Is it true that King Herod tried to kill Jesus?

On whether King Herod ever tried to kill Jesus, Ian Wilson (Jesus: The Evidence) has this to say:

"And this lack of confidence extends to aspects such as Matthew's story that King Herod was so anxious to kill the infant Jesus that he ordered the slaughter of all recently born children in the hope of eliminating Jesus ... Josephus, who never shrank from cataloguing Herod's crimes, has no mention of such an atrocity, yet had anything like it occurred it would surely have rated among the best-remembered of Herod's misdeeds."

And in the view of John Shelby Spong (Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus), neither birth story, in Matthew and Luke, contains any historical truth.