Political Booknotes Reviews
Roberts, Gregg Easterbrook, Alfred Friendly, Jr., Nicholas Lemann, and Chalmers M.
Political Booknotes Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the C.I.A.'s Crusades David Corn Simon and Schuster, $27.50 By Gregg Easterbrook David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine and an...
...Nicholas Lemann, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly...
...Franklin "picked up a glass and started a story...
...The resulting book is an amazing compendium of C.I.A...
...Yet, Gorbachev's fellow citizens increasingly came to see him as an unclothed emperor...
...The major events in FDR's life were (1) his conquest of the polio that crippled him, at age 39 in 1921, for life and (2) the effect on the Eleanor-Franklin relationship of the love affair he had—pre-polio—with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, a younger woman "tall, beautiful, and well-bred, with a low throaty voice and an incomparably winning smile...
...One of these was with Joseph P. Lash, a youthful idealist who came to love her and with whom she wrote or otherwise confided the substance of her six books...
...No Ordinary Time" Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon and Schuster, $30 By Chalmers M. Roberts In early 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his daughter Anna to become his hostess, filling in for the peripatetic first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt...
...Rather than being a Lewis Mumford- or Jane Jacobs-like lordly architectural theorist, Langdon defines his mission as collating and promoting the work of others—mostly a loose group of architects and planners who are trying to create an improved breed of neighborhoods made up of single-family homes with yards and garages...
...His avowed acceptance of the interdependence of the world, of the priority of all-human values over class values, and of the indivisibility of common security marked a revolutionary ideological change...
...The larger Gorbachev loomed on the international stage, the longer he was able to ride the tiger he had unpenned at home...
...Shackley rose to be the C.I.A.'s associate deputy director and was, in the 1970s, mentioned as a potential future C.I.A...
...At one point, hoping to exert remote-control over the renegade, "Shackley and his operations chief were even trying to get Agee a book contract...
...You knew Shackley wouldn't approve it.'" Corn presents Shackley, though often wrapping himself in the flag, as privately indifferent about whether operations resulted in the gains for the United States or were fiascoes that led to the deaths of friendly agents (as happened under Shackley's command at Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere) or the persecution of civilians (as happened to the Hmong tribe, which the C.I.A...
...She kept on doing this kind of work after entering the White House...
...Furthermore, she developed several very close relationships that seemed to fill a need for the kind of love that had gone out of her marriage...
...Those who think Hillary Rodham Clinton is too active should read about Eleanor...
...Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly...
...It has vast and pervasive implications: Everything from presidential politics to pop culture is now suburb-dominated, and it looks as if the suburbs are only going to continue growing...
...Did he hope that by withdrawing from over-extended positions in Afghanistan, Africa, Nicaragua, and Eastern Europe, he could win time— perhaps even some Western economic support—to consolidate the hold of a rejuvenated Communist apparat on the USSR...
...It is true that Langdon has to rely on only a tiny handful of contemporary examples (the leading one of which, Seaside, Florida, isn't a suburb at all, but a resort) to demonstrate that there is a movement toward traditionalist suburbs...
...in the Cold War...
...Shackley, ever the careerist, apparently took that to heart...
...Gorbachev actually undercut and even reversed the momentum of political and economic change in the fall of 1990 when, facing fierce opposition, he shelved the radical plan of action he had initially sponsored...
...And she had a sheaf of papers this high and she said, 'Now, Franklin, I want to talk to you about this . . .' I just remember .. . that I thought, 'Oh God, he's going to blow.' And sure enough, he blew his top...
...This is one...
...There is much about Eleanor's unflagging efforts to improve American life, especially for blacks, during the war years...
...In the larger arena, Garthoff cloaks his hero in statesman's robes...
...Corn notes, "For many C.I.A...
...was preparing for the Bay of Pigs and attempting to unseat Castro (for a time the Miami bureau was the C.I.A.'s largest operation...
...He took every single speck of that whole pile of papers, threw them across the desk at me and said, 'Sis, you handle these tomorrow morning...
...Corn reports that once when Henry Kissinger was visiting the Saigon station, a senior officer asked if he was satisfied with the intelligence he was getting...
...Still, Goodwin is doubtful that there was a sexual relationship, either then or later...
...Official Soviet prose, even of the Gorbachev era, is turgid...
