An impressively researched and readable account of the use and misuse of covert activity against Hanoi during the Vietnam War. In 1961, President Kennedy decided to step up covert activity against the North Vietnamese government. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he placed this extensive campaign in the hands of the Pentagon, rather than the CIA. The resulting product was the Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group (MACVSOG). Based on interviews with military officials and recently declassified documents, Shultz (International Politics/Fletcher School, Tufts Univ.) details the origins, successes, and failures of MACVSOG. Tasked with inserting agents into the North, waging psychological warfare, and mounting covert naval and reconnaissance operations, MACVSOG became a casualty of inconsistent policy goals, unrealistic expectations, interagency rivalry, and bureaucracy. It cultivated its own share of mishaps too. Most agents inserted either did not make it back or turned out to be double agents. Shultz points out, however, that despite MACVSOG’s inability to achieve its announced goals, it managed to derail much of Hanoi’s resources to counterespionage activities. This distraction, Shultz argues, should be the main purpose of such activity; it is the misunderstanding of the role and capabilities of covert operations that has hampered the effectiveness of most covert activity to date, including that of MACVSOG. Shultz does a thorough job of untangling the twisted chain of command behind this secret war and in analyzing the rationales behind what often seemed irrational directives. He is so meticulous in this pursuit, in fact, that he often leaves the reader wandering in similarly marshy territory. A detailed study that sheds much light on the functions of special operations and the difficulties of waging war in Vietnam. Don—t expect to be engaged in any moral debate on covert operations or the Vietnam War. Shultz’s message is pragmatic: If you—re going to do something, do it right.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019454-5
Page Count: 412
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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