He is noted for a memorandum he wrote to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1945 urging that Japan be given a warning before the use of the atomic bomb on a strategic city.

Bard was active in civic organizations in the Chicago area, including Boy Scouts of America and the American Red Cross.

[7] Although he was an active Republican,[8] Bard was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat who had once held the same post.

Bard was also a member of the War Manpower Commission, established by President Roosevelt to balance the wartime labor needs of the civilian and military sectors of the U.S. economy.

When Bard became Assistant Secretary, Navy policy was to prohibit African Americans from enlisting for "general duty" (combat) roles, restricting them to service as "messmen".

As a member of a committee appointed to investigate the Navy's racial policies, Bard's special assistant Addison Walker argued for allowing enlistment of a small number of African Americans for general duty on an experimental basis; and Bard himself promised Mark Abridge, who chaired President Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices Committee, that enlistment of African Americans would be given consideration.

In a memorandum dated June 27, 1945, to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson,[16] Bard argued that Japan should receive two or three days' "preliminary warning" before the bomb was used.

"The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling," Bard wrote, adding that he felt "that the Japanese government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender."

On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched the invasion of Manchuria which decimated the already-weakening Manchukuo Imperial Army.

He received the Navy's Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1954,[23] and he died in a nursing home in Deerfield, Illinois, on April 5, 1975, at age 91.