Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  His final months were marked by a series of crises and a growing gap between American rhetoric and the reality of the world situation. The Suez Canal crisis blew up in late July, when Egyptian president General Gamal Abdel Nasser announced he was nationalizing the canal after months of tensions with Britain, France, and Israel. The prospect of war between the US’s Allies and the influential Middle Eastern power, and the possibility the Soviets might intervene to assist Nasser, forced Eisenhower, who was still recovering from abdominal surgery, back into command. When Conant paid a visit to the Oval Office on September 7 before returning to Germany, he found the president looking tired and troubled, grappling with the difficult question of how to deal with Egypt’s nationalist leader. “How to cut Nasser down to size without war or uniting the Arabs?” was how Eisenhower defined the dilemma, though Conant knew that, unlike Dulles, at the deepest levels, his old friend was categorically opposed to the use of military force.

  With US and NATO officials distracted by the Suez affair, the Russians moved into Budapest on November 1, crushing the uprising in the Hungarian capital and overthrowing the government. While Conant was digesting this report, Moscow delivered to Bonn a threatening note warning that London and Paris were vulnerable to nuclear attack if they continued down the path of aggression. “What sounded like a herald of World War III from the Kremlin came last night,” Conant recorded in his diary, more frightened than he cared to admit. “We are quite uncertain what the future has in store.”

  Amid the chaos of events and news that Dulles had undergone surgery, Conant offered to stay on in Berlin until the spring. It would accommodate the secretary’s convalescence for what turned out to be colon cancer and give Eisenhower, who had easily won reelection, more time to find a suitable replacement. But on January 10, 1957, he was somewhat startled to receive a sealed letter from Dulles accepting his resignation effective as of February 15, coinciding with a planned trip to the United States for a series of speaking engagements. It took another two weeks for the White House to issue the official announcement, leaving Conant to wonder if at the last minute there had been “a difference of opinion at the State Department.” The president sent a letter expressing his “deep personal regret” that Conant was leaving and thanked him for his outstanding work in seeing the return of Germany to “its rightful place in the family of nations.” On a more personal note, Eisenhower added that he would miss his old friend’s “wise counsel on which I drew so frequently.”

  Conant, who had been taken aback by his abrupt dismissal, was sorry to be leaving in such a hasty and undignified fashion, but on later reflection, he felt almost relieved. He was eager to be finished with his ambassadorial duties so that he could plunge into his new work. The press had sniffed out his Carnegie project and broke the story the moment his resignation was announced, igniting something of a bidding war for his services. There were the usual rumors that he would go into politics, and the Boston Herald named him as a possible running mate for Vice President Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.

  In their final weeks in Bonn, the Conants attended the requisite round of farewell parties, received more parting gifts than they knew what to do with, and bid good-bye to their embassy staff, “quite a heart-rending business,” Patty reported to her mother. On February 19 they flew to New York and took up residence in the Algonquin Hotel, their temporary address until they decided where to settle. After living in official housing for more than a quarter century, they had no place to call home.

  * * *

  I. Clark pursued his grievance in a libel suit in the United States District Court but died before it could be settled.

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  Warrior Educator

  What will be needed is not more engineers and scientists, but a people who will not panic and political leaders of wisdom, courage, and devotion, with capacity for solving intricate human problems. Not more Einsteins, but more Washingtons and Madisons.

  —JBC to President Eisenhower

  In the summer of 1957, Edward R. Murrow made a special trip to Randolph, New Hampshire, to see Conant, who had recently returned from a two-month sojourn in Switzerland. They had known each other since the war and were old friends, and had joined forces on the Committee on the Present Danger. The last time they had seen each other was in the fall of 1953, when the CBS broadcaster had interviewed Germany’s new high commissioner in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The interview had made news because a border incident had taken place while the cameras were rolling, capturing the dramatic scene as West German police used their nightsticks to turn back a group of young Communists who were trying to cross into the Western sector.

  Sitting on the porch of Conant’s summer home and sipping lemonade, they laughed at the memory of the sensational headlines and caught each other up on the more prosaic events in their lives. Both men were older and grayer, a touch more austere in appearance, but neither had changed much, each still as tough and lean as winter lobster. Murrow, whose hard-hitting reports had helped lead to the downfall of Joseph McCarthy, hosted his own weekly television show on CBS called See It Now, which covered important issues as well as profiles of famous actors, musicians, and newsmakers. He had conducted an interview with Oppenheimer, and one with Truman in 1955 in which the president admitted that dropping the bomb had not been a difficult decision—the hard choice had been to intervene in Korea, which started a war. Murrow was intruding on Conant’s holiday to see if he could persuade him to cooperate with a program about his remarkable career of public service, which the Washington Post had hailed as that of a man “who could indeed be called a leader of leaders.” It would cover his pioneering Manhattan Project role, activities as a nuclear policy maker, and contributions to the defense of Germany, as well as his perspective on the arms race and their chances of imminent extinction.

