Guide to Specialists

Michael Dobbs
Senior Fellow, Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program
October 2006-July 2007

Project Focus:
One Minute to Midnight: A New Perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis

ARCHIVED SPECIALIST PROFILE

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Languages: Russian, Spanish, French, Serbo-Croat, Polish, Italian

Michael Dobbs worked for The Washington Post for 25 years as a national and foreign correspondent. Focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis, his project analyzes 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.

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 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.

Publications:

• "Passport to Frustration" (The Washington Post, June 23, 2007).
• "Can't Verify, Can't Trust" (The Washington Post, February 1, 2007).
• Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
• Madeleine Albright (Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999).
• Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Random House, 1998).

Available on usip.org

• The Cuban Missile Crisis: Lessons for the War on Terror
  Senior Fellow Project Report, May 17, 2007