Harvey Wheeler

Who was Harvey Wheeler?

John Harvey Wheeler was an American author, political scientist, and scholar. He was best known as co-author with Eugene Burdick of Fail-Safe, 1962, an early cold war novel that depicted what could easily go wrong in an age on the verge of nuclear war. The novel was made into a movie, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, in 1964. In later years, Wheeler was a founding editor of the Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 1982, and an early advocate of online education and the Internet as a democratizing tool. He taught a course in "OnLine Publishing" for Connected Education in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Wheeler attended Subiaco Academy, earned his bachelor's and master's degree from Indiana University, and his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University; became full professor of political science at Washington and Lee University, where he wrote "Fail-safe". In 1960 he became longtime fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif. While at CSDI he wrote, edited or contributed to a dozen books, including "Democracy in a Revolutionary Era" and "The Virtual Library".