  Conant turned him down flat, his twinkly good humor gone. He did not want a documentary highlighting his wartime service. Nor would he appear in See It Now’s upcoming two-part series on atomic energy. He took no pride in the creation of the atomic bomb because of the ongoing threat to the world posed by nuclear weapons. He had no wish to revisit that part of his life. Fortunately, he had been active on other fronts—as a chemist, university president, and statesman. Now, at age sixty-four, he intended to devote his remaining time—“as long as I can write and talk”—to education in a time of revolutionary change. He was in the midst of organizing a major study of the nation’s public high schools, which he believed were the “vast engine of democracy” and the American way of life. It was backed by a generous $350,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, which had rented him offices at 555 Fifth Avenue in New York, footed the bill for a small staff of former principals and professors, and arranged for what in military terms was called “logistical support” from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, which he’d helped start and served for years on the governing board.

  His plan of attack remained unchanged: assign the most talented people to the research study, identify the best formula for change, apply the ideas in a test case, and make the results public in an effort to foment action. After Labor Day, he would begin inspecting as many schools across the country as possible, observing classrooms and interviewing students, teachers, and administrators. He intended to devote a year to his exploration, and would publish his findings and recommendations in book form. He envisioned other education initiatives down the road, and other books. What he did not say in so many words, but perhaps did not need to, was that he intended this work to be his legacy—not the bomb.

  He would remain gun-shy about subsequent efforts to chronicle his storied career. He rebuffed a similar approach from CBS’s Eric Sevareid and rejected his publisher’s initial suggestion that he write about his life, stating his “strong prejudice against people who wrote autobiographies.” Conant was ultimately persuaded to write a memoir of his Harvard presidency, but it was so dry and devoid of per
sonal detail that after reading the finished manuscript, his editor had to request the inclusion of at least a few mentions of his wife and children.

  It was not simply that he was averse to examining his actions and motivations; he had a genuine horror of delving into the past. Conant had spent most of his married life trying to keep his family’s private tragedies out of public view, in part out of a sense of self-preservation, and in part to protect his wife from further heartache. His fear of exposure had increased in proportion to his fame. Over the years, he had gone to great lengths to preserve the carefully curated image of a proper Boston family that he and Patty presented to the world. No matter how hard he tried, however, he was powerless to prevent the inherited maladies of the Richards family from wreaking havoc with their lives. While in Germany, he and Patty had been rocked by the news of the suicide of her youngest brother. In November 1953, just before Thanksgiving, Thayer had thrown a topcoat over his pajamas and driven to the railway station near his home in Blacksburg, Virginia, and then laid down on the tracks. He was forty-eight.

  Conant attributed his death to the same endogenous depression that twelve years earlier had claimed Patty’s brother Bill. Despite a fortunate start, Thayer’s life had been full of disappointment. He had wanted to be a naval architect but ended up teaching design at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and in recent years had struggled to support his wife and twin boys. Bankrupted by his wife’s breakdowns and hospitalizations, and having begged money from family and friends until they cut him off, he had finally buckled under the weight of debt and despair. Conant, hoping to keep it out of the press, decided against returning home for the funeral. Patty wrote her grief-stricken mother how “brave and wise” she was in coping on her own and for “carrying your burden very gallantly.” She assured her that she “need not worry too much about Thayer’s boys,” both juniors at Harvard, as they appeared “intelligent, well-balanced and happy-natured.” But by then, of course, there was every reason to worry. Faced with this latest evidence of her family’s genetic predisposition to mental illness, Conant feared there was a very real risk the disease was being passed down from one generation to the next.

  Perhaps for this reason as much as for any past difficulties, Conant remained wary of his adult sons. He was always braced for bad news. On the surface, Jim, a reporter in the Montreal office of Time, seemed to be stable and making a go of it as a journalist, but there were ominous signs of strain. He had married a pretty young woman, Norice O’Malley, with a four-year-old daughter. Raised a strict Catholic, her parents had managed to have her first marriage annulled and had adamantly opposed another ill-conceived union, and refused to attend the wedding. In rapid succession, the couple had a daughter and a son of their own. When Jim and his young family had visited Randolph that summer, they did not appear to be coping well. Jim was moody and tired from working long, unpredictable reporters’ hours. He was drinking more than he should and chain-smoked as if his life depended on it. Patty was too besotted with her grandchildren to notice, but Conant, who did not miss much, was concerned that the demands of the job, lack of sleep, and three small children might be his son’s undoing. He sent Jim off with a hefty check and hoped it would ease some of his financial worries. With advancing age had come the inevitable regrets about his inadequacies as a father, and Conant, following his father-in-law’s example, used money as a means of assuaging his guilt.

