Jennet conant, book about her grandfather, difficult time putting down. Would you please encapsulate the life of your grandfather briefly because he seems to have compressed four or five lives into one lifetime. He did, in fact, he wrote a memoir called my several lives, the only problem with it it was New York Times declared he was a great man and it was a dull book because he was a buttoned down yankee and he didnt reveal too many secrets. My grandfather had extraordinary career because he the country in three wars essentially, too hot andn one cold. He became president of harvard and because of his wartime experience and because he was a brilliant chemist by training, he ended up being recruited by roosevelt to be one of scientific generals, he was in charge again of all chemical weapons but that included a new weapon and he ended up overseeing the Manhattan Project, laboratory at los alamos where they built the first atomic bomb. He had advised roosevelt and became key adviser to truman and ie eisenhower during cold war and how to control nuclear weapons, how to confront the russian threat. He later became ambassador to germany during theom height of e cold war when it was believed that the third war might be fought, right there on the lines of east germany because of the soviet aggression. I think because of its entire wartime experience, he became convinced that the only way for democracy to survive, the best way to beat our enemies and be a strong country was to have a great School System where we showed that democracy was better than dictatorship and that we would have sufficiently brilliant people, talented people in government and science and the way to do that was to have the sat, which he helped invent and implement in schools across the country, produce what had he felt were the kind of leaders, the kind of technically advanced people that we would need in positions of power if we were going to be a great nation and the hightech world that he foresaw approaching in the 50s and 60s, so he had an extraordinary impact on american life. Critical role he had in shaping the future direction of our country in that regard. Many people go ahead. No, please. Hes referred to as father of american atochrosy, that access should be determined entirely by merit not by birth, not by family, not by geography, that really came about through his early working at harvard and applying to military intelligence test to the sat and trying to use the sat as a tool really to open up college to everybody based on merit to make it a system of as fair as possible, of course, controversial now and has many critics but originally the idea was fairness, openness, two trait that is my grandfather thought were key to american democracy, the idea of a free and open society with social nobility, he thought that was key to preserve quality and felt that was the best way to combat fascism and communism, he was a real colder war era and he thought it was the tool to do that. Nd its a very important part of his legacy which is almost forgotten now. And how much of that do you think came out of his own background in terms of growing his boyhood in boston, the experience he had, the opportunity he had to go to harvard and his own experience . It came entirely from his childhood. He was from dorchester, a new workingclass, commuter suburb because, you know, moved out there and new railroads and so the old, the rules class of boston looked down on dorchester, growing up around very old city and he was, a scholarship boy. He had been lucky going to Public Schools to get into luxbury latin, very good school and he won a scholarship and he was a scholarship boy from the wrong side of the tracks in those days at harvard which was a school of rich men sons and you really felt it. When he entered harvard in 1914 it was such a school of rich mens sons, his graduating class of 1914 had, you know, boys that had come to school with servants and butlers and they lived in vast apartments and they had large stipend and and residences with swimming pools and catering facilities and Laundry Services and scholarship boys lived in unheated houses in the outskirts of the campus, he had no heat, no Running Water and he didnt even have electricity the first few months he was in the rooming house, so he used to bathe in the gymnasium, it was a much harder life for the scholarship boys and he never forgot the experience and the fact that boys like him couldnt get into any better fraternities and many of his friends had part time jobs where they worked long hours to try and pay for their books and meals, he was luckier than that, his father was making pretty good income and so his father provided him with money cofor books and meals, but he never forgot the huge divide between the haves and the have notes and it marked him for life and very much formed the core of his educational philosophy. He seems to have had a strong sense of self and strong sense of purpose from a very young age. I remember in reading yeah. I remember reading in your book that his parents wanted him to go to milton academy, a private high school and he rejected the idea and he wanted to go instead to roxbary latin, thats pretty extraordinary for a boy of that age. Absolutely extraordinary. He knew the very young age that he wanted science that he showed a real aptitude for it. He was tinkering with batteries and electricity and all the kind of new apparatus, tells a story about being a very little boy and doorbells were introduced, brandnew thing, very Simple Technology and they often broke and he would go to his neighbors and rejigger the battery and the electricity that triggered the mechanism and that gave him such a huge thrill the sense that he could fix something and make it work and that he played with all kind of apparatus after that and took things apart and put them back together, he built his own microscope, he built excerptial equipment and he newbie the time he was very young that this is what he wanted to do, this was a time where science was changing and it was quite exciting