Low Protean

MY SEVERAL LIVES: MEMOIRS OF A SOCIAL INVENTOR by James B. Conant. 701 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.

In 1920, not long before he was married, 27-year-old James Bryant Conant confessed to his financee that he had three ambitions. The first was to become the leading organic chemist in the U.S. "After that," he said, "I would like to be president of Harvard; and after that, a Cabinet member, perhaps Secretary of the Interior."

Conant very nearly did it all. When he left the laboratory in 1933 to become Harvard's 23rd president, his work on the structure of chlorophyll had gained him an international reputation. Before he resigned 20 years later to become U.S. High Commissioner to Germany, he had moonlighted in wartime Washington as one of half a dozen key figures managing the development of the atomic bomb. While he never made the Cabinet, in 1955 he became the first American ambassador to the newly sovereign Bonn government. Before and since, he has sowed sensible, evolutionary ideas in U.S. education.

Reactions and Love. Conant is now 76. With the help of a Carnegie Corporation grant and two graduate students he has put together a volume of memoirs. It should be a great deal more interesting than it is. Part of the trouble is Conant's lack of total candor, perhaps the natural result of Yankee reticence. Whether he is describing a faculty revolt in the late 1930s (over tenure and promotion) or his disgruntlement with John Foster Dulles 25 years later, Conant tantalizes more than he satisfies. Perhaps, too, in his protean lifetime Conant commissioned and read too many committee reports for the good of his own prose.

He writes with genuine feeling of his prewar mountain climbing adventures, which unhappily ended when he injured his back on Mount Washington. Occasionally he throws out comments that should encourage anyone who has ever done battle with organic chemistry. "The course of organic reactions, like that of true love, does not run smooth." It is reassuring to learn that, at 15, the future president of Harvard, then a Roxbury Latin schoolboy, could not even spell supper or business. And he does not spare himself an occasional joke at his own expense. Bernard Baruch, meeting him in 1942 at Washington's Carlton Hotel to begin work on a synthetic-rubber study, surveyed Conant's fox face and spartan, wire-rimmed glasses and instantly announced: "Well, you're not much to look at--that's certain." When an unexpected rainstorm drenched the large and eminent audience at Harvard's tercentenary celebration in 1936, Yale's President James Rowland Angell found the explanation: "This is Conant's way of soaking the rich."

In his memoirs, as in the memory of many of his professional associates, Conant remains a baffling and difficult man --by turns waspish and wry, pompous and self-depreciating. He calls himself a "social inventor," but by his own account, he emerges more as a catalyst and a tinkerer. His most influential role was as an educational goad, especially at Harvard, where he was responsible at least in part for such innovations as a revised graduate program for training schoolteachers, the Nieman fellowships for journalists and the general-education curriculum for underclassmen begun in the late 1940s. His greatest service to U.S. education was a 1959 report containing a score of key recommendations for strengthening the nation's public high schools. Long before most of the country was aware of an impending educational crisis, Conant pointed out that an integrated democracy would be impossible without basic reform of public secondary education. "Social dynamite," he wrote in 1961, "is building up in our large cities in the form of unemployed out-of-school youth, especially in the Negro slums."

Conant finds in himself a certain sympathy for the cause of youthful critics of education today. "Perhaps the time has come to give up all attempts of a faculty to tell young men and women what they ought to study in order to be broadly educated," he writes. "Can it be that the fetish of upholding academic standards has misled us? The educational process should continue throughout life. The knowledge and the skills required in a vocation are something quite apart. Have we in the United States unnecessarily entangled the two?"

The pedagogical technique is characteristic. Conant is not really asking a question but making a statement. Yet he admits that the issue raises "problems which to an oldtimer look almost beyond solution." Perhaps this is why, when old acquaintances ask, "Aren't you glad you are no longer a college president?" Conant never gets around to the answer.

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