Winks, Robin William, 1930-2003.
Robin Winks, 72, Scholar, Parks Advocate and Author, Is Dead
By PAUL LEWIS
New York Times, April 10, 2003
Robin W. Winks, a Yale scholar who combined a love of British imperial history with enthusiasm for open spaces and a consuming interest in international espionage and detective fiction, died on Monday in New Haven. He was 72.
The cause was complications after a stroke, his wife, Avril, said.
In more than 40 years of teaching at Yale, Dr. Wicks, who held the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. chair of history, wrote extensively about the history of the British Empire, with particular emphasis on Canada and Canadian relations with the United States, as well as on Australian and New Zealand history.
He also developed a boundless enthusiasm for America's national parks and monuments, and in 1998 became one of the few people to have visited all 376 of these sites.
His tireless advocacy for preserving open spaces led the National Parks Association in 1999 to award him its first Robin W. Winks gold medal for "enhancing public understanding of the national parks."
Another great interest of Dr. Winks's life was espionage and detective fiction, on which he wrote several books.
In 1987 he published "Cloak and Gown: Scholars in America's Secret War," an account of the Central Intelligence Agency's relationship with major American universities, especially Yale, which included portraits of famous spy-hunters like James J. Angleton and Norman Holmes Pearson.
Some of the book's chapters remain unpublished because their subjects are still living. Dr. Winks deposited these writings with the Beinecke Library at Yale under a 50-year seal.
In 1999 he won the Edgar Award for his book "Mystery and Suspense Writers."
Robin William Winks was born in Indiana on Dec. 5, 1930, and graduated from the University of Colorado in 1952.
As a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand, he received a master's degree in Maori studies from Victoria University before studying ethnography back at Colorado and earning his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1957.
He joined the history faculty at Yale in 1959 and remained there for the rest of his career, with the exception of some visiting posts overseas. From 1969 to 1971 he was cultural attaché at the United States Embassy in London. From 1999 to 2000 he was the Vyvyan Harmsworth visiting professor of American history at Oxford University, to which he returned in 1992 and 1993 as George Eastman professor, lecturing on the history of the British Empire.
He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Honor Winks of Alpharetta, Ga.; and a son, Eliot Myles of Pittsburgh.
Espionage Historian Robin Winks Dies
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 9, 2003; Page B06
Robin W. Winks, 72, a Yale University history professor and prolific author whose interests included black life in Canada, detective fiction, the environment and espionage, died April 7 at Yale-New Haven Hospital after a stroke.
Dr. Winks, who joined Yale's staff in 1957, wrote or edited about 25 books. He may best be remembered for "Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961," which garnered much attention for revealing the great extent to which American spy agencies had recruited Ivy League university faculty and students.
In that 1987 book, he said the Office of Strategic Services, and later the CIA, plumbed Yale because it was rife with the "idiosyncratic individual, the person of odd curiosity and distinctive knowledge, the freewheeling thinker who went past tested systems and conventional wisdom to the untried."
He details the spy careers of James Jesus Angleton, who became the CIA's director of counterintelligence, and Norman Holmes Pearson, a faculty member who did counterintelligence work for the OSS in England.
In making his link, Dr. Winks also noted two statues of Nathan Hale, the Yale graduate and Revolutionary War spy: one at the New Haven campus and one at CIA headquarters at Langley.
Robin William Winks, the son of teachers, was a native of West Lafayette, Ind. He moved extensively with his parents during the Depression. They settled in Colorado, where he was a high school football quarterback.
"Football," he once said, "is a form of brawny chess."
He was a 1952 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Colorado, where he also received a master's degree in ethnography. He was a Fulbright scholar in New Zealand and received a master's degree in Maori studies at Victoria University. He received a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1957.
He went into academia after considering careers as a foreign correspondent or diplomatic service.
His books included "Canada and the United States: the Civil War Years" (1960), "British Imperialism: Gold, God, Glory" (1963), "The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence" (1969), "The Blacks in Canada: a History" (1971), "Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction" (1982) and "Laurence Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation" (1997).
With Maureen Corrigan, he wrote "Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection and Espionage" (1998), for which he received the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America for best critical or biographical work.
Over the years, he was cultural attache to the U.S. Embassy in London, chairman of the National Park Service advisory board and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He lectured widely, from shipboard cruises to Oxford University.
At Yale, he was a former master of Berkeley College, a residential community, and ran a wine and whiskey appreciation society for students. His wife said he was appalled that students did not have a finer appreciation of good liquor.
He did his writing on three Hermes 3000 manual typewriters and was said to have held one of the highest recorded speed-typing scores in Colorado during his high school years.
Survivors include his wife, Avril Flockton Winks, whom he married in 1952, of Northford, Conn.; two children; and two grandchildren.
