{"id":13735,"date":"2016-03-28T07:13:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T12:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=13735"},"modified":"2016-03-28T07:13:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T12:13:03","slug":"historical-non-fiction-book-of-the-month-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/28\/historical-non-fiction-book-of-the-month-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical Non-Fiction Book-of-the-Month Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a book review from Michael Kriegers website. I wanted to post it because it contains a TON of good information on the subject. I will be posting my own personal review of this book this summer.<\/strong><\/em> -SF<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"DB\"<\/p>\n

The Devils Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and The Rise of America’s Secret Government<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles\u2014who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats\u2014falls firmly in the latter camp.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It\u2019s almost like\u00a0Game of Thrones\u00a0to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I\u2019m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 From the Mother Jones article:\u00a0You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of you will be intimately familiar with the name Allen Dulles. Younger readers, of my generation or below, will be far less so. It is precisely because the youth of this nation remain so ignorant of the nefarious characters in\u00a0America\u2019s past, that David Talbot\u2019s recently published book,\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Chessboard:\u00a0Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America\u2019s Secret Government<\/a>, is so incredibly important.<\/p>\n

Mr. Talbot has been\u00a0recently conducting invaluable interviews about the book with various media organizations. One of the best I\u2019ve seen is with Mother Jones<\/em><\/a>. Here\u2019s some of what he had to say about America\u2019s longest serving CIA director:<\/p>\n

\n

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It\u2019s almost like\u00a0Game of Thrones\u00a0to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles\u2019s biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn\u2019t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him \u201cthe Shark.\u201d<\/strong> His favorite word was whether you were \u201cuseful\u201d to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld\u2014who was sitting at Dulles\u2019s knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.<\/em><\/p>\n

Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today.<\/strong> And of course the most controversial part of my book, I\u2019m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How about Dulles\u2019 role in the assassination of JFK? Talbot pulls no punches here either\u2026<\/p>\n

To me it\u2019s one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK\u2019s closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you, with your investigative resources, try to get [to] the bottom of it?\u201d You should read what he says in\u00a0Brothers, but basically it came down to, \u201cWell, I thought it would ruin my career.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there\u2019s a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement.<\/strong> Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn\u2019t have acted on its own.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the CIA are good guys now. Or so the propagandized American public believes\u2026<\/p>\n

Read the Original Article at Liberty Blitzkrieg<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a book review from Michael Kriegers website. I wanted to post it because it contains a TON of good information on the subject. I will be posting my own personal review of this book this summer. -SF The Devils Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and The Rise of America’s Secret Government Allen Dulles,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[932,1427,2908,5269,475,1286,6051,4880,3712],"tags":[2330,10656,10657,10658,10659],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13735"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}