Robert Timberg

Robert Timberg is the author of The Nightingale’s Song, John McCain: An American Odyssey, and the State of Grace: A Memoir of Twilight Time. A 1964 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he served with the First Marine Division in South Vietnam from March 1966 to January 1967. Timberg worked at the Baltimore Sun for more than three decades as a reporter, an editor, and a White House correspondent.

Mr. Timberg, who died Sept. 6 at 76, endured more than 30 surgeries to repair the damage done by the third-degree burns that had nearly melted his face and scarred much of his body. During a surgery on his lower eyelids, a critical procedure that was performed without anesthesia because his body would not absorb the drug, he screamed so intensely and so long that the operation was a trauma also for the doctor.