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WORK TITLE: A Matter of Honor
WORK NOTES: with husband, Anthony Summers
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.robbynswan.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY: American
married to ANTHONY SUMMERS, also author of Sinatra: The Life * http://www.robbynswan.com/about.html * https://anthonysummersandrobbynswan.wordpress.com/about/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; husband’s name Anthony Summers; children: three.
EDUCATION:Smith College, B.A.; postgraduate work in Russian and East European Studies.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Easy Living, Woman’s Day, Irish Times, Irish Sunday Independent, Life, London Independent, European and National Journal, Daily Mail, Miami Herald, Talk, and the Telegraph.
SIDELIGHTS
Robbyn Swan is an award-winning nonfiction writer and journalist who has worked on some of the world’s biggest crime stories. She has penned accounts of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the excesses of FBI Director Herbert Hoover, the Watergate scandal, and Frank Sinatra’s links to Lucky Luciano. Swan has also written about Richard Nixon, the Washington madam, and more recently, women soldiers in the War on Terror and prisoner abuse at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Swan often writes in collaboration with her husband, Anthony Summers. Her writings have appeared in various publications including Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Woman’s Day, the London Independent, the Daily Mail, and the Irish Times. Swan has also served as a consultant on documentaries for PBS, A&E, the History Channel, CNN, and the BBC. She graduated from Smith College and did postgraduate work in Russian and East European Studies.
Swan and Summers partnered to write The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, which was released in 2000 and made the New York Times best-seller list. Drawing upon over a thousand interviews, the authors propose that the former president’s criminal behavior did not begin with Watergate. They train a critical eye on Nixon’s paranoia and reliance of alcohol and prescription drugs, as well as his abuse of his wife and his ties to various shady figures, including wealthy California businessmen, presidential pal Bebe Rebozo, crime boss Meyer Lansky, and eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes. The authors trace Nixon’s role in plots against Fidel Castro and Chilean political leader Salvador Allende and detail his sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks in 1968, his ties to the Mafia, and the illegal contributions made to his two presidential campaigns.
Writing in Library Journal, Karl Helicher found the volume to be an unrelentingly negative portrayal of Nixon that “is bogged down by an overabundance of detail” and has a “he said, she said” quality overall. New Statesman reviewer Godfrey Hodgson observed: “Summers energetically marshals evidence that Nixon was not only financially dishonest and politically unscrupulous, but psychologically unstable.” While acknowledging the “impressive research” that went into the volume, a Publishers Weekly contributor offered a somewhat different perspective, suggesting that the authors “[construe] as nefarious schemes what others might call normal politics.”
In 2005, Swan and Summers published Sinatra: The Life. The book presents new material about the singer’s life, including his connections with the Mafia, love life, and tangled relationships with U.S. presidents. Through interviews with Sinatra’s lovers, the authors discuss how Sinatra’s connection to the Mafia started in a remote Sicilian village. They also look at Sinatra’s tempestuous marriage to Gardner, and they discuss Sinatra’s passions and interests and how his life influenced his music.
Calling attention to the book’s length and thousands of references, a reviewer for the Economist commented: “You never for a minute get a feel for the man, or, most important, his music. Even when the authors discuss his career . . . there is always an agenda; the book’s stated purpose is to uncover the truth about Sinatra’s politics, his womanising, his violence and, most of all, his ties to the mob.” The Economist reviewer also felt that the account suffers from “a snide, evem self-satisfied” tone, especially when discussing Sinatra’s ties to organized crime. Atlantic correspondent Benjamin Schwarz found the book largely void of insight and hardly more than a tattered version of Kitty Kelly’s sensational 1986 scandal-ridden tome, His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra. Schwarz added: “Although Summers and Swan have laid some important groundwork for the considered and sprawling biography their subject merits, this slackly written, cobbled-together book is third-rate Vanity Fair fodder.”
