History – New York City – education and deconstruction.com

His Eminence and Hizzoner

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “His Eminence and Hizzoner” by John Cardinal O’Connor and mayor Edward I. Koch, published in 1989. As might be recalled, at the book’s writing, O’Connor had recently been named a Cardinal in the Catholic Church. Koch was New York City’s mayor, starting in 1978. Each man took turns expressing his views on various hot-button political issues such as abortion, the separation of Church and State, discrimination, education, healthcare, etc.

In the 1980’s, when Americans began to receive tens of cable TV channels, the outrageously concentrated power and influence of the Catholic Church and media outlets such as the New York Times began to wane.

Indications of this include:

Prior to then, every year on Christmas day and Easter Sunday, the Pope delivered a speech televised on the three major TV networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. He was on all the channels. Present-day Americans have infinite educational and entertainment choices on these Christian holidays, around which crass commercialism, endless religious discussions, and stressful family gatherings revolve.
The New York Times‘ reviews- (of performing-arts productions, architecture, and other cultural goings-on in New York City among intellectuals) had extremely wide readership among influencers who would help attract or repel early attendees through word-of-mouth. This fed on itself to, say, close a show, or spur its longevity. The reviews were that influential. Fortunately, times have changed.

In another example, in the book from former American president Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, Koch wrote about how Trump bragged about meeting with the Times‘ lead reviewer of architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable. That meeting led her to write a glowing article that put undue influence on the City Planning Commission. In this way, in building Trump Tower, Trump received especially advantageous structural and financial terms and conditions from the city government, that other developers didn’t get. And future developers wouldn’t get them either, due to zoning changes.

With respect to financial help from the government, Koch believed poverty programs for instance, should have lent money to small businesses, regardless of the ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. of the parties involved, to provide equal opportunity for everyone who was economically disadvantaged. He thought of “affirmative action” as helping people who had suffered or were suffering discrimination, by making them aware of jobs and education programs, but not giving them favorable treatment through setting quotas for their acceptance or hiring.

Read the book to learn much more about the views of the cardinal and the mayor, in their time and place– the 1980’s.

Vigilance

The Book of the Week is “Vigilance, My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City” by Ray Kelly, published in 2015.

Born in Manhattan in September 1941, the author grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Long Island City in Queens county, the youngest of five children. He was a cadet for the New York City police department (NYPD) while attending college, where he majored in business.

In 1964, he was a U.S. Marine and “… getting sent to the Southeast Asian nation [Vietnam] was still seen as a perfectly fine posting… an exotic place where you could go and be an adviser, play at some guerrilla warfare, obtain command and experience, and learn about a different culture…” He went there and actually enjoyed the life-threatening aspects of soldiering.

In the early 1970’s, the author was assigned to the vice squad, whose subdivisions kept pimps, prostitutes, numbers-racketeers, and drug dealers in line. That last category changed their products through the years, from opium, pot and acid, to heroin and pills. In the mid-1980’s, the crime rate soared with the introduction of crack-cocaine.But rather than blame an increase in crime on social ills such as drugs, family breakups and poverty– the mayor of New York City in the early 1990’s, David Dinkins– appointed the author as police commissioner, who changed the NYPD, starting in October 1992.

The author engaged in operations management to determine the number of cops (of a total of about 25,000) required for specific types of calls, to deploy the city’s resources wisely. He thought Dinkins deserved more credit than he got for lowering the crime rate.Beginning in the mid-1990’s, the author earned a law degree, and worked in a few different capacities in white-collar law enforcement on behalf of the federal government. He bragged about helping with big drug busts involving Mexican marijuana, Federal Express, cocaine cartels and Mexican banks in the late 1990’s. He also bragged about foiling a terrorist plot involving a car bomb at Los Angeles airport at the end of 1999. After 9/11, he felt there was a crying need to dispel inter-agency rivalry in United States law enforcement. He favored consolidating agencies to form one, that would be responsible for homeland security.

Incidentally, the personal accounts of senators Tom Daschle and Robert Byrd contained starkly different recollections as to how the Department of Homeland Security was formed. The reason was that: Daschle and his staff were subjected to lots of trauma and massive disruption as victims of an anthrax attack in 2001 so they personally witnessed the problems with American law enforcement and saw the need for one department, whereas Byrd’s office experienced no such ordeal, so Byrd zeroed in on George W. Bush’s political exploitation of the situation.

