Richard Immerman, Temple University, former chair, State Department Historical Advisory Committee (HAC)
Over the course of my half-century academic career, actually over the course of my lifetime, I have never met anyone quite like Bill Burr. It’s a cliché to call him one of a kind, but in Bill’s case, it’s true. And that’s unfortunate. Not just the scholarly and public policy communities but also the world would be better off if there were more Bill Burrs. He was wicked smart; he was selfless and unassuming; his commitment to transparency and truth-seeking was boundless; his respect for evidence inspired us all; and above all he was a kind and generous human being.
These attributes made Bill irreplaceable. His countless electronic briefing books accessible to all of us on the National Security Archive’s web site told the hidden story of America’s nuclear history. Once labeled “the Yoda of FOIA,” his publication of thousands of declassified documents was vital to our scholarship. So was Bill’s own scholarship. His Nixon’s Nuclear Specter was an instant classic, and his Kissinger Transcripts was a staple of my “Superpower America” course. And of course Bill was extremely active in SHAFR, serving on the Council and on Diplomatic History’s editorial board and, it seemed to me, attending every annual meeting no matter the location. One of my greatest honors was to join with David Painter to nominate Bill for the Anna Nelson Prize. The last time I saw him was when he stood up to accept it. His body was diminished, but not his mind or soul.
Yet it was during my decade-plus tenure as HAC chair that I observed most unambiguously how one-of-a-kind Bill was. The HAC is mandated to hold public meetings four times a year. Bill was the public—literally. At almost every meeting he was the sole attendee who was not a member of the HAC or Office of the Historian. Drawing on his granular expertise, he held our feet to the fire, asking probing questions about the status of a FRUS volume or a State Department record group, always pushing for more rapid release. I wish I had archived our voluminous offline correspondence. Because of Bill Burr, I was a better HAC chair.
And because of Bill Burr, I am a better scholar and better person. As I wrote, he is irreplaceable.
Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology
Bill Burr's impact on the present field of nuclear history cannot be overstated. His work at the National Security Archive curating, contextualizing, and, above all, doing the hard work of obtaining and making accessible declassified documents about nuclear history has enabled entirely new perspectives and branches of inquiry and stimulated the work of many, many scholars, myself included. His dedication to accessing and preserving these documents was part of the critical infrastructure of the field. On top of all of this, he was generous, kind, and humble. My own work has relied heavily on his efforts, and he virtually embodied the ideal that it was not enough to simply do the work, but to create and maintain the key resources that allow others to further develop the work as well. His parting is a tremendous loss and he will be dearly missed.
Lynn Eden, author, Whole World on Fire
Bill’s death is a shock, and a great loss to the profession, the historical and political science community, and to me personally. Bill and I were friends since we both researched our dissertations at the same time in the National Archives. Over many years, we saw each other when we were in the same city and generally kept in touch by phone and e-mail. I remember how proud Bill was of his life partner, Ming-Ju Sun, an artist, who did many books for Dover Publications.
Bill was a scholar and a substantial author, publishing quite a few excellent articles. Bill’s numerous briefing books for the National Security Archive, in which he—with great persistence—gathered documents that he had FOIA'd or obtained through other legal means, ordered them in a way that made historical sense, and provided tremendously helpful context, are a great and enduring contribution to the field. Of course, I am grateful that Bill did a briefing book on my book, Whole World on Fire; the briefing book contained additional interesting documents I had never seen. Fairly recently, Bill sent me a document I didn’t even know existed, but that is highly relevant for my work. Bill was a very sweet guy, a great and indefatigable researcher, an excellent writer and thinker, and a wonderfully generous friend. I’m very sad he has died so young.
Steve Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists
Everyone who studies nuclear history knows the name of Bill Burr and knows at least a little about his achievements in the field. The Nuclear Vault that he built is a monument of scholarly diligence and productivity that will endure for generations.
But not everyone knows what a thoughtful and generous person he was. Many of the qualities that made Bill an outstanding scholar also made him the best of colleagues.
In his research as in his daily life, he was attentive to nuance and alert to new possibilities. He was simultaneously ambitious in the goals that he set for himself and modest and unassuming in the way that he pursued them. Reviewing old emails from Bill, I find him repeatedly offering assistance, pointing out errors, proposing alternatives and sharing his own knowledge and experience. As a person, he was unfailingly kind and considerate. May his memory continue to inspire the rest of us.
