Robbyn Swan takes pride in having worked some of the biggest stories of this century and the last - from the rise of the American Mafia, to the Hiss spy case, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. She's delivered scoops on FBI Director Hoover's sexuality,Richard Nixon's White House pill-popping, and Frank Sinatra's links to Lucky Luciano.
Her research has added significant elements to what we now know about the Kennedy family’s dalliance with organized crime to turn the 1960 election and Richard Nixon's cynical manipulation of the 1968 Vietnam peace talks to win that year's presidential race.
She tracked down and interviewed the Washington madam alleged to have been at the secret - sexual - core of the Watergate scandal, and – most recently – plumbed the role of women soldiers in the prisoner abuse scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Swan's 2011 book, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. The book won the prestigious Gold Dagger for non-fiction on the subject of crime.
Swan is the author of two bestselling books:
Sinatra:The Life (2005) and
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000).
She has written feature stories for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair,Talk, Marie Claire, The Irish Times, Woman's Day, The Sunday Independent [Dublin], The Daily Mail, The Gloss, and Easy Living.
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
An investigation of the events of September 11 - published by Ballantine on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC.