New book by professor emeritus on shelves at library
Baldwin of the times: Hanson W. Baldwin, a military journalist’s life, 1903-1991 by MSUM professor of history emeritus Robert B. Davies is on the shelf in the Livingston Lord Library at PN4874.B26 D38 2011. Among Baldwin’s memorable scoops were the loss of three American cruisers at the battle of Savo Island, the real story behind the U-2 spy incident, and the clustering of Soviet ICBMs in 1962. His dispatches from Guadalcanal and the Western Pacific won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1943.
For almost 40 years, Baldwin was America’s best-known military affairs writer and analyst whose primary forum was the New York Times. A naval academy graduate (1924) he joined the Times in October 1929. During his career he had memorable news scoops including his report on the loss of four allied cruisers at the Battle of Savo Island (1942), the real story behind the 1960 U-2 spy plane incident, and the clustering of Soviet ICBM missile sites in 1962. He wrote that the war in Vietnam was mismanaged by Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, and and he accused President Johnson of refusing to tell the American public what it would take to win that unpopular war. Baldwin retired in 1968 and lived until 1991.
Davies taught in the history department at MSUM for 32 years. He retired in 1998 and now lives in Bow, N.H.
“Robert Davies has written a thoughtful, sensitive, and readable account of a journalistic giant. As the military correspondent of the New York Times during World War II and during the height of the Cold War, Hanson Baldwin explained American power at its peak. He was in some ways a rigid Victorian but also a humanist, and he held himself to a high standard that makes one nostalgic for the newspapering of an earlier age.”
—EVAN THOMAS, author of The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898