Michael Dobbs (journalist)

Michael Dobbs (born 27 July 1950) is a British-American non-fiction author and journalist.

Dobbs at the 2019 Texas Book Festival

Early life and education

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.

Career

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. 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]

Bibliography

TitleYearISBNPublisherSubject matterInterviews, presentations, and reviewsComments
Down With Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire1997ISBN 9780679431794KnopfHistory of the Soviet Union (1982–1991), Dissolution of the Soviet Union
Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey1999ISBN 9780805056594Henry Holt and Co.Madeleine AlbrightPresentation by Dobbs on Madeleine Albright, May 14, 1999
Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America2004ISBN 9780375414701KnopfOperation PastoriusBooknotes interview with Dobbs on Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America, March 28, 2004.
Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War2012ISBN 9780307271655KnopfPresentation by Dobbs on Six Months in 1945, September 11, 2013
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War2008ISBN 9781400043583KnopfCuban Missile CrisisPresentation by Dobbs on One Minute to Midnight, September 27, 2008
Washington Journal interview with Dobbs on One Minute to Midnight, August 16, 2017
The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between2019ISBN 9781524733193KnopfPresentation by Dobbs on The Unwanted, May 15, 2019
King Richard: An American Tragedy2021ISBN 9780385350099KnopfRichard Nixon, Watergate scandal

Personal life

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]

References

  1. "Grapevine, Autumn 2006". University of York. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
  2. "Michael Dobbs – Authors – Random House". www.randomhouse.com. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
  3. "Michael Dobbs biography". Michael Dobbs.
  4. "Poland On the Front Page 1979-89 – The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal". Archived from the original on 14 July 2007. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
  5. "Michael Dobbs: Guide to Specialists: U.S. Institute of Peace". Archived from the original on 12 December 2007. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
  6. "THE UNWANTED". Michael Dobbs. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
  7. "King Richard: Nixon and Watergate—an American Tragedy and". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  8. "King Richard". Kirkus. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  9. Szalai, Jennifer (19 May 2021). "'King Richard' Finds Fresh Drama in Watergate". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 May 2021.
  10. Dobbs, Michael (3 June 2008). "The real Michael Dobbs". The Fact Checker. The Washington Post. Retrieved 13 October 2008.
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