Arturo Jiminez-Bacardi, University of South Florida and Fellow, National Security Archive
Bill Burr was an amazing colleague, mentor, and inspiration. When I started as an intern at the NSArchive, I consistently ran into him on the NARA shuttle. We sat together and had many great conversations. He also showed me how to navigate NARA. Any question I had, he was so patient and helpful.
Over the years, when I visited the Archive, he always came to say hello, and we chatted for long periods of time. He gave me feedback on articles I wrote, shared documents – I mean, he was just an incredible person. Bill touched countless lives, and I can only imagine how difficult his passing must be to everyone else at the Archive.
He left an enormous legacy and a more transparent world.
Sina Azodi, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University
I first met Dr. William Burr in 2013, when I began working as his research assistant at the National Security Archive. From the very beginning, he ignited my interest in nuclear history and archival research, and he taught me how to read diplomatic cables and approach archival sources with rigor, care, and intellectual honesty. Over the years, Dr. Burr remained a generous and deeply committed mentor, consistently taking the time to read my work and offer thoughtful, incisive feedback. His scholarship, mentorship, and quiet dedication to the craft of history shaped generations of researchers. A world without William Burr is a less educated one. He was irreplaceable, and he will be profoundly missed.
Michael Evans, Editorial Director, National Security Archive
Bill was the first person that I knew at the National Security Archive, the person who hired me as an intern in 1995, and my office next-door neighbor for 30 years. Bill brought me on to help compile a chronology of the Berlin Airlift, a skill that would serve me well at the Archive. I was soon hired as a research assistant on another project, but it all began with Bill, who charmed me with his easygoing style and the extent of his knowledge not just of U.S. nuclear programs—where he led the way—but really with just about anything having to do with national security or intelligence policy. He was the perfect mentor for young document hounds at the Archive. He was almost casually one of the foremost experts on Henry Kissinger’s famous talks with the Chinese and Soviet leaders, and yet he was one of the humblest people I have ever met. The one briefing book that I co-authored with Bill—about Kissinger’s “green light” to Indonesia on the East Timor invasion, all based on Bill’s archival research—was a prominent link in the New York Times obituary of Kissinger. I owe so much to Bill. I don’t know what the Archive will do without him.
Hans M. Kristensen, Federation of American Scientists
Bill was a giant resource and institution and had an immense impact on the public discourse about nuclear weapons history. I remember him as a kind and professional person with a can-do and investigative mindset. Truly a great loss!
Leopoldo Nuti, University of Roma Tre
Bill was a dear and trusted friend, and his knowledge of US nuclear history and archival sources was unparalleled. Whenever I asked him for something he was always willing to help out and share all the information he had. I can't help thinking that when we mourn his very sad loss we also mourn the passing of an era.
James G. Hershberg, Professor of History and International Affairs, The George Washington University
So sad, so irreplaceable. Aside from being relentlessly friendly and generous, Bill did as much as (or more than) anyone to educate people (citizens, journalists, scholars—and probably even officials) about post-World War II national security history, and on an incredible range of issues and events from the Middle East conflicts to the Vietnam War to the Berlin Crisis to the Sino-American opening to everything nuclear and much, much more. His incredible knowledge of and ability to navigate the declassification system was unparalleled. Despite his expertise on U.S. issues, one of my fondest and most vivid memories of Bill is from early January 1993 when Bill attended the Cold War conference in Moscow and joined us each night at the Radisson Slavyanskaya lobby cafe for hours hashing over the day’s presentations and revelations. Bill was an Archive pillar for almost four decades and will be acutely missed.
Benoit Pelopidas, Sciences Po
I just wanted to say that I fondly remember the last time I saw Bill in January for a lunch with James Graham Wilson and Jim Goodby and then at the Archive. He has always been extremely generous with me and other members of the Nuclear Knowledges team and went out of his way to uncover or get documents declassified that would be helpful to us. A few months ago, he still kindly agreed to act as a discussant online for a seminar we were planning. I will miss him and remain grateful.
Frank N. von Hippel, Princeton University
Bill cared, and his work was excellent. He leaves a great legacy in the National Security Archive.
Once, every couple of years or so, he would contact me about a new project he was working on.
Please pass on to his family how much he meant to the nuclear arms control community.
I will miss him.
David Albright, Institute for Science and International Security
Bill Burr performed an incredibly valuable service, relentlessly pushing for declassifications, organizing the results, and putting them into context. Over the decades, I have often used his work. Just two months ago, I had to give a talk, and the go-to source was one of his briefings. He was also instrumental in ensuring that the National Security Archive will last for the ages and keep pushing for declassifications and government transparency.