...They weren't necessarily evil, but the sum total of the things they did, by and large, was...
...True, in 1918, when Eleanor found a packet of Lucy's love letters, her husband was 36 and physically a whole man...
...Corn depicts Shackley as first and foremost a bureaucrat: obsessed with memos and performance statistics, with chains of command, with CYA...
...his blood pressure, for readers who pay attention to their own, registered 240/130 a few weeks before his fourth election to the presidency...
...Literally to his dying day, Lucy provided FDR with the love and comfort he lacked from Eleanor...
...Gorbachev's "impact," Garthoff writes, was "the single most significant factor" in reversing superpower confrontation...
...Chalmers M. Roberts is a retired reporter for The Washington Post...
...His latest, massive (780 pages) study of the Cold War's finale piles up a tower of evidence for the view of Mikhail Gorbachev as the catalyst and inspired conductor of this century's grandest peaceful realignment...
...The Lucy affair ended their marital relations, led to separate bedrooms, and freed Eleanor "to define a new and different partnership with her husband, free to seek new avenues of fulfillment...
...On the other hand, it is undeniably true that suburbs with street grids, sidewalks, front porches, and strollable shopping districts are both more pleasant and more democratic in spirit than places like Irvine...
...Long citations set the reader's brain to napping and eye to roving...
...Corn writes that he is avoiding conclusions because "good biographies tend to speak for themselves...
...Every paragraph is packed with names, dates, and specifics about the inner life of the American intelligence community...
...is a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek and The New York Times...
...The result is an essential reference work, if not always the liveliest reading...
...she became "one of the president's most intimate companions...
...Political Booknotes Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the C.I.A.'s Crusades David Corn Simon and Schuster, $27.50 By Gregg Easterbrook David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine and an accomplished journalist, has expended enormous effort chasing down the life story of Theodore Shackley...
...Enter Lucy once again...
...And what should the good guys have stood for...
...As long as it supports my policy...
...officials at a Virginia hunt country estate, yet no one in the agency seems to have questioned how he lived far beyond the means of his government salary, a precedent missed in the Aldrich Ames coverage...
...official Philip Agee had become disenchanted with the agency and declared his intention to publish a book naming agents, but had not actually done so...
...Ultimately the suit was dismissed and, in a rare judgment that surely would win the Monthly's approval, about $1 million in legal costs were awarded to Shackley, bankrupting Christie...
...Merely promoting the idea of traditionalism is useful, and, more broadly, A Better Place to Live, like David Rusk's Cities Without Suburbs and Joel Garreau's Edge City, conveys the happy feeling that somebody out there is actively trying to find a fit between suburbanization and liberal ideals...
...In either case, they will find in Ambassador Garthoff s work an exceptional source of detail and documentation on which to draw...
...She had long cared about issues and hated small talk...
...Is the book a biography...
...The result is an interesting book, one for which Corn should be generously credited with undertaking and that is definitely worth reading, but one that left me feeling oddly unsatisfied...
...Their confidences give his judgments added weight...
...Doing it summarily, however, leads Garthoff to write that "All in all, Gorbachev did succeed [by mid-1988] in advancing political reform" and to conclude that in mid-1991 "Economic reform was also proceeding (although so, too, was continuing economic decline...
...died) but, as she told Anna, sex was "an ordeal to be borne...
...Perhaps this result was dictated by the choice of Shackley as subject matter...
...Of course, it was too late...
...officer-turned-gangster Edwin Wilson, who sold arms to Muammar Qaddafi...
...and in Washington, during the Church Committee hearings into C.I.A...
...excesses...
...Two examples: >- As head of Agency operations in Laos in 1968, Shackley decided to fortify a place called Nam Bac, near the border of Laos and North Vietnam, with U.S.-backed Laotian forces...
...And so on...
...The fields of architecture, planning, and urban studies have long been implicitly or explicitly hostile to the suburbs, palpably yearning for the day when the federal government would stop subsidizing interstate highways and home mortgages, when racial prejudice would lessen, and when, consequently, the mass migration back to the cities and yard-free, car-free living could commence...
...Shackley's next posting was station chief in Saigon at the height of the war...
...This working relationship was advantageous for both...
...Historians in the next century may find Gorbachev to have been only a better-than-ordinary politician extracting every lingering advantage from a hopeless situation...
