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Summary of

The Last Honest Man

A

Summary of James Risen’s book

 

The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys

—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy

GP SUMMARY

 

Summary of The Last Honest Man by James Risen: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of James Risen’s “The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy” designed to enrich your reading experience.

 

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The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

 

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This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. You agree to accept all risks of using the information presented inside this book.

 

Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

 

Senator Cathedral”

Senator Frank Church questions William Colby, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, about the CIA's secret storage of lethal shellfish toxin for use in assassinations despite a presidential order to destroy it. Mitchell Rogovin, a civil liberties lawyer hired by Colby to be a special counsel to the CIA, takes out a strangely designed, battery-operated pistol, shaped like a.45 handgun with a large sight attached atop its barrel. F. A. O. "Fritz" Schwarz, the Church Committee's chief counsel, realizes Church wants him to get the gun and quietly asks Rogovin to push it his way.

 

The Church Committee was conducting the first major congressional investigation into decades of abuses committed by the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, and the rest of the United States intelligence community in September 1975. Senator Frank Church held up a CIA dart gun at the beginning of the first public hearing, which became the iconic image of the Church Committee. The hearings showcased the two sides of Frank Church: the ambitious, publicity-seeking politician yearning for acceptance in Washington, and the radicalized outsider who despised the American imperialism represented by a spy agency prepared to kill foreign leaders with toxinfilled darts. Days before the public hearings began, Church offered a preview with a jeremiad against the rise of American militarism. Frank Church's desire to overturn the status quo in Washington's national security establishment was matched by his hunger for acceptance and headlines.

 

At the first public hearing, Church used a dart gun to draw attention to the need for intelligence reform. However, CIA director Colby had recognized that the dart gun could be a potential public relations disaster and had resisted Church's demands. Church Committee staffer Paul Michel was assigned to force the CIA to bring the dart gun. The press covering the Church Committee saw only this publicityseeking side of Church, but gradually, the scale of the illegal activities and abuses of the intelligence community came into greater focus. Frank Church's public hearings in 1975 provided an unprecedented forum for a national debate on the proper limits of the power of the government's dark side.

 

The hearings also marked the high-water mark of Church's career, as he led the Church Committee's unprecedented effort to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the US government. Church believed that the future of American democracy was threatened by the rise of a permanent and largely unaccountable national security state, and sought to rein in America's spy agencies. He succeeded by disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power and spearheading reforms, creating the rules of the road for the intelligence community that remain in place today. Frank Church was responsible for bringing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other government intelligence apparatus under the rule of law for the first time in 1975. He was seen as America's chief investigator, revealing the nation's darkest secrets and helping explain how the nation had lost its way in the decades since World War II. Despite his flaws, Church was an honest man at heart and his integrity would drive his life's work: trying to save the American republic from its transformation into a dangerous, militaristic empire.

 

Frank Church was an iconoclastic politician who refused to conform to the Washington establishment's belief in American interventionism. He believed that America had lost its way in the decades after World War II through the creation of an unaccountable national security state that pushed the United States into endless wars abroad and threatened democracy. Church's iconoclastic thinking and achievements were shaped by his life leading up to his walk into history in 1975. He was born in an isolationist America in the 1920s and came of age in China during World War II. He expressed his fears over America's new imperial ambitions and witnessed the Japanese surrender in China. He was disgusted that the United States had so closely allied itself with a corrupt warlord.

Frank Church won his first Senate race in 1956 and was viewed by the political elite as a boy. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War revived Church's skepticism about American imperial overreach. Church emerged as an early advocate for congressional hearings on U.S. policy in Vietnam and helped change the national debate about the war. By the 1970s, Church had become a radical in the Senate and wanted to overthrow the status quo in American national security policy. He eventually helped to stop the Vietnam War by pushing Congress to use its power of the purse to threaten to cut off funding for the conflict.

 

Church was not willing to return to the status quo after Vietnam and began to investigate the sources of economic and political power that he believed had led the nation into Vietnam. Frank Church launched a landmark investigation into the rising global power of America's corporate giants, leading to a much broader investigation of the CIA. The Church Committee's hearings became a constitutional convention, airing basic questions about the proper balance between liberty and security. Church's achievement was not inevitable, as three witnesses were murdered before he could testify, but the coincidences kept piling up and the killings brought an unnerving sense of danger to the committee. The CIA and the rest of the intelligence community had grown into a secret government-within-a-government without any independent oversight or meaningful legal controls.

 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower set the pattern for the CIA's dark future by directing the Agency to help stage coups in Iran and Guatemala, while also trying to overthrow foreign leaders in countries from the Congo to Cuba. Presidents from Kennedy to Nixon continued to use the Agency's covert-action arm whenever diplomacy became too difficult or awkward. For decades, the CIA's operations faced only glancing scrutiny from the White House and virtually none from Congress, until 1975, when Frank Church arrived on the national stage.

