Anthony Lewis, in The Times, called the Lippmann book “candid and balanced,” adding, “Steel does not flinch from unpleasant facts or critical judgments.”
But Joseph Epstein, the former editor of The American Scholar, called it “a catalog of revisionist presuppositions, assumptions and notions” and “scarcely more than a checklist of Walter Lippmann’s opinions.”
In “Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives” (1989), Mr. Epstein took Mr. Steel to task as a writer and historian. “In foreign policy, Steel’s point of view is that of a revisionist, which means he believes that the past 40 years or so in American foreign policy have been a period of imperialist intention,” with the United States seeking “world hegemony.”
He added: “Steel views the Cold War as more the fault of the United States than of the Soviet Union, and in his own journalism he has shown a great impatience with what he construes to be the screen of moral babble, paranoia and simple hypocrisy behind which American policy has operated.”
Mr. Steel’s last book, “In Love With Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy” (2000), attacked what he called myths about the senator that arose after his assassination in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential primaries — that “had he lived and become president, he would have quickly ended the war in Vietnam, brought Black and white Americans together, alleviated poverty and discrimination, and achieved a more just and humane society.” Mr. Steel said “there is little, beyond hope and need, to lead us to believe” that R.F.K. would have achieved such goals.
Starting in the early 1970s, Mr. Steel taught at Yale, the University of Texas, Wellesley College, Rutgers University, U.C.L.A., Dartmouth, George Washington University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, the University of Paris, the American Academy in Berlin and Princeton. He taught at U.S.C. from 1986 until he retired in 2008.
He is survived by his brother, Bruce Sklut. Mr. Steel’s cognitive impairment progressed in 2016, and since then he had lived at the Sunrise nursing home Sunrise on Connecticut Avenue in Washington.
He had kept an apartment in Washington for years, and rarely visited his hometown in Illinois.
“I lived in New York and Paris and London, and in a dozen other places across the globe that for a time I called home,” Mr. Steel told World Authors. “All those places shaped me in one way or another. But somewhere along the way I also stopped trying to escape from the small town. Confinement, I’ve come to think, lies more in the head than in the place.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
