I rarely do this, but I am going to recommend a book... Pls see :
Book is by Tim Weiner, author of four books and co-author of a fifth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.
Enemies: A History of the FBI
His newest book is "One Man Against The World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon."
Now this is why the Nixon book is so important.
Weiner had access to newly declassified records, diaries, papers of people in the Nixon WH.
for us Boomers, the book tells the back story of the things we knew about during Nixon's reign of terror.
for those too young at the time, it is great very readable history of how the White House can be so subverted by a very dangerous man,
one more dangerous that even we knew at the time.
Here is an example:
Nixon bombed Cambodia in secret. The secret leaked out years later.
the book not only tells how and why the bombing was kept secret, and of Kissinger's role in it.
but now we learn of the top secret results of that bombing.
For example:
The flight records for the B-52 bombers carrying out the attacks would be falsified by the top American commander in Saigon, Gen. Creighton Abrams. His accomplice would be the commander of American forces in the Pacific, Adm. John McCain, whose son, later a senator, was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“In order to set the stage for a possible covert attack, and clear the books on this matter within the Bureaucracy, we should send a message to General Abrams authorizing him to bomb right up to the Cambodian border,” Kissinger told Nixon in writing before the plans were executed. A routine request for a B-52 strike on a Communist target in South Vietnam would serve as a cover for a Menu strike in Cambodia. The B-52 pilots and navigators (not the rest of the crew) would receive secret orders from ground controllers directing them to strike targets inside Cambodia.
On the bombers’ return, two sets of flight reports would be filed, one true, one false.
and here is how the results of those bombings were discovered years later:
In November 2000, Bill Clinton became the first American president since Nixon to visit Vietnam. To help in the search for unexploded bombs, which remained a lethal threat there and in Laos and Cambodia, Clinton made public an air force database that contained a staggering statistic.
Between March 1969 and August 1973, America dropped 2,756,727 tons of bombs on Cambodia. That figure was nearly five times greater than previously known, exceeding the tonnage of all Allied bombing during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
No one knows how many Cambodian civilians were killed, perhaps one hundred fifty thousand.
I consider this an essential book, esp. for those of us who lived thru the anti-war times back then.
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