Although Conant had been rather ambivalent about the German army's march across Europe prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland, after the start of the war on September 1, Conant "emerged on the national scene as a leading interventionist and in the Roosevelt administration as an apostle of military preparedness," according to a biography of Conant written by James B. Hershberg '82.

The man who advised students at the June 1939 Commencement to "neglect the tumult of the moment" would later send a telegram to Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 after the evacuation at Dunkirk in May 1940 stating, "I believe the United States should take every action possible to ensure the defeat of Hitler."

For the next year and a half, Conant played a major role in the interventionist movement. He began to make more frequent trips to Washington and also became a member of the influential "Gentleman's Club," an informal group of wealthy activists who used their connections with the influential elite to create the public support necessary for war.

This group included such men as Time and Life publisher Henry Luce, future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency Allen Dulles, columnist Joseph Alsop and others who felt the need to prod the Roosevelt administration toward greater support for the Allies.

In the early stages of Nazi aggression and even after the German invasion of Poland, the student body reacted angrily to Conant's position.

"We are frankly determined to have peace at any price," said a Crimson editorial appearing in the fall of 1939. "We refuse to fight another balance-of-power war."

At the 1940 Harvard-Yale Game, a group of Crimson and Lampoon editors joined forces to parody Conant's leading role in the interventionist movement. In 1941, students protested outside the president's office in Mass. Hall.

But as the signs of German aggression became clearer during 1941, greater numbers of students, in what another Crimson editorial termed a "seemingly drastic shift," prepared to leave school and head off to fight the enemy.

Finally, following Pearl Harbor, Harvard, along with the rest of America, decided to go to war.

The War Effort

Harvard's Class of 1946 was at the center of the global conflict.

The war fragmented the class, forcing the members to accelerate their college experience and, in most cases, interrupt it with a tour of duty in the military. Even with a sped-up trimester system allowing students to graduate in two-and-a-half years instead of the normal four, only 32 members of the class managed to graduate in June 1946. Most had to return after being discharged from the service to a University which had, in some sense, left them behind.

"The class was totally fractured," MacPherson says. "It was all screwed up." He says he moved into Wigglesworth in the fall of 1942, then lived in Adams House until he joined the Tenth Mountain Division that winter.

Many in the Class of 1946 never got a chance to spend their first year in the friendly confines of Harvard Yard, a privilege since taken for granted by the entering class, because the dorms were occupied by military trainees.

In June 1942, the first members of the Class of 1946 began their college careers under the new trimester system, but this educational device could not enable them to avoid the long arm of the draft.