Rand History Project Interviews

Scope and Contents

This collection consists of the compact audio cassettes and transcripts for the Rand History Project interviews, which is a dual institutional study of the RAND Corporation and its military sponsor, the Air Force. This collection covers the period 1945 though the early 1960s and consists of 104 hours of interviews with 29 individuals. The RAND interviews were conceived as another angle of inquiry on the relations between expert knowledge and the military in the early Cold War. RAND drew together engineers, scientists, and mathematicians whose specialties were oriented toward military hardware design and the physical sciences and sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists, and other social science and humanities specialists. All were organized within a single institution to study the problem of warfare in the cold War, especially from the perspective of the Air Force.

Arrangement

The RAND History Project Interviews are arranged alphabetically by interviewee. Series I (boxes 1-9) contains interviews on audio cassette tapes. Series II (boxes 10-12) contains the transcripts.

Biographical/Historical note

This collection contains the interviews for the RAND History Project Interviews. These interviews explore the non-profit research firm's efforts to study the various problems of U.S. national security during the Cold War, in particular, from the perspective of the U.S. Air force (USAF). RAND brought together physical scientists, political scientists, sociologists, engineers and mathematicians and organized them within this single institution to pursue such research efforts. The RAND Project constitutes one of a number of oral history endeavors conducted by the National Air and Space Museum's (NASM) Department of Space History. The principal (though, by no means the only) interviewer for this project was Martin Collins, and the interview set consists of 104 hours of interviews with 38 individuals. The following people were interviewed for this project: Bruno Augenstein, Robert Bacher (with Lee DuBridge), Edward Barlow, Robert Belzer, Paul Blasingame, Edward Bowles, Charles Carey, Frank Collbohm, Merton Davies, Robert Davis, James Digby, Gene Fisher, Richard Frick, Olaf Helmer, Lawrence Henderson, Charles Hitch, Victor Jackson, Amrom Katz, Scott King, Burt Klein, Charles Lindblom, Hugh Miser, David Novick, Malcolm Palmatier, Ernst Plessett, Edward Quade, Arthur Raymond, Ben Rumph, Robert Salter, Bernard Schriever, Lloyd Shapley, Gustave Shubert, Robert Specht, Hans Speier, George Tanham, Crawford Thompson, and Albert Wohlstetter.

Related Materials

Similar materials, specifically a series of videohistories on the same topic, are housed in the Smithsonian Institution Archives in the The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation Interviews, local collection number SIA 9536.