Richard G. Hewlett

In early 1945, he was sent to Western China as a radiosonde operator, sending meteorological information by radio to U.S. forces, which used them in planning bombing raids on Japan.

While he was completing his dissertation, Hewlett accepted a position as an intelligence specialist in the United States Air Force, examining open literature on factories in the Soviet Union.

In 1957, Hewlett was contacted in order to find a historian to write an official history of the AEC, a pet project by Commissioner Lewis Strauss.

Hewlett later recounted an incident in which he was called, as Chief Historian, to witness to opening of an old wartime filing cabinet found under a stairwell of an AEC building.

The cabinet turned out to be the wartime correspondence files of Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant, and is currently considered one of the most important collections of documents relating to Manhattan Project history.

Hewlett continued his work and published the second volume, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952 in 1969, which received the David D. Lloyd prize from the Harry S. Truman Library Institute.

After the success by Cantelon and Williams in contracting themselves to the DOE, Hewlett, Cantelon, Williams, and Rodney P. Carlisle, then a visiting researcher at the DOE, together founded a private company devoted to writing commissioned official histories of government agencies, individuals, or private companies, named History Associates Incorporated and based in Rockville, Maryland.

Hewlett later said that only one time he attempted to be involved in AEC/DOE policymaking, writing up a history of the AEC's policies in handling nuclear waste, which he later said did not always portray the agency in a positive light.