David Holloway, Stanford University
Bill was a central figure in our community. Through the National Security Archive he made an immense contribution to our work with the carefully curated briefing books he created. He was, besides, unfailingly helpful when asked for help and, more generally, a very good person to deal with.
We will miss him sorely.
Avner Cohen, Middlebury Institute of International Studies
It is rare that a scholar creates a new and distinct domain of research. Bill Burr was among those few. For nearly four decades, almost from scratch, he developed and excelled at a new form and domain of historical research, the Electronic Briefing Book. By now he is widely recognized by his peers as the father-founder of a new paradigm of historical research.
Bill was too humble to consider himself the kind of pioneer that we, his peers, clearly recognized him for. He modestly dismissed praises that he created a new paradigm of historical research. But for us, Bill has been the scholar who laid the foundations – i.e., new methodology, technology, style and space – for archive-based nuclear history as a distinct domain of historical research.
As a peer since the 1990s, I had the good fortune to witness – and learn from – Bill almost from the start. He joined the National Security Archive in 1988, shortly after it came into being. By that time, the Archive was more like a hub of new inspiring ideas driven by the ethos of transparency but less a center filled with research activity. Bill, along with Tom Blanton and Malcolm Byrne, was among those who transformed the Archive from a vision into a hub of concrete historical agenda.
It was Bill who made the Archive into a Mecca of archive-based nuclear history.
Two global developments made it possible. First, the end of the Cold War – along with the fall of the Soviet Union – and the recognition that soon the big Cold War nuclear secrets would become open. Second, the invention of the internet in the early-mid 1990s created the recognition that this new innovation would revolutionize human ability to transmit knowledge. Bill correctly recognized the implications of these two developments on doing nuclear history – a new paradigm of doing academic research – methodology and technology – was on the horizon.
By 1996, Bill authored the Archive’s very first Electronic Briefing Book (EBB) in the fresh Archive web site, titled “The United States, China, and The Bomb.” Since then, Bill has authored (or co-authored) a total of 233 EBBs in any area of nuclear history. In 2004, those nuclear-related EBBs were placed under one roof, known as the Archive’s “Nuclear Vault.”
For me, losing Bill is an enormous personal loss. We formed a remarkably close professional friendship for nearly three decades, which started around the publication of Israel and the Bomb (1998). In 2006, when a bulk of new American documents from the early Nixon Administration on the Israeli nuclear program (NSSM 40) became declassified, Bill called me up proposing co-authoring a new EBB on the subject.
Ever since, Bill became my longest and most extensive collaborator ever. Jointly we co-authored/co-edited 11 EBBs, in addition to 8 major articles in leading publications, the Washington Post, Politico, Foreign Policy, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Ha’aretz weekly magazine. Our hope was to fully cover the entire 1960s – the most formative decade in the American-Israeli nuclear dialogue. We accomplished most of it. We talked about the remaining last this past September, as Bill expressed frustrations over the prospect of a new round of declassification that is necessary to complete our joint commitment.
As a close collaborator I knew Bill very well through work. I greatly appreciated his amazing professional modesty and humbleness, I recognized his enormous knowledge, I respected his extreme care for detail and accuracy, I adored his patience and tolerance. We did not always agree on things, but we were always able to settle our disagreements in a decent and friendly way. The credit was mostly Bill's, not mine.
Rest in peace, dear partner.
David Alan Rosenberg, Co-founder, Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University and former Maritime Strategy Chair, National War College
Bill Burr’s death has left me in shock and great sorrow. Bill and I were friends and colleagues for close to half a century. Our mutual friend Lynn Eden introduced us in 1975 or 1976 in—of all places—the main research room of the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue, when the three of us were researching our respective PhD dissertations. Bill and I worked closely together (along with University of Maryland PhD candidate Georg Schild, now Professor of North American History at the University of Tübingen in Germany) in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the Berlin Crisis Project of the Four Nation Nuclear History Program, conducting documentary research, submitting mandatory declassification review requests, and undertaking document-based oral history interviews with former State, Defense and intelligence community planners, policy makers and analysts.
