Michael Dobbs (US author)

Michael Dobbs (born 1950) is an Anglo-American non-fiction author. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at the University of York, graduating in 1972 with a BA in Economic & Social History,^[1] with fellowships at Princeton and Harvard.^[2] He worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, since 1980, when he joined the paper as its Warsaw correspondent. He was the Post's bureau chief in eastern Europe (1980-1981), Paris (1982-1986), and Moscow (1988-1993).

Dobbs spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. He was the first western journalist to visit the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980, and also covered the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989 and the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. He also reported on the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

In Washington, he worked for the Post as a State Department reporter and as a foreign investigative reporter, covering the Dayton peace process.^[3][4] During the 2008 presidential campaign, he returned to the newspaper to launch its online "Fact Checker" column, which was suspended when the election was over.

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. Other books include a biography of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America.

He is a distant relative of Michael Dobbs, the British politician and author of the political thriller House of Cards.^[5]

Michael Dobbs is a visiting professor in the Department of Communications Studies at the University of Michigan. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

References

1. ^ "Grapevine, Autumn 2006". University of York. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:7GsPmJYsbH4J:www.york.ac.uk/admin/dao/keepintouch/grapev/Grapevine%2520aut06.pdf+%22University+of+York%22+%22Michael+Dobbs%22&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjzMPsPjbQ3JvCB3FlZQ-6uK8u1OkZHxiVxYfVMQ_rkB7qSrtjVmAsIXQxN0CKOsR-0dfz5WOSGtUcJemSWMavIIy0vhwiPkqG13ef1lfcmtSzyi0JGkwTPsQRXFL377sRmPZ5Q&sig=AHIEtbQXsWyMuH4e5U0DUaYIUaNn4eSsxQ. Retrieved 2010-03-01. 
2. ^ "Michael Dobbs - Authors - Random House". www.randomhouse.com. http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=7148. Retrieved 2010-03-01. 
3. ^ "Poland On the Front Page 1979-89 - The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal". web.archive.org. Archived from the original on 2007-07-14. http://web.archive.org/web/20070714121845/http://www.polandonpageone.com/michael_dobbs_en.html. Retrieved 2010-03-01. 
4. ^ "Michael Dobbs: Guide to Specialists: U.S. Institute of Peace". web.archive.org. Archived from the original on 2007-12-12. http://web.archive.org/web/20071212211244/http://www.usip.org/specialists/bios/archives/dobbs.html. Retrieved 2010-03-01. 
5. ^ Dobbs, Michael (2008-06-03). "The real Michael Dobbs". The Fact Checker (The Washington Post). http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/06/the_real_michael_dobbs.html. Retrieved 2008-10-13. 

External links

• Dobbs, Michael (2008-06-02). "One Minute To Midnight". National Security Archive. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/dobbs/index.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-13. 

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Name	Dobbs, Michael
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Date of birth	1950
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