Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Facing charges of unpreparedness, Eisenhower was under pressure to reactivate a major research-and-development effort along the lines of the OSRD and place it under the control of a “qualified citizen such as Ex-Pres Conant of Harvard,” as a Boston Globe editorial urged. Eisenhower announced he would appoint a full-time science advisor to the president to help lead the counteroffensive against Russia. He asked William T. Golden, a respected financier-turned-dollar-a-year man who had first suggested the idea to Truman, to interview likely candidates, beginning with Conant. “He displayed no interest in returning to science activism,” recalled Golden, who had a long conversation with the former wartime leader and considered him “too opinionated and set in his ideas to fulfill the role.” Conant was still adamantly opposed to the hydrogen bomb, as well as to biological and chemical warfare, and maintained that the “missile gap”—he refused to believe the Russians had any real advantage in ICBMs—was a myth. He admitted to working “on the arbitrary assumption that there will be no war for a year or more,” but did not seem very hopeful another world conflict could be avoided.

  To appease his critics, Eisenhower agreed to a buildup of nuclear weapons, and appointed James Killian, the president of MIT, to the post, and under his direction assembled the President’s Science Advisory Committee to provide crucial counsel on the missile program as well as the space race. George Kistiakowsky, the committee’s missile expert, tried to persuade Conant to take part but found him unsympathetic to the alarmist response to the Soviet muscle flexing.

  While pooh-poohing the rush to build bomb shelters and expand the missile program, Conant appreciated that the furor over Sputnik had made education a top national priority. In 1958 Eisenhower put forward the National Defense Education Act, a shrewdly titled piece of legislation authorizing increased federal aid to public schools and ushering in a huge program of student loans for college, aimed particularly at those majoring in math, science, and foreign languages, all fields relevant to national security. Amid the scramble for brainpower, critics were calling for raising educational standards in American schools to keep up with the Russians, while others, such as Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the developer of the nuclear-powered submarine, believed imposing “tough” training of talented youth was so central to the fate of the nation that he advocated the European system of segregating the brightest, university-bound students in special academies. School board superintendents and principals all over the country were clamoring for answers to questions about how their curriculum should be reorganized and how to improve instruction in science, math, and foreign languages. In terms of stimulating public interest in his study, Conant noted, the “timing was perfect.”

  If the Carnegie Corporation was betting that by recruiting a figure of Conant’s stature it would mean the nation must take notice of his school report, it paid off. His book The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens, published in February 1959, spent weeks on the bestseller list—unusual for a book about education—and sold fifty thousand copies in its first three months. It garnered high praise from critics, gave impetus to extensive school reforms, and landed him on the cover of Time as “The Inspector General” of US public schools. (His fourth appearance on the cover was “a rare record” for someone who had never held elected office.) The postwar baby boom was propelling an enormous expansion in American education, and no one was better positioned to lead the way forward than Conant, the magazine’s publisher declared, “who has done more than any other educator to throw Sputnik’s red glare where it belongs—on the US public schools.”

  Conant’s slim book supplied the answers the country was looking for in twenty-one specific reforms that were elegant in their simplicity and rejection of extremes. Essentially optimistic about the basic pattern of American schools, he saw no need for “radical changes” and instead urged numerous improvements in the identification and nurturing of talent to serve the nation. He flirted with controversy only in his assertion that too little was being done for gifted pupils: the top 15 percent who were the country’s secret weapon in the ballyhooed competition with Russia. He attributed the lower enrollment of able girls in math and science courses to parental and societal influences, and urged additional guidance counseling to help focus career goals at an earlier age. His prescription was to have all students tested at an early age and provided with two tracks, so that those with greater aptitude could move on to advanced-level courses and enter college ahead of the game. The SAT, which he helped to create and was instrumental in establishing as the world’s largest-scale intelligence testing program for college admissions, would help with this “sorting-out process” and would serve as a democratizing force.

  Repeating the same themes that had once jolted Harvard, he argued against a caste-conscious system that would separate the intellectual elite and entrench social antagonisms, and recommended shared homerooms and citizenship courses to promote integration and cohesion. For the same reason, he believed the excessive development of private and parochial schools could be dangerously divisive. He sought to galvanize students of all classes and races across the board, arguing that “equality of esteem” was every bit as essential as equality of opportunity. He did not believe everyone should attend a four-year college and was a staunch supporter of junior colleges and vocational programs. “Each honest calling, each walk of life,” he argued with his unassailable faith in public education, “has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.”

  These were ideas Conant had delineated as far back as the early 1940s, in an unpublished book titled What We Are Fighting to Defend, in which he first set down his vision of a distinctive American meritocracy, with social mobility and opportunity for all. In Conant’s Jeffersonian vision of American education, Time reported, a comprehensive high school should be a shared experience of community; a “melting pot” that not only served the academically talented but also mixed children of all social backgrounds and intellectual abilities, and provided training to each student geared to his or her needs. “A modern industrial nation needs more than a few brains: it has to uplift talent at every level. It cannot afford technological unemployables—spiritually, politically, or economically.” The best way to beat the Soviets was to lead by example; to show that democracy was better than dictatorship, and this required a public school system that furthered all the hopes and aspirations of a free society.