field at the time. Also quite driven because i recall that not only went to harvard at 16 but he went as sophomore because he had completed enough advanced work in high school to have entered in sophomore. He completed harvard in three years . Really two and a half. Well into his sophomore credentials. The thing is that specialization was very common in those days, you trained, you went to harvard particularly if you were from a scholarship background. You really went in not for a general but tor train for a profession. So he very much, he had two older sisters, the family was not particularly well off, he very much had a sense that he was driven to succeed in a profession that for a boy like him he would have to make his own way, he was very ambitious and he wanted to get ahead as quickly as possible, get on to the graduate program in chemistry and g start training r his profession, so, yes, he moved very quickly as he said along a very narrow track at harvard taking as much chemistry and science as he could and as little of things like english and history as he could get away with at the time in his life. It reminds me about the subject of your first book, similar experience at yale and then going onto harvard law school, so you seemed to have picked twodriven people. Its interesting but not uncommon. If you read the biographies of truly exceptional men, they knew very young, maybe its a coincidence of brilliance and luck, but they find their vocation very young and they are very focused and different individuals and so you see that very oftenen with scientists, mh mathematicians an politicians as well, course set at tender age. Se you begin your book with a powerful scenario, Christmas Eve 1945, your grandfather is in the kremlin e with the Foreign Ministers of the Nuclear Power of the allies. You have stalin there, the foreign minister from russia, tell me why you began the scene with that particular time in history . Well, it was an extraordinary moment in history. The war had just ended, russia had been our ally, but we had the most powerful weapon ever made by man. We had dropped two atomic bombs of different designs on hiroshima and harisoki. We had not told our allies that we had the weapon, the british of course, knew because they had helped us make it but came as something of a surprise to the russians, not as much surprise as we thought we later found out because of espionage but nevertheless we had used this weapon andna russians were quite disgruntled, conferences held to divide the spoils of war and geographically and we draw the boundaries, the russians were being very difficult and we had thought, of course, that with this weapon we would be really in thehe dominant position in te postwar negotiations, truman and our secretary of state burns were convinced that we were in the cat birds seat but the russians would never acknowledge the bomb, they never made reference to it and in the first conferences they kind of ridiculed and made fun of the bulge in pocket, kept making jokes about it and american policymakers were astounded, here we were the most powerful country in the world, victorious nation, we had this huge weapon and the russians refused to take it seriously. So negotiations had not proceeded as we had anticipated and in a desperate effort to try to negotiate with the russians, secretary of state burns agree today this special conference over christmas in moscow and he had taken along the leading bomb expert james to try and talk to the russian scientists and the hope was that the russians would acknowledge the bomb, was this decisive weapon and agreed to some kind of nuclear controls, agree to International Committee to control the future of all nuclear weapons, this was crucial because my grandfather and bush, thes. Head of the Manhattan Project, really almost all of the scientists that worked on the bomb at los alamos and chicago and other laboratories felt that this was not a secret we could keep, that the technology that went into making the bomb would very quickly proliferate, they couldnt protect it and it would be a matter of time only before not only the russians had it but other enemies, petty dictators could could conceivably get a hold of the technology. There was a great fear that this weapon was so powerful that it could really destroy the world in the wrong hands become something that terrorists could use, all of this was clearly envisioned by its creators really before the war was over and they began trying desperately to put in place some kindpe of International Controls so that this weapon could not proliferate, it would not have people stockpiling and Building Nuclear weapons left, right and center. And so this meeting in moscow in Christmas Eve was so crucial because my grandfather and the american that is went were desperately hoping that they could convince stalin and molotuff to control the future of the terrible force. They were very optimistic that it could still be done but by the time they left moscow, they were they were less convinced that the russians really wanted to participate in these negotiations. And what did they envision might be the form of control that they might be able to convince the russians to submit to or to agree to . The scientists hope that in exchange enormous gesture, sharing the secret, the Nuclear Secret of the bomb in exchange for giving this technology to the world in the hopes that it could be used as form of clean power for nations all over the world, nations would come together and Form International organization, they would later try and do this through the un but at this Time International organization, community of likeminded nations that would then have a board that would supervise laboratories, police them, if you will, hold inspections to make sure laboratories were use used for power and in no way towards making more weapons. That was their idealistic hope and they really believed at the time that it was achievable but as my grandfather wrote, you know, what other what other belief could they have except this hope for