A muckraking adventure in the violation of First Amendment rights.
Although it probably won't come as a surprise to most readers that
the federal government is capable of spying on its citizens,
Mackenzie professes a certain bewilderment at the lengths to which
the CIA went to suppress dissent in the days of Vietnam. The
veteran left-wing journalist, who died of brain cancer in 1994,
began his career as the publisher of an antiwar rag called the
People's Dreadnaught; harassed by campus police, he was forced to
suspend publication, although he later won $2,500 in a lawsuit
against Beloit College over the matter. At a national level, he
writes, similar suppression was the order of the day. Although the
CIA is constrained by law from conducting investigations "inside
the continental limits of the United States and its possessions,"
in fact, Mackenzie charges, it concocted an elaborate
counterintelligence program against various home-grown protest
groups in the 19605 and early '705, reasoning that it was taking
antiterrorist measures and thus living up to the spirit, if not the
letter, of its charter. Among the targets, Mackenzie writes, was
Ramparts, a venerable leftist magazine that managed to earn the
wrath of the Feds by reporting on that very internal spying. Other
targets were the libertarian gum Karl Hess, renegade CIA
whistleblowers Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, and a host of
lesser-known dissidents. The CIA emerges as the heavy, naturally,
but the real villains in Mackenzie's account are various
policymakers from the Johnson administration to the present.
"Incrementally over the years they expanded a policy of censorship
to the point that today it pervades every agency and every
department of the federal government," he writes. And, he
continues, that change was so gradual that few guardians of the
First Amendment noticed. Mackenzie is occasionally over the top,
sometimes glib. But his charges ring true, and civil-liberties
advocates will find much of interest in his pages. (Kirkus Reviews)
"If anything is more corrupting than power, it is power exercised
in secret. Angus Mackenzie's magnificently researched, lucidly
written study of the CIA's outrageous threats to freedom in America
over the years is a summons to vigilance to protect our democratic
institutions."--Daniel Schorr
"The late Angus Mackenzie has left an appropriate legacy in
Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, a fitting capstone to his long
career of exposing government secrecy and manipulation of public
information. Secrets is a detailed, fascinating and chilling
account of the agency's program of disinformation and concealment
of public information against its own citizens."--Ben H. Bagdikian,
author of "The Media Monopoly
"Scrupulously reported, fleshed out with a fascinating cast of
characters, skillfully illuminating a subject the news media seldom
looked into and never got straight, Angus Mackenzie's last and best
work richly deserves a posthumous Pulitzer--for nonfiction,
history, or both."--Jon Swan, former senior editor, "Columbia
Journalism Review
"This courageous, uncompromising book belongs on the bookshelf
of every serious student of journalism and the First
Amendment."--Tom Goldstein, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism,
Columbia University
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