The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has received an increment to the collection of Gregg Herken, American historian and professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Merced and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Herken, an expert on atomic energy during the Cold War, is the author of The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945-1950 (1981), Counsels of War (1985), Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (2002), and The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (2014).
The latest addition to Herken’s collection contains documents, notes, photographs, and correspondence related to The Georgetown Set, a historical portrait of Washington DC Cold Warriors who helped shape strategy in the years after WWII. The Georgetown neighborhood coterie of affluent, well-educated, and connected civilians guided the country from the Marshall Plan through McCarthyism, Watergate, and Vietnam. The Georgetown set included Phil and Kay Graham, husband-and-wife publishers of The Washington Post; Joe and Stewart Alsop, odd-couple brothers who were among the country’s premier political pundits; Frank Wisner, a driven, manic-depressive lawyer in charge of CIA covert operations; and a host of other diplomats, spies, and scholars. The Wall Street Journal described Herken’s volume as “A remarkable book. . . . A bravura feat of research and writing . . . Herken has described a time, a milieu and a life that were, one might say, stranger than journalism.”
