Michael Dobbs

Class of Spring 2009

Former Foreign Correspondent

The Washington Post

Peace Never Came (completion of a war trilogy)

At the American Academy in Berlin, Dobbs worked on completing the last part of a trilogy of books about the Cold War that aims to explain and analyze the origins of the Cold War, focusing on the six months between February and August 1945. Despite its historical focus, the book also sheds light on many of the problems that preoccupy world leaders today, including nuclear proliferation, the destructive power of nationalism, and the quagmire in the Middle East.

Michael Dobbs worked for the Washington Post for more than 25 years as a national and foreign correspondent. Dobbs was the first Western journalist to visit the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980 and spent much of the 1980s covering the collapse of communism, reporting from Poland, Eastern Europe, and Russia, as well as China during the Tiananmen uprising. He was bureau chief in Moscow from 1988 to 1993. In Washington, he has worked for the Washington Post as a State Department reporter and as a foreign investigative reporter. He has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, and at Princeton University. In 1998, he published Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Random House, 1998), which told the story of the collapse of communism followed by the insightful Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). In One Minute to Midnight (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), Dobbs analyzed the interplay between the White House and on-the-ground events to shed light on the pressures and dilemmas that confront a modern-day president facing a major foreign policy crisis.