Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  On Monday Conant had lunch with Eisenhower at the Commodore Hotel and spent two hours briefing him on the Committee on the Present Danger’s latest proposals for increased military and economic aid to the Allies. Just as they were finishing their meal, Eisenhower turned to Dulles, a tall, severe-looking man, and prompted, “Foster, don’t you want to talk to Jim about Germany?” After they excused themselves and went into an adjacent room, Dulles offered him the high commissioner’s post. It would be a term of at least four years, he said, adding, “You won’t be much good to us for a year until you have shaken down in the job.”

  In his typically forthright fashion, Conant brought up his political liabilities, including his recent controversial stand against state funding for parochial schools—his argument that they were divisive of the social fabric had antagonized Catholics—which might affect his confirmation by the Senate. He also felt obliged to mention that while he favored the demilitarization and denazification of Germany, he had “grave doubts” about the administration’s plans to rearm the country. Impatient, Dulles brushed aside his reservations. “Well, we don’t have to agree on everything,” was his gruff response.

  As Conant boarded the five o’clock train for Cambridge, he was elated. “The Day! Oh Boy!” he scribbled in his diary that night. “Where will I be 4 years from now? Heaven knows, but at least not in this job.” He was done with Harvard. He could hardly believe it.

  The next day, Dulles telephoned to seal his appointment. “You are hooked,” he said. “There is nothing in the objections you raised.”

  Moments later, McCloy called to urge him to accept and impress upon him the importance of the job at this critical juncture. In a divided Europe, Germany—still under Allied and Soviet occupation—was on the front lines of the ideological struggle, and the key to whether there would be war or peace in the world. When the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, the hope was that this would be the beginning of a new era of reconciliation and reconstruction, reintegrating the war-torn country into the democratic European community, and that this new Germany would dedicate itself to the defense of the West. Its purpose was to become a strong partner in the cold war NATO alliance, the breastplate against Communist aggression. If continental unification could be achieved, the president wrote, “all lesser” problems facing Europe “would disappear.”

  Now Eisenhower was calling on Conant to complete the transition from military to civilian control and to conclude the recognition of the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, as a sovereign state—as well as its rearmament as part of the European Defense Community (EDC), which was a cornerstone of the administration’s European policy. The treaties had been signed in May 1952 but not yet ratified and were “hanging fire.” As the Berlin crisis had showed, a misstep could provoke the Russians and ignite another East-West showdown. The sooner he got to Bonn, McCloy told him, the better. Dulles was doing what he could to “rush through” Conant’s appointment, and he would be on the first plane after being cleared by the Senate.

  He and Patty began making plans for their new life. It was not the Cabinet post that her ambitious young suitor had promised during their courting days, but as good as. She was giddy with excitement and immediately began brushing up on her rusty German, which, she reminded him, had always been much better than his. On Christmas Eve a warm note arrived from “Ike” expressing his gratitude at Conant’s “readiness to help. I scarcely need tell you,” Eisenhower added, “what a great satisfaction it is to know that you will be on the team.” He agreed to “keep the matter completely under cover” until Conant had a chance to inform the governors of the university. Three days later, another letter came from Eisenhower: “How delighted I am with the prospect of having you with us,” he wrote. “I find myself almost bursting with the desire to tell my friends about our good fortune in this regard.”

  Conant spent the weekend writing notes to old friends he wanted to tell personally and present some justifications for his decision, ahead of the White House announcement. Twenty years in the Harvard trenches, he wrote George Kistiakowsky, was “long enough to serve a sentence for youthful indiscretion.”

  In the hectic days that followed, McCloy called several times to say that speed was of the essence. Conant did not have to be persuaded. He was in a hurry to go. He hated “lengthy farewells,” and his innate horror of fuss made him want to get the mawkish scenes behind him as fast as possible. It had not been a hard decision. As he told his old friend Bill Marbury when he tendered his resignation, he was “tired of exercising the same muscles.” After two decades at the helm of Harvard, Conant was tired of passing the collection bucket around the Brahmin elite, tired of complaints about his controversial political stands, tired of the bureaucratic battles. Just the previous spring, two major rows tried his patience, the first over his opposition to state funding for parochial schools, and the second over his reorganization of the slumping football program and “firing without warning” the director of athletics—both of which earned him more brickbats than plaudits.

  Even his critics had to concede that despite his playing “hooky” to a great degree during the war years, Conant had been an inventive, modernizing president, ushering in the era of “Big Science” and introducing a series of significant improvements and additions that had transformed Harvard from a provincial school to a leading national university. His National Scholarship program opened the college to needy students from all parts of the country, setting a precedent that other leading American universities would soon follow, while his tenure reform and system of ad hoc committees to oversee permanent appointments—so resented at the time—kept the faculty robust and guaranteed that talent would continue to converge there. His relentless focus on merit broadened the student body and weakened the quota system designed to limit the admission of Jewish and African American students. In establishing the Nieman Fellowship, he sought to elevate the standards of journalism by bringing reporters to Harvard to pursue further studies. Conant created the Littauer School of Public Administration to enable government officials to study policy, and transformed the Harvard School of Education into one of the major training centers for public school administrators. The Harvard report General Education in Free Society, published in 1945, became the blueprint for college curricula and, along with the required “general education” courses, influenced the next two generations of students and professors. Under his stewardship, Harvard’s endowment grew from $138 million to $290 million—few presidents could hope to leave a richer legacy.

