He has not yet become an elder statesman, though his foreign policy credentials are considerable, but he is certainly our ancient mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve to let him tell his tale of what really happened.

For this book he was awarded the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction a National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. Steel wrote for The New Republic in the 1980s.

Ronald Lewis Steel (born March 25 1931) is an award-winning American writer historian and professor.