BUT– not only did the Bush administration chaotically rush into consolidating departments, it also failed to provide job security and benefits for newer employees. In law enforcement especially, that is an invitation for trouble– that means higher turnover than otherwise among employees who have access to weaponry and sensitive data. Enough said.

Anyway, the author became NYPD police commissioner again with mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002. He created counter-terrorism and intelligence departments. His idea of policing involved the “three C’s” of Counter-terrorism, Crime-fighting and Community relations. He took credit for technologically modernizing the NYPD. For, in the single-digit 2000’s, “… We had twenty different databases that didn’t speak to each other and were almost impossible to search. Each division, bureau, and unit had its own hardware and software and its own unique way of maintaining the files.”

Beginning in 2003, the NYPD stationed (anti-terrorism) detectives in major cities around the world, starting with Israel, of course. The author felt that international cooperation was an important element of countering threats from abroad. He wrote that geopolitical pressure between or among allies brought to bear on rogue states, could deter attacks. He boasted that in 2006, his team foiled a plot to blow up the Hudson River tunnels in Manhattan.

In 2013, he launched a social-media operation whose goal was to detect online activity that would result in gang activity on the streets. The author expressed his views on a few other topics; he believed:

body-cameras should be used by law enforcement officers, as they protect both officers and the public;

there should be diversity in hiring of officers, as their jobs are a community-oriented service, and should be a reflection of the community; and

military equipment should be used by local law enforcement only as a last resort.

Read the book to learn additional details of the author’s life and career.

Bella Abzug – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Bella Abzug, An oral history (sic)” by Suzanne Braun Levin and Mary Thom, published in 2007. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Abzug was a pioneer in law and politics, not just due to her gender. Females in each of their respective times had to be tough as nails to be taken sufficiently seriously to wield influence to effect change.

In this day and age, the Web, TV and radio are dominant sources of voting-influence. However, it is difficult to measure how much influence specific individuals (pundits, politicians, celebrities, etc.) of those outlets, have on voters. When users, viewers or listeners merely acknowledge that they like a show or read the messages or posts of someone specific, it is likely they are seeking to confirm what they already believe– those “influencers” aren’t changing the audiences’ minds. Therefore, candidates must try to influence impressionable people who are voting for the first time who make up their minds ahead of time, and try to gauge how significant a sector, are voters who decide at the last minute.

The 2020 presidential election will likely have unprecedented last-minute surprises, so no one really knows how to fully prepare to influence the outcome of the election. Nevertheless, one unbiased open-ended survey question asked of high schoolers, college students, and last-minute voters– which might actually turn out to be all voters in 2020– could be, “What was the biggest influencer of your voting decision for or against a certain candidate– an individual, website, TV show, TV commercial or radio show? Name him, her or it, and specify the candidate, and whether for or against.”

Anyway, born in 1920 in New York City, Abzug graduated from Columbia University Law School during WWII. After the war, she applied for a job as an attorney at a law firm that practiced labor law. She said the firm (because they were sexist) “… would offer me money which was lower than the minimum wage paid the workers they were representing!” In those days, law firms didn’t hire attorneys who were female, let alone ones who were Jewish, as was Abzug.

Abzug intentionally avoided learning how to use a typewriter so bosses wouldn’t order her to do typing rather than practice law. In 1972, she was the first member of Congress to call for president Richard Nixon’s impeachment.

There was plenty of political violence during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. According to Margot Polivy’s recollection, “Every month or so, there was a major demonstration. Half the time all of downtown Washington (D.C.) reeked of tear gas… All the Nobel Prize winners started to get arrested, and they didn’t have jail space for them.”

In 1974, Abzug coauthored the Privacy Act and FOIA, which required federal government agencies to send unclassified documentation to any member of the public who requested it in connection with the government’s operations and records. Unfortunately, times have changed. Radically.

Read the book to learn much more about Abzug’s personality, family, career and accomplishments.

Underground

The Book of the Week is “Underground, My Life With SDS and the Weathermen” by Mark Rudd, published in 2009.

March 1969 saw the start of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against Cambodia. The author wrote, “I was so sure I knew better than my parents; after all, their generation had brought the world to this state of affairs, if only by their acquiescence.”

Rudd became the poster boy for the media as a protest leader at Columbia University during its period of violent unrest in the spring of 1968. He started his degree there in the autumn of 1965. At the time, the school employed African American female maids to clean the dorm bathrooms, a service included with the boarding fee.

