T. D. Allman

T. D. Allman (born 1944) is an American author, historian, and journalist. As a freelance journalist he did exposés of the CIA's secret involvement in the war in Laos. He interviewed Yasser Arafat, Helmut Kohl, Boris Yeltsin, and Manuel Antonio Noriega as foreign correspondent for the magazine Vanity Fair. He has also written about the History of Florida. One of his books on foreign policy added the phrase "Rogue State" to foreign policy discourse and he coined the prase "secret war".

Life

Allman graduated from Harvard University in 1966 and volunteered with the Peace Corps in Nepal. His first book, Unmanifest Destiny, grew out of his doctoral thesis at Oxford University and dealt with issues of American nationalism in U.S. foreign policy.

Writing

Allman's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, as well as in The Guardian, Le Monde, The Economist.

He is credited with the coining of the phrase "secret war". He rescued massacre victims in Cambodia, which led to his work being banned from The Washington Post. Later, as a contributing editor of Harper's, he aroused further controversy when he predicted that the U.S. defeat in Indochina had opened the door to a new epoch of Pacific Rim success for American values and economic systems. He also rebutted claims that the Earth was running out of oil and predicted that U.S. cities, far from being doomed, were on the verge of a "Yuppie renaissance". His reports from Iraq and on the Colombian drug wars received wide attention, as have his profiles of figures such as Dick Cheney.

Allman's first book on Florida, "Miami: City of the Future" is considered the definitive work in its field. His history of Florida, Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and named one of the best works of history and non-fiction by Kirkus Reviews. The Florida Association of Authors and Publishers honored it as both the best overall book on Florida, 2013-2014, and the best book in the non-fiction for adults category.

Papers

Harvard University's Houghton Library is the repository of the T.D. Allman archive. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College also hold some of his papers.

Legacy

The T.D. Allman Studentships, funded by the ChengZhong Focus Foundation, support ground-breaking independent research into past and present events.

Works

As author

• Anatomy of a coup, Glad Day Press, 1970
• Unmanifest Destiny: Mayhem and Illusion in American foreign policy--from the Monroe doctrine to Reagan's war in El Salvador. Dial Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-385-27464-7.
• Miami: City of the Future. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1987. ISBN 978-0-87113-102-7.
• Rogue State: America at War with the World. Nation Books. 2004. ISBN 978-1-56025-562-8.
• Finding Florida The True History of the Sunshine State (First ed.). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0-8021-2076-2.

As co-author or contributor

• Cambodia: The Widening War in Indochina
• Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1968-1973 ISBN 1883011590
• Conservatism as Heresy: In Defence of Monarchy
• Provence: An Inspired Anthology ISBN 0609806785
• The Florida Reader: Visions of Paradise ISBN 156164062X
• Spain: True Stories: The King Who Saved His Country ISBN 1885211678
• Why Bosnia? ISBN 978-0963058782
• Miami, the America Crossroad: A Centennial Journey ISBN 053659693X
• Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington’s War on Drugs. ISBN 9781560254324
• These United States: Original Essay by Leading American Writers ISBN 1560256184
• Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print ISBN 1560256184
• Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA: From Prophecy to Protest ISBN 9789052015637

In French

• "Un Destin Ambigu"
• "La Floride : Cœur révélateur des Etats Unis"

In Spanish

• "Miami: La Ciudad del Futuro"
• "El Hombre Mas Peligroso del Mundo"