International Control because the weapon now existed. Ro it had been used and it could be replicated, so they had to strive for International Control because that was the only way to avoid a desperately dangerous arms race from developing and so i begin this book with Christmas Eve summit at the kremlin because that is where they had all their hopes pinned on that meeting. It also seems to be the cusp between the world war ii and the cold war to follow and very poynant time in worlds history. Yes, and it was really, really our last hope in a way of bringing the russians around to our way of thinking, we thought, we still believed when they set off for that mission that there was a chance that they could convince the russians and by the time my grandfather returned from that trip, he began to have grave doubt that ise the russias would come to the negotiating table, of course, as we now know years later, the russians exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949 and cold war began along with desperate arms race that we are now struggling with. Over the language span of history, while he may not have accomplished the shortterm objective, in many ways he and others were quite because the agency fulfills, not all some of the function that is you were describing a moment ago. Though, i think, you know, my grandfather again, bush, so many scientists, they foresaw, you know, in a meeting with truman, even outlined the possibility of Small Nuclear suitcase bombs in the hands of our enemies. They really understood all too clearly what this weapon and what its falling into the hands of enemies mean, that america would never really be safe again, that we would be terribly vulnerable and a Nuclear Conflict of the kind that would involve these weapons would be devastating beyond belief really, unthinkable in their mind. So they foresaw this and they really they really struggled mightily to try and bring russia to the negotiating table and when that opportunity faded and the Atomic Commission was founded, they did feel, particularly my grandfather terribly fearful that it would not have the powers needed to keep the arms race from developing at a terrible rate and from the weapon falling into enemy hands and they were very right about that. Why dont we step back, we now have a sense for what he accomplished during world war ii, but he grew up in a family, if i recall, where his mother was a quacker. Yes. In world war i, my recollection while he was state of the union at harvard, he was not enthused about the prowar efforts that were then begin to go build in the United States and he went through a rather substantial conversion, perhaps because of the german gassing of the french and belgium troops. Would you describe some of that and how you think that conversion came about . In really many ways, i think its the saddest aspect of his life. As we have talked, he loved chemistry and loved science and great ambition was to become a nobelprize winning scientist, his mentor at Harvard Theodore William Richards was, he became his fatherinlaw. This is the career path he had in mind. His mother was a quacker, many of the relatives, in fact, were quakers, so much so when he was at harvard and world war i broker out in 1914 and he was entering graduate school, great many of his classmates and maiends became caught up in the war, so was the faculty. It really divided the campus, but the head of harvard became very pro the war and the pro the allies, they started rotc campus, students drilling in uniform, many of his friends were volunteering, he was horrified and wanted no part of the war. He saw war as aggressive old empires with plenty of fault on either side battling out over territory and money and he did not see it as a moral cause and he did not see a reason for america to get involved and he prsonally had no desire to get involved and he took great steps to avoid it and, in fact, he lost friends over it, many people did not admire his sort of isolationist position at the time, but when america finally declared war on germany and the germans were using this new chemical weapon, poison gas, to slaughter the allies, he was on his way to volunteering, he felt he had no choice, most americans felt they had no choice at that age but volunteer once the country had declared war on germany and he got stopped on his way to the Recruitment Offices in washington, d. C. By a professor, very famous chemist james norris and he stopped him on the sidewalk and said, dont go off and shoulder a gun and, youre wasting your brains doing that. De we need you to help us combat these horrible weapons that are going to slaughter our boys when they get to the front in europe. Youre a chemist and we need to develop protection, we need to develop defenses and we need to develop even worse chemical weapons to keep the germans from killing our boys. So convinced that he would be more effective in that way, he reluctantly did not volunteer for the army and he went into the Chemical Warfare service and was immediately put to work perfecting an american version as it were of poison gas, it was mustard gas, the weapon of choice at the moment and he spent a year or more perfecting a formula for mustard gas which immediately went into production and america made vast amounts, started making 30 tons a month and shipping it to the front, by the end of the war we were producing more mustard gas than all of the european nations combined. So he became involved in making this horrifying weapon of mass destruction. Whats really sort of awful and i show this is his his terrible misgivings about it are clear on the letters he wrote fiancee, trying to beat the deafl at its own game, gassing the inventors of gas, he did not like it, he felt he had no choice. Before the war was over, he ended up being promoted and sent to secret facility to try to invent an even more deadly gas which he had helped come up with with another chemist and they worked in the secret wartime laboratory in an old automobile plant in willaby, ohio, 20 miles outside of cleveland and they s