  As usual, the news about Ted was even more troubling. Through the diplomatic grapevine, they received word that their younger son, who had been living in South Korea on and off since the war in 1950, was planning to elope after a whirlwind two-week romance. They had scarcely seen him in recent years and knew little about his life beyond the fact that he had been working in the television and film unit of the United Nations and various offshoot information agencies, and was trying to establish himself as a documentary filmmaker. He had spent his last dime—and more than a few of theirs—to finance Children in Crisis, about the youngest victims of the Korean War, which had won an award at the 1955 Berlin Film Festival. Before they could register their objections, a cable arrived from Ted informing them that it was all decided and casually describing his intended, Ellen Psaty, as “an attractive, intelligent American girl.” After tying the knot in a civil ceremony in the Seoul mayor’s office, they would be taking off on a two-month honeymoon in Southeast Asia. He could not have made it any plainer that their presence was not required. A telegram from Alice Dowling, the wife of the US ambassador to South Korea, Walter “Red” Dowling, who had been Conant’s deputy in Bonn, furnished the details that the bride was an art historian, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, and “possessed of a great deal of social charm.” Far from assuaging Patty’s doubts, the Dowlings’ wire convinced her that the woman in question had latched onto her son because of his last name and they would all pay dearly for it in the end. Ted still seemed determined to spite them at every turn.

  It seemed they had come home to all the problems they had left behind and then some. In September 1957 Miriam Richards died at the age of ninety-one. Distraught and still mourning, Patty went to Cambridge to pack up her mother’s apartment in the Hotel Continental, where she stumbled across letters and diaries disclosing details about her brothers’ illness and a continued debate with a succession of doctors over what was the cause—nature or nurture. Filled with rage and pain, she spent weeks reading and ripping up her mother’s tortured introspection, stuffing armloads of papers down the incinerator chute of their New York apartment in Manhattan House, at 200 East Sixty-Sixth Street. “My mother suffered all her early life from ‘nervous prostration,’ ” Patty confided to a friend, explaining that her “gifted brothers” had never really found themselves and “ended in suicide.” Her husband had been her tower of strength through it all: “I have my much more realistic and earthy spouse to thank that I turned out fairly normal!” But the letters had reopened old wounds and left her wobbly and more needy than ever. Conant could not bear the way she martyred herself to her family, enshrined her father, and wallowed in misery.

  Making matters worse, Patty was finding it difficult to adjust to the everyday realities of civilian life. She had enjoyed the perks of having a large household staff since moving into the Harvard president’s mansion in 1933, and, as she complained to a friend, was really no longer very “domestic minded.” She had reveled in the luxury of their subsidized embassy existence—the butler, maids, cooks, drivers, secretaries, and solicitous aides who catered to their every need—and missed the endless distractions of the diplomatic social merry-go-round. Their New York routine was comparatively dull, and until they found a competent “daily” to cook and clean, they were forced to eat most of their meals out at one of their clubs: the Century, Metropolitan, Harvard Club, and Patty’s favorite, the Cosmopolitan Club. Conant, who relished his independence, quite liked fending for himself and boasted of becoming “master of the two-minute boiled egg.” Patty jokingly despaired that he would be content to “live like a monk.”

  Unlike his wife, Conant did not miss official life. He wrote Patty not to expect him to accept another ambassadorial post “unless you force me to it,” adding for good measure, “I would be perfectly happy if I never attended another formal dinner party the rest of my days! Ditto for cocktails.” If he initially had misgivings about the amount of travel involved in visiting some fifty-five schools in eighteen states over the academic year, he came to see it as a way to banish all the melodrama from his life. Work was his deliverance. It was a relief to go on the road.

  He was on his fourth or fifth school when the news flashed on October 5, 1957, of Russia’s unexpected coup in launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit earth. Sputnik came as a shock to the United States and touched off a wave of hysteria that the Soviets had stolen the technological lead, with conservative critics blaming the lag in science on serious structural flaws in American public schools. The erosion of the US atomic advantage, hig
hlighted by the Soviets’ successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile a month earlier, meant that Soviet nuclear warheads could now reach American soil. Edward Teller went on television and announced gravely that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” A stream of prominent scientists and military leaders bemoaned the fact that the United States had conceded technical superiority to the Russians, and warned that the country had to catch up in what was now a “tough competitive race.”

  The deep sense of national humiliation, and anxiety over the alleged intellectual inadequacy and “softness” of American society, led to a big push to overhaul the education system, with teachers looking to Moscow for new methods and models, much less panaceas. Conant counseled President Eisenhower not to overreact to the exaggerated threat and steered him away from creating a crash science education program, believing excessive reliance on technology and technocrats could hurt the country. “Those now in college will before long be living in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles,” he telegrammed Eisenhower, revealing a skepticism of the narrow agenda of the new generation of cold war leaders. “What will be needed is not more engineers and scientists, but a people who will not panic and political leaders of wisdom, courage, and devotion, with capacity for solving intricate human problems. Not more Einsteins, but more Washingtons and Madisons.”