Home >  A & E >  Books

'Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon And The Secret Palace Of Science That Changed The Course Of World War II' by Jennet Conant

Book Briefs: ‘Tuxedo Park’

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

By Fred Bortz

	Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon And The Secret Palace Of Science That Changed The Course Of World War II By Jennet Conant Simon & Schuster $26.00

Journalist Jennet Conant got more than she bargained for when she started rattling the door of the closet that housed her family’s most intriguing skeleton.

On Jan. 30, 1940, her father’s favorite uncle, William T. Richards, killed himself at 40.

He was a former Princeton chemistry professor, the son of a Harvard Nobel laureate and the brother-in-law of Harvard President James B. Conant (the author’s great-grandfather). He was apparently unable to live up to the impossible goals he had set for himself.

Richards left behind a soon-to-be-published novel, “Brain Waves and Death,” written under the pseudonym William Rich. The book was “a thinly veiled account of the legendary scientific laboratory owned by the millionaire Alfred Lee Loomis and the eccentric coterie of geniuses whose work he financed,” writes Conant in “Tuxedo Park,” named for the exclusive suburban New York enclave where Loomis lived and built his laboratory.

In her relative’s elite intellectual circle, “suicide was regarded as a kind of weakness, a moral failure. ... My grandfather used his influence to have the incident covered up, and it was never spoken of again.”

The Harvard president even managed to suppress a draft of a William Rich short story titled “The Uranium Bomb,” written less than a year after the discovery of nuclear fission and more than five years before the first atomic bomb.

As Conant discovered, for nearly three decades, Loomis “seemed to stand at the edge of important events, intimately involved and at the same time somehow overlooked. ... Few men of Loomis’ prominence have gone to greater length to foil history.”

She took that discovery as her challenge. Though Conant tells the story chronologically, its central theme is never completely clear -- nor should it be.

Like the character of Loomis himself, this is a fabric woven of many strands -- financial genius, brilliant inventiveness, a passion for science, human traits and appetites -- each essential to the emergent pattern.

Loomis must have wondered whether anyone would figure out the complexity of his life. Thanks to Conant’s efforts, the tapestry is at last on display for us to try.

The reviewer is the author of science books for children and a resident of Monroeville.