Michael Dobbs has been working for The Washington Post since 1980, when he joined the paper as its Warsaw correspondent. He was the first western journalist to visit the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980, and spent much of the 80s covering the collapse of communism, reporting from Poland, eastern Europe, Russia, and China during the Tiananmen uprising. In Washington, he has worked for the Post as a State Department reporter and as foreign investigative reporter. Dobbs is the author of two books: Down with Big Brother, a history of the collapse of communism, and a biography of Madeleine Albright. He has held fellowships at Harvard and Princeton universities