Harry H. Ransom *54

Harry Ransom, pioneer scholar of U.S. intelligence gathering and retired professor emeritus of political science at Vanderbilt University, died Jan. 28, 2014. He was 91.

Ransom graduated from Vanderbilt in 1943 and served in World War II. He earned a master’s degree in politics from Princeton in 1949, completing his Ph.D. in 1954 (after teaching for four years at Vassar). The following year, he was one of the American Political Science Association’s first class of Congressional Fellows on Capitol Hill.

In 1955, Ransom joined the faculty of the newly created Defense Studies Program, a graduate center at Harvard. In his six years at Harvard, he sharpened his interest in U.S. intelligence systems. His first book, Central Intelligence and National Security, was the first scholarly book on the subject.

Ransom then returned to Vanderbilt and taught there until he retired in 1987. He testified before congressional committees throughout his career about accountability and intelligence gathering. One colleague, Loch K. Johnson of the University of Georgia, wrote that Ransom “carried the lamp of learning into the corridors of Congress, where such light is sorely needed.”

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.