  Conant was so “intensely focused, to the point of being blindered, on the idea of a class-bound present,” according to Nicholas Lemann, author of a history of the SAT, that he failed to detect the obvious flaw in his plan to build a classless society “by relentlessly classifying everyone.” He did not foresee that an entire industry would spring up to help students, who could pay for it, achieve higher test scores in order to get into elite colleges, and the SAT would end up inhibiting diversity. Or that as a consequence of this flagrantly unfair competition, the intellectual elite would be resented at least as much as they were admired for the work, scheming, and investment that propelled them to the top of the educational—and societal—heap. For such a dogged realist, Lemann contends, Conant was naïve—“touchingly naïve, or willfully naïve, or just unpardonably naïve”—not to realize he was creating “a new kind of class system even more powerful than the old one.”

  Conant never thought he had all the answers. Ever the pragmatist, he always regarded the SAT as a work in progress, not the be-all and end-all it became. He saw his reforms as a first set of attainable goals in what should be an ongoing dynamic process. But he persevered, marshaling all the forces available to him to solve the problem of social inequity, convinced of his mission to make democracy work by revitalizing the education system, in the same way the drafters of the Constitution sought to safeguard the goals of the American Revolution. His educational doctrine helped shape many of the basic meritocratic ideas and attitudes that Americans now take for granted: the principle that admission to college should
be based not on family background but on talent and achievement; the necessity of need-blind, full-aid admissions; and the policy of colleges and universities to rely on the SAT as a way to expand the pool of candidates outside the traditional geographic and socioeconomic regions of recruitment.

  “Conant believed that admissions policy was a weapon in the battle against Communism,” observed cultural critic Louis Menand, noting that both his educational philosophy and political ideology were conditioned by the cold war. “Conant helped create the atomic bomb; he also helped to create the SAT. Americans born after 1945 were raised in the shadow of both.”

  * * *

  Conant’s campaign for American intellectual and ideological leadership gained momentum as the cold war heated up. On November 27, 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev provoked a new Berlin crisis by demanding that the United States and Western Allies pull their forces out of West Berlin within six months, reviving fears of a superpower clash. Khrushchev demanded that West Berlin be converted into a demilitarized “free city.” If the Allies did not accept his proposal and get out of Berlin, the Soviet Union would sign its own peace treaty with the GDR and end the Allied occupation unilaterally. “Berlin is the testicles of the West,” Khrushchev stated at the time, testing US resolve. “Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze Berlin.” Eisenhower dismissed Khrushchev’s threats in a terse statement but was perturbed to hear that the French foreign minister thought some kind of “low-level” recognition of the GDR might be preferable to risking war. At the president’s direction, Dulles was on his way to Brussels to formulate a unified NATO response, but before leaving, he asked for input from the three past US high commissioners to Germany.

  Conant, who had long predicted that Khrushchev would venture close to war to get his way, believed the Western powers should hold their ground and warn Moscow they had no intention of relinquishing their responsibilities for the freedom and safety of the people of West Berlin. “I am still firmly of the opinion that no negotiation of any sort should be opened with the German Democratic Republic,” Conant advised Dulles, who was fully prepared to send in troops to honor their commitment to a free Berlin. “And I hope that the first public statement of the Western position will make it plain that we will use force if necessary to ensure that West Berlin remains under the control of the present freely elected government, and likewise we will use force if necessary to ensure that the city is supplied as at present.”

  As the Berlin crisis kept the West on edge, and Khrushchev’s high-stakes play resulted in a flurry of diplomatic activity, Conant fielded a number of offers from Eisenhower and others to return to government service. He was offered the opportunity to head or participate in commissions on foreign economic aid and national goals. Various lobbying groups also sought to enlist his support, including many members of the rebooted Committee on the Present Danger (CPD-II) who felt the Berlin situation was a ticking time bomb that could escalate into the use of nuclear weapons. Conant declined all the invitations, preferring to focus all his efforts on education. The Soviets’ six-month deadline came and went, and they decided not to push their ultimatum. But with a four-power conference planned for that summer in Geneva to try to resolve the Berlin situation, Conant continued to speak out on the need to stand firm and not yield to Khrushchev’s posturing and propaganda. Believing that too many Americans were unaware of the gravity of the East-West battle, he joined Bush in forming a new citizens group, the Committee to Strengthen the Frontiers of Freedom.

