Jim would recover and resume work on a Baltimore newspaper, but he struggled with the crushing apathy induced by the drugs. He was still “on the edge,” Conant jotted in his diary in the dispassionate tone of a scientist observing the anomalies of the brain, noting that his son’s moods were still decidedly on the “manic side.”
Jim’s life slowly unraveled. “He tried to slug it out in those lower depths,” recalled Henderson, who visited him in places he “never knew existed,” filled with the homeless and criminally insane, “the jetsam companions this Harvard president’s son was cast among.” His illness robbed him of everything, leaving in its wake “lonely apartments, dissolved marriages, and children adrift from any real home.” He was increasingly unkempt, his tweed jacket tattooed with cigarette burns, fingers stained yellow with nicotine. When in the grip of mania, Jim drank to excess—a dangerous cocktail when mixed with heavy medication—and wandered the streets arguing with his demons, telephoned at all hours of the night, and repeatedly reported his brother to the FBI as a Communist agent, resulting in more than one follow-up investigation.
Conant and his wife were appalled by Jim’s steady deterioration. After one harrowing episode, when he went off the rails at their summer retreat in Randolph and disappeared in the night, a neighbor, Judge R. Ammi Cutter, had to drive all over the countryside looking for him. He pulled Jim out of a local bar and called an ambulance to cart him back to Sheppard Pratt. Patty, mortified by all the gossip, had reached her limit and refused to allow him to return. “It’s all very well for us to go through the dread and anxiety we have lived with so long—that’s our lot!—but we have inflicted enough on the Randolph community,” she wrote her husband. Then she softened her tone, adding dismally, “I’m afraid I can’t see his problems very objectively anymore.”
Jim’s downward spiral took an emotional toll on the extended family, especially the Conants’ youngest son, who was terrified he would “go the same way” as his brother and uncles. After Jim’s breakdown in 1959, Ted and his wife received a letter from Dr. Kubie informing them there was no need to be concerned about the mental health of their offspring—one-year-old James and a new baby daughter, Jennet—and stating categorically that Jim’s condition was not caused by genetic factors. It was obvious Conant had asked Kubie to write the letter to put their fears to rest, but his glib assurances had the opposite effect. “I wondered what the hell kind of mad family I had married into,” Ellen recalled. “Here I was a new mother with two small children condescendingly being told, ‘Don’t worry, dear.’ It was frightening. I thought that none of them were living in the real world.” Ted was increasingly tense, and at times worryingly wrought up, the smallest setbacks sending him into an uncontrollable rage. Ellen was convinced her husband’s problems were rooted in his relationship with his rigid, judgmental father. “The tragedy of Ted’s life is that he felt he had to revolt against what he admires most in his heart,” she told her mother-in-law angrily, demanding to know how such an acclaimed educator could have been such an inadequate parent. “His admiration for [his father] and all he stands for is boundless,” yet the two could “barely speak to one another.”
* * *
Turning his back on an ill wind, Conant concentrated on his work. In his new incarnation as “educational statesman,” he kept up a “cruel pace,” one journalist observed, visiting 125 more schools over the next year, giving speeches and interviews, running for planes and buses, sleeping in bad hotels, and eating lukewarm chicken lunches in an endless succession of cafeterias. The second installment of his Carnegie study, Slums and Suburbs: A Commentary on Schools in Metropolitan Areas, completed in 1961 and “written in wrath” at the conditions he found in Philadelphia, Chicago, Saint Louis, and Detroit, ignited a firestorm with his warning that ghetto schools were woefully inadequate and that the equivalent of “social dynamite” was building up in the big cities, especially in the African American community. Unless prompt action was taken to improve slum schools, and unless there were “drastic changes” in the advancement and employment prospects of African American youth, he feared the “dangerous social situation” would “explode.” To add a cold war rationale to his wake-up call, Conant argued that not only was this social injustice unacceptable, it left inner-city children more vulnerable to the “relentless pressures” of Communism: “What can words like ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ mean for these young people?” he asked.
