Hechler , Kenneth William , b 1914 , US military historian and politician

Born 1914; educated Roslyn public schools, Swarthmore College, and Columbia University; taught political science at Columbia, Barnard, Princeton and Marshall Universities; research assistant to Judge Samuel Rosenman and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Roosevelt's public papers; section chief, Bureau of the Census, 1940; personnel officer, Office for Emergency Management, 1941; administrative analyst, United States Bureau of the Budget, in 1942 and 1946; entered the United States Army in 1942 as a private in the Infantry; commissioned a second lieutenant, Armored Force, in 1943; assigned to European Theater of Operations as combat historian in 1944, where he interrogated German prisoners of war; special assistant to President Truman 1949-1953; associate director of American Political Science Association at Washington, D.C., 1953-1956; research director, presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson, 1956; administrative aide to Senator John A. Carroll of Colorado in 1957; moved to Huntington, W.Va., in 1957 to teach at Marshall University; delegate Democratic National Conventions, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1980 and 1984; elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-sixth and to the eight succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1959-January 3, 1977); host of a daily talk show and a writer for a weekly newspaper column; science consultant, House Committee on Science and Technology, 1980-1982; taught at the University of Charleston and Marshall University, 1981-1984; elected secretary of state of West Virginia in 1984.
Publications: Author of Insurgency: personalities and politics of the Taft era (Columbia University Press, New York, 1940) and The bridge at Remagen (Hamilton, London, 1961).