchdogs, hoping that by throwing them a bone he could prevent the wholesale banning of books and blacklisting of professors.

  On June 9 the New York Times announced, “Eisenhower and Conant in Group Barring Communists as Teachers,” the two university presidents joining eighteen other prominent educators in signing a statement declaring that membership in the Communist Party involved “adherence to doctrine and disciplines completely inconsistent with the principles of freedom on which American education depends.” Belonging to a movement characterized by conspiracy and deceit, the Education Policies Commission’s (EPC) fifty-four-page pamphlet American Education and International Tensions concluded, rendered an individual “unfit to discharge the duties of a teacher in this country.”

  It was a calculated, cynical tactic that Conant, as one of the leaders of the EPC, justified as pragmatic politics. The move showed how far he was willing to go to protect the independence of the university and keep the FBI from becoming a fixture on campus. He knew it would be too far for some and that the die-hard civil libertarians would judge him harshly, noting, “A lot of people would say I sold myself down the road to the reactionaries.”

  Complicating matters, Conant had enlisted the help of Grenville Clark in fending off Frank B. Ober, a wealthy, conservative Harvard Law alumnus who as a state legislator had sponsored the Maryland Subversive Activities Act of 1949, and that spring launched a campaign to end all financial contributions to the university until all the radical professors were discovered and fired. Conant was willing to fire avowed Communists, but he would do without Ober’s money before he got into the business of trying to “ferret out” clandestine party members, convinced that policing professors could seriously damage the university. Clark responded to Ober’s complaints with a double-barreled twelve-page letter-cum-legal-brief reaffirming the university’s refusal to censure its faculty for unpopular views, stating categorically, “Harvard cannot be influenced at all to depart from her basic tradition of freedom by any fear that gifts will be withheld.”

  Unfortunately, the publication of the EPC’s strong statement barring Communist teachers coincided with the Harvard Alumni Bulletin’s reprinting of the Clark-Ober letters, exposing Conant’s somewhat inconsistent stands on academic freedom and placing him, he later admitted, in “an almost indefensible position.” Seeking to explain himself, to both the faculty, which approved of the EPC’s anti-Communist policy two to one, and the students, who were opposed by the same margin, he gave a talk to the university on June 22.

  “In this period of a cold war,” he told them, “I do not believe the usual rules as to political parties apply to the Communist Party.” Drawing a distinction between heresy and subversion, he likened Communists to a group of spies or saboteurs in an enemy country. Sticking to his statement that he would not knowingly appoint “card-holding members of the Communist Party” to the teaching profession, and calling the ban the “single exception which is the unique product of this century,” he then concluded with his usual ringing rhetoric: “As long as I am president of the university, I can assure you there will be no policy of inquiring into the political views of members of the staff.”

  Harvard’s battles with HUAC were far from over, and Conant’s stern opposition to faculty members who took the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination continued to aggravate critics. But even the gadflies on the Crimson conceded that he came up with the “answer to end all answers to the ‘iffy’ question” in an interview after the commencement exercises of Yeshiva University, where he received an honorary degree. When asked what he would do if a member of the faculty walked into his office and announced his allegiance to Moscow, Harvard’s president, exasperated by the vexing issue, retorted, “I would send for a psychiatrist.”

  Conant made other accommodations during this fraught period that indicate his actions were often ruled by expediency and that his support of academic freedom was not as unfaltering as it ought to have been. “Conant talked one way and acted another,” was author Sigmund Diamond’s withering description of the Harvard president’s conduct when, under pressure from the Carnegie Corporation, he acquiesced in the forced resignation of a young radical historian from the Russian Research Center, H. Stuart Hughes, the grandson of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. In his book Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955, Diamond contends that Conant allowed the CIA to vet members of the Russian center—modeled on the research and analysis branch of the OSS—so that it became “the locus of a fruitful collaboration between the intelligence agencies and Harvard,” hoping this cooperation would be a way of keeping Hoover at bay while still maintaining good relations with the government and preserving all those lucrative research grants. There is little evidence of Conant’s direct personal involvement in the CIA and FBI collaboration that Diamond alleges, although it could be argued that his willingness to look the other way was bad enough.I

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  In desperate need of “some peace and quiet,” the Conants left for their annual August sojourn in the Canadian Rockies, eager to escape the summer heat and boiling controversy. As was her habit, Patty fretted about their holiday plans and whether there was enough to do to keep her husband occupied during his time off. “I always feel dubious about vacations with Jim because he is theoretically ‘against’ them, and expects so much from any outlay of his precious time that I’m never sure that the best-laid plans will turn out satisfactorily,” she wrote her mother. At the end of their first week, she was relieved to report that “after the usual early stages of suspended judgment,” he seemed to be enjoying himself, and was so absorbed in his geopolitical contemplations and outdoor exertions that “the days aren’t long enough. I’m also grateful that the fish are cooperating,” she added, “something one can’t always count on!”

