John Prados

In Memoriam: John Prados, 1951-2022

By the National Security Archive, Published Nov. 30, 2022

Washington, D.C., November 30, 2022 - We are deeply saddened to announce the passing yesterday of National Security Archive senior fellow Dr. John Prados, a celebrated military and intelligence historian who ranks as one of the founders of the Archive.

His willingness, even eagerness, to share document treasures he had found in the early 1980s reinforced the idea first put forward by journalists Scott Armstrong and Ray Bonner of the need to create an institutional memory for U.S. national security documents. With Jeffrey Richelson and a handful of other spy watchers, John convened the SI-TK-BYEMAN group, when those codewords were so secret that any government employee with a clearance had to leave the room when John said the name of the group.

A prodigious author and researcher, John leaves behind a whole bookshelf of highly informed, well documented volumes covering military and intelligence history from the battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, through Dien Bien Phu, the entire Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, and so much more—including a before-its-time collection (on CDs) of presidential recordings from Roosevelt through Nixon. John also edited a number of well-received, major document compilations in our own Digital National Security Archive series, especially covering Vietnam and the history of the CIA.

Among his 27 books, several of them translated into French, a highlight was his biography of William Colby, which argues that the CIA director’s accommodating approach to congressional investigations in the 1970s of Agency wrongdoing actually saved the CIA, in stark contrast to the CIA veteran community, which has been deeply critical of Colby for giving away the “family jewels.” John even argued that Colby didn't go nearly far enough but also said that saving the CIA wasn't necessarily a good thing for democracy anyway.

John was a self-described “man of the 60s” who swam against many currents. He practically invented the title “independent scholar,” not least because in multiple periods of his life he earned his living less from his books and teaching than—remarkably—from designing war games, another indication of his wide-ranging interests and unusual gifts.

Although he would rarely mention his love of gaming, one of his creations, Third Reich (1974), has not only survived the decades, it stands as one of the most popular strategy games of all time, having long since transitioned from the board to digital. Third Reich took an innovative approach to strategic gameplay, combining land, naval and air combat elements while also factoring in important economic calculations and political decision making. “The central idea is that players are national leaders, run their economies, and choose the forces they build and how they conduct operations,” John explained. “My cardinal point was that the complexity of the game should be in the gameplay, not the mechanics of the rules.”

Games of strategy were not only intellectual challenges in themselves for John, they also reinforced his scholarly findings about agency and contingency. Things didn't have to turn out the way they did. Human choice made a difference, while circumstances often ruled.

John was adept at finding ways to communicate that message with impact. At frequent public events featuring notable former officials from the Vietnam era such as Robert McNamara, John could be counted on to calmly fend off any temptations to color the historical record by presenting factual and analytical correctives that were utterly unassailable. Among his uncountable public presentations, he was a key scholar-participant in the historic Brown University-sponsored conference in Hanoi in 1997 where McNamara and a number of other former top U.S. and North Vietnamese decision-makers convened to hash out lessons from the American War.

Fellow historians have already begun registering the loss of one of their most prolific colleagues. James Hershberg, professor at The George Washington University, called him “one-of-a-kind” and an early influence dating back to the 1980s with the appearance of his seminal The Soviet Estimate. Fred Logevall of Harvard remembered him as “a historian’s historian” who “could appear intimidating at the lectern (and from the floor in the Q&A), but underneath was a warm man with a ready smile and a hearty laugh.”

John’s personal qualities absolutely matched his professional attributes. As many of us at the Archive know, he regularly offered his help selflessly to many a younger writer, always tempering his sharp eye with plenty of encouragement. As an Archive fellow, even in the era of telecommuting, he was a willing and contributing, in-person participant at every staff meeting, working group—and happy hour—despite a numbing schedule of writing, teaching, speaking, and other commitments.

Just a couple of weeks ago, John, ever the irrepressible archivist, reminded us that there was still “gold in them thar hills,” referring to the archival treasures still hidden away in U.S. presidential libraries. John will be remembered as the ultimate prospector in the gullies of the documentary gold rush, and his many valuable contributions to national security scholarship, to the gaming community, and as friend and mentor to many, will continue to have a positive impact for years to come.

The entire Archive staff and Board extend our condolences to John's partner, Ellen Pinzur, a long-time member of the Archive family, and to John's beloved daughters Danielle and Natasha.

New York Times

John Prados, Master of Uncovering Government Secrets, Dies at 71

An “archives rat,” he was expert at digging through declassified materials to tell new stories about America’s military history.