 

PART ONE

 

 

 

 

 

“If I make no mark elsewhere” 1924–1975

“Happier Times”

The editor at the Boise Capital News had to double-check the name on a letter written by an eighth grader at North Junior High School, Frank Church, in April 1939. He was impressed and published the letter on the newspaper's front page. Church's father, a tradition-bound Catholic shopkeeper, would never be able to rein in his son's ambitions, which would soon range far beyond Boise and the Mountain West. Church was born in 1924 in Boise, Idaho, which was then a small city of just 20,000. He was the smartest kid in school, affable, and spoke and wrote more clearly than most adults.

Church's ambitions would soon range far beyond Boise and the Mountain West. The most important details in this text are the events that led to the assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905 and the rise of a unionized workforce in the northern minefields. Frank Church was born in Idaho in 1871 and was the third Frank Church to live there. He was rewarded by President Grover Cleveland in 1893 for his work in the assay office, which measured the purity and content of the gold dug by miners. Frank Forrester Church Jr. was born in 1890 and had a cautious personality.

He married Laura Bilderback and owned a sporting-goods store in Boise by the 1920s. His father had only a limited impact on Church's personality and growth. His brother, Richard, was nearly nine years older and played only a limited role in Church's early life. Frank was sick during much of his childhood and was ill-suited to Catholic elementary school. His older brother's biggest impact on Frank's life came when he persuaded their father to transfer him to public school.

The Church family enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life, but when Frank Church was growing up in the 1930s, they were forced to cut corners by renting out the upstairs floor of their home. Frank was an oddity, a city kid at heart who was born in the Mountain West. He excelled at school, but some of his classmates resented him for being a teacher's pet. However, his intelligence was undeniable, and his teachers realized that he was unique and that his intelligence demanded respect. Frank Church had a good sense of humor and was easily elected student body president.

His father was politically conservative and deeply religious, but as he grew, he turned away from both the Republican Party and the Catholic Church. He became a lifelong Democrat in one of the most solidly Republican states in the nation. His role model was William Borah, the senator whom he had stoutly defended in his letter to the Boise Capital News. Borah was an iconic figure who dominated Idaho politics for a generation. Frank Borah was a long-serving senator from Idaho who was hailed as a progressive but later became an isolationist.

He had an affair with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the celebrity daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, and was believed to be the father of Aurora Borah Alice. Frank Church, a 15-year-old boy, publicly cited Borah as his role model, but this was seen as good politics in Idaho. Early in his Senate career, Church learned some harsh facts that further tarnished his image. Frank Church was a 16-year-old from Boise, Idaho, who went to pay his respects to Mary McConnell Borah's widow and discovered that she had made ends meet after Borah's death. This made Church think differently about Borah, and he helped her move into a nursing home in Oregon.

Church also took after Borah in public speaking and debate, leading the Boise High School debate team to win the state championship. In 1941, Church traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, where he competed in a national publicspeaking contest for high-school students. His speaking style was clipped and precise, suggesting he was far more cosmopolitan than a teenager from Boise had any right to sound. Frank Church was a junior at Boise High when he wrote a pro-Borah letter to the newspaper in which he urged America to stay out of world affairs. In his first-ever public address outside Idaho, Church broke with the political tradition of William Borah and argued that America had to remain true to its values of democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law in the face of unprecedented threats.

President Roosevelt had persuaded Congress to approve his Lend-Lease program to provide embattled Britain with warships, while Charles Lindbergh was leading the opposition to U.S. intervention in the European war. Church's speech echoed the famous "Four Freedoms" speech of Franklin Roosevelt. He called for a vigorous defense of the American Way, which he defined as having three pillars: social, economic, and political freedoms. He warned of the system's flaws, particularly those that allowed elites to gain greater power and trampled the rights of minorities and the dispossessed. Church argued that the true threat to political freedom in America came from within, rather than from Germany or other foreign enemies.

Frank Church, a 16-year-old from Boise, Idaho, vowed to defend the third principle of the American way—political freedom. He won the American Legion basketball championship and college scholarship, and returned to Boise as a local hero. Church's political ambition and mischievous side led him to pull elaborate pranks, such as pretending to hypnotize his friend Orville Poorit and sticking pins in him. This speech changed Church's life and allowed him to attend Stanford University. Frank Church's life was changed forever when he met Bethine Clark, the daughter of Idaho's Democratic governor, Chase Clark.

