Winks, Robin William

(b. 5 December 1930 in West Lafayette, Indiana; d. 7 April 2003 in New Haven, Connecticut), prolific scholar in such varied fields as United States–Canadian relations, environmental studies, detective fiction, American espionage, and the broad range of European and world history.

Winks was the son of Evert McKinley, a teacher and a coach, and Jewell (Sampson) Winks, a teacher and an administrator. During the Depression his family moved extensively, living in Nebraska before settling in Colorado. In 1952 Winks graduated magna cum laude with an AB in history from the University of Colorado and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1952 as a Fulbright scholar, he earned an MA in Maori studies from Victoria University in New Zealand and then was awarded a second MA in ethnography from Colorado in 1953. On 11 September 1952 he married Avril Flockton. They had two children.

In 1957 Winks received a PhD with distinction from Johns Hopkins University. During the academic year 1956–1957 he served as an instructor at Connecticut College for Women. From 1957 until his death he was on the Yale faculty, eventually holding the post of Randolph W. Townsend, Jr., Professor of History. Other Yale offices included director of the Office of Special Projects and Foundations from 1974 to 1976 and master of Berkeley College from 1977 to 1990. Winks held numerous visiting appointments, among them George Eastman Professor (1992–1993) and Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History (1999–2000), both at Oxford University. Other academic posts included lecturing in Edmonton, Canada; London, England; Beirut, Lebanon; Sydney, Australia; and Stellenbosch, South Africa. From 1969 to 1971 Winks was a cultural attaché to the American embassy in London.

Winks’s first major study, Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years (1960), was based on his doctoral dissertation. Here Winks notes that Canadians were far more opposed to the American North than had previously been realized, and far fewer British North Americans served in the Union armies than had been assumed. He again focused on Canadian history in his book The Blacks in Canada: A History (1971), a work that begins with the arrival of the first African slave in New France in 1628 and takes the story down to black protests in the late 1960s. Because their numbers were few and their leadership and press scattered, Canadian blacks, Winks noted, had even less success than their American counterparts in gaining an acceptable place in national life.

Other explorations into the wider fields of British, Canadian, and Asian history included such works, either written or edited, as These New Zealanders! (1953); The Historiography of the British Empire: Commonwealth: Trends, Interpretations, and Resources (1966); Malaysia: Selected Historical Readings (1966), with John Bastin; The Age of Imperialism (1969); Slavery: A Comparative Perspective: Readings on Slavery from Ancient Times to the Present (1972); An American’s Guide to Britain (1977); Asia in Western Fiction (1990), with James R. Rush; and the volume Historiography in the Oxford History of the British Empire (1998). In 1989 the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States awarded Winks the Donner Medal for significant contributions, and in 1997 he was the first non-Canadian to receive the Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies.

Winks engaged in many other publishing efforts, serving as coauthor of a number of survey texts in world history, Western civilization, and American history. Usually collaborating with such prominent scholars as Teofilo Ruiz, he also wrote eight volumes on European history for Oxford University Press; they spanned the Stone Age to the cold war era. With Marcus Cunliffe, he edited Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (1969).

Winks’s magnum opus dealt with the evolution of the American intelligence community during World War II and the early cold war. Titled Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (1987), the book describes the origins and nature of the Office of Strategic Services as well as the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency. Based on previously unpublished private papers, recently declassified documents, and interviews with over two hundred former agents with the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency, the work explores the underlying bonds between the world of the university and that of the intelligence community. He focused on his own campus, Yale, which served as the primary provider of top-level intelligence personnel.

A strong conservationist, Winks devoted much of his career to protecting the world’s natural resources. From 1981 to 1983 he was chairman of the National Park System Advisory Board and served multiple terms as a trustee of the National Parks and Conservation Association, the latter awarding him its first gold medal for contributions to public education and establishing the annual Robin W. Winks Award. By 1999 he had visited all 376 national parks in the nation, carefully appraising displays and welcome centers. Venturing into Western history, he wrote the life of the railroad mogul and philanthropist Frederick Billings (1991), who developed the Northern Pacific Railroad, and Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation (1997). With his daughter, Honor Leigh Winks, in 1980 he published books for juveniles on the Saint Lawrence and Colorado rivers.

An expert on the detective story, Winks wrote a column on mystery fiction, “Post Mortem,” for the Boston Globe, and was author of Modus Operandi: A Excursion into Detective Fiction (1982), a work that received the Edgar Allan Poe Award, or “Edgar,” from the Mystery Writers of America. He also edited or coedited a number of works on espionage and detective fiction, including the well-known The Historian as Detective (1969). “Historians,” he said, “are the best detectives there are, because they know how to ask good questions and how to dig for the answers.”

In 2003 Winks died at Yale–New Haven Hospital as the consequence of a stroke suffered the previous September. His description of Yale faculty members could well apply to himself: 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.”

The Robin Winks papers are at the manuscripts division of the Yale University Library. Obituaries are in the Boston Globe and Washington Post (both 9 Apr. 2003), the New York Times (10 Apr. 2003), and the Independent (London), (12 Apr. 2003).

Justus D. Doeneke