A review of Eisenhower's use of intelligence resources and covert operations—first as Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, then as president—which, though variously flawed, does demonstrate a vital linkage between the two: because of his wartime experience, Ike was ready and willing, come the Cold War, to apply covert action by the CIA to any international problem, especially in the Third World. Ambrose, an old Eisenhower hand, and Immerman, a CIA specialist, present Ike as the epitome of the managerial general in his direction of the myriad wartime intelligence activities. His first exposure to covert action occurred when the OSS tried unsuccessfully to woo the Vichy French to passivity prior to the North African invasion. He learned the dangers of overreliance on ULTRA intercepts when his intelligence head failed to foresee Rommel's offensive at Kasserine Pass. Then, with D-Day in prospect, he managed the elaborate deception that cloaked the true invasion site. And, the authors write, he used ULTRA preeminently for early warning of Hitler's planned attack at Mortain to choke the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachhead. Somewhat more dubious, in the light of new evidence, is their contention that the failure of the Arnhem operation "indicated that the Allies had come to rely too heavily on ULTRA." In other instances, too, their interpretation of intelligence failures involving ULTRA is open to challenge. But on the whole their account of Ike's relationship to wartime intelligence is adequate if no breakthrough—except for its bearing on his enthusiasm, as president, for the early CIA of Allen Dulles. Apropos of those years, however, they merely describe—with little new information—familiar covert operations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Cuba; they ignore the use of the CIA in the Middle East (in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq); and they obscure the extensive CIA involvement in the Congo by concentrating on whether or not Ike ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (in apparent ignorance, moreover, of the admitted CIA role). Finally, the continuity of CIA programs from the Truman to the Eisenhower administrations is barely explored—leaving the reader with a faulty impression of Ike's particular input. While the WW II section will serve for some purposes, the treatment of the presidential years is apologetic in tone and verges on palace, not critical, history.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 1980
ISBN: 1578062071
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1980
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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