Rudd joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in March 1966. He had grown up in a suburban Jewish family. His father had fought in the Second World War, during which Hitler was perceived as “Absolute Evil.” The United States used its powers for good to defeat the latter. However, twenty years later, when Lyndon Johnson’s war crimes began to be revealed, Rudd became disillusioned with his own country.

Rudd and his contemporaries didn’t support any presidential candidate in 1968 because “Electoral politics was beneath our concern.” He and his fellow political activists were concerned, however, about the deleterious effects of a senseless war perpetrated by the federal government, along with the university’s related and other nefarious activities.

For at least the last half century, hypocritical liberals have sought to “… co-opt the energy of radical young people into working for meaningless reforms…” However, with Vietnam, some would say the protests were justified. For, the American president started a needless war that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and ruined lives– recruiting cannon fodder against their will. The stubborn, arrogant president didn’t take a lesson from the stubborn, arrogant French, who epically failed in clinging to their fast-fading colonialism in mid-1950’s Indochina.

Columbia University had secret contracts with the U.S. government– researching both war weaponry for the Pentagon and war policy for the execution of the war. In spring 1968, this accounted for 46% (!) of the nation’s budget. The university was also abusing eminent domain in planning both to construct a segregated sports complex in Morningside Park, and more dormitories on West 114th Street off of Broadway near its campus. For years, it had quashed the formation of a union of black and Latino cafeteria workers.

Rudd and his fellow activists held rallies and went on protest marches. He wrote to school publications. The protesting led to occupations of campus buildings by, eventually, thousands of activists in the last week of April 1968.

Although Rudd’s became the most recognized name and face associated with the historical event (possibly because he was a white male), there were plenty of other activist organizations of different ethnicities whose members were arrested and got beaten up by law enforcement sent in by New York City Mayor John Lindsay; those fighting for civil rights, black-power, and peace.

The New York Times propagandized that the destructive and immature hooligans provoked the police; the police were the good guys. It should have come as no surprise to the cynical that the university was in bed with the newspaper. The school’s board of trustees claimed the newspaper’s publisher as one of their own. He was also an alumnus. The Times’ employees were alumni of the Columbia School of Journalism. Nevertheless, the university actually met about half of the six-odd demands of the activists.

After he was expelled from Columbia, Rudd became a recruiter for SDS, visiting various chapters and speaking at universities around the nation. The two major issues were always Vietnam and racism. Various groups within and without SDS, including the Weathermen (a spinoff of SDS), the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, the Black Panthers and the Revolutionary Youth Movement began arguing among themselves and with each other at conferences they jointly held in the next few years.

Rudd was in the Weathermen. He believed that the way to rebel against “the man” was through armed struggle. According to his FBI dossier, he urged college kids to kill cops. But his group was anti-racist, pro-Communist and anti-reactionary.

In the summer of 1969 in New York City, he and his fellow revolutionaries came across as so violent, they turned people off when they spoke at a Central Park rally. The other SDS factions thought the Weathermen (or, as they had renamed themselves, the Weather Bureau) were anarchistic, chauvinistic, masochistic and Custeristic.

In Chicago, there were clashes between sadistic cops and radical protestors. “Cook County Jail was overflowing with the addition of almost three hundred Weathermen, the total number arrested over the three days. The period was named ‘Days of Rage.’ ” After that, Rudd’s group went underground and broke off from SDS.

Rudd’s group’s heroes continued to be: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Vladimir Lenin, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers.

By the mid-1970’s, Rudd’s group had claimed responsibility for more than twenty-four bombings, which were intended to destroy only property. There occurred three accidental deaths of its own radicals from a botched bomb-making operation in Greenwich Village in spring 1970.

Read the book to learn a wealth of other details of the tenor of the times, the mentalities of Rudd’s contemporaries, and how Rudd fared after his Chicago arrest.

BONUS POST

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BONUS POST

I am pleased to announce that my book: “The Education and Deconstruction of Mr. Bloomberg, How the Mayor’s Education and Real Estate Development Policies Affected New Yorkers 2002-2009 Inclusive” is available through the following online channels:

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City Room – LONG BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “City Room” by Arthur Gelb, published in 2003. This large volume presented the highlights of the author’s 45-year New York Times career. There were two short passages that might cause confusion for the reader: when the author discussed health department and city infrastructure programs in 1947 or 1948, and also, “After covering Colombo’s murder during a rally in Columbus Circle on Columbus Day, June 28, 1971…”

In 1933, president Franklin Roosevelt insisted that the White House press corps get his permission to quote him directly. The journalists accepted that condition with nary a protest. Having grown up in East Harlem and the Bronx, New York City, Gelb began his career as a copy boy at the Times in May 1944. At the newspaper, writers and editors were always at odds over editorial control. Subjectively, the copy of each was ruined or improved by his counterpart.