Swan and Summers partnered again to write The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11, which was released in 2011 a decade after the terrorist attack on the United States. The account chronicles the events surrounding September 11, 2001, from the attack on the World Trade Center, to the actions of the first responders, the federal government’s flawed response, the report of the 9/11 Commission, and the clues that point to foreign involvement. Basing their observations on official documents, transcripts, and interviews, the authors describe the vulnerability of the World Trade Center after the first bombing in 1993, the now-famous intelligence briefing received a month before the attack saying “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” the absconding of secret documents by former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and the many signs and warnings that something was about to happen, most of which were ignored. In a review in Spectator, Philip Hensher said that the authors “have written a very decent and inquisitive account of 9/11 which draws attention to real gaps in the official account.”
On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 2016, Swan and Summers published A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice. In their account, the authors chronicle the scapegoating of Admiral Husband S. Kimmel after the December 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, which brought the United States in World War II. As commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Kimmel was relieved of his command, accused of dereliction of duty, and publicly disgraced. In subsequent investigations, Kimmel defended his actions, and later his two sons, both Navy veterans, strove to clear his name. After their deaths, Kimmel’s grandsons have carried on the struggle.
Swan and Summers trace the evidence which pointed to duplicity and betrayal in Washington. To hide U.S. intelligence secrets, the government covered up the actual fault, which pointed to high military and political officials who had failed to provide Kimmel with information about Japanese aggression. Kimmel knew very little of the intelligence Washington was getting about weaponry and espionage. According to Richard B. Frank in History Net, “A Matter of Honor is persuasive that Kimmel suffered gross injustice in multiple ways, but the authors’ analysis falters on one critical point,” which was that Washington had warned naval command in Hawaii about the possibility of Japanese attack, though those warnings had specified locations other than Pearl Harbor. According to Frank, “the destroyer USS Ward reported that it had sunk a submarine (undoubtedly Japanese) about an hour before the Japanese air armada arrived,” but Kimmel appeared to have given that report little credence. Frank identifies the true failure as the lack of an effective air information center that could have analyzed reports and transmitted messages to muster defenses, as well as the lack of proper attention that Washington officials and U.S. naval commanders alike paid to reports of Japanese belligerence.
In Booklist, Gilbert Taylor reported that Swan and Summers claim that “the preponderance of responsibility for the Pacific Fleet’s vulnerability to surprise air assault lay with Washington officials.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “The authors find enough blame, high and low, to go around” and termed the book “a solid demonstration of how an insistence on secrecy proved to be a fatal breakdown as the Japanese attack loomed.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer summed up A Matter of Honor as a “sad story [that] reads like a thriller, thanks to the authors’ evocative prose and careful use of detail.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, July-August 2005, Benjamin Schwarz, review of Sinatra: The Life, p. 125.
Booklist, October 15, 2016, Gilbert Taylor, review of A Matter of Honor: Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice, p. 15.
Economist, July 16, 2005, review of Sinatra.
History Net, March-April 2017, Richard B. Frank, review of A Matter of Honor, p. 69.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of A Matter of Honor.
Library Journal, November 1, 2000, Karl Helicher, review of The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, p. 92.
New Statesman, October 9, 2000, Godfrey Hodgson, review of The Arrogance of Power, p. 56.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2000, review of The Arrogance of Power, p. 72; September 26, 2016, review of A Matter of Honor, p. 81.
Spectator, September 3, 2011, Philip Hensher, review of The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11, p. 34
ONLINE
Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan Blog, https://anthonysummersandrobbynswan.wordpress.com/ (July 24, 2017).
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com (May 31, 2005), Nathan Rabin, review of Sinatra.
Crime Writers Association Website, https://thecwa.co.uk (July 24, 2017), short profile.
London Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (August 25, 2011), Toby Harnden, review of The Eleventh Day.
National Post Online, http://nationalpost.com/ (September 9, 2011), Tod Hoffman, review of The Eleventh Day.
Ordinary Times, http://ordinary-gentlemen.com (November 2, 2016), review of A Matter of Honor.
Robbyn Swan Website, http://www.robbynswan.com (July 24, 2017).
Robbyn Swan has co-authored five ground-breaking non-fiction books. Her 2014 book, Looking for Madeleine told the heartbreaking story of the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann. The Eleventh Day, on the September 11 attacks, was published in 2011. The Arrogance of Power, a biography of former President Richard Nixon, appeared in 2000. Sinatra :The Life was published in May 2005 by New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
Ms. Swan is a graduate of Smith College and did post-graduate work in Russian and East European Studies. