He served in the early 1950s as a nuclear targeting officer in the United States Navy, in the period during the Korean War.

His interest in the Russian imperial house had been inspired by the birth of his son, Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia.

This hereditary disease also afflicted Nicholas's only son the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, heir apparent to the imperial throne.

Massie and his wife Suzanne chronicled their personal experiences as parents of a hemophiliac child in Journey, published in 1975.

In addition, the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and their children were exhumed from unmarked, hidden forest graves near their execution site.

[1][2] This was the basis of an NBC television network miniseries, Peter the Great (1986), which won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave.

[1] It won the 2012 inaugural Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction[3] and the 2012 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

[6] While president, he called on authors to boycott any store that refused to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which had been threatened by Islamic religious leaders.