Ronald Steel

Ronald Lewis Steel (né Sklut; March 25, 1931 – May 7, 2023) was an American writer, historian, and professor. He is the author of the definitive biography of Walter Lippmann. He was Jewish and his father immigrated to the United States from Russia.

Steel earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and English He served in the United States Army, stationed in Paris and was a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, stationed in Hamburg. the definitive biography of Lippmann. the Bancroft Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. The book was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973.

Steel was a professor of International Relations, History, and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he taught from 1986 to 2008. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

Later life and death In 2016, Steel moved to a nursing home in Washington, D.C., due to increasing cognitive impairment from dementia. He died there on May 7, 2023, at the age of 92.

Works U.S. Foreign Trade Policy, 1962 Italy, 1963 The End of Alliance: America and the Future of Europe, 1964 North Africa, 1967 Pax Americana, 1967 Imperialists and other Heroes: A chronicle of the American Empire, 1971 Walter Lippmann and the American century, 1980 Temptations of a Superpower, 1995 In Love with Night: the American romance with Robert Kennedy, 2000