Wednesday, April 5

Journalist and historian Michael Dobbs spoke to us on 5 April.  Drawing on this witness to history Michael explored how the events of the past led to the conflicts of today in Ukraine and the wider world.

A self-described “presidential crisis historian” Michael has written seven books dealing with how a president confronts the gravest challenges of modern times, and how his decisions affect the rest of us. He is the author of The Unwanted – Nixon and Watergate, An American Tragedy and One Minute to Midnight-Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.

Before becoming an author, he was a journalist and foreign correspondent.  After a stint in Rome as a correspondent for Reuters, and a tour of Africa, he lived in Yugoslavia during the twilight years of Marshal Tito. He moved to Poland for The Washington Post just in time to witness the extraordinary spectacle of workers rebelling against the “workers state”. He was the first western reporter to visit the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980 and in 1981 he witnessed Boris Yeltsin climbing on a tank to face down Communist hardliners.  He also covered the imposition of martial law in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Gorbachev-Reagan summits, the Tiananmen uprising in China, and the 1989 revolution in Romania.

Other highlights of his journalistic career including exposing the Soviet atomic spy known as Mlad (Theodore Hall), revealing Madeleine Albright’s link to the Holocaust, and covering the Bosnia peace negotiations. In 2007, he launched The Post’s Fact Checker column, handing out “Pinocchios” to lying politicians.

In addition to his work as a journalist and historian, he has taught courses at the universities of Princeton, Michigan, Georgetown, and American University. He also spent seven years at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he organized conferences on the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia..