One Damn Thing After Another: A Sort of Memoir

by Gregg Herken

The title of this "sort of memoir" is borrowed from Mark Twain's observation that life is "just one damn thing after another." Its author--a professor who taught American diplomatic history and the history of the Cold War for nearly four decades--originally intended the book's readership to be limited to prospective grandchildren. But the stories within--about the vicissitudes of academic life at Oberlin, Yale, and a University of California start-up campus; student protests against the Vietnam War at the 1969 March on Washington; a summer internship as an intelligence analyst on the CIA's Soviet desk; a subsequent, 15-year career as chairman of the Department of Space History and Curator of Military Space at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum (including successfully negotiating in Moscow the swap of a nuclear-tipped U.S. missile for its Soviet equivalent); family summers spent at a remote, idyllic Cape Cod cabin, and other, international travels (including an arrest in Mexico for terrorism)--might also appeal to a broader audience. As Mark Twain also "No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words, can be uninteresting."
Gregg Herken is the author of five books on nuclear history, including The Georgetown Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (Knopf, 2014), and Brotherhood of the The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (Henry Holt, 2002), a finalist for the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History.

275 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 23, 2022