When Bill joined the National Security Archive, he worked to declassify a wide array of State and Defense Department documents on Cold War subjects. He particularly focused on nuclear history. Building on the initial declassification efforts I had undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s publishing articles and monographs on the nuclear arms competition, Bill became the American if not global expert on nuclear weapons history matters. He plowed new ground in archives that I and others, like our mutual friend Fred Kaplan, had previously explored, and succeeded in obtaining re-release of documents the government, particularly the Navy, had reclassified and closed to researchers. As members of the National Security Archive’s Advisory Board, Professor Ernest May of Harvard, retired Air Force General William Y. Smith and I, along with May’s student and Archive Senior Fellow Robert Wampler, worked very closely with Bill on developing the agenda for declassification requests. Bill and I continued our relationship, talking at least once a month and exchanging e-mails for the next quarter century. In addition, in 2008-2009, when my daily work on non-history subjects for a federally-funded defense think tank prevented me from finishing a chapter on the arms competition for the Cambridge History of the Cold War, Bill stepped up and completed it, keeping me as a co-author. I will always be grateful for his generosity and support.
Bill was a private and unassuming soul, who generously shared his vast knowledge with colleagues, professors, the press, and large numbers of students, not only at George Washington University, but at universities around the world. He was a meticulous scholar, and a person of great integrity. He was also stubborn and persistent in mastering the mysteries of the U.S. government’s declassification processes. Bill pushed his declassification requests through numerous denials and redactions all the way to the top of the security review pyramid, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP). In doing so, he was able to get released some of the most significant historical documents on nuclear aspects of the Cold War and beyond. These included nuclear intelligence documents, particularly on Israeli nuclear weapons; papers on the origin and development of U.S nuclear non-proliferation policies; Presidential policy and crisis decision-making including the “Nuclear Football” and the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy documents; highly classified official histories by the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff; and the Office of the Secretary of Defense Office of Net Assessment’s history of the U.S-U.S.S.R. Strategic Arms Competition, 1945 to 1972, and a number of its major supporting studies. He also tracked and relentlessly exposed U.S. government efforts to reclassify and withhold documents already released and, in many cases, published by the Archive or in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series.
Bill made major scholarly contributions through his numerous articles and books, but his unique monuments are the electronic briefing books he prepared for the National Security Archive’s Nuclear Vault and on other Cold War and nuclear subjects. Each briefing book provides a detailed introduction to the policy, planning, or intelligence matter it pertained to, as well as concise, contextual introductions to the individual documents it presented. Each of these briefing books is a superb teaching tool for graduate or undergraduate history and political science classes. His briefing book on the development of, and decision to use, the atomic bomb in World War II, which went through a number of updates and revisions, is the best work on its subject, potentially deserving of separate publication.
As noted earlier, Bill’s outreach to scholars and students, and their inquiries to him, formed a major part of his contribution to the history profession. Earlier this fall, while he was suffering from the illness that took his life, he assisted a PhD Candidate in history from the University of Iceland with his work on Cold War nuclear history. He put Tjörvi Schiöth in touch with me, and in the last few weeks he and I have engaged in several long conversations based on Bill’s suggestions. When word reached me of Bill’s passing, I asked Tjörvi if he would be willing to contribute a reminiscence of his work with Bill. He provided the note below, which is an eloquent expression of gratitude from a student to a senior scholar. It is a remarkable tribute to Bill and sums up very well what made Bill such an outstanding scholar and human being.
“I knew Bill Burr only briefly. I had lunch with him when I came to Washington D.C. this fall on a Fulbright Grant to do archival research for my PhD in history (on U.S. nuclear strategy). Bill was very kind and gave me a tour of the National Security Archive. He was very helpful and supportive of my project, provided invaluable comments and helped to guide my research in the right direction. I was in regular email contact with him, he would always respond very quickly to my queries and send me documents and articles to read. (When he did not respond to my last message, I thought something was odd.) It was fascinating to meet him at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and to see him doing his work. (This was in September.) When I met him there, he was working on one of his Electronic Briefing Books and told me about the documents he had unearthed. This included a big colored map that showed the bomb damage in Hiroshima. While at the archive, he also gave me useful advice for finding documents, and helped get me started on serious archival research. I am deeply saddened by his passing. He struck me as both a very humble individual and a determined truth-seeker. He did not make any great claims to wisdom or make much of his own accomplishments; he did not pretend to “know” anything, he would just point to the documents. (This was despite the fact that I thought he was one of the most knowledgeable experts in this field, and his contributions to increasing our knowledge have been substantial.) As an example of this—which I think speaks to his character—when I asked him to tell me the story of how he got a very important study declassified, his answer was simple: “On what I did to get some of those docs unearthed, it is a simple story. Making requests to the agencies and slogging through the process.”