Best-selling author, popular Pitt professor gained celebrity
Donald Goldstein, an Air Force veteran and University of Pittsburgh professor who finished his dying mentor’s account of the Pearl Harbor attack and turned it into the best-selling “At Dawn We Slept,” died Monday in Florida.
He was 86 and died of heart failure after suffering a stroke in February.
Mr. Goldstein, who held numerous university degrees in history and other subjects, enjoyed two careers.
His first was as an Air Force officer at bases around the country; he retired as a lieutenant colonel. His second was as a teacher and writer at Pitt. He wrote 28 books, many of them about World War II, and was probably the nation’s foremost expert on Pearl Harbor.
He made his name as an author after publishing “At Dawn We Slept” in 1981. An exhaustive review of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack that launched America into World War II, the book has a tortured history.
Mr. Goldstein’s mentor at the University of Maryland, history professor Gordon Prange, had been Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s historian in Japan and interviewed the Japanese officers who carried out the attack.
But his unwieldy manuscript stretched to thousands of pages and he had churned through six frustrated editors at McGraw-Hill. When he was dying of cancer in the mid-1970s, he asked Mr. Goldstein to finish the project for him. He did, with the help of Mr. Prange’s assistant, Katherine Dillon.
“This is the most definitive study ever done on Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Goldstein said to the Post-Gazette when the book came out. “This man [Mr. Prange] spent his life on it.”
Mr. Prange had died the year before.
Mr. Goldstein used the leftover material to write other books, including “Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History,” “Dec. 7, 1941” and “Miracle at Midway,” which also was a best-seller.
But it was “At Dawn We Slept” that made him famous.
“I started out to repay Prange and get the damned thing published,” he said. “It now works out that I am doing pretty well for myself. This book has taken me, a nobody, and made me into a somebody.”
Born in New York in 1931, Mr. Goldstein was raised in Hampton, Va., and attended Maryland on a track scholarship. One of his professors was Mr. Prange, who became his inspiration and collaborator.
After graduating in 1954 and earning his master’s degree, he joined the Air Force. He served at bases around the country, earned degrees in political science and public administration along the way, and taught at the Air Force Academy and Air War College, among other institutions.
He was full of stories, opinions and anecdotes.
From 1959 to 1961 he had been the ranking officer on the island of Quemoy between Taiwan and China. He recalled Cold War tensions as the Chinese would often take potshots at Americans. “They yelled things across the water to us,” he said in another interview with the PG. “And we would wave a flag and they would shoot at it.”
He married his wife, Mariann, an Air Force nurse, in 1961, and they raised four children. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Denver in 1970 and in 1974 came to Pitt, first living in Bethel Park and then Upper St. Clair.
He and Gordon Prange had stayed in touch over the years. Mr. Prange’s book on Pearl Harbor was more than 3,000 pages and he knew he was dying. He needed help.
“His publisher had long decided he would never finish it,” said Mr. Goldstein told the PG.
He took on the project, renegotiated the publishing deal with McGraw-Hill and got the story into print.
“My father felt that it was more or less his deathbed wish that Donald and Katherine do what they could to get it done,” said Winfred Prange, Gordon’s son, who lives in Maryland. “Goldstein’s real talent was that he was able to take this manuscript and make ‘At Dawn We Slept’ into something the American public could read. “Glip [Goldstein’s nickname] was really an ex-athlete. He had that jock mentality of, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this.’”
The book was a best-seller and remains in print.
Although revisionist historians have since claimed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew about the Japanese attack ahead of time and did nothing so America would be forced into war, the book and Mr. Goldstein’s other works conclude that the president did not know.
After the success of “At Dawn We Slept,” Mr. Goldstein became something of a celebrity. He was not shy about his opinions. When the much-panned Hollywood blockbuster “Pearl Harbor” came out in 2001, he lambasted it for its innumerable inaccuracies, particularly a ludicrous scene in which FDR gets out of his wheelchair to prove what is possible.
“Roosevelt would never have done that,” he said in an interview at the time. “He would never have done that and called attention to his infirmity.He never showed it.”
He said the movie was a disservice to veterans because many Pearl Harbor survivors were still living and knew what happened and how.
“’Titanic’ was a bunch of crap, too,” he said, “but they got away with it because no one was alive.”
The 1970 movie about Pearl Harbor, “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” for which Gordon Prange served as a consultant, was much more true to history, he said.
Other major Hollywood war movies also made the grade in his mind, such as the opening half-hour showing the D-Day landings in “Saving Private Ryan.”
“The good thing the movie does is explode the myth that war is a game,” he said. “It’s not just a bunch of toy soldiers playing. It’s luck, it’s hell, it’s, ‘Why did I live, why did the guy next to me die?’”
Beyond writing, speaking and consulting for various TV history projects, Mr. Goldstein was revered on Pitt’s campus for his teaching at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He won many awards and the respect of students who enjoyed his animated style.
“He was a fabulous teacher. His door was always open to students,” said Phil Williams, director of Pitt’s Ridgway Center who wrote two books with Mr. Goldstein. “He was devoted to his students and their well-being.”
Michael Dabrishus, assistant university librarian at Pitt from 2002 until this year, became friends with Mr. Goldstein over the years. One day he decided to drop in on a class.
“Engaging is the word,” he said. “It was like a theater performance. Students loved him.”
In 2006, Mr. Goldstein gave his collection of historical materials to Pitt’s library, including some 4,400 books, 13,000 photos and hundreds of films, videos and the transcripts of 200 interviews of Japanese and American participants in the Pearl Harbor attack.
The collection has been appraised at about $900,000.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Goldstein is survived by two sisters, Blanche Bishop of Atlanta and Frances DeHaven of Hampton, Va., and his children: Tammie, of suburban Chicago; Tim, of Seattle; Tom, of Salem, Ore.; and Teri, of Birmingham, Ala.
Mr. Goldstein will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The funeral Mass is at 8:30 a.m. Dec. 28 at St. Timothy Catholic Church in Lady Lake, Fla. Arrangements are being handled by the Hiers-Baxley funeral home in Ocala, Fla.
Donations may be made to Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs for the Donald Goldstein Teacher of the Year Award or The Donald Goldstein Scholarship Program.