The Wisdom of the Northeast

...By ending the War quickly, they hoped to save half a million American lives, and the lives of many more of the enemy...

...Of course, the two men were not unpatriotic, and Oppenheimer's humiliation was a national disgrace...

...During the late 1940s, he and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the team that built the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb...

...In 1940 he changed course, joining a number of well-connected interventionists, such as Henry Luce, the chairman of Time Inc., and Allen Dulles, the future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, who called themselves the Century Group, after the Manhattan men's club where they met...

...In 1954, as a direct result of his position, Oppenheimer's security clearance was withdrawn by the Atomic Energy Commission...

...Long before Conant's death in 1978, the group of leaders he typified was ejected from its high command...

...James B. matriculated at Harvard College in 1910...

...Nonetheless, they were willing to enter Democratic administrations, since even the most conservative of them, such as Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War for not only Franklin D. Roosevelt but also William Howard Taft, had embraced internationalism with a fervor quite unusual at the time in their own party...

...The Wise Men went on to play an important role in the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself one of their number...

...Robert Lovett, Secretary of Defense from 1951 to 1953, was born in Texas and married into a prominent New York banking family...

...Although Conant suffered much less for his hostility to the H-bomb than Oppenheimer did, he was the victim of a bit of scientific intrigue that Hershberg tells fairly well...

...Hersh-berg does not say that the decision to drop the bomb was mistaken or immoral, but he challenges these assumptions...

...But the Eisenhower period turned out to be an interlude in the history of the Republican Party...

...And if it is true, as Hershberg (and others) charge, that the dropping of the bomb "was seen as obviating the necessity of Soviet intervention to force Japan's defeat," this concern was not self-evidently wrong—even from the standpoint of Japan's long-term interests...

...A conspiracy then emerged among the scientists of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, who yearned to develop the H-bomb and resented Conant's rejection of it...

...High Commissioner in the American Zone of Germany...

...Two years later, after a "whispering campaign" organized at the same Berkeley facility, Conant was denied reappointment to the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee...

...In their day authorities of all kinds enjoyed more prestige than they currently do, but that was not the only, or even the main, reason for the pervasive influence of the Wise Men...

...Four years later, in the spring and early summer of 1945, when it became clear that a new and terrible weapon lay at hand, Conant was among those who urged its use against Japan...

...he held back in the end because we made its price too high by deploying troops in Germany...

...indeed Hershberg shows convincingly that "rather than being swayed by Oppenheimer," as has generally been thought, "Conant led the opposition and emboldened Oppenheimer to make a stand...

...President Truman and his advisers knew the Japanese had bitterly contested regions far from their home islands and thus assumed an invasion of Japan itself would be a nightmare for everyone...

...As late as 1938 he wrote (to Walter Lippmann) "that any solution [to them] which does not involve a general European war would be highly satisfactory...

...A good deal of U.S...

...To quote Acheson, the United States could not "persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm 'by example.'" Besides, the principle of mutually assured destruction, which eventually brought a certain stability to the nuclear arms race, rested on a perception of parity that surely required both sides to have the same kinds of munitions...

...C. Wright Mills feared that interlocking circles of elite decision-makers had removed the important issues of our society from mass politics...

...His other goals were to be president of Harvard and then to enter the Cabinet...

...Might we have forestalled the Soviet H-bomb effort by abandoning ours, as Conant and Oppenheimer hoped...

...defense ties to Western Europe, he acted as their spokesman on the issue that moved them most deeply...

...While most were well-heeled Northeastern Protestants by birth, there was a certain amount of diversity in their ranks...

...It is true that Stalin was not inflexibly committed to such an attack, but neither was he inflexibly committed against it...

...Mills' spirit must be happy now, for mass politics has returned to the making of foreign policy...

...Notwithstanding Conant's troubles over the H-bomb, his strong ties to Ike won him an appointment as U.S...

...Conant's background was in many ways typical of this group: Though not a Brahmin—his father was a prosperous local businessman in the ordinary Boston neighborhood of Dorchester?he was a descendant of Roger Conant, the founder of Salem in 1626...

...In 1933, at the age of 40, he achieved the second objective...

...Hershberg also points to evidence suggesting that Tokyo would have surrendered without an invasion: peace feelers sent out by certain Japanese officials through the Soviets...

