Volume 41, Number 13 · July 14, 1994
The Quiet American
By Louis Menand
James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
by James G. Hershberg
Knopf, 948 pp., $35.00
James Bryant Conant was made president of Harvard in 1933, when he was forty. He had been a professor of chemistry, and was sufficiently untested as an administrator to have been passed over, not long before, by his own high school, Roxbury Latin, during its search for a new headmaster. But he proved an active and modernizing educator. Conant had supervised the production of a poison gas (never used) called lewisite during World War I, and shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he was invited to join a government body created to oversee scientific contributions to military research. In 1941, he was appointed head of a subgroup known as S-1, which was the code name for the atomic bomb, thus becoming the chief civilian administrator of American nuclear research and, eventually, a principal figure in the decision to drop the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. He continued to play a role in the articulation of nuclear policy after the war, and in 1953 left Harvard to become Eisenhower's high commissioner, later ambassador, to Germany. After his return to the United States, in 1957, he undertook a series of widely circulated studies of public education, underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation. In 1965, his health began to fail, and he gradually withdrew from public life. My Several Lives, an autobiography notable for its reticence, appeared in 1970. He died in 1978.
Review, 6573 words
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