By Clay Risen Dec. 3, 2022, 12:57 p.m. ET

John Prados, a military historian whose dogged pursuit of classified government material led him to write dozens of books upsetting accepted truths about the Cold War, Vietnam and the American intelligence community, while also achieving renown as an award-winning board-game designer, died on Tuesday in Silver Spring, Md. He was 71.

His partner, Ellen Pinzur, said the cause of death, at a hospital, was cancer.

A self-described product of the 1960s who, with his ropy ponytail and bushy mustache, certainly looked the part, Dr. Prados was both a scholar and an activist.

As a historian, he wrote thick, deeply researched books on subjects as varied as the Battle of Leyte Gulf during World War II, the success of the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War, and the White House’s maneuverings before the 2003 Iraq war.

Running through all his work was the contention that records of intelligence and covert activities represented a sort of historical dark matter: a vast amount of material that, while invisible in conventional narratives, could, if revealed, radically shift our understanding of the past

Across several books about the Pacific Theater in World War II, for example, he demonstrated that the American command of everyday intelligence — where Japanese forces were, where they were going — was just as important as the sheer firepower the United States brought to the fight.

His goal, he wrote in “Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II” (1995), was to “reassess the outcomes of battles and campaigns in terms not just of troops or ships but of how the secret war played out.”

For decades after World War II, such information was virtually impossible to access. Dr. Prados was still a graduate student at Columbia University when, in the 1970s, historians and journalists began taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to crack open government archives.

But going through the material was a slog, especially before digitization. Only a few people had the fortitude for it. Dr. Prados was one.

“He was an archives rat,” said Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, where Dr. Prados was a senior fellow. “He was the ultimate prospector in the primary-source gold mine.

Dr. Prados at a conference in an undated photo. Though he earned a doctorate, he never held a full-time academic position. He was accepted by academic historians all the same. Credit...The National Security Archive

Though he held a doctorate from Columbia, Dr. Prados never held a full-time academic position. Still, he was respected by academic historians and accepted into professional organizations, including the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

“John was astonishingly productive, but what stands out in his work is the attention to detail,” Fredrik Logevall, a historian at Harvard, said in an email. “He was ever on the hunt for new sources, for the latest declassified documents, and he put them to expert use in his books.”

Dr. Prados was driven by more than intellectual curiosity. As a young man in the early 1970s he had been shocked by the extent of official perfidy revealed by documents like the Pentagon Papers and events like the Watergate scandal, and he believed that democracy hinged on the public’s access to government secrets.

Like other scholars and journalists who utilized the Freedom of Information Act, he worried that the lessons learned by his generation, coming out of the 1960s, were being forgotten in the 1980s, just as the Reagan administration was pushing secret wars in Central America and illegal deals like the one revealed by the Iran-contra affair.

“The American people not only have a need but a right to know their history,” he told The New York Times in 1993.

John Frederick Prados was born in Queens on Jan. 9, 1951 — the same birthday as President Richard M. Nixon, he often noted, with a mix of humor and horror. When he was in middle school his father, Jose Prados-Herrero, moved the family to San Juan, P.R., where he took a job with a sports arena. John’s mother, Betty Lou (McGuire) Prados, taught English as a second language.

John graduated from high school in Puerto Rico, then returned to New York to attend Columbia. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and international affairs in 1973 and a doctorate in political science in 1982.

His dissertation, about the successes and failures of American intelligence assessments of Soviet military power, became his first book, “The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Soviet Strategic Forces,” published in 1982.

His marriage to Jill Gay ended in divorce. Along with his partner, he is survived by his daughters from his marriage, Dani and Tasha Prados; his brother, Joe; and his sister, Mary Prados.

After years spent collaborating with the National Security Archive, he joined the organization as a senior fellow in 1997. He soon became its most visible and vocal figure, quick with a quotation or research tip for a like-minded journalist, especially after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the Iraq war, events that he feared would herald a new era of government secrecy.

Dr. Prados liked to say that his love for researching and writing was closely related to his second passion: designing board games that intricately simulated historical military conflicts. He created more than 30 such games, with titles involving the Napoleonic Wars, World War II and, of course, Vietnam.

Many of his games have come to be regarded as classics of their genre, none more so than “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (1974), a globe-spanning strategy contest in which players, as the different warring nations, balance economic and military resources against the chance of a dice roll. The game won a Charlie award, the top honor in war game design.

Fans of the game were legion, and far-flung: The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño created a character who mastered it in his novel “The Third Reich.”