Michael Dobbs (born 27 July 1950) is a British-American non-fiction author and journalist.
Michael Dobbs (born 27 July 1950) is a British-American non-fiction author and journalist.
Dobbs was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and graduated from the University of York in 1972, with a BA in Economics & Economic History, [1] and completed fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. [2] He became a U.S. citizen in 2010.
Dobbs spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. He was the first Western reporter to visit the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980; he also covered the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989, the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia.[ citation needed ] He joined The Washington Post in 1980, when he was appointed bureau chief in eastern Europe (1980–1981), based in Warsaw. He was also bureau chief in Paris (1982–1986) and Moscow (1988–1993). Other assignments included stints in Rome for Reuters news agency (1974–1975), in Africa as a freelancer (1976), and as a special correspondent in Belgrade (1977–1980), when he covered the death of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. [3]
In Washington, he worked for the Post as a United States Department of State reporter and as a foreign investigative reporter, covering the Dayton peace process. [4] [5] During the U.S. presidential campaign in 2008, he returned to the newspaper to launch its online "Fact Checker" column.
Dobbs is the author of the "Cold War trilogy", a series of books about the climactic moments of the Cold War. His Down with Big Brother: The Fall of The Soviet Empire was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for nonfiction. His hour-by-hour study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, was a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times history prize and was named one of five non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. The final book in the trilogy, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War (Knopf, 2012), describes the division of Europe into American and Soviet spheres of influence after World War II.
His 2019 book, The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between won the Jewish Book Club Award for Holocaust Studies. It tells the story of Jewish families desperately seeking American visas to escape Nazi Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. [6] Earlier books include a biography of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America, about a bungled Nazi sabotage attempt directed against the United States in 1942.
Michael Dobbs was a visiting professor in the Department of Communications Studies at the University of Michigan from 2010–2011; he has also taught at Princeton, Georgetown, and American universities. He is a staff member of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, where he organized conferences of international decision-makers on the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. He also covered the genocide trial of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić for Foreign Policy magazine.
Dobbs's most recent book is King Richard: Nixon and Watergate - an American Tragedy, (Knopf, 2021) which earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly [7] and Kirkus, [8] and was described as "intimate and extraordinary" by Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. [9]
Dobbs, who lives outside Washington D.C., is a distant relative of Michael Dobbs, the British politician and author of the political thriller House of Cards. [10]
The Watergate scandal was a major political controversy in the United States during the presidency of Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974, ultimately resulting in Nixon's resignation. The name originated from attempts by the Nixon administration to conceal its involvement in the June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C.
Harry Robbins "Bob" Haldeman was an American political aide and businessman, best known for his service as White House Chief of Staff to President Richard Nixon and his consequent involvement in the Watergate scandal.
George Gordon Battle Liddy was an American lawyer and FBI agent who was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping for his role in the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration.
Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the honorific title of associate editor though the Post no longer employs him.
Carl Milton Bernstein is an American investigative journalist and author. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Bernstein was teamed up with Bob Woodward, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by long-time journalism figure Gene Roberts.
Louis Patrick Gray III was acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from May 3, 1972, to April 27, 1973. During this time, the FBI was in charge of the initial investigation into the burglaries that sparked the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon. Gray was nominated as permanent Director by Nixon on February 15, 1973, but failed to win Senate confirmation. He resigned as Acting FBI director on April 27, 1973, after he admitted to destroying documents that had come from convicted Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt's safe—documents received on June 28, 1972, 11 days after the Watergate burglary, and given to Gray by White House counsel John Dean.
Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon's death, a family attorney stated that former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat. By then, Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously denied being Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein then confirmed the attorney's claim.
Barry Sussman was an American editor, author, and public opinion analyst who dealt primarily with public policy issues. He was city news editor at The Washington Post at the time of the Watergate break-in and supervised much of the reporting on the Watergate scandal.
William Mark Felt Sr. was an American law enforcement officer who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1942 to 1973 and was known for his role in the Watergate scandal. Felt was an FBI special agent who eventually rose to the position of Deputy Director, the Bureau's second-highest-ranking post. Felt worked in several FBI field offices prior to his promotion to the Bureau's headquarters. In 1980, he was convicted of having violated the civil rights of people thought to be associated with members of the Weather Underground, by ordering FBI agents to break into their homes and search the premises as part of an attempt to prevent bombings. He was ordered to pay a fine, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan during his appeal.
The Final Days is a 1976 non-fiction book written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate scandal. A follow-up to their 1974 book All the President's Men, The Final Days concerns itself with the final months of the Presidency of Richard Nixon including battles over the Nixon White House tapes and the impeachment process against Richard Nixon.
Hirsch Moritz "Harry" Rosenfeld was an American newspaper editor who was the editor in charge of local news at The Washington Post during the Richard Mattingly murder case and the Watergate scandal. He oversaw the newspaper's coverage of Watergate and resisted efforts by the paper's national reporters to take over the story. Though Post executive editor Ben Bradlee gets most of the credit, managing editor Howard Simons and Rosenfeld worked most closely with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on developing the story. Rosenfeld published a memoir including an account of his work at the Post in 2013.
Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the organizer of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. The plan involved eight German saboteurs who had previously spent time in the United States.
Jerald Franklin terHorst was an American journalist who served as the 14th White House Press Secretary during the first month of Gerald Ford's presidency. His resignation in protest of Ford's unconditional pardon of former president Richard Nixon is still regarded as a rare act of conscience by a high-ranking public official.
This bibliography of Richard Nixon includes publications by Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, and books and scholarly articles about him and his policies.
Mark Riebling is an American author. He has written two books: Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA and Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler.
Theodore Harold White was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series.
Marilyn Berger Hewitt is an American broadcast and newspaper journalist and author. She worked for newspapers including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and hosted local television news programs in New York City.
Timothy Naftali is a Canadian American historian who is clinical associate professor of public service at New York University. He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev. He is a regular CNN contributor as a CNN presidential historian.
Richard David Breitman is an American historian best known for his study of The Holocaust.
Crooked is a novel by author Austin Grossman, published in 2015 by Mulholland Books. It is a cosmic horror fantasy and secret history of the Cold War and the Watergate scandal, narrated by a fictionalized Richard Nixon.
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