  On July 5, 1959, Parade magazine featured a silver-haired, bespectacled Conant on the magazine’s cover in front of an American flag, publishing what it called “an Independence Day message from a great patriot answering Khrushchev’s boast that the future belongs to Communism.” In his “Open Letter to America’s Grandchildren,” Conant, the great gladiator for democracy, endeavored to be the steadying hand he had been over the past two turbulent decades, restoring faith in the public school system, reassuring a new generation that their country would win the cold war, and dispensing soothing advice on how to survive “the long protracted struggle between two cultural patterns that seems to lie ahead.” He had played the same role so many times before, during so many crises, that the phrases all had a familiar ring: “Patience and yet more patience, strength and wisdom to handle strength—all these we shall need in abundant measure,” he counseled. “This nation, having arrived at the point in history where the words ‘foreign policy’ take on new meaning, must traverse that narrow knife edge which divides supineness from belligerency.”

  Although he had shifted his sights from world affairs to the classroom, it had not altered his view of the cold war competition with the Russians. Looking ahead ten years, Conant predicted the nation would be living in a “fearful world” dominated by rockets. “There is one essential for our survival,” he declared in a speech upon receiving the Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Service, “and that is that we possess an invulnerable system of retaliatory power and that the Soviets believe the system to be invulnerable.” To defend its freedom, the United States had to keep up its military spending in order to maintain a rocket system able “to deliver thermonuclear weapons to such an extent and in such a way that at least three-fourths of the industrial complexes of the Soviet Union would be utterly destroyed.” He was increasingly concerned with the role of education in preserving society and the need to nurture the vital democratic institutions of the nation to guard against totalitarianism.

  He did everything he could to shake the country out of its complacency—none of his contemporaries did more—but Conant had no new ideas to offer, observed the historian Sam Bass Warner Jr., just the same pleading to maintain the nuclear freeze until the cold war thawed. “What emerged from Conant’s tireless efforts,” he wrote of the spent warrior, “was not a discovery of alternatives but an endless defense.” Conscious that he had pounded the same drum for more than two decades, Conant sounded a little melancholic when he told an interviewer, “It is easy to be defeatist about the prospects for peace and freedom and to forecast global war. I have ventured to do otherwise with all sincerity.” Quoting his beloved Jefferson, he told reporters, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” In the nuclear age, it was the price of survival.

  He had reluctantly agreed to serve as a consultant to the National Security Council Planning Board, a one-day review of highly classified material, when a medical emergency in March 1959 landed him back in the hospital. A small benign tumor was removed from his thyroid gland, and he was on doctor’s orders to reduce his workload. He was still recovering at home in New York when a panicked call came from Norice that Jim had suffered a complete nervous breakdown. It was a reoccurrence of the mania, phobias, and suicidal thoughts that had been brought on by combat stress during the war. Conant and his wife canceled a planned trip to England and rushed to Montreal to see their son. They were unprepared for the pathetic condition they found him in: frothing, delusional, paranoid, and wildly agitated. Jim was diagnosed with manic depression, known today as bipolar disorder. The doctors assured them that with rest, therapy, and medication, the symptoms would abate, but when they left their son on the mental ward that afternoon, they were both in an anguished state.

  After two months in the hospital, Jim was discharged. He was “released in fragile health,” recalled his cousin and Exeter classmate Gregory Henderson, and before long “the shadows came back, uninvited.” Over the next eighteen months, Jim would have two more acute breakdowns and was in and out of the hospital. The treatments then available—isolation, electric shock therapy, and the powerful tranquilizer Thorazine—could calm his excited state but could not control the manic “cycles,” the massive highs and miserable lows, which struck with alarming frequency. Conant consulted the finest doctors in the country, talking to specialists at McLean Hospital in Boston, Payne Whitney in New York, and Silver Hill in Connecticut, as well as a world-renowned psychiatrist in Switzerland.

&nb
sp; On the advice of his old friend Dr. Lawrence Kubie, he sent Jim to Sheppard Pratt, a small private psychiatric hospital in Baltimore. Kubie, who had closed his New York practice to become the hospital’s director of psychotherapy, had a reputation for being extremely good at courting the rich and famous, and counted the playwright Tennessee Williams among his former patients. Patty told Ted that Sheppard Pratt, with its rolling green lawns and country club look, was preferable to the other asylums because it was where the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald had sent his wife, Zelda, when she periodically “went to pieces.” As was so often the case, Conant indulged his wife’s fantasy that it was a genteel place to heal for the literary set. “He was more concerned for her peace of mind,” said Ted, disgusted by what he viewed as his father’s concern with reputation, and reliance on the Harvard old-boy network, rather than “doing what was best for their son.”

  They were celebrating Christmas at Ted and Ellen’s new house in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1961 when they received word that Jim’s estranged wife, who had been battling depression, had attempted suicide. With both parents in the hospital at the same time, the children had taken refuge at the neighbors’. Conant spent the next two weeks flying back and forth to Montreal, arranging for Norice’s hospitalization and scrambling to find a live-in nanny to look after the three young children. Lawyers were hired, trust funds set up, and a psychiatrist appointed to supervise the care of the entire family, effectively removing him from the equation. Conant quickly packed his wife off to Germany for an extended holiday to help put the wretched business behind her. “After that, he washed his hands of the whole mess,” said Ted. “He did not want my mother disturbed, he did not want their life disrupted any more than it already had been. It was out of sight, out of mind.”