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Article: James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- April 11, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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JAMES B. CONANT. Harvard to
Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear
Age. By James G. Hershberg. Knopf.
948 pp. $35.
James G. Hershberg worked on this masterful biography for a dozen years, and in the end he says he was "still not sure" whether he "liked" his subject. The problem with James Bryant Conant--Harvard's president from 1933 to 1953 and the man most responsible for ushering America into the atomic era--is that for a university president and presumably an intellectual, he was capable of an astonishing degree of deception and self-deception. But then again, maybe a talent for subterfuge comes with the territory. Writing his ...