The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA - Softcover

Burton Hersh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971066019 ISBN 13: 9780971066014

Publisher: Tree Farm Books, 2001

Synopsis

This is a group biography of the founders of the CIA. It deals with their Wall-Street origins and points up their methods and results.

About this title

About the Author:

Since graduating from Harvard College with high honors, Burton Hersh has adroitly sidestepped regular employment and persevered throughout a long and frequently tumultuous career as an independent writer. Following a six-year stint as a Fulbright Scholar and military translator in Germany, he returned to New York in the sixties to more than a decade as a successful magazine article writer. These easy-going editorial years -- in a better literary America -- were punctuated by the 1968 publication of Hersh's first novel, "The Ski People" (McGraw Hill).

Hersh's persistent interest in contemporary American history led to the 1973 appearance of "The Education of Edward Kennedy" (Morrow), which quickly established itself as the standard work on the embattled liberal senator. "The Shadow President" (Steerforth Press) appeared in 1997, a universally acclaimed follow-up volume about Kennedy's later career. Also offered by Morrow, "The Mellon Family," came out in 1978, was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and, like "The Education," wound up among the top fifty books in sales in the year it came out.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A sprawling chronicle that details how a clutch of Ivy- educated Wall Street attorneys and their associates--the ``Old Boy network''--created the Central Intelligence Agency and influenced the formative decades of the cold war. Hersh (The Mellon Family, 1978, etc.) has performed a prodigious job of research, conducting more than 100 interviews and burrowing through mounds of archives and declassified documents. His narrative runs from the 1919 Versailles conference, where the young Dulles brothers observed uncle Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state, to the Bay of Pigs operation and the frustrating retirement years of its principals. Six men occupy the foreground here: sanctimonious John Foster Dulles and his hedonistic younger brother Allen, who before their heyday as Eisenhower cold warriors were well-heeled corporate lawyers who ran interference for German firms instrumental in the Nazis' prewar rearmament; legendary OSS chief ``Wild Bill'' Donovan; Frank Wisner, ultimately CIA operations chief; New Deal diplomat William C. Bullitt; and Carmel Offie, the dandyish assistant to Bullitt and Wisner and a master of diplomatic sleight-of-hand. Hersh hopes to show how these latter-day Wilsonian ``global salvationists,'' aching to roll back the Communist menace, forged an intelligence apparatus intoxicated with the black arts of covert activities- -loosely supervised, often amateurish, sometimes harebrained. He sheds light on the frantic wartime operations of Allen Dulles and Wisner in Europe, as well as on how much the Americans benefited from the bulging Soviet files of ex-Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen. Yet time and again, Hersh projects his insouciance until it begins to grate (e.g., George Kennan was a ``brilliant, mavericky, neurasthenic cheese-parer''). Dulles & Co. deserve a more straightforward treatment than this arch account that bites off more than it can chew. (Eight-page b&w photo insert--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tree Farm Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0971066019
• ISBN 13: 9780971066014
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 474