Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist by Jennet Conant (review)

Nearly thirty years ago, as I was researching a study of James B. Conant (1893–1978)—chemist, Harvard University president, Manhattan Project administrator, diplomat (Ike's man in Germany), and more—I interviewed the great man's granddaughter, Jennet. Although she was only a teenager when he died, she offered insights about various aspects of her grandfather's life, making clear that she was a perceptive and articulate observer.

In the ensuing years, Jennet Conant established herself as a prolific popular historian, churning out at a steady clip a series of engaging studies of topics loosely revolving around World War II and the early Cold War—from secret scientific enterprises in Tuxedo Park (radar) and Los Alamos (the nuclear bomb) to British spies to Julia Child's work for the Office of Strategic Services before going on to become a renowned promoter of French cuisine on television. Looming over all of Jennet's work, however, though making only occasional cameos in her oeuvre (even in 109 East Palace, her 2005 portrait of Los Alamos), was the man whose story she had grown up with: her eminent grandfather, who is often recalled as the figure who, on 31 May 1945, as a member of the Interim Committee chaired by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, offered the targeting criteria adopted to justify the first use of the nuclear bomb against Japan—"a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses."

Man of the Hour is the second book-length study of Conant, after my own James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), to supplement Conant's own massive but not very revealing autobiography, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). In his memoir he was constrained by his sense of propriety and privacy (the first draft did not even mention his wife) as well as, on nuclear issues, classification restrictions. ("Several lives too long, alas," rued one critic, in Kirkus Review in February 1969. "Let's hope that Mr. Conant draws an adept biographer or two with fewer compunctions about editing and a greater predilection for literary flair.")

On first hearing that Jennet Conant had finally produced a biography of her grandfather, I immediately—and excitedly—wondered whether she had uncovered two particular items that I had sought for many years and had come to see as Holy Grails of my research. When working on my book I was able, thanks to permissions from Conant's wife, Grace, and son Theodore, to use Conant's personal papers at Harvard (as opposed to his presidential papers, which fell under the university's restrictions and required separate efforts). After Grace's death, Theodore Conant kindly gave access to his mother's intimate private papers, which were not donated to Harvard. Still, I long suspected that Jennet might have access to additional, potentially sensitive, personal family files—the sort that would be accessible only to a member of the immediate Conant family. My suspicion, and hope, that she might have squirreled away some secrets that had eluded me grew when Jennet revealed, in Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), that I had fallen victim to one of her father's "lurid tales" about the mysterious suicide of James B. Conant's brother-in-law, scientist William Richards ("the biographer [i.e., me] believed him, and so did I"), and also recalled having "pried out open locked trunks stored in the basement of my grandparents' country home in Hanover, New Hampshire, and pored over old letters and diaries, looking for clues." Though I believed I had pored over many of those same materials, I had to wonder what else Jennet might have discovered.

One crucial item missing from Conant's Harvard papers were...