  With his bad back forcing him to retire from what he thought of as “real” climbing, Conant had to settle for long all-day rambles in the wilderness, losing himself in the unspoiled alpine meadows and measureless solitude. Earlier in the summer, on a drive from Berkeley to San Francisco with the physicists Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, he had intimated that he was “burned out” and was finding his duties as an atomic advisor increasingly burdensome. When Lawrence tried to engage him on the subject of radiological warfare, Conant raised his hands to stave him off, saying in effect that he had “done his job during the war” and was too old and tired to be exploring new weapons of mass destruction. Disillusionment, fatigue, and the failure to achieve any kind of international cooperation had worn him down and dimmed his enthusiasm for nuclear policy.

  That July marked the fourth anniversary of Trinity. Just days after the test, full of plans for the future, Conant had jotted down a list of “personal ambitions” on a scrap
of blue Harvard stationary: “What JBC would like to do before death or senility overtakes him.” There were books he wanted to write: on chemistry, the philosophy of science, poetry, and public education. A course he wanted to teach on Critical Phases in the Advancement of Knowledge. Subjects he wanted to study intensively—the seventeenth century—with an eye to still more books. All he had managed was Education in a Divided World and another slim volume, On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach, an attempt to give readers a better understanding of modern achievements by providing a basic grounding in the trial-and-error nature of experimental inquiry. The previous fall, in a break with a long-standing Harvard tradition that its presidents did not teach, he had actually taught a course based on the book. Still, four years had passed, and he had hardly made a dent in the list.

  There were also fences to mend. He was trying to spend more time with Patty and had promised to dine with her at home twice a week. He had been far too preoccupied and had left her “holding the bag” after their son’s breakdown, to an unfair extent. This was also the first time in many years that they were sharing their holiday with Ted, now twenty-three, on summer break from Swarthmore College, where he enrolled after being discharged from the merchant marines. Father and son were still uneasy in each other’s company, but they had a shared passion for the mountains, and the lofty summits and vast expanses gave them a fresh perspective and seemed to allow for their own “armed truce,” however temporary. Patty was pleased to see them “having an experience of shared exhilaration and companionship that is unique to both of them.”

  Acknowledging the bumpy road they had traveled to get here, she confided to her mother, “You can imagine how happy it makes me to see them having such fun together—with all the pressures of 17 Quincy St. far away.” With their oldest son seeming more like himself every day, and starting a new job as a reporter in Chicago, she felt for once that all was right with the world. “Our vacation has been a great success,” she scribbled at the end of her last letter on September 4. “Jim & I have never known such uninterrupted sunshine.”

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  I. Lest anyone accuse him of having a secret axe to grind, Sigmund Diamond disclosed that he was dismissed from Harvard by McGeorge Bundy in 1954, a year after Conant’s retirement, because he refused to talk to the FBI about his and former associates’ ties to the Communist Party.

  CHAPTER 20

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  A Rotten Business

  When I am in Washington, it seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum.

  —JBC to Bernard Baruch

  In September 1949 Conant was en route to Cambridge, after his annual swing through the California Harvard Clubs, when he was summoned from his railroad car to receive an urgent telephone call from Washington. Picking up the receiver, he heard a voice relay the message—scrambled by the usual OSRD shorthand—he had dreaded since the start of the arms race in 1945: “They have it.” An American B-29 weather reconnaissance plane on routine patrol over the North Pacific had picked up a radioactivity count that was higher than usual. Laboratory analysis confirmed the presence of fission isotopes. By September 19, Bush’s hastily organized panel of experts concluded that the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb.

  On September 23 Truman made a terse announcement: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” The president wisely decided to conceal Washington’s shock and alarm, and, in an effort to minimize public anxiety, endeavored to put the Soviet explosion in context, explaining that the basic facts of nuclear fission were available for all nations to exploit, and that it had been known the American monopoly would eventually be broken. Conant had been certain the Russians would get there, just not this soon. Unlike Bush and Groves, who had always dismissed his fear of a rival in the race, he had given a great deal of thought to this day. The Russian achievement demonstrated once and for all the futility of secrecy. The balance of power was now a balance of terror, but it did not alter his attitude toward the Soviet challenge: the two countries were still locked in a stalemate, and it was more evident than ever that they must work toward international control, with the long-term goal of gradual disarmament.

