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RED-LISTED

HAUNTED BY THE WASHINGTON WITCH HUNT

Here, Williams (Divine Rebel, 1981) gives voice to those silenced lawyers, academics, and civil servants—the nearly invisible federal employees who filled the government's vital middle ranks—whose lives and careers were destroyed by the federal loyalty program whose purpose was to expose Nazis and Communists in government. Between 1934 and 1974, thousands of federal employees were investigated and either dismissed or bullied into resigning by various committees that suspended protocol and deprived good citizens of their basic rights of privacy, speech, and association in the misguided pursuit of spies—although none were actually identified. Williams focuses on about a dozen victims whose terrible ordeals survive in FBI dossiers, diaries, and—although the subjects are now in their 70s or 80s—in the still painful and embattled conversations of the accused. Jessica Davidson, for instance, a young lawyer working for the NLRB, was forced to resign because she belonged to the Washington Bookshop (a cultural oasis in Washington that for no special reason was placed on the perilous ``Attorney General's List'') even while her colleague stayed on as a demoralized, paranoid, ``mentally paralyzed'' functionary. Another victim, a brilliant self-described ``iconoclast,'' was dismissed, the epithet ``Disloyal'' scrawled across his dossier although he had devoted his life to government service. Meanwhile, Williams says, real Communists evolved into superpatriots and became informers, still justifying themselves 40 years later. Some others, such as Conrad Snow of the State Department, defied Joseph McCarthy and survived—but with diminished stature and reputation. Two ironies emerge from Williams's study: that even as America fought Hitler, its government was not only banning but burning books; and that fear of being branded as disloyal drove out some of the most loyal and talented of public servants just when they were most needed. A balance of chilling documentary evidence with poignant personal reminiscence.

Pub Date: June 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-201-55069-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993

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HOW TO FIGHT ANTI-SEMITISM

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.

While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

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