...In short, they were chiefly descendants of the people who founded this country, at the last moment when they had enough power to exercise a collective influence over its destiny...

...He does say that the committee "scorned, glossed over, or ignored" anything "that might muddle the clarity" of its message, such as "uncertainty regarding the likelihood of a Soviet attack against Western Europe...

...James V. Forrestal, who held the same post from 1947 to 1949, was shanty Irish and converted to Presbyterianism...

...The evidence suggests otherwise...

...Conant also took a high position in an agency created on his advice to mobilize scientists for military research, and in 1941 he was made the ultimate scientific decision-maker for the atomic bomb program...

...But they were wrong...

...By the late 1920s he had arguably attained the first of the three great ambitions he had revealed to his fiancee shortly after their engagement: to become the country's leading organic chemist...

...Stalin, who was determined to have his own H-bomb, ignored American proposals to create a UN nuclear regulatory body...

...More important was the common social background that usually permitted them to speak with a single voice...

...They argued that such a powerful explosive would be unnecessary against real military targets and was therefore suited only to civilian ones...

...Hershberg's James B. Conant (Knopf, 948 pp., $35.00) is too long, and it is marred by the author's tiresome ambivalence toward "Cold War orthodoxies" he chafes at but cannot bring himself to reject...

...It was already clear, however, that Jim Conant did not plan to spend his whole career in the laboratory and study...

...They proposed a rival candidate, Detlev Bronk, the president of Johns Hopkins University, and the full membership elected him despite his attempt to withdraw...

...Virtually all of the Wise Men, whatever their antecedents, went to elite colleges where they established the connections that later blossomed forth in such organizations as the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and its successor, the Committee on the Present Danger...

...For example, another contemporary U.S...

...But these overtures were not acts of the Tokyo government itself, dominated by hard-liners...

...Along with many scientists, Conant instinctively feared that unless control of atomic weapons and energy were internationalized following the War, any nation possessing the required technical resources would aim to construct its own nuclear armaments...

...research on fusion had been carried out during the War, and Klaus Fuchs, as Conant lamented when the Soviet spy was arrested in 1950, "knew everything" that had been discovered on the subject up to 1945, so there is no doubt that his employers realized this was the next step forward...

...military estimate, which the author prefers to believe, suggested that the total of American dead might have been closer to 40,000—still a lot, one would think...

...In fairness to Conant and Oppenheimer, I should note that the news of Fuchs' betrayal broke two days after Truman resolved to start an H-bomb program...

...If Hershberg does not quite endorse the Conant-Oppenheim-er view, he clearly sympathizes with it...

...Are we better off without Wise Men...

...Bernard Baruch, the financier and government adviser, was a Jew...

...Of the others, many, including Conant, were more Protestant than Christian: They derived their high principles and restrained behavior from ancestors whose religious outlook few of them any longer held rigorously...

...In 1950 Conant was nominated for the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences...

...Without Wise Men to provide a lead, we have not only resisted their internationalism but failed as well to adopt a more limited but thought out vision of American international interests...

...The main contribution he made in 20 years as the university's chief executive was the "up or out" rule for junior faculty...

...On scientific matters, Conant was often out of step with the other Wise Men...

...Hershberg questions the decision to station American soldiers overseas so persistently that he must regard it as a mistake, though he never actually says this...

...Though Dean Ache-son, Secretary of State from 1949 to 1952, and Averell Hani-man, the diplomat and negotiator, were Democrats, the great majority, like Conant, were registered Republicans...

...Yet today, as the world the Wise Men created comes apart and we must reconsider our international position from the ground up, much as they did, their story has a sad cogency, for they gave American foreign policy a sense of direction that it now catastrophically lacks...

...Writers & Writing THE WISDOM OF THE NORTHEAST BY ROGER DRAPER JAMES BRYAN CONANT, Harvard's 23rd president, was one of the famous Wise Men, that generation of luminaries who "guided America from Pearl Harbor to the Grand Alliance to the Cold War consensus' and then, as his biographer James G. Hershberg puts it, to "the disillusionment and fragmentation of Vietnam...

...But as chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, created in 1950 to promote U.S...

...Today, they have no real descendants...

...Our leadership is more diverse, our decision-making more open than ever—changes that are in themselves good—but we have become, not coincidentally, a country less capable of making decisions...

...Conant was not an early convert to intervention in the problems of Europe...