Pendleton Herring, a political scientist whose long career helped shape the ways Americans have understood their national government since the 1920s, died of pneumonia Aug. 17 in Princeton, N.J. He was 100.
Though his name is unknown to most Americans, his thinking has inspired generations of scholars and has been enshrined in the very structure of the U.S. government. After World War II, Dr. Herring was the chief intellectual architect of the National Security Act of 1947, which led to a dramatic reorganization of the military and intelligence branches of the federal government, including the creation of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Pendleton Herring's thinking was behind a U.S. military restructuring.
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_____Correction_____
The Aug. 20 obituary of Pendleton Herring misspelled the name of political scientist Austin Ranney.
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In the 1920s, while completing his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Herring was one of the first scholars to make a systematic study of lobbying in Congress. Between 1929 and 1941, he wrote six books, some of which are still taught in colleges and are considered authoritative studies of American government. Later, as president of the Social Science Research Council, he worked to make the social sciences, and political science in particular, more intellectually rigorous and more useful to both government officials and the public.
According to Austin Janney, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, Dr. Herring exerted a "greater influence on social science than anyone in his generation."
His lifelong study of American democracy gave greater force to his denunciations of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Without attacking Sen. Joseph McCarthy by name in a 1953 speech that is still circulated on scholarly Web sites, Dr. Herring forthrightly condemned "political hacks" who were "making careers for themselves through exploitation of public concern with communist contagion."
Dr. Herring's interest in American politics emerged early in life. On March 4, 1913, when he was only 9, he witnessed the presidential inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. Besides serving two terms as president, Wilson is considered the father of modern political science. In later years, Dr. Herring would edit his papers and serve as president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
He was born Edward Pendleton Herring in Baltimore on Oct. 27, 1903, the son of a physician. As a teenager, he spent three summers as a cook on board freighters that traveled the world, developing an ease with people that would serve him throughout life.
A man of wide and cultivated interests, he received a bachelor's degree in English from Johns Hopkins in 1925 and was art editor of his college humor magazine. While studying for his doctorate in political science, which he received in 1928, he asked his professors for permission to interview congressmen and lobbyists about the impact of special interests in Congress.
It was considered a revolutionary departure from standard academic practice of the time, in which research was conducted in libraries. He traveled from Baltimore and strolled through the corridors of Capitol Hill.
"I remember distinctly knocking on a very large door that was opened by a little man with a florid countenance," he recalled in a 1978 interview published in "Political Science in America: Oral Histories of a Discipline."