In August 1956, the author described how he solicited enough money to keep Joseph Papp’s non-profit, Shakespearean theater organization alive by reviewing a partially rained-out production of the Taming of the Shrew. The following year, the Shakespeare Workshop won its lawsuit against New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses, obtaining a permit to have free shows in Central Park.

In 1966, the Times reported on the classic problems of education in the city. Mayor John Lindsay controlled the nine-member school board. Minority parents and civil rights groups thought he was indifferent to educating their children, as “… 85% of minority students in the city read far below grade level… The teachers’ union was perceived by some in the community as virtually a Jewish institution and racist as well.”

In spring 1970, a former law-enforcement official hired by the Times took six months to write a three-part series on extensive corruption in the New York City police department. It took that long to collect and verify all the information in the articles. “… we had numerous sources and stacks of documents and tape-recorded conversations corroborated what we had published.”

And the journalist assigned the series, David Burnham, declined to write a book on the whole sordid affair, “… ethical to the bone, [he] did not feel he should profit from having performed a public service.” Mayor Lindsay was furious that the Times exposed his poor record on corruption; he tried to pressure the paper not to print it.

In spring 1971, it took almost three months for numerous Times employees working around the clock, to prepare the Pentagon Papers for publication. Newspaper executive A.M. Rosenthal was pleasantly shocked that they were able to keep the project secret for that long!

There ensued prolonged, torturous and tortuous legal wrangling over how much the public has a right to know about the government’s nefarious activities. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of free speech.

In a nutshell: old-school journalism used to be comprised of an alcohol-lubricated male-dominated field of workaholics, some of whom were investigative reporters– critical thinkers who asked intelligent, probing questions (like, ‘How’s the building of “the wall” coming along?’).

If this was fifty years ago, the Times would have a reporter personally go to “the wall” and have someone write a human-interest story about what they saw and heard. With their own eyes and ears. Maybe even a detailed, two-part series. And follow up every month or so.

Not now. Can’t afford to send anyone anywhere anymore to get a firsthand account, to write any fact-filled article, rather than an opinion-filled one. Neither can any other media outlet. This, for a host of reasons that have been accumulating for decades. Everywhere Americans try to get honest, factual information– TV (including cable), radio, newspapers, magazines, internet, rallies and political (junk) mail– they can’t. Trust is at an all-time low.

For years, readers, listeners and viewers have read, seen and heard contradictory stories, and video and audio clips. Sometimes fanciful ones. Additionally, quotes have been taken out of context, words have been deleted, and the rest, spliced together. Which ones? Only the editors know. Sure, some websites do fact-checking, but the audience gravitates toward the sites simply to confirm their beliefs, not really to get the truth.

Now it’s all unctuous political hacks with fertile imaginations, whose goal is to get a candidate elected, reelected or to cut down political enemies– not to educate the populace. Such nonsense comes from both sides of the aisle.

As is well known, one slogan of the 1992 presidential campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid.” The 2020 election might well say, “It’s the media, stupid.” Wait. That should be rephrased: “It’s the stupid media.”

Eventually, dissatisfaction with this sorry state of affairs will reach critical mass. There will be sufficient backlash to reverse the trend. Because the audience will stop paying attention until influential parties inspire value in honesty and fact-checking again.

Anyway, read the book to learn about the adventures of Gelb and his colleagues.

Undercover

The Book of the Week is “Undercover, The Secret Lives of a Federal Agent” by Donald Goddard, published in 1988. This was the biography of a New York City undercover drug agent allegedly named Michael Levine.

Born in December 1939 in the Bronx (in New York City) among blacks and Latinos, Levine’s childhood was fraught with fighting and underage drinking. At eighteen years old, he applied to join the Air Force but pursuant to his aptitude test results, was assigned to the Air Police. He, helped only by a German shepherd, ended up guarding American nuclear weaponry in a rural area near the Canadian border. He enjoyed the work, but after a year, got into a fight sparked by racial tension.

