Michael Doyle

Book author and journalist

The Ministers' War:
John W. Mears, the Oneida Community and the Crusade for Public Morality

Nightmare in the Pacific:
The World War II Saga of Artie Shaw and his Navy Band

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I am a reporter with E&E News/POLITICO, based in Arlington, Virginia. I teach journalism as an adjunct professorial lecturer at the George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs.

I worked as a reporter in the Washington, D.C. bureau of McClatchy newspapers from 1988 to 2017, covering legal affairs, the Supreme Court and California issues. I previously worked at the Palo Alto Weekly, the Gilroy Dispatch and the Modesto Bee.

My newest book is Nightmare in the Pacific: The World War II Saga of Artie Shaw and his Navy Band, published in 2025 by the University of North Texas Press.

I am also author of The Ministers' War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community and the Crusade for Public Morality (2017); Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution (2012) and The Forestport Breaks: A Nineteenth-century Conspiracy Along the Black River Canal (2004), all published by Syracuse University Press.

I have contributed to Slate, the Washington Monthly, the Yale Law Report, the California Journal and other periodicals.

I graduated from Oberlin College. I was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Yale Law School, where I earned a Master of Studies in Law, and I also earned a Masters In Government from The Johns Hopkins University, I served as a volunteer firefighter/EMT in Arlington County between 2002 and 2016.

Bio

In The Press

In the Press

Nightmare in the Pacific

Without a doubt, the definitive account of the nightmare years Shaw encountered in the navy. The level of research would please even Artie Shaw!"

Loren Schoenberg

Senior scholar, National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

"A scrupulous researcher, Michael Doyle tells this story with real panache while also debunking myths and exaggerations that have cropped up over the decades. He has a novelist's eye for vivid detail, and his prose crackles with the jumpy energy of a Bob Hope USO monologue.

David W. Stowe

Author of Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America.

The Ministers' War

"Doyle’s lively and often humorous narration of Mears’s life-long campaigns to get the nation’s house in order— in particular, by ridding it of the free-love abomination of the Oneida Community— illuminates the philosophical and religious ferment that marked this period of American history. Doyle’s patient and meticulous use of extensive archival material brings the story and its characters alive, making for a compelling read."

"Doyle’s small gem of a book should prove invaluable in facilitating discussions of ante- and postbellum America. Undergraduates will appreciate its clarity and brevity; general readers will find it fascinating."

Northeast Popular & American Culture Association

Ellen Wayland-Smith

Author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table.

Radical Chapters

"In generous, elegant prose, Doyle traces Kepler’s life and times from World War II as a radical pacifist, antinuclear activist during the Cold War, and antiwar activist from the Vietnam War to his death in 1995."

San Francisco Chronicle

"The book’s text is enhanced by Doyle’s skill in melding the voices of Kepler and his colleagues to tell the story of the peace activist and his bookstores. A superbly researched and written book."

Camille McCutcheon

Journal of American Culture

Nightmare in the Pacific:
What other people are saying

“Nightmare in the Pacific” is first-rate, well-researched, and intriguingly written. Doyle provides sensitive portraits of the musicians involved in Band 501, and an absorbing account of Swing Music in the Big Band Era and World War II."

-- Mark Lardas

Scanalyst

"Nightmare in the Pacific” greatly informs and enhances our understanding of Artie Shaw, his contemporaries, and their wartime service. I highly recommend this essential document."

--Dennis Spragg

author of Glenn Miller Declassified