...Anna tried to shield the already ill president from strain and stress, but Eleanor, a self-described "pest," often made this difficult...
...Is the book a history of C.I.A...
...Fortunately, Garthoff the diplomat-turned-academic is an industrious reporter as well...
...As Corn tells it, "The point was to take the war to the NVA, 'to really bloody the nose of the North Vietnamese.' as one embassy officer recounted...
...Langdon calls these people "traditionalists...
...I don't think mother had the slightest realization...
...Wrapping up the Moscow-Washington diplomatic record from 1981 through 1991, this analysis comes as no surprise...
...automaton or simply a failed human being...
...He was determined to change the name of the game...
...The reader exits wondering if this is a typical C.I.A...
...Not really, since much of the text does not concern Shackley directly...
...and the culture of intelligence...
...If so, the focus on Shackley becomes strained and artificial...
...The traditionalists' main causes are re-establishing street grids, finding a balance between uniformity and variety in house design, designing houses that face and sit close to the street, and locating shopping districts nearer to residential ones...
...Unable to travel easily on his own, "he had started by teaching Eleanor how to inspect state institutions in 1929...
...Separately and together, the two works are authoritative contemporary history...
...FDR depended on the information she brought him, though on occasion "she irritated and exasperated him, but he never ceased to respect and admire her...
...In assembling and ordering so much of the primary record and supplementing it with a wealth of illuminating, secondary sources, Garthoff has done for the final decades of Soviet-American relations what the Venerable Bede did for the early centuries of English Christianity...
...Whatever future analysts think of such encomiums, they will surely bless Garthoff for the thorough scholarship of The Great Transition and its predecessor volume, Detente and Confrontation (1985), out in a revised edition this year...
...FDR died at 63...
...If she was his eyes and ears, she seldom was his hostess...
...There were good guys in the C.I.A., but often they were driven down to the level of the bad...
...When he suffered a stroke, FDR changed his will to leave Le Hand half his estate, but she died first...
...Combined with this was a "sublime confidence" and a "native optimism...
...In some ways he can appear to have been the personification of the C.I.A...
...Devastating in its portrayal of the self-deluded policy-makers of the Reagan administration, The Great Transition seems, and not only just by contrast, overly generous to the acumen of the Kremlin leadership...
...Joining the agency shortly after its creation following World War II, Shackley went on to become a senior C.I.A...
...It was a complicated logistical operation, and Shackley was warned that no Laotian commander could handle the job...
...At any rate, monitoring Agee, Shackley planted two agents as friends of the former officer, then had them pass Agee both money—ostensibly as loans from sympathetic leftists—and bugged typewriters...
...As governor of New York, Franklin had taught her to be his "eyes and ears...
...Kissinger replied, I am satisfied...
...It does not diminish the revolutionary role or significance of Mikhail Gorbachev to suggest that the more resistance he met to domestic reform, the more daring he became in revising, then abandoning, hallowed dogma in foreign affairs...
...The relationship between Eleanor and Franklin is central to an understanding of FDR and his presidency...
...Garthoff records this episode and many similar detours on the bumpy road of perestroika, but he rarely attempts to connect the fitful Soviet progress on the home front with the far more decisive performance beyond the Soviet borders...
...Shackley was in charge of the anti-Agee operation and cold-heartedly jettisoned C.I.A...
...After leaving the C.I.A., Shackley started hazy consulting and "political risk analysis" businesses with so-clean-they-sound-suspicious names like Research Associates International...
...He has not just pored through Soviet archives that only recently opened...
...Director Richard Helms and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow on the debacle exculpated himself and blamed local commanders, who had been against the operation in the first place: one career diplomat who read it said, "It was the most dishonest piece of political-military reporting I had ever seen in my life...
...It would be nice if a parallel process could occur in the design-of-space professions: If, recognizing that there's a lot not to like about the suburbs, they still tried to create a suburbia we could feel better about: one less anonymous, less segregated, less car-dependent, and more communitarian...
...Goodwin has written an entrancing, indeed magnificent account of the second half of the Roosevelt saga, the war years, with enough flashbacks to the peacetime New Deal years to give background to readers who, like Goodwin, have no personal memory of FDR and his times...
...Officers who tried to get the real, discouraging news up the chain were shut down by Shackley...
