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Cargando... The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracypor James Risen
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. In the fall of 1975, The Church Committee began an investigation into why the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) held a lethal toxin. Since its inception, there had been no oversight of the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), or the National Security Agency (NSA). Senator Frank Church was leading a righteous crusade to unearth abuses by intelligence agencies. Church had been in intelligence during WWII, a part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first spy agency. That group evolved into the CIA. Had Church not decided to go into politics, he would have been on a career path in the CIA. Instead, decades later he was holding the CIA accountable for covert actions involving assassinations and spying on Americans. The Watergate scandal was an alert to investigate other government misdeeds. The Church Committee’s research took them into all the intelligence agencies. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all found these agencies to be useful. Eisenhower fought the Cold War through the CIA. The CIA’s knowing Kennedy’s secrets muzzled any complaints. Frank Church was a complex man. He was considered a radical, driven by high ideals. He ran clean campaigns, unwilling to sling dirt. He loved media attention and enjoyed cocktail parties with Hollywood celebrities and counted John F. Kennedy as a friend. He never paled around with the other senators. He was against gun control, a nod to his Idaho constituents, and against the Viet Nam War. He supported the protection of wilderness lands. The Church Committee findings were acted upon by President Carter in 1978 with the first oversight reforms, including banning the assassination of foreign leaders. The intelligence community were spitting mad, and so were conservatives like future president Ronald Reagan. George H. Bush had lead the CIA before becoming president, and his son George W. Bush supported Dick Cheney’s working to weaken the reforms. Walter Mondale told the author that what he was most proud of in his career was his work with the Church Committee. If oversight had not been enacted, who knows what America could have evolved into. Most of the abuses described I had heard about as breaking news stories, but seeing them all together in one narrative was sobering, and frankly, terrifying. Thank you to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate, he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed--from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI--would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power--and winning--in this book -- adapted from jacket. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)973.92092History and Geography North America United States 1901- Eisenhower Through Clinton Administrations BiographyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Many of the names involved in this book resurfaced in my life time and became more involved in the U.S. political culture. Many of the issues from this time period have become cyclical and it is almost dejavu as to what is occuring in the U.S. and around the world now.