James B. Conant place of burial Mount Auburn Cemetery
Later life
Conant returned to the United States in February 1957, and moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. Between 1957 and 1965, the Carnegie Corporation of New York gave him over a million dollars to write studies of education.  In 1959 he published The American High School Today, better known as the Conant Report. This became a best seller, resulting in Conant's appearance on the cover of Time magazine on September 14, 1959. In it, Conant called for a number of reforms, including the consolidation of high schools into larger bodies that could offer a broader range of curriculum choices. Although it was slammed by critics of the American system, who hoped for a system of education based on the European model, it did lead to a wave of reforms across the country. His subsequent Slums and Suburbs in 1961 was far more controversial in its treatment of racial issues. Regarding busing as impractical, Conant urged Americans "to accept de facto segregated schools". This did not go over well with civil rights groups, and by 1964 Conant was forced to admit that he had been wrong. In The Education of American Teachers in 1963, Conant found much to criticize about the training of teachers. Most controversial was his defense of the arrangement by which teachers were certified by independent bodies rather than the teacher training colleges.President Lyndon Johnson presented Conant with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with special distinction, on December 6, 1963. He had been selected for the award by President John F. Kennedy, but the ceremony had been delayed, and went ahead after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. In February 1970, President Richard Nixon  presented Conant with the Atomic Pioneers Award from the Atomic Energy Commission. Other awards that Conant received during his long career included being made a Commander of Légion d'honneur by France in 1936 and an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Britain in 1948, and he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957. He was also awarded over 50 honorary degrees, and was posthumously inducted into the Alpha Chi Sigma Hall of Fame in 2000.Between 1965 and 1969, Conant, suffering from a heart condition, worked on his biography, My Several Lives. He became increasingly infirm, and suffered a series of strokes in 1977. He died in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire, on February 11, 1978. His body was cremated and his ashes interred in the Thayer-Richards family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery. He was survived by his wife and sons. His papers are in the Harvard University Archives. Among them was a sealed brown Manila envelope that Conant had given the archives in 1951, with instructions that it was to be opened by the President of Harvard in the 21st century. Opened by Harvard's 28th president, Drew Faust, in 2007, it contained a letter in which Conant expressed his hopes and fears for the future. "You will ... be in charge of a more prosperous and significant institution than the one over which I have the honor to preside", he wrote. "That [Harvard] will maintain the traditions of academic freedom, of tolerance for heresy, I feel sure."
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