Albert James Wohlstetter (December 19, 1913 – January 10, 1997) was an American political scientist noted for his influence on U.S. nuclear strategy during the Cold War. He and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter, an accomplished historian and intelligence expert, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan on November 7, 1985.
Early life and education
Albert Wohlstetter was born on 19 December 1913, the fourth and youngest child of Philip Wohlstetter and Nellie (née Friedman). His paternal grandparents were cosmopolitan Jews who immigrated to the United States from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Albert's father, Philip, was born in the United States about twenty years later. Albert's older siblings were William (1902–1967), Helene (1906–1974) and Charles (1910–1995). Albert's brother Charles was an accomplished businessman who would help Albert get his start as a young man. Charles also employed Helene at one of his companies, ConTel, where she was killed in a shooting by a disgruntled employee in 1974.
The Wohlstetters lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. After attending the City College of New York, Philip Wohlstetter became an attorney and served as chief counsel to the Metropolitan Opera. In 1912, he founded one of the early phonograph companies, the Rex Talking Machine Corporation. Luminaries of the performance world were regular guests in the Wohlstetter home. The Rex company was taken over and its Wilmington, Delaware factory converted to war production during the World War I. Philip died of a heart attack in 1918 when Albert was four years old.
City College of New York
Wohlstetter started at City College of New York in 1931 through a scholarship in modern dance, earning a B.A. in 1934. At the time he was involved in radical politics, and was a member of the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party, a Trotskyist splinter group, in the mid-1930s.
Columbia University
Wohlstetter started at Columbia Law School on a fellowship in 1934. It was in a class there that he met Roberta Morgan. Wohlstetter was bored by law school and left the program after only one year. He stayed at Columbia to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science where he studied under Abraham Wald and was a peer of Jacob Wolfowitz. After a thesis titled Language and Empiricism earned him an M.A. in June 1937, several fellowships allowed him to work on his dissertation. He had a fellowship with the Social Science Research Council on a project to incorporate modern mathematical methods into economics and business cycle research. From 1941 to 1942 he was a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
In August 1942 the Wohlstetters vacationed with Dwight Macdonald, one of the editors of Partisan Review, and his wife, Nancy in Nantucket.
He left Columbia's graduate program to work for the U.S. government on war planning during World War II and never completed his doctorate.
Early career
During the Second World War, Wohlstetter worked on problems of war production. He was first hired by the Planning Committee of the War Production Board. It is unclear how he ended up there. In an interview, Wohlstetter says that while on the Carnegie associateship with NBER, Simon Kuznets was hired by Robert R. Nathan and it was Kuznets who hired Wohlstetter. Albert's brother Charles recounts that it was Arthur F. Burns who gave Albert the job.
Later he worked at Atlas Aircraft Products Company.
After the war, Wohlstetter worked briefly in business in New York. He moved back to Washington, D.C. to serve as the Director of Programs for the National Housing Agency (USHA) in 1946 and 1947, the only time in his career he was a federal employee. At the USHA Wohlstetter worked with Paul Weidlinger, an engineer who had worked during the war for an aircraft company owned by Albert's brother, Charles, designing modular buildings such as airplane hangars that could be assembled quickly. At the USHA Wohlstetter and Weidlinger worked on applying such principles to domestic residential buildings.
During the 1937–1938 school year, Roberta had worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Southern California, during which time she became enamored with the California lifestyle. At her urging, and with his brother Charles helping to secure a job for Albert, the Wohlstetters moved to Santa Monica in 1947. Albert went to work for the General Panel Corporation to "tool up" their industrial plant. General Panel Corporation was a company founded by Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann, two important figures in the Bauhaus movement.