  That fall, Newsweek had put him on the cover as the undisputed leader of American education, but noted of his controversial tenure, “being a seer is no guarantee of wholesale approval.” For his part, Conant felt he had given Harvard his all and was ready for a fresh challenge.

  On New Year’s Day Conant broke the news to the Harvard Corporation. His announcement, he recorded in his diary, was greeted with “thunderous silence.” Informing the Overseers two weeks later proved anticlimactic. A heavy New England snowstorm cut down on attendance, and a morning radio broadcast carried the story. He explained that the Corporation had made him president emeritus from September 1, 1953—he would be sixty, the age at which the by-laws allowed him to retire—and granted him a leave of absence until that date. “I shall be leaving Harvard permanently,” he concluded, metaphorically shutting the door behind him.

  His sudden departure shocked observers of the national scene from Cambridge to Washington. “Even in a period of surprises, the resignation of President James Bryant Conant and his acceptance of the highest American diplomatic post at Bonn will startle many,” opined the Boston Daily Globe. “Conant has been, during the last 20 years, so bright a star in the galaxy of American educators, particularly in the realms of science, that it is difficult to think of him as a moveable body.”

  It was not, however, a complete surprise on Harvard’s campus. His tête-à-tête with Eisenhower in New York just before Christmas ha
d not gone unnoticed, and rumors abounded. The Harvard community had its own insular view of Conant’s latest globetrotting enterprise, which it did not necessarily perceive as graduating to greater glory. “It seemed ten steps down,” commented McGeorge Bundy, whose name was already being mentioned as a possible successor, “for the president of Harvard to merely run Germany.”

  The editorials on his appointment, from the New York Times to the Tribune, applauded him for putting his country’s problems before Harvard’s, and praised a life dedicated to defending democracy and the principles of freedom. For once, the Crimson was not critical: “Conant reached greatness,” wrote the editors. “His courage, his calm and modest determination, and his sense of high purpose have infected all those whom he has touched. Now these same qualities have called him to a new task, and certainly it too is a crucial one. We cannot pass judgment on his choice, nor can we doubt its wisdom. But we cannot deny a sense of personal loss, because we are students in America and because we are Harvard students.”

  Hundreds of letters and telegrams came from prominent alumni, fellow educators, and public figures across the country paying tribute to his achievements, mourning the passing of an era, and hailing Eisenhower’s new envoy as the man of the hour. A few bemoaned his leaving while Joe McCarthy’s congressional investigations still hung like a dark cloud over Harvard, and begged him to stay and continue to fight. “You alone could give altitude to the opposition and courage to the quavering academes,” wrote Agnes E. Meyer, an influential journalist and education activist who was married to Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer.

  But his wartime colleagues understood the urge to buckle on new armor and slay new dragons. “The next time I see you, I will click heels and salute!” cheered Bush in an ironic reference to the Fascist forces that would need to be eradicated once and for all if democracy were to flourish in Germany. Oppenheimer, too, recognized the lure of such a momentous challenge, exclaiming to a colleague, “Typical of the physical scientist! To give up something very difficult so as to try the impossible!”

  Conant said much the same thing when he attempted to explain his abrupt exit to Percy Bridgman, the laboratory partner with whom he had just missed inventing synthetic rubber all those years ago. “I would like to be frank with an old friend,” he wrote, “and to say that one of the primary reasons for my undertaking the difficult assignment is the feeling that I wanted to try my hand at one more tough task before I die.”

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  Man of the Hour

  At a time when the whole European treaty system and the progress toward European unification hang in the balance, there is urgent need of a man of impressive stature in that strategic post. President Conant is just the man to fill the need.

  —New York Times editorial, January 13, 1953

  For Conant, the diplomatic assignment felt like coming full circle. “Germany has been a thread running all through my life,” he told a reporter as they toured the bombed-out ruins of Berlin, the former capital of Germany, now divided and under four-power control, and located 110 miles within what used to be the Soviet zone of occupation and was now the German Democratic Republic (GDR). When the Federal Republic was formed in 1949, Bonn became the de facto headquarters of the West German government, but Berlin remained the de jure capital and all-important symbol of resistance. Conant liked to make a show of driving through the Eastern sector in the high commissioner’s shiny black Cadillac sedan, with the American and High Commission flags flying from its front fenders, as a way of letting Berliners—and the Russians—know he was there.

