When and where was John Patrick Diggins born?
John Patrick Diggins entered the world on the 1st of April 1935, in San Francisco. His father worked as a gardener for the City of San Francisco while his mother Anne Naughton arrived from Ireland.
John Patrick Diggins entered the world on the 1st of April 1935, in San Francisco. His father worked as a gardener for the City of San Francisco while his mother Anne Naughton arrived from Ireland.
The University of California Berkeley awarded him a bachelor's degree in 1957. He later earned a master's degree from San Francisco State College and a doctorate in History from the University of Southern California in 1964.
His first book Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America won him the 1972 John H. Dunning Prize. He also wrote The Rise and Fall of the American Left and Ronald Reagan: Fate Freedom and the Making of History which described shifting political loyalties.
Diggins declared Reagan one of three or four truly great presidents in U.S. history despite his original memory of Reagan during the 1960s Berkeley protests. He concluded Reagan was far from conservative and more on the liberal side of the ideological spectrum.
He died in Manhattan on the 28th of January 2009 after battling Colorectal cancer. He survived by companion Elizabeth Harlan who had been with him fifteen years along with a son, daughter, two sisters, and grandchildren.