Gregg Herken Ph.D.

Foil: 7 Panel: 3 Column: 2 Line: 36

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Toni E. Thomas

Gregg Herken was a senior historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum during the years 1988-2003. He had previously taught at Oberlin College, Yale University and the California Institute of Technology. From October 1988 to September 1996, he was the Chairman of the museum's Space History Division. He is the author of The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, Counsels of War, and Cardinal Choices, a history of presidential science advising. During his tenure at Air and Space, Herken received a Mac Arthur research and writing grant for and completed Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. I in 1994-95, he was detailed as a senior research and policy analyst to the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments as a result of some of the discoveries that he made in research for his book on Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Teller. As a curator at the museum, Herken was instrumental in the acquisition of the Pershing II and SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missiles, and the Corona and Grab spy satellites. He pioneered the museum's expansion of its military space collection.