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Book Review: The Last Honest Man by James Risen and Thomas Risen

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The Last Honest Man
The Last Honest Man
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This article first appeared in CounterPunch on July 21, 2023.

James Risen has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting twice. The first win was as part of a New York Times reporting team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for coverage of the September 11th attacks and terrorism. The second win came with his bestselling book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (2006). Another highly commended book he's published is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014), detailing the "homeland security industrial complex", or the rise of the super-intrusive surveillance we all cope with today.

State of War included an article on the NSA's Stellar Wind program that Risen had written as a Times reporter, with Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," which was quashed by editors and only published14 months later (December 2005) when Risen informed the Times that he'd be including it in his forthcoming book. The story's suppression of the Stellar Wind story partially inspired Ed Snowden to blow the whistle 8 years later on the government's global surveillance abuses. Risen later wrote about the Times decision, after he moved to The Intercept, and described it as being based not on national security issues so much as it was a favor to NSA head Michael Hayden by Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman.

Risen himself was inspired by the doings and findings of the Church Committee hearings of 1975, which brought to light and confronted for the first time the often illegal excesses of the tax-payer funded Intelligence Community (IC). This inspiration was the source of his latest book, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy. As the title suggests, the biography, co-written with Thomas Risen, is largely a character assessment of the life and work of an ambitious Democratic politician from conservative Idaho who conceivably maintains his integrity while battling the dark shadows of America's growing empire, powered by the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) and enforced by the machinations of the CIA.

It's a battle that Risen has been reporting on for a couple of decades now, mostly while at the Times, and in a series of books, beginning with The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (2004). His prize-winning work for the Times while covering the events of 9/11 and its aftermath was followed by brave reporting on how the government responded to the terrorist attack. What it did was awaken the Surveillance State -- the tyrannical sleeper cell that Frank Church had warned us all about in his famous August 17, 1975 Meet the Press interview.

At that time, he told us that the US government's comprehensive monitoring of electronic messages (particularly by the NSA by means of its cooperating partners in the telecommunications industry) while probably important to keeping America safe, could, without honest oversight, slip into criminal shenanigans inimical to the ideals of American democracy. He said, in part:

At the same time that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

This battle to prevent such slippery slippage down the slope has been largely lost. James Risen was one of the first reporters who saw it slipping. When the NYT killed his and Eric Lichtblau's October 2004 piece on the illegal Bush Administration-ordered warrantless surveillance program that hoovered up millions of citizen records, with the secret cooperation of the telecommunications industry, Risen found himself in the thick of a world gone wrong. Eventually, Risen jumped to the new Intercept, established by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, in the follow-on to the Snowden avalanche of revelations of 2013. The Intercept sought to publish whistle-blowings the MSM eschewed, especially regarding national security state malfeasance. Greenwald would even write a Pulitzer prize-winning book, No Place To Hide, which harkened back to the original inspiration from Frank Church.

The Last Honest Man is an easy, straightforward read, without a lot of trapeze words with skin in the game. It reads like old time journalism used to read: I felt cared for as a reader. It has three parts. The meat of the book, Part Two, covers one year: 1975, the year of the IC hearings that revealed the secret doings, including assassinations, of the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. Part One, from 1924 to 1975, describes his upbringing in Idaho and rise to political power in the state and later, in the footsteps of a legend, to the Senate. Part Three deals with the afterglow of his courageous wranglings with the CIA and his deterioration of health and long-established fight with cancer, and his defeat in 1980 in the changing of the guards in Washington, as America fell in love with Reagan, his economic trickle-downs, and his administration's return to covert and illegal "national security" operations, including, potentially, treasonous acts.

Part One details his language acquisition skills, his advanced vocabulary -- even by Boise standards -- his eloquence as an orator and his handy deconstructive skills as a logician. Risen writes, "It was the world of the mind and of words and language that attracted Church." He first came to public attention after he wrote a letter to the editor of the Boise Capital News that was, writes Risen, "a well-crafted, deeply informed defense of the isolationism of Idaho's Senator William Borah...an argument for why the United States should stay out of another war as storm clouds gathered over Europe." After it got published, nobody wanted to believe it was written by a 14 year old kid! Isolationism was a strong sentiment throughout conservative Idaho, and Church was essentially establishing his creds against empire-building from the get-go. Also he was a staunch defender of gun ownership. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. (Try living in a country with no guns, when the Criminal Element takes over.)

But Risen details how that position would change as the newsreel horrors of the Nazis unfurled on cinemas and ached at the viewer for help. Risen describes the national zeitgeist:

A poisonous brew of isolationism, anti-Semitism, and proto-fascism lingered in the political climate in the United States, despite the growing menace posed by Hitler. American politics teetered on a knife-edge.

Church woke from his parochialism, and, as Risen notes how such evil, as represented by the Nazis and Japanese, had evolved a desire for America to inject its Goodness into the world; not Teddy Roosevelt manifest destiny hoo-hah, but a genuine all-pervading feeling that America's grace and beauty could effect a global warmth. In a high school student speech contest, Church gave tongue to his newly glowing ideals:

No longer an isolationist, he now urged a muscular American role in the world. In his first-ever public address outside Idaho, Frank Church was going to break with the political tradition of William Borah"His speech clearly mirrored the famous "Four Freedoms" speech that Franklin Roosevelt had delivered a few months earlier.

But this notional goodness would also later evolve into a hand-wringing despair of a coming darkside germinating in American values, once "we" double-tapped the Japs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some generals drew the conclusion that we wuz da new Rome now, motherfukka, and you don't like it you can lump it.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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