James Bryant Conant - High Commissioner

High Commissioner

In April 1951 Conant had been approached by the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, about replacing John J. McCloy as United States High Commissioner for Germany, but had declined. However, after Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, Conant was again offered the job by the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and this time he accepted. At the Harvard Board of Overseers meeting on January 12, 1952, Conant announced that he would retire in September 1953 after twenty years at Harvard, having reached the pension age of sixty.

In Germany, there were major issues to be decided. Germany was still occupied by the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France. Dealing with the wartime allies was a major task for the high commissioner. West Germany, made up of the zones occupied by the three western powers, had been granted control of its own affairs except for defense and foreign policy in 1949, but most Germans wanted a neutral and reunited Germany. At home, the Eisenhower administration sought to reduce its defense spending by re-arming Germany and replacing American troops with Germans. Meanwhile, the House Un-American Activities Committee slammed Conant's staff as communist sympathizers and called for books by communist authors held in USIA libraries there to be burned.

The first crisis to occur on Conant's watch was the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. This brought the reunification issue to the fore. Konrad Adenauer's deft handling of the issue enabled him to handily win re-election as Chancellor in September, but this strengthened his hand in negotiations with Conant. Adenauer did not want his country to become a bargaining chip between the United States and the Soviet Union, nor did he want it to become a nuclear battlefield, a prospect raised by the arrival of American tactical nuclear weapons in 1953 as part of the Eisenhower administration's New Look policy. Conant lobbied for the European Defense Community. This would have established a pan-European military, which seemed to be the only way that German rearmament would be accepted, but opposition from France killed the plan. In what Conant considered a minor miracle, this cleared the way for West Germany to become part of NATO with its own army.

At noon on May 6, 1955, Conant, along with the high commissioners from Britain and France, signed the documents ending Allied control of West Germany, admitting it to NATO, and allowing it re-arm. The office of the United States High Commissioner was abolished and Conant became instead the first United States Ambassador to West Germany. His role was now to encourage West Germany to build up its forces, while reassuring the Germans that doing so would not result in a United States withdrawal.

Conant returned to the United States in February 1957, and moved to New York. In 1959 he authored the The American High School Today. This became a best seller, resulting in Conant's appearance on the cover of Time magazine. He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with special distinction, by President Lyndon Johnson on December 6, 1963. He had been selected for the award by President John F. Kennedy, but the ceremony had been delayed, and was presented with the award after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. President Richard Nixon presented him with the Atomic Pioneers Award from the Atomic Energy Commission in February 1970.