A gripping, authoritative work.
A thorough history of a century of conflict between Britain and America and the East.
A serious scholar and lucid writer, Harvard historian Walton, author of the three-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, maintains that the Cold War began with the 1918 Soviet coup and is still in progress in the digital world. Taking advantage of recently declassified documents, the author delivers a vivid account of intelligence skulduggery, mostly familiar to history buffs but no less deplorable in the retelling. Despite a dystopian government and threadbare citizenry, the Soviet government’s proclamation that they were building the first truly just society galvanized idealists around the world. This gave them a permanent spying advantage because many Westerners volunteered their services. Stalin feasted on their avalanche of intelligence but acted as his own analyst; wildly paranoid, he regularly dismissed vital information. The Cold War followed with occasionally spectacular but mostly uninspiring and often disastrous operations, from the overthrow of unsympathetic governments to American officials’ near-psychotic obsession with Cuba to unwinnable wars and Soviet moles. At the same time, unhappy Russians occasionally defected or passed on their nation’s secrets. Walton emphasizes that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not include the KGB, which reconstituted itself as an agent of revenge against the West. “It was from this bitter revanchist stew in Russia that Putin emerged,” he writes. Putin’s efforts to make Russia great again may not be going well, but his intelligence service’s strategy of hijacking the internet to spread disinformation and influence American elections may be its most successful operation. In the final chapter, Walton focuses on China. Not crippled by a command economy and more technologically sophisticated, it is vacuuming up American secrets with a remarkable efficiency. Throughout, the author is incisive in his analyses, and the seven-page glossary of relevant acronyms will help readers keep track of countless global agencies and organizations.
A gripping, authoritative work.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781668000694
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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