...But in an area such as the C.I.A., where "facts" are uncertain and the footing ever-shifting, little speaks for itself...
...No, the USSR collapsed of its own rotting weight, and Japan won the Cold War...
...In this Shackley is like the C.I.A...
...2,000 Laotian soldiers were killed...
...He did so with his secretary, Marguerite "Missy" Le Hand, who adored him and who played hostess in Eleanor's absence as well as being "the important conduit to the president...
...This is the cause that Philip Langdon (whom I know slightly by virtue of our both being associated with The Atlantic Monthly) takes on in A Better Place to Live...
...Corn writes of the period after former C.I.A...
...You knew it wouldn't get out of Vietnam that way, because it was bad news,' said Bob Wall, an Agency man who was on the ground...
...At the recommendation of a young cardiologist, Dr...
...As the C.I.A...
...But in other ways Shackley's life meanders across the intelligence landscape toward no clear end beyond self-advancement, and in many of his exploits the line between bad idea from the start and good idea that got out of hand is impossible to draw...
...Anna explained: "Intuitively, I understood that here was a man plagued with God knows how many problems and right now he had twenty minutes to have two cocktails . . . He wanted to tell stories and relax and enjoy himself—period...
...Not really, since Blond Ghost paints covert operations in a bad hue, but never makes apparent what an intelligence agency would be justified in doing...
...And as she once wrote him: "We are really very dependent on each other though we see so little of each other...
...And Doris Kearns Goodwin, in this massive book, has made it central to her account of the World War II years...
...The antipode of the traditionalist suburb, to Langdon, is a place like Irvine, California, which is the result of meticulous but misguided planning rather than sprawl...
...seduced and abandoned in Laos, and even, Corn says, occasionally bombed by mistake...
...It was a terrible waste of people,' remarked a senior embassy official, 'and basically because of Ted's ambitions.'" Shackley's report to C.I.A...
...Shackley ignored the warnings, believing "Washington would be ecstatic" if he could establish a presence in the North...
...Ultimately Shackley became the target of the hallucinogenic Christie Institute lawsuit, which drew considerable publicity for claiming Shackley was the evil mastermind of a globe-spanning drug and assassination conspiracy and which was taken in full seriousness by Hollywood trendy-cause donors such as Jackson Browne...
...This view syncs perfectly with the book's portrayal...
...he has also kept up a 30-year conversation with many Kremlin advisors and Beltway insiders able to interpret the official results...
...The money was to hook Agee to the planted "friends": one of them the sole actually tall, shapely woman in, it seems, the entire history of real espionage...
...World War II was at a critical stage, and FDR would have to decide whether to run later that year for his fourth term...
...This book recounts in much wellknown detail the story of FDR's wartime leadership (essentially the war in Europe, little about the war with Japan) and his struggles and agreements with Churchill and Stalin over such critical points as the second front in Normandy and the construction of the president's dream, a new world organization to keep the peace to come...
...The operation failed miserably...
...operatives simply because Agee might expose them...
...and "Gorbachev set out deliberately" to do so...
...Unfortunately, Blond Ghost descends to anticlimax when, in an epilogue, Corn describes the one interview he was able to wrest from Shackley...
...It means he's listening...
...One of the problems with this book is Corn's failure to articulate what sorts of missions he thinks would have been justified...
...But Hopkins finally married and moved to Georgetown...
...were beginning...
...their work recalls the earliest (in some cases pre-automobile) generation of suburbs—places like Oak Park, Illinois...
...Mclntire hid the truth about FDR...
...fact and lore...
...It was found in the office...
...The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War Raymond L. Garthojf Brookings Books, $44.95 By Alfred Friendly, Jr...
...infatuation with dubious covert operations at the expense of worthwhile intelligence gathering...
...employees during the Cold War, the drama in the intelligence business came not from face-to-face confrontations with an armed KGB officer...
...itself: palpably creepy, but you can't be sure whether that stems from being sinister or just secretive...
...Perhaps Shackley is both: In a sense, he is emblematic of the kind of bad guys who populated the C.I.A...
...Or, as the author concludes: Gorbachev pressed ahead with his unilateral actions and concessionary negotiations not owing to the Reagan hard line and military buildup, but despite it...
...director (insiders make a great show of calling this job by its formal name, "director of central intelligence...
