Penn Townsend Kimball II (October 12, 1915 – November 8, 2013) was an American journalist and college professor at Columbia University, most notable for suing the American government in the mid 1980s after his discovery that the FBI and CIA considered him and his wife a security risk.
Kimball was one of three siblings, born to a middle-class family in New Britain, Connecticut. His father was an executive for a household goods manufacturer, his mother was a former elementary school teacher, and his older brother George E. Kimball went on to become a noted quantum chemist and operations researcher who also taught at Columbia University. Kimball was named after his grandfather, Penn Townsend Kimball, who had moved from Massachusetts to Chicago; Kimball's family moved from Chicago to New Britain before he was born. Kimball went to Lawrenceville School, graduated from Princeton University in 1937, and spent a year at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a master's degree in politics and economics. He served in the Pacific as a Marine in World War II, becoming a captain.
His journalism career began in New York during the 1940s. During that era, he worked for numerous magazines and newspapers including The New Republic and the New York Times. He was an aide to governors Chester Bowles of Connecticut and W. Averell Harriman of New York. While still studying for a doctorate at Columbia University, he was hired as a journalism professor there in 1958. In the 1970s he worked with Edward Logue on urban renewal and wrote a report on the South Bronx, Areas of Strength, Areas of Opportunity. He was also an election consultant to the CBS network and a producer/writer for Omnibus. He retired from Columbia in 1985, after which he completed his a doctorate in political science from Columbia and became a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.