John Lubetkin
John Lubetkin was interviewed
for BookCast by Fairfax County Public Library Director Sam Clay.
M. John Lubetkin is the author of Jay Cooke's Gamble, the story of how Cooke's financing of the Northern Pacific Railroad reignited war with the Sioux, rescued George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, pushed frontier settlement four hundred miles westward, and triggered the Panic of 1873.
He became interested in the ill-fated 19th-century expedition to survey the proposed Northern Pacific Railroad, while still in college, after finding an old book in his fraternity house at Union College. Lubetkin marked an intriguing quote in the book from one of the surveyors and returned 10 years later to find the bookmark still in place.
Lubetkin is on the Board of the Northern Virginia Railway Historical Association.
He is the 2004 recipient of the Little Bighorn Associates' Lawrence A. Frost Award.
John Lubetkin is a retired cable TV executive, who lives in McLean, VA.