James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age By James Hershberg Knopf, 949 pages, $35 In the autumn of 1950, as a first-year graduate student in Cambridge, Mass., I grew … ...

President James Conant, Detective Inspector Walter Thompson, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Harvard University, Oct. 6, 1943 (Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia Commons)) ...