In the next several years, he found that intelligence work was his calling. That was the way to put his acting talent and street-Spanish language skills to use for good, to combat evil. He did time at the IRS Intelligence Division, and then the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agency, part of the Treasury Department of the federal government.

Sometimes as many as four other government entities (FBI, CIA, IRS, NYPD) were supposed to cooperate to surveil a mafia don in the neighborhood of Little Italy in Manhattan (New York City). The undercover work became a joke because the don knew he was being tailed, and the don’s driver told the spies where he would be going. Working morning, noon and night, Levine frequently got his man, arresting all walks of life of the criminal underworld– possessors of unlicensed guns, drugs, stolen driver’s licenses and credit cards– taking on five or six cases at a time.

From the ATF, Levine was promoted to customs inspector, under the auspices of the State Department, where he got more power than ever. He was able to execute searches without a warrant, and operate internationally. In 1973, he survived the consolidation of entities of law enforcement of cocaine, heroin, hash, marijuana, etc.– into one Drug Enforcement Administration.

Levine’s favorite place to work was on the street. He wasn’t meant to be a paper-pushing bureaucrat in an office. One kind of case he worked might involve a “buy-bust” on the Lower East Side (of Manhattan) in which the informer was an “orange-haired Cuban bisexual who lived with the female Jewish butcher” that resulted in the arrest of three Mexicans who possessed a full kilo of heroin.

Levine acquired more than two decades of experience masquerading as an insider in the New York City drug scene. He witnessed all aspects of it, handling thousands of cases, working harder, and more hours than most other law enforcement personnel. He testified in court as an expert witness countless times. Therefore, he felt he knew the least bad solution to the ever-increasing societal problems stemming from the abuse of drugs.

Levine said the drug users were the problem– they were the ones generating demand for the product. If they disappeared, so would the problems because the sellers would go out of business. He pointed out that the “… dealers weigh the risks against the money they make. They don’t respond to fear of the law.” The users would.

Levine recommended that there be strong deterrents: hard prison time for illegal-drug possession and illegal-drug intoxication of the slightest amounts.

At first glance, that recommendation seems logical. Of course, Levine’s career would get a gigantic boost in the event of such a trend. For, Levine described his undercover work thusly: “We’re paid to lock people up, that’s all. What happens to ’em after that has got nothing to do with us. It’s up to them, their attorneys, our attorneys, public opinion, politics, the media… Juries convict people, not agents… But that’s not to say you won’t face real dilemmas about guilt and justice.”

HOWEVER, considering the consequences, one begins to think, “Oh, that’ll end well.” Harsher punishments would create as many problems as they would solve. The trouble was that many of the users were also dealers. So if the users/dealers were the sole source of income for their families, and the users got locked up for a long time, what happened to their families?

The jails would become overcrowded, and there would have to be a massive hiring effort to build more prisons, and catch, process, judge, guard and legally represent the additional soon-to-be prisoners, not to mention the legal can of worms that drug-testing would open up.

Not only that, such a major change in the legal system would highlight the two-tier justice system in this country. Poor people of all ethnicities possessing drugs would be imprisoned. As always, the troubles of those people (most of whom began their lives in unlucky situations) would be compounded. Just ask any public defender– whose caseload would increase, but his or her budget wouldn’t.

This, while the rich people (such as those in the Hamptons– the summer-vacation region on Long Island in New York State), would skate. Those inheritors of wealth and privilege could afford to hire high-priced attorneys. They would squelch the bad publicity that would result from their indiscretions by paying people to shut up and go away with non-disclosure agreements. Their families might have been just as dysfunctional as those of the poor, but the public would never hear about any of that.

As is well known, addicts hurt themselves and their families, but are usually not a danger to society at large, unless they get behind the wheel of a car, or operate heavy machinery. Or get into a gunfight over a drug deal gone bad. However, as an aside– there ought to be NO inherent unfairness in imposing very harsh penalties on possessors of firearms that were acquired ILLEGALLY. Applying the “broken windows theory” of crime to such possessors would likely prevent countless violent crimes.

For, the kinds of people who get hold of guns when they shouldn’t, are the kinds who use them in not-so-nice ways. So it would seem that they would be much more dangerous to society at large, than addicts.

In recent decades, there has been a media trend to report on human interest stories of mass-shooting victims so as to not glorify the shooters. But the news cycle on them ends, and celebrity non-stories, hysterically reported, grab the headlines again.