The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had outlawed segregation in public schools, and by the early 1960s, the country had embarked on a painful struggle to attain the equality of opportunity Conant had long espoused. It was a huge step in the right direction, but there was continued resistance across the country, and Conant was impatient for change. “These situations call for action, not hairsplitting arguments,” he argued, insisting that ignoring racial inequality would put the nation at risk. He was sounding the alarm again, only this time for the children for whom his meritocratic solutions did not apply. “For the first time the reserved, understating New England scientist and university administrator appeared moved to anger,” observed the New York Times. “He has seen the underprivileged slums and the prestige-obsessed overprivileged suburbs. The sight offended his sense of justice as much as his ideology.”
Slums and Suburbs, published in 1961, made headlines at a time when the civil rights movement was at its peak. While some reviewers lauded the book as trenchant and prophetic, Conant infuriated black leaders, who seized on his criticism of “token integration”—the transporting of pupils across large cities—as tacit approval of the “separate but equal” doctrine and condemned his views. He had argued that a better long-term strategy would be to spend more money to upgrade inner-city schools and the surrounding area, “to bring the schools closer to the needs of the people in each neighborhood,” and invest in better housing and business opportunities. His demand that pupils be taught “marketable skills”—any real vocational training that could lead to jobs and be a vehicle of opportunity—was misinterpreted as an attempt to create what one critic called “an army of shoeshine boys.” After the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged his assertion that the real issue was “not racial integration but socioeconomic integration,” Conant resigned himself to the fact that the issue was already so inflamed he could make little headway, and retreated. By the time the Signet edition was issued in paperback in 1964, he had revised his views, and stated he had been wrong to oppose busing.
Accustomed by now to shrugging off attacks, he quickly turned his attention to the education of teachers, despite a colleague’s admonition that it would make the past disputes “seem as nothing by comparison.” Undeterred, Conant kicked the “hornets’ nest,” writing a stinging critique of traditional teacher training—alienating many of his peers in the process. Calling the existing certification system “scandalously remiss,” he proposed making actual teacher performance in the classroom the major criteria for licensing public school teachers, and recommended significantly reducing theoretical courses in teaching methods. He cited the glaring shortcomings turned up by his study, expressing alarm that more than one third of all seventh- and eighth-grade mathematics classes in the country were taught by teachers with less than two college courses in the subject. He went on to declare the certification system “bankrupt,” referred to education extension courses as “Mickey Mouse” offerings, and labeled the teachers who took them to earn easy credits “opium smokers.”
Those who hoped Conant might be mellowing with age were in for a surprise. He was more outspoken than ever, his tone magnificently sulfurous. All his books were calls to action, and even his establishment opponents had to acknowledge they were of “unequaled impact,” attributing his success to his “missionary zeal” and willingness to crisscross the country popularizing for his reforms. He was driven by his “burning faith in the American social experiment,” said
Frank Keppel, one of Conant’s closest Harvard colleagues and Carnegie advisor. “He did not enjoy controversy, but was often involved in it. His sense of responsibility simply drew him to move ahead.” A Los Angeles Examiner columnist quoted Conant’s favorite motto, which for many years hung on the wall behind his desk in the Harvard president’s office: “Behold the turtle—he makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” “He hasn’t pulled his neck in yet,” the writer observed. “That’s the kind of man he is, and the attitude is implicit in his every word and gesture.”