...Did he "call off' the arms race because he—and he alone—understood it could produce no winner, or in hopes of restructuring the Soviet economy for a different competition, or because it was easier to make deals even with a partner as incoherent as Ronald Reagan than it was to reanimate his own society...
...official in pre-Wall Germany, when Berlin was the center of the espionage universe...
...malfeasance, when the American role in domestic politics in Chile was coming to light, and the first halting attempts at public scrutiny of the C.I.A...
...To have done that job thoroughly would have at least doubled the length of this study...
...Gorbachev "was the first Soviet leader to see the world in post-Leninist terms...
...Eleanor said, "I'm sorry," and turned to talk to someone else...
...Howard Bruenn, whom Mclntire was forced to call in, FDR cut his cigarette consumption from 20 or 30 a day to five or six...
...As a crosscheck of Corn's thesis I spoke to one former C.I.A...
...In this Shackley does sound like a distillation of the C.I.A.'s worst faults...
...What Bill Clinton did in 1992 was try to arrive at a liberal Democratic political formula that would appeal to suburban voters rather than just writing off the suburbs as Republican territory...
...Wilson also often entertained C.I.A...
...And there were FDR's two married cousins for company, as well as his devoted friend and adviser Harry Hopkins, who lived in the White House family quarters for years...
...in Laos, during the "secret war" of the late 1960s...
...The request "threw Eleanor into a tumult of conflicting emotions," but in the end her answer was no...
...Ross Mclntire, an ear-nose-and-throat man...
...I left Blond Ghost thinking the book was not as interesting as the article based on the book, which this magazine published in its July/August issue, an article in which Corn simply came out and said what he thought about the C.I.A...
...The payoff of all this, aside from how it looks, is that it would generate the human interaction and street life that so many suburbs sorely lack...
...Nonetheless, Garthoff s view of Gorbachev as the masterful, decisive visionary is not fully convincing...
...Is the book an indictment of the (presumably now past) C.I.A...
...In 1943, after her husband's death, the visitor was listed simply as Lucy Rutherford...
...Without money from Shackley, Agee's book project might have faltered and died," Corn writes...
...if Eleanor would not provide it, he would find it elsewhere...
...Domestic life is highly reactive to shifts in cultural and aesthetic tastes, so it's plausible that traditionalism could first catch on as an idea and then sweep across the suburban landscape like so many previous trends...
...Given the author's focus on the diplomatic record and especially on arms control, he has made a commendable effort to examine contemporary domestic politics in both Washington and Moscow as backdrops to the by-play between the two capitals...
...in Miami, when the C.I.A...
...But his imaginative moves may have been dictated as much by internal needs as by global discernment, a series of tactical shifts couched in terms of grand, innovative strategy...
...Corn suggests that instead of shutting Agee down, this agency money allowed Agee to go on writing when he was penniless...
...Shackley acts soulless and dodges questions: Nothing comes of the confrontation...
...Alfred Friendly, Jr...
...Such cursory judgments ring only partly true...
...On occasion FDR was driven to Georgetown to pick Lucy up for White House visits or to go to Shangri-La, now called Camp David...
...She was in and out of the White House, sometimes alone and other times with her husband and children...
...in Saigon, during the Vietnam War...
...A gregarious man who hated to be alone, FDR required womanly affection...
...As first lady, she went her own way, including writing a six-day-a-week column called "My Day" from wherever she happened to be, at home or abroad...
...Franklin Roosevelt, only child of a doting mother, developed a desire to please which required a pattern of evasiveness well known during his 12 White House years...
...Motive is not the only question historians must weigh in sorting out the collapse of Soviet power, but some will certainly probe those of Mikhail Gorbachev more skeptically than Garthoff has...
...Now the widow of a rich man with a teen-aged daughter as well as step-sons, Lucy came to the White House first as "Mrs...
...As a statistic, this is up there with the Census Department's announcement 100 years ago (which became the foundation of Frederick Jackson Turner's career as the leading American historian of his day) that there was no longer a detectable frontier line...
...But every so often you run across a well-researched, well-written book that for some reason doesn't quite click...
...Everyone lives in over-regulated walled neighborhoods, you can't walk anywhere, and all shopping has to be done on huge, daunting "arterial" roads...
