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

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

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

honest man
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The Last Honest Man is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's examination of Senator Frank Church, the man at the center of numerous investigations into the abuses of power within the American government. Church was an unlikely hero who led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and became a radical critic of American imperialism. He exposed dark truths such as assassination plots by the CIA, links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, and surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755441885

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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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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