* * *
After writing six books in six years and running through $1 million of Carnegie Corporation financing—all the royalties were plowed back into research—Conant found himself feeling restless again. Anticipating the outcry that would accompany the publication of his last installment, 1963’s The Education of American Teachers, he decided it might be a good time to get out of town. In the habit of thinking several moves ahead, he already had a plan. A brief trip to Berlin in 1962 had started him thinking about the future now that the Soviets had erected a wall dividing the city. The Iron Curtain, which had been “transparent” in his time as ambassador, was now made of concrete and topped with barbed wire—a constant reminder of the cold war. No longer could one say, as he had done so often as high commissioner, that Berlin was the “showplace of democracy.” Nikita Khrushchev’s immediate purpose was to put a stop to the humiliating exodus of East Germans to the West, but the perimeter had a profound impact on the isolated city, surrounded by Russian troops. To Conant, “The armed East German police who looked from watchtowers over the wall provided proof that the potentialities of a third world war were ever present.”
The youthful American president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who ran on post-Sputnik fears and the mythical “missile gap,” had won office with his promise of a reinvigorated defense policy. But for a week after the wire fence was rolled out and work started on a more permanent partition in August 1961, Kennedy made no public protest over the Berlin Wall, casting doubt on America’s pledge to protect the “outpost of freedom.” West Berliners were understandably furious that the Americans had not knocked down the wall. They felt betrayed and abandoned. They had seen their city torn in half, had their freedom curtailed, and in some cases had been cruelly separated from family and friends. In an attempt to boost morale, Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, was planning an ambitious project to turn free Berlin into a major cultural center. Conant was approached about lending his prestige to a new Pedagogical Center that would make Berlin the leading city in Europe in the field of education. When he returned to New York, he wrote a memorandum on the tense political situation in Berlin at the request of the Ford Foundation, mentioning the planned education center. Before long, Conant was asked to go back under the foundation’s auspices to help build the center and strengthen the German-American friendship.
On June 26, 1963, a few weeks after he and Patty arrived in Berlin, Kennedy came through on a much-anticipated state visit. It was a bright, unseasonably warm summer day, and they decided to join the quarter million Berliners who were gathering downtown to hear the American president’s address from the balcony of the town hall. “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world,” Kennedy told the cheering throngs. “Let them come to Berlin.” When he told his audience “in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” pronouncing the German words in his strong Boston accent, Conant could not help smiling. He experienced the tremendous rush of recognition and gratitude that surged through the crowd and felt that Kennedy’s speech had done a great deal to restore their belief that America stood with them. “The president went very far in committing himself emotionally to the Berliners,” he noted in his diary, pleased by the clear statement of US support, and seeing it as a continuation of the solidarity with the German cause he had voiced during his years there. “ ‘If one wants to understand the modern world, let him come to Berlin.’ Excellent and moving sentiments with which I not only heartily agree but could claim to have anticipated.”
The following week, the White House announced that for his outstanding contributions to science and education, Conant would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given by the government to civilians. President Kennedy would bestow the medals in a ceremony on December 6, 1963. Patty excitedly made plans for their trip to Washington, with friends offering to organize a party in his honor. On November 22, just before they were due to leave for the United States, Conant was at the closing banquet of a teachers’ conference at the Hotel Kempinski when the manager approached and whispered in his ear in German that Kennedy had been shot. Stunned, and racked with anxiety and horror, he struggled to remain composed and asked to be kept informed of any developments. Moments later, the manager returned and “with a despairing gesture” told him the president was dead. Out of respect for their American guests, their German hosts and dinner companions stood and observed a moment of silence for the slain president. He and Patty stumbled blindly through the lobby, in a hurry to be away.
They sat up half the night listening to the news on the radio. Outside, tens of thousands of Germans took to the streets in a torchlit procession, “full of sorrow and worry.” It was impossible not to think of Kennedy’s enormous impact on Berlin, as well as the “spirit of optimism” that followed his successful confrontation of Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, and how that “new spirit” mounted still higher after his triumphant visit. The next morning, they joined other stricken members of the diplomatic community at a military service. The brightness of the day contrasted sharply with the somber nature of the occasion, and when two buglers sounded the first melancholy notes of taps, both he and Patty felt it “went right through our hearts.”
