I am now an American citizen. I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I am a child of the Cold War–almost literally. I went to Russia for the first time at the age of six weeks, courtesy of my diplomat parents. Here I am, aged seven, with my mother and younger brother Geoffrey, in the British embassy, opposite the Kremlin, under the watchful eye of a KGB guard.
Before becoming an author, I was a journalist and foreign correspondent. After a stint in Rome as a correspondent for Reuters, and a tour of Africa, I lived in Yugoslavia during the twilight years of Marshal Tito. I moved to Poland for The Washington Post just in time to witness the extraordinary spectacle of workers rebelling against the “workers’ state.” I was the first western reporter to visit the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980. As The Post‘s bureau chief in Moscow, I was standing in front of Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 when he climbed on a tank to face down Communist hardliners. In between these two events, I 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.
Books in order of publication:
Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire – 1996
Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey – 1999
Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America – 2004
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War – 2008
Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman. From World War to Cold War – 2012
The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between – 2019
King Richard: Nixon and Watergate—An American Tragedy – 2021
Oak Lawn Library Friends 