Background

Fred Kaplan was born on July 4, 1954, in Hutchinson, Kansas, United States to the family of Julius E. Kaplan and Ruth Gottfried.

Education

Fred Kaplan went off to Oberlin College as a prospective literature major, Nevertheless, the Watergate hearings, which he watched every day in the summer after his freshman year, switched Kaplan to political science, initially with an activist bent (he worked the next summer for a tenants’ rights group in Harlem and spent a Winter Term with the Citizens Action Program in Chicago), until he was drawn to the International Relations. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976.

In graduate school, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kaplan immersed himself in the still-headier world of nuclear strategy, arms control, and military force-planning, on which he then built a career. He received his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in 1978 and 1983 respectively.

Career

In 1978, Fred Kaplan moved to Washington and worked as Representative's Les Aspin’s foreign and defense policy adviser in the House of Representatives. After two years, he realized that he "wasn’t cut out for even the outskirts of officialdom", left, and wrote The Wizards of Armageddon, an inside history of nuclear strategy. By the time he finished the book, nuclear strategies was a big issue; the major newspapers were hiring “experts” as their defense correspondents; he got a call from the Boston Globe, and joined up as a reporter.) Kaplan stayed at the Globe for 20 years - in District of Columbia through the 80s, as Moscow bureau chief in the early post-Soviet era, then New York bureau chief for seven years during Giuliani Time and the attacks on 9/11 - all the while doing occasional freelance writing, too (including reviewing jazz, high-end audio, and movies, which he still does for Stereophile and Home Theater).

At the end of 2002, Kaplan quit the Globe and got hired by Slate to be the “War Stories” columnist. It was the best professional move for him he ever made. He found his voice as a writer, continued to do longer pieces for other publications, and churned out three more books - Daydream Believers, about American foreign policy in the early 21st century, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, (which fuses all my interests and passions), The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (which was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist), Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, and, most recently, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War.

Achievements

• Fred Kaplan managed to achieve the status of an internationally renowned journalist. His competence in the acute topics of the day makes his publications a highly demanded product. He is a recipient of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

    (Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as “a rare comb...)

    2020
  • 1959: The Year Everything Changed

    (While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the e...)

  • The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

    (The Insurgents is the inside story of the small group of ...)

    2013
  • Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

    (In June 1983, President Reagan watched the movie War Game...)

    2016
  • The Wizards of Armageddon

    (This is the untold story of the small group of men who ha...)

    1983
  • Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power

    (America's power is in decline, its allies alienated, its ...)

    2008
  • Dubious Specter: A Skeptical Look at the Soviet Nuclear Threat 1980

Views

In the sphere of cybersecurity Fred Kaplan addresses how Russia’s hack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cyberwar. He shares insights into how major nations hack each other constantly to spy, steal information and corrupt each other’s computers with viruses. He illuminates the troubling situation at hand -that if a real war were to break out, cyber warfare could destabilize power grids, financial sectors and other key features of the world economy within minutes. Through captivating anecdotes and analysis, he shows that these dangers are nothing new - they are an inherent feature of the technology and have been since the dawn of the Internet fifty years ago.

Personality

As a teenager, Fred Kaplan fell hard for movies, jazz, and Lenny Bruce.

Interests

• movies

• Writers

  Robert Warshow

• Music & Bands

  jazz

Connections

Fred Kaplan married a journalist, author, and media analyst Brooke Gladstone in 1983. They have twin daughters Maxine and Sophie.

Father:

Julius E. Kaplan

Mother:

Ruth Gottfried

Wife:

Brooke Gladstone

Daughter:

Maxine Kaplan

Daughter:

Sophie Kaplan

consultee:

Les Aspin

References

• Fred Kaplan