  After playing a leading role in the devastating military defeat of Germany, he had returned as its defender, not conqueror. This new partitioned nation now stood at the very heart of the cold war conflict. Conant’s task was to restore order in the hotly contested region and protect it from the Russians, who had registered their displeasure at the proposed European Defense Community (EDC) by sealing off the East German border and imposing on the Western sector of Berlin what was known as the “little blockade,” to distinguish it from the big blockade that precipitated the Berlin crisis of 1948. Frightened of being forever trapped in the Communist bloc, East Germans were finding subterranean routes through the Russian barriers and converging on West Berlin at the rate of three thousand a day. On top of the scores of refugees, the prospect of rearmament was the cause of enormous uncertainty, as was the fate of Berlin itself, to be determined by separate negotiations between the East and the West. After having spoken out so much about a strong Europe being the key to the defense of the free world, Conant could not help feeling there was a certain “symmetry” to his coming back to bring the emerging Federal Republic solidly into the Western democratic alliance and NATO.

  He had been thrown right into the thick of things. Between the day that Eisenhower named him high commissioner for Germany and his arrival in Bonn on February 11, through his CIA briefing and hostile grilling before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it was exactly a month. He had expected McCarthy to give him trouble—the usual charges about Harvard being “soft on Communism”—but the Wisconsin senator had remained strangely silent. Instead, most of the questions had come from Republican senators who zeroed in on his infamous claim in the Atlantic that he favored the “complete redistribution of property every generation.” They demanded to know if Conant’s refusal to investigate radicals on Harvard’s faculty meant their German counterparts would be able to “pull the wool over his eyes.”

  What swung the two-day confirmation hearing in his favor was that Eisenhower, who had courted McCarthy just enough to win his endorsement for the presidency, exerted pressure on the junior senator from Wisconsin not to hold up the appointment. McCarthy, who by his own admission was gearing up for an “all-out fight,” had researchers digging into every phase of Conant’s career, even asking a sharp young Yale author named William F. Buckley Jr. to prepare a speech that would help scuttle his nomination. After Ike dispatched Nixon to drive home his message, McCarthy backed down, writing Eisenhower that even though he was “much opposed to Conant,” he would not carry it to the Senate floor because he did not “want to make a row.” Massachusetts senator Leverett Saltonstall, his college classmate, also came to Conant’s aid and helped to push through his confirmation as the last order of business on Friday, February 6.

  He was sworn in the very next day, wearing in the lapel of his best dark suit the rosette representing the Medal for Merit awarded to him for his wartime contributions. It was all done with a minimum of formality, Saturday morning not being the usual time for such a ceremony. Seventy-two hours later, “loaded down with information,” he left for Germany on a plane from New York. It all happened so quickly that Patty was not finished with her packing and household arrangements and had to follow on a later flight. When the celebrated American scientist-turned-diplomat picked up his wife at the Frankfurt airport on February 12, his welcoming embrace—“Der Kuss!”—was captured by dozens of photographers and made the front page of newspapers around the world. The press was friendly, their questions bland. Conant was amused by “such rapid changes in fortune.” He was now a diplomat and “no longer a controversial figure.”

  Returning to Germany after an absence of twenty-three years, Conant had no idea what to expect. He was not sure what the lingering effects of Hitler’s regime might be, or, as he put it to a journalist, “how many Nazis might still be hiding under the bushes.” He no longer thought of the Germany of old but of “Germany as a bulwark” against any Soviet plans to expand its Communist regime.

  As high commissioner, he was in effect military governor of West Germany, inheriting the mantle passed down by Eisenhower himself, who had taken charge when it was a shattered country on the brink of mass starvation. After Ike, with short intervals when the post was held by deputies, came the formidable General Lucius D. Clay, and then the banker John J. McCloy, who used his almost dictatorial powers to promote democracy and lay
the groundwork for the booming economic revival of West Germany by dispensing almost $3 billion worth of Marshall Plan funds. At the same time, Conant was also chief of the US Mission in West Berlin.

  There were now two Germanys, with two capitals, two currencies, and two ideologies, and the escalating tensions with the Russians had all but doomed West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s hopes for reunification. While Conant privately accepted the logic of a divided Germany, Secretary of State Dulles had warned that the fall of the pro-American Adenauer government would be “disastrous,” so the new high commissioner was pledged to plug the revered seventy-seven-year-old leader’s campaign for unity and do all he could to make sure he won reelection.

  The situation was confusing from the outset, and Conant’s first challenge was to complete the job the State Department thought it had already accomplished: get the West Germans and the French—who could not quite bring themselves to believe in the rapprochement—to put aside their ancient feuds and ratify the European Defense Community (EDC) treaty, which would create a continental army of two million men. As soon as the pact was signed, it would abolish the High Commission, restore normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany, and lead to the exchange of ambassadors. Conant was convinced that the sooner he could end the occupation and establish West Germany as a sovereign nation, with its own army, the better it would be able to defend against the peril on its own doorstep. For the United States, advancing West Germany’s postwar path “from pariah to partner” was pragmatic national self-interest: a peaceful, prosperous Germany, integrated in Europe and aligned with America, preserved German industry and resources for the West and ensured order.