He was struck by the force of the emotion, considering that he had never particularly liked Joe Kennedy Sr., and they had often butted heads, especially when his youngest son, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, was expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish exam during his sophomore year. “I found myself asking myself why I, a cold, reserved New Englander and not a personal friend, should have been so overcome last night and at the ceremony this morning,” he wrote his old friend Tracy Voorhees. “I felt, still feel, the way I did the afternoon of Pearl Harbor. I don’t know the answer myself, but almost all of free Berlin feels the same way.”
Conant assumed the award ceremony would be canceled, but when word came that it would be taking place as scheduled, he and Patty flew at once to Washington. On the morning of December 6, Conant and his wife went to the White House, where the mood was a strange mixture of “sadness and festivity.” A touching note of congratulations from Robert F. Kennedy, a Harvard student in the Conant era like his brothers, added to the poignancy of the day. They gathered in the State Dining Room, where the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, opened by saying that despite the shameful events of two weeks earlier, this was a moment of great pride. He presented Conant with the medal with special distinction, and read the citation: “Scientist and educator, he has led the American people in the fight to save our most precious resource—our children.” It felt a bit like old home week, with Felix Frankfurter and Jack McCloy collecting white stars at the same time.
Conant returned to Berlin for what would turn out to be a two-year stay. German bureaucracy moved at such an excruciatingly slow pace that by the fall of 1964, when construction on the new building was supposed to have begun, no stone had been turned and no money allocated. By now an old hand at intimidating bureaucrats, he knew the one sure way to get results was to shine a light on the problem. He told the mayor “politely but firmly” that if the necessary funds were not voted, and he had to leave Berlin with nothing accomplished, “neither the collapse of the brilliant plan or my own frustration would go unnoticed.” Conant got the funds. When he finally left for America in May 1965, th
e center was on its way to becoming a reality. Brandt, who had become a good friend, likened Conant’s critical role in rallying support for the project to that of a “fleet in being” which never had to fire a shot yet was the decisive factor in the confrontation.
* * *
His sabbatical in Germany may not have been as productive as he had hoped, but it afforded ample time for what he described as “leisurely reflection.” It was impossible to turn a corner of that historic city without starting a train of reminiscences. “As I ticked off the dates of modern history in my mind,” he recalled, “I almost always found myself starting with a picture of that placid world which started to go to bits just when I graduated from college in 1914. It seemed inconceivable that Americans could have ever been so aloof from international affairs and so self-righteous as we were then.” On his return from Europe, Conant, who had cranked out several more books on education reform, planned to embark on his last book project: his memoir. He told his editors he expected it would fill several volumes. In the fall of 1964 he had turned down a job offer from Sargent Shriver, director of the Peace Corps and the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity, to lead and direct the troops on the educational front of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. His excuse was his age, though he later agreed to join the advisory council. The truth was that apart from speaking out on the education issues he felt most strongly about, he was ready to step off the public stage.
On the way home, he and Patty stopped off in Paris, where he intended to treat his wife to a grand holiday, when a sudden spell of weakness caused by an irregular heart rhythm landed him in the hospital. He spent two weeks in the American Hospital undergoing tests and receiving intravenous medication. Released in late June, he flew straight to New York and checked himself back into the hospital. He was put on a regimen of digitalis and other medications, but was cautioned against any rigorous exercise. His heart condition meant no more hiking the steep mountain trails of New Hampshire. He was still absorbing this piece of bad news when Patty, who had also been under the weather, was diagnosed with colon cancer. She underwent immediate surgery, and the malignant tumor was removed. They caught the cancer before it had spread, but the operation left her with a colostomy bag. Weak and dejected, Patty could not face yet another house search and move in what she called their “lone wolf existence,” changing countries and addresses every few years. They spent most of the next three months convalescing in a succession of hotels and seaside resorts, “picking ourselves up by our bootstraps.” In October they settled in a new apartment in Manhattan House, and Conant began work on his memoir.
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