She belonged to the most influential family in Democratic Party politics in the state, and they first met when she attended a statewide student-government convention in Idaho Falls. The Clark machine was nicknamed by Rivals in the Democratic Party in Idaho. Bethine and Frank Church were attracted to each other on an intellectual level, sharing a thirst for knowledge and an interest in history, current events, and politics. They became classic mid-century high-school sweethearts, with a healthy dose of literate romance. Frank loved to recite poems of A. E. Housman to Bethine, but their relationship was tested by war.

“The finest diction in the Army”

Frank Church was in the middle of his senior year in high school when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. He decided to wait rather than rush into military service and stayed in high school, graduating in 1942. He then went to Stanford University, but Bethine Clark left for the University of Michigan. Church left for the Army in the spring of his freshman year and was sent for specialized training before he was even made an officer. In the summer of 1943, he was secretly sent to Camp Ritchie, Maryland for intelligence training.

The Black Chamber was a secret operation run jointly by the Army and the State Department in which analysts read and decrypted cable traffic of foreign embassies in Washington. With World War II raging, the Office of Strategic Services was created to handle espionage, sabotage, and paramilitary operations behind enemy lines. The OSS was the precursor to the CIA and was the training ground for future CIA directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and William Colby. Frank Church was recruited from other parts of the Army and trained to become an Army intelligence analyst at Camp Ritchie, a covert base hidden away in the mountains of Maryland. Camp Ritchie was a secret training center for a group of immigrants and Jewish refugees who were selected for intelligence work against the Nazis.

Bethine Clark, the wife of Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho, was mystified when Frank Church disappeared from his language-training program at Lafayette College. Virgil Clark, the wife of her cousin, Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho, helped Bethine find him. Church was so weak and out of shape that he almost washed out, and his Selective Service card from 1949 states that he was six feet tall but weighed only 140 pounds. Frank Church was a 20-year-old officer in the U.S. Army's Chinese Combat Command during World War II. He wrote frequently to Bethine, but their relationship remained ambiguous.

They had a sexual relationship, but Frank was unwilling to commit to her. In June 1945, Church wrote to her from Kunming, China, recognizing that she was now seeing other men. He wrote that he envied "the lucky characters at Michigan and elsewhere who can, by virtue of location alone, date you at your pleasure". Bethine Church was an intelligence officer in China who had a brush with action in 1945 when he heard a commotion and realized his rifle was jammed. He crawled under a truck to clean his rifle, but it was too late for him to join his troops.

Church's oratorical skills and ability to analyze intelligence reports impressed General Robert McClure, who made him his main briefer. Church privately began to chafe at McClure's excessive attention. Church was chosen to join the American delegation to witness the surrender of Japanese forces in China in Nanking in September 1945. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his intelligence work, which McClure believed had improved orders-of-battle reports and special studies on the Japanese Army in China. Despite the plaudits from McClure, the war left Church depressed and with a sense of dread.

Frank Church wrote to Bethine after the Japanese surrendered and expressed his fear of imperialism. He was recommended for a postwar Army intelligence service position, but declined it due to his intention to return to civilian life. When Church returned to Boise, Stan Burns convinced him to pursue his interest in Bethine, and Church asked her to marry him. Bethine said yes, but demanded that Church wait until he went back to Stanford to finish college. Frank Church returned to college as an undergraduate after serving as an Army officer halfway around the world.

He emerged from World War II much more liberal in his political thinking than he had been when he joined the Army. He was attracted to the leftwing politics of Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's former vice president, who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Church joined the Stanford debate team and was asked to give a series of public speeches, attacking the corruption and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Frank Church grew up in Idaho and was beginning to understand racial discrimination. He defended labor unions in a debate against the University of California and married his fiancée Bethine in 1947.

In 1947, Church started at Harvard Law School, but he and his wife struggled with life in Cambridge. He transferred back to Stanford's Law School and in 1948 his son, Frank Forrester Church IV, was born in Palo Alto. In 1949, an operation revealed that Church had testicular cancer. Frank Church was diagnosed with seminoma, a less-extreme form of testicular cancer, and had a chance to survive, but his treatment was limited by the medical knowledge and technology available in the late 1940s. He underwent deep X-ray therapy to kill any remaining cancer cells, but the radiation burned his flesh purple and left him feeling terribly nauseated.

Bethine was able to help him keep down fluids and food in between fits of vomiting. Frank Church was diagnosed with cancer and weighed 90 pounds by the end of his treatments. He became depressed when he had a false alarm, but his treatments worked and he recovered. He realized he had to take risks right away, even if it meant going back home to Idaho and gambling in politics.

“If you don’t run you will never get there”

In the years after World War II,

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 09.05.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-4188-5

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
Church was an unlikely hero who exposed dark truths about American imperialism, assassination plots, and surveillance of civil rights activists.