20 Facts About Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz was born on May 5,1936 and is an American historian and political economist.

Gar Alperovitz served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State.

Gar Alperovitz was awarded a Marshall scholarship to pursue a Ph.

Gar Alperovitz wrote his dissertation on the role of the atomic bomb in the creation of the postwar economic order.

Gar Alperovitz was named a fellow of King's College, Cambridge University in 1964.

On leave from courses, Gar Alperovitz served as the legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1964 and 1965, where he played a role in efforts to limit the scope of powers given to the President in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, drafting an amendment to the resolution that would have prevented the escalation to a full ground war in Vietnam.

In 1966 Gar Alperovitz joined the Brookings Institution as a non-resident guest scholar.

Gar Alperovitz was elected as a founding fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School that year.

Gar Alperovitz reported that, at the time, there was substantial but not definitive evidence suggesting that gaining diplomatic leverage against the Soviet Union was a major consideration in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Gar Alperovitz has written extensively on the decision to use the atomic bomb in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Gar Alperovitz revisited the subject in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth published by Knopf in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the decision.

Gar Alperovitz holds that the architecture of both suffers from centralized power that fails to support liberty, equality, ecological sustainability, genuine participatory democracy, and community.

Gar Alperovitz acknowledges the utility of certain forms of private enterprises and markets along with participatory economic planning.

Gar Alperovitz has said his work is influenced by his studies at the University of Wisconsin with historian William Appleman Williams, at Cambridge University with post-Keynesian theoretical economist Joan Robinson, and by his work with Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, an early environmentalist and the founder of Earth Day.

Gar Alperovitz is recognized as the leading architect of the first modern steel industry attempt at worker ownership.

Gar Alperovitz was involved in efforts to stop the escalating Vietnam War for several years, both as a political actor and later as an activist.

From 1966 to 1968, while a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, Gar Alperovitz played a role in the burgeoning antiwar movements coalescing in Cambridge at the time, developing the "Vietnam Summer" activism campaign centered on canvassing and teaching.

The New Yorker at the time credited Gar Alperovitz with devising the campaign's strategy, which sought to educate and agitate "undecideds and unaffiliated doves" into taking action against the war.

In 1971 Gar Alperovitz met Daniel Ellsberg at a Cambridge dinner party.

Gar Alperovitz was unaware that months earlier, while still a RAND employee, Ellsberg had secretly made several sets of photocopies of a classified United States Department of Defense report on the history of the Vietnam War, giving a portion of one set to New York Times journalist Neil Sheehan.