Book Review: James Conant, Warrior Scientist
/Man of the Hour:
James Conant, Warrior Scientistby Jennet ConantSimon & Schuster, 2017When it comes to reading a biography of Person X written by one of Person X's children or grandchildren, we make allowances, of course, for human nature. If a biographer spent many a wonderful day in the Cotswolds fly-fishing with his dear old father Neville Chamberlain, we can smile a bit indulgently when Munich: The Triumph appears in bookstores. If a writer's earliest memories are of being dandled on Nani's knee, we shall hear perhaps less than we should about editors being bullwhipped when a subsequent book turns Nani into Indira Ghandi.But readers don't extend that indulgence indefinitely, and it has a small price tag: we're OK with the child or grandchild injecting a little family bias, but in exchange we'd like a little restraint, a little perspective – a small acknowledgement of the reality that you really ought not to be writing a purportedly objective biography of a family member in the first place.The allure is obvious, as are the advantages, which are on full display in Jennet Conant's new biography of her grandfather, Harvard President and government scientist James Conant. Granddaughter Jennet, author of four previous books including the superb Tuxedo Park, has had the kind of unfettered access to grandfather Conant's letters, diaries, and personal papers that a non-relative might not have been granted. This gives her book, James Conant: Warrior Scientist, a generously personal feeling and makes it at times intensely revealing.Conant led a remarkable life. In his youth he worked on behalf of the United States government at a time when it was working hard to counter the threat of German-deployed poison gas on the battlefields of France. In the next world war, he presided over the Manhattan Project. At the height of the Cold War, he advised US Presidents on the most terrifying weapons ever created. And in his 20-year tenure as president of Harvard, he was a genuine trailblazer, cutting away the intellectual deadweight and a great many of the sinecures, opening admissions, and admitting women for the first time into Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School. And he wrote an entire shelf full of books, including some standard textbooks and a very interesting memoir, My Several Lives.But he was, on balance, an appalling person. Yes, he made the most elite institution of higher learning in America marginally less elite. But two times in his life, he was presented with opportunities to choose between human decency and the most towering evil then imaginable in the world, and in both cases, he not only chose the towering evil but actively chose to worsen those evils. And this forces his granddaughter into some biographical contortions that would be comical if they weren't so dreadful. Take her quick summary of James Conant at the beginning of the book, the standard kind of bullet-point you find in almost all biographies. See if you can spot the astonishing bit:
A chemist, statesman, educator, and critic, he had had within his grasp all the elements to help forge the new atomic age. Supremely confident, he had acted upon his convictions to shape the kind of world he wanted to live in. He was, first and foremost, a defender of democracy. He had helped design and manufacture weapons of mass destruction in two world wars to protect liberty. He had fought for an open and fluid society, for a fairer system of higher education, for free discussion, a competitive spirit, and a courageous and responsible citizenry.
It's bad enough that “he acted upon his convictions to shape the kind of world he 
wanted to live in” could be said just as readily about Hitler or Attila the Hun, but surely even descendant-written biography shouldn't be elastic enough to encompass that “helped design and manufacture weapons of mass destruction in two world wars to protect liberty”? In 1918, the US poison gas factory arsenal at Englewood, Maryland was working at full tilt manufacturing an average of thirty tons every day of a variation of a gas called lewisite that had been lovingly labored over by Conant to make it far uglier, far deadlier, and far cheaper. The United States was producing more mustard gas than Germany, England, and France combined when suddenly all that nightmarish work was rendered moot:
In only four months, working under extreme pressure, he successfully oversaw every stage of development from laboratory to large-scale production. The plant went into operation right on schedule. In November, just as they were about to begin ramping up production, word came that the war was over. The fighting ceased on the entire Western Front at eleven o'clock on Monday morning, November 11, 1918. Exhausted, and outmatched by the better-coordinated and equipped Allies, Germany surrendered. Lewisite had not been needed to force the enemy's hand after all. In a war of awful weapons, the worst would not be used.
If it had been used, if weaponized US poison gas had been used on Germany troops, the first person in line to see the results would have been James Conant, and he wouldn't have looked at the gnarled blisters and steaming chemical burns as human suffering but as field data. And even the suffering inflicted by Conant's chemical weapons was eclipsed by the suffering inflicted by Conant's nuclear weapons, and even granddaughter Jennet is forced to admit – with a sideways, excusing slant – that this didn't seem to bother him all that much:
Some modern historians, such as Paul Ham, like to cite Conant's denials of any moral qualms over Hiroshima as a sign of his “pride and utter lack of remorse.” But it is worth nothing that in his 700-page autobiography My Several Lives, Conant devotes just two and a half pages to the fateful decision. That such an abbreviated summary in no way reflects the agonizing internal debates, complex considerations, and uncertainty that resulted in one of the most terrible military actions ever undertaken by the United States would seem to speak less of pride than of pain.
Those pages in My Several Lives most certainly do not speak of any pain on Conant's part. He was mostly irritated by the moralistic second-guessing that began happening immediately in the wake of two Japanese cities full of women and children and old people being incinerated – he scornfully called it “Monday morning quarterbacking.” That's granddad.It's amazing, given James Conant's moral turpitude, that Jennet Conant has managed to make such a solid, valuable book about him. Most of this can be attributed to the narrative and historical skill of the author, although there's no denying the importance of James Conant's contributions to American and world history. James Conant still needs a big, critical biography – but this one is easily rich and smart enough to be indispensable to all subsequent ones. But please: no more family members.