...Shackley was a leading Central Intelligence Agency figure from the onset of the Cold War until his semi-compelled retirement when Stansfield Turner purged the agency during the Carter administration, and later, Shackley's name surfaced as a secondary player in the Iran-contra scandal...
...The natural objection to Langdon's views is that they're unrealistic: People actually like arterials, cul-desacs, and garage-to-the-front houses, and that's why there are so many of these things...
...Only a Soviet leader could have ended the Cold War...
...The United States pushed the Soviet empire to its knees and won the Cold War...
...is vaporous and at many levels hard to draw conclusions about, Corn's book seems to have trouble coming to conclusions beyond straightforward ones, such as that intelligence operations should be lawful...
...For those today who are always conscious of the health of a president, there is recounted here the terrible story of FDR's decline and the miserable White House physician who so long had attended him, Dr...
...Eleanor bore Franklin's six children (the first FDR, Jr...
...He did not lose the arms race, he called it off...
...Goodwin adds nothing new about the polio, but she does provide the most complete, and, to me, the most satisfying account of the Lucy affair and its ramifications and consequences...
...As a private operator, Shackley got messed up with Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, and others involved with Iran-contra...
...The author writes that while their letters "possess an emotional intensity and a sensual explicitness that is hard to disregard," there is no certainty they went beyond hugs and kisses...
...Or they may judge him a classic prophet without honor in his own country...
...A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburbs Philip Langdon University of Massachusetts Press $29.95 By Nicholas Lemann The United States has just become a suburban-majority nation—that is, over 50 percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas but outside the city limits...
...The way Goodwin recounts it, the reader will most likely sympathize with Franklin rather than Eleanor...
...Blond Ghost needed more conclusions, and fewer accounts of whose names were on what memos...
...James Roosevelt, the eldest son, said that Franklin once "approached Eleanor with the idea that they should try once more to live as man and wife," as the author puts it...
...his dismissal of many operatives without thanks or cause is ironic in light of how bitterly Shackley later complained in right-wing circles of his own dismissal by Turner, though in Shackley's association with Wilson, Turner had very good cause...
...Eleanor also had close women friends, chief among them Lenora Hickock, an Associated Press reporter who gave up her career when she fell in love with Eleanor...
...Corn acknowledges that however exotic Shackley may sound in outline, "as is true of some of the better spies, he was not a colorful man...
...In dealings between Washington and Moscow from 1986 onwards, the main focus of The Great Transition, the diplomatic initiative repeatedly fell—by White House default—to the Soviet leader, and he repeatedly seized and widened each opportunity...
...Those who prefer Thomas Carlyle to Caspar Weinberger will lean toward the last of the summary verdicts proposed above and will find in Raymond L. Garthoff a potent ally...
...It worked, both politically and morally—most of the time Clinton has given the impression of trying to find common ground between suburbanites and liberalism, rather than pandering...
...Johnson," and sometimes with her daughter, who also visited on her own...
...Option three: A brilliant Kremlin leader, besieged at home and long misunderstood abroad, perceived the irrelevance of superpower military competition to the overarching new challenges of global security and engineered a strategic retreat toward sanity in East-West relations...
...For today's generation it should at once be said that Lucy was no bimbo in the Kennedy or Clinton sense...
...Meanwhile the opposite continues to happen—and today blacks are suburbanizing more rapidly than whites...
...gone bad...
...She had become a "political force in her own right," which had produced a profoundly different sense of self—of independence, competence, and confidence...
...At one White House cocktail hour, Anna recounted, Eleanor appeared, wolfed down her limit of one drink, and "sat down across the desk from Father...
...official who worked closely with Shackley: He described the subject of Blond Ghost as "an amoral man, interested in nothing other than himself...
...the evidence is simply lacking...
...Shackley also served Langley's in-house interests...
...But Shackley's career foundered on his association with the C.I.A...
...He was a man whose "perpetual cheer" served him well in both Depression and war...
...And as Eleanor once said to Winston Churchill, "When Franklin says 'yes, yes, yes,' it doesn't mean he agrees with you...
...Shackley, according to Corn, promoted the line Washington hawks wanted to hear: the Viet Cong were on the decline, enemy casualties were heavy, the North's power was slipping...
...After Missy came Princess Martha of Norway, "tall and willowly, full of light and gaiety...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 9
