Unlike Tim Weiner’s brilliant Legacy of Ashes, whose litany of disastrous covert operations makes for painful reading, this...
By turns hilarious and horrifying, the story of the CIA’s attempts to disseminate anticommunist propaganda through a variety of front organizations.
Since the agency’s inception in 1947, writes Wilford (History/California State Univ., Long Beach), its leaders envied communist-front organizations that (they believed) accepted KGB money, slavishly carried out its wishes and won hearts and minds throughout the world. To counteract this, the CIA began funneling funds to students, unions, women’s groups, political parties, governments-in-exile, arts organizations and anticommunist left-wing periodicals. Readers’ jaws will drop at the Who’s Who of prominent Americans who took the agency’s money: Richard Wright, Gloria Steinem, a young Henry Kissinger, AFL president George Meany and the UAW’s Reuther brothers, among many others. Until the mid-1960s, if an international gathering of students, women, writers, blacks or journalists took place, the CIA probably footed the bill for the American delegation. This was not viewed as hypocritical in the way it would be today, argues Wilford, whose previous scholarly publications have also dealt with the complex relationships between government agencies and private organizations. Members of the cash-strapped avant-garde and activist groups funded by the CIA were usually idealists with admirable goals. More liberal than most government departments, the agency refused McCarthy’s demand to fire ex-communists and homosexuals, and the beneficiaries of its largesse often ignored the suggestions that accompanied it. Amusing passages describe CIA fronts feuding with other CIA fronts and activists on CIA expense accounts who traveled the world denouncing U.S. policies. Everything unraveled in 1967, after a series of exposés sparked by a Ramparts magazine article converted chronic rumors into headlines and Congressional investigations. Those who accepted CIA money had always worried that revelation of this link would convert their good work into a public-relations catastrophe, and that is precisely what happened. Everyone now agrees it was a bad idea from the start.
Unlike Tim Weiner’s brilliant Legacy of Ashes, whose litany of disastrous covert operations makes for painful reading, this superb account will provide CIA aficionados with some welcome comic relief.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-674-02681-0
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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