Richard G. Hewlett

Richard Greening Hewlett (February 12, 1923 – September 1, 2015) was an American public historian best known for his work as the Chief Historian of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

Hewlett was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1923. In 1941, he attended Dartmouth College, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps doing work related to meteorology. With a number of other privates he attended Bowdoin College for a year, focusing on science. In June 1944, he did work relating to using radar to track weather balloons, and eventually the military sent him to Harvard University to study in the electronics school. In early 1945, he was sent to Western China as a radiosonde operator, sending meteorological information by radio to U.S. forces, which used them in planning bombing raids on Japan. After the war, Hewlett attended graduate school in history at the University of Chicago, though he never completed his undergraduate degree. He received his master's degree in 1948 and his PhD in 1952, writing his thesis on Lewis Cass, a nineteenth-century Michigan politician.

While he was completing his dissertation, Hewlett accepted a position as an intelligence specialist in the United States Air Force, examining open literature on factories in the Soviet Union. Hewlett found the job tedious and in 1952 leaped at the chance to be a program analyst in the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), compiling classified progress reports from all of the many branches of the AEC for the Commissioners. Hewlett later said that this job gave him a good general overview of the AEC and how it worked.

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