James Bryant Conant was appointed president of Harvard in 1933 at the age of forty. Previously, he had been a professor of chemistry and was relatively inexperienced as an administrator, having been overlooked not long before by his own high school, Roxbury Latin, during its search for a new headmaster. However, he proved to be a dynamic and modernizing educator. During World War I, Conant had supervised the production of lewisite, a poison gas that was never used. 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 returning to the United States in 1957, he undertook a series of widely circulated studies of public education, funded by the Carnegie Corporation. In 1965, his health began to fail, and he gradually withdrew from public life. His autobiography, *My Several Lives*, notable for its reticence, was published in 1970. He passed away in 1978.
It’s a career that touches on many areas—science, government, education, the cold war, the national security state, the politics of the atom. But it doesn’t touch on that many areas, and it is somewhat disheartening to pick up James Hershberg’s book on Conant, which runs to nearly a thousand pages, and read, on page seven, the words, “I have not attempted a full biography.” The impulse is to respond, "I'll just wait for the full one, then," but the thought is stifled by the prospect of an even more massive volume. Hershberg’s disclaimer turns out not to be quite accurate. *James B. Conant* is a full biography; it's just unevenly proportioned, and this is the consequence of the project's genesis. It began as Hershberg’s senior thesis at Harvard on Conant’s role in nuclear policy from 1939 to 1947, which then developed into Hershberg’s doctoral dissertation at Tufts on Conant’s role in nuclear policy from 1945 to 1950. These rather specialized studies constitute the core of the present book, to which the material needed to make it presentable as a life has been added: the story of Conant’s service as postwar emissary to Germany, which is fairly detailed, and an account of his work as an educational administrator and policy-maker, which is cursory. Well, relatively cursory. For although Hershberg has many strengths as a historian, concision is not among them; and it is hard not to feel that a more succinct account of the nuclear Conant, together with a more informative (and also … Related Topics Articles: Renaissance Man What a Disaster! White Wives and Slave Mothers.