  The news of Russia’s accomplishment sent a collective shiver through the closed community of nuclear physicists and weapons experts, touching off an intense inner struggle over the correct response to the new Soviet threat. The immediate reaction of most of Conant’s peers was that the United States should accelerate its atomic program to increase its lead over the Soviet Union, with some advocating they move aggressively to develop a hydrogen bomb. America’s current stockpile of atomic warheads numbered about two hundred, with technical advances having increased the explosive power achievable by a factor of five or more. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had already put forward a proposal that summer to expand the production of weapons and fissionable material, including a hugely improved fission bomb equivalent to five hundred thousand tons of TNT. But now that the Soviets had caught up, the question was whether this would be enough to maintain the National Security Council strategy of “overwhelming superiority” and continue to act as a deterrent to war.

  This question added sudden urgency to the discussion of the hydrogen bomb and sent Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence scurrying to Washington to launch a campaign to persuade the president to mount a crash program to develop what some viewed as the ultimate winning weapon. AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss, the lone conservative Republican appointee, articulated their position. “The time has come to make a quantum jump in our planning,” he wrote, arguing that only the most powerful offensive weapons could provide a reliable defense against Soviet domination. “We should now make an intensive effort to get ahead with the Super . . . that is the way to stay ahead.”

  Conant was quickly drawn into the center of the debate when Strauss urged Truman to consider inaugurating a thermonuclear weapons program, and the president referred the issue to the AEC’s General Advisory Committee. Horrified at the prospect, Conant took prompt personal control of the H-bomb opposition, impressing on Oppenheimer, as chairman of the GAC, that the correct response to the Soviet threat would be to reinvigorate the existing atomic program, not rush into a breakneck effort to build the still hypothetical superbomb. It was strategically wrong, to say nothing of the moral arguments against building a weapon capable of almost unlimited destruction. Oppenheimer, who also had reservations about the much more powerful fusion bomb, attempted to rein in an excited Teller when he called hours after the announcement of the Soviet test. “Just go back to Los Alamos and keep working,” he told him curtly, then added, “Keep your shirt on.”

  Teller was stung by Oppenheimer’s hostile reaction. An insistent advocate of the Super since 1942, Teller was not going to give up the chance to explore the new weapon and possibly lead his own bomb laboratory. He had been aghast when Oppenheimer had dropped by his Los Alamos office the day after peace was declared in August 1945 and informed him, “With the war over, there is no reason to continue work on the hydrogen bomb.” Teller’s traumatic childhood memories of the Fascist persecution of Jews in Hungary had made him a ferocious anti-Communist, and he equated national security with maximum firepower. He found Oppenheimer’s nonchalant attitude almost frightening. His feelings were complicated by jealousy—the October cover of Life touted the tall, handsome physicist as the “No. 1 Thinker on Atomic Energy”—and deep resentment that Oppenheimer was regarded as “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” Now he saw a chance to be father of the hydrogen bomb, and realize his ambition to develop the new weapon and make certain the United States maintained its nuclear superiority.

  Teller found an eager ally in Lawrence, who was also politically “at the opposite end of the spectrum” from most of the members of the GAC and was in search of a new role—and new source of funding—for his cyclotrons. The Berkeley physicist had listened with rapt attention as a confident Teller explained that the hydrogen bomb was feasible: the proje
ct would require large quantities of tritium (a form of heavy hydrogen) that would in turn require the construction of a huge production reactor using heavy water instead of graphite as a moderator. It would take a big, concerted effort—comparable to the Manhattan Project—to produce such a big bomb. Lawrence, galvanized by the challenge, recruited his colleague Luis Alvarez to the cause, and they left to meet with Teller in Los Alamos on Friday, October 7, 1949. Then they flew directly to Washington that weekend and threw themselves into whipping up military and congressional support for their plan. David Lilienthal, who like Conant believed that dependence on the atomic arsenal created a “false sense of security,” was revolted by the “bloodthirsty” trio’s ardor for a weapon of such awful power.

  From the start, the GAC had been divided about the feasibility and advisability of the Super. Conant had made no secret of his views, speculating grimly about how many H-bombs it would take to contaminate the atmosphere and the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by a few gigantic blasts. On one occasion, he muttered to fellow committee member I. I. Rabi that developing the weapon would “only louse up the world still more.” He loathed Lewis Strauss. The irritating, self-important Wall Street banker’s appointment to the AEC was one the main reasons he had turned down the chairmanship. Aware that Oppenheimer was carefully weighing all the alternatives before making such a far-reaching policy decision, Conant sought to exert his influence. He wrote a letter elaborating the reasons he was against any all-out effort that might disrupt the Los Alamos atomic program in favor of a weapon of such dubious feasibility, stating emphatically that the crash program to build the Super would go ahead “over my dead body.”