There’s no follow-up– NO reporting of punishment, if any, for the shooters subsequent to their pleas or trials, if they weren’t killed at the scene of the crime. Perhaps if the media showed (with harsher, new laws) the serious punishments resulting from the shooters’ actions again and again, there would be less tolerance in society for illegal firearms. This might be a start.

Anyway, read the book to learn the details of Levine’s life.

Counsel for the Defense – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Counsel for the Defense, The Autobiography of Paul O’Dwyer” by Paul O’Dwyer, published in 1979.

Born in County Mayo, Ireland in 1907 to a family of farmers, O’Dwyer was the youngest of eleven children. Gruff and authoritative more than affectionate, his father organized a teachers’ union at the one-room schoolhouse, angering the local priest, whose power was diminished thereby.

When he was eighteen, O’Dwyer emigrated to the United States, following four of his older brothers. While studying pre-law at Fordham University, he remarked, “The contradiction in our giving munificent foreign aid while letting poor whites remain illiterate and hungry was difficult to understand. (The injustice to the Negro community was not even discussed and I did not then think about it.)” In 1926, he attended law school at the then-Brooklyn campus of St. John’s University and joined a political club comprised of Jewish democrats. At that time, Irish Catholics were liberal democrats. U.S. citizenship was required before he was permitted to practice law. He attained that honor two years after passing the bar exam.

O’Dwyer was made a law-firm partner at 26 years old, litigating cases of labor law. In the late 1930’s, his oldest brother was elected to the post of Brooklyn District Attorney. By 1945, the brother was mayor of New York City. O’Dwyer represented the National Lawyer’s Guild, an organization that defended victims of the Communist witch hunt of the McCarthy Era.

Read the book to learn of the author’s adventures in running for offices; why he identified with the Jews who were fighting for the independence of Israel– which led him to handle an arms-smuggling case; of O’Dwyer’s opposition to a literacy test required for voting in some states in the early 1960’s; and his eventual senatorial career, among other legal and political activities.

Reporter

The Book of the Week is “Reporter, a Memoir” by Seymour M. Hersh, published in 2018.

Born in 1937 in Chicago, Hersh took over his family’s dry-cleaning business for his mother when his father died in 1954. For, his twin brother was busy at college and his older twin sisters were elsewhere. Upon attending junior college, he met a professor who changed his life; who told him that the University of Chicago was a better place to develop his talent in writing.

When Hersh worked as a copyboy for City News in Chicago, “The cops were on the take and the mob ran the city… The guys [reporters] on the street who did not get their facts straight or were consistently being out-reported did not last long.” Apparently, times have changed. In 1959, Hersh became a full-fledged reporter.

In 1966, after having acquired experience in various places, Hersh began earning his reputation for exposing ugly truths, at once depressing and infuriating, mostly about the U.S. government. No lie about the Vietnam War was too extreme to cover up the Johnson administration’s embarrassing, unethical goings-on. He and I.F. Stone were two of the few journalists who ferreted out the truth, but, since they were against the war, were smeared as pinko at best, and couldn’t be believed.

In late 1967, Hersh sold out and became press secretary for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. He lasted three months, for various reasons; after which, he returned to informing the public via New York Times articles, and books, about controversial, big, dirty secrets that led to serious harm to animals and humans, being perpetrated by the U.S. government.

For instance, hundreds of thousands of animals were killed by anthrax and Q fever germs (among other toxins and biological substances) in experiments around the world, in research funded by the United States.

Dugway Proving Ground in Nevada was NOT an isolated incident. “It was the same old story: A local community financially dependent on the military had kept its collective mouth shut” in connection with the deaths of six thousand sheep due to a nerve gas mishap.

Nixon tried to do an end-run around pesky Geneva Convention provisions in connection with “legalizing” defoliants and herbicides in South Vietnam. As is well known, his presidency revolved around the war. Not fun and profit.

After the war, Hersh continued churning out books and articles on Watergate, and other scandals of which the public wouldn’t have been informed but for him. Two New Yorker magazine articles ran to 25 pages each. They “… were fact-checked line by line, by two experienced young women who essentially moved to Washington for weeks.” Again, apparently, times have changed.

Hersh was subjected to harsh criticism from people who admitted they hadn’t even read his (admittedly long) book on Kissinger. Some things never change.

Read this book to learn of Hersh’s investigations into: the My Lai Massacre (whose details were revealed thanks to him), the evil activities in which Nixon, Kissinger, Robert McNamara, CIA members and others engaged, Osama bin Laden’s murder, and much more.