Gregg Herken

Gregg Herken (born May 23, 1947 in Richmond, California ) is an American historian. He was particularly concerned with the history of the atomic bomb in the Cold War.

Herken studied history at the University of California, Santa Cruz , with a bachelor's degree in history and political science in 1969, was an assistant at the Institute for International Studies in Berkeley in 1973/74, and received his MA in 1971 from Princeton University , at the he received his PhD in American diplomacy history in 1974. In 1974/75 he was a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and from 1975 to 1977 at California State University in San Luis Obispo . He taught as an assistant professor at Oberlin College in 1978, was an associate professor of US history at Yale University from 1978 to 1985, and was a professor at the University of California, Merced until retirement . From 1988 to 2003 he was a historian and curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. From 1988 to 1996 he headed their Space History Division. During this time and under his leadership, the museum expanded the military space department and acquired Pershing II and SS 20 rockets (for which he flew several times to Russia) and spy satellites (grave and corona).

He received a MacArthur Fellowship for his book on the roles of Robert Oppenheimer , Ernest Orlando Lawrence and Edward Teller in the development of nuclear weapons during and after World War II. He worked on it for ten years and evaluated numerous new eyewitness reports and archives from secret services (CIA, FBI, KGB). Herken discovered, among other things, that Robert Oppenheimer led a closed group of the Communist Party in California with Haakon Chevalier from 1938 to 1942 . After Herken he was not a Soviet agent.

In his book, The Georgetown Set , he deals with the influential role of three men who were friends of each other and who met regularly on Sundays for lunch and exchanged information during the Cold War: the owner of the Washington Post Philip Graham , the CIA agent Frank Wisner (head Secret Operations Department), and columnist Joseph Alsop .

In 1994/95 he advised the White House Advisory Committee on questions relating to radiation experiments on humans.

Fonts

• The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, Knopf 1981, Princeton UP 1988
• Counsels of War, Knopf 1985, Oxford UP 1986
• Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI, Oxford UP 1992, Stanford 1999
• Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, Henry Holt and Co. 2002
• The Georgetown Set: Friends and rivals in cold war Washington, Knopf 2014

Web links

• Homepage, UC Merced
• Website at the National Air and Space Museum
• Entry in Contemporary Authors , Gale 2009

Individual evidence

1. ^ Profile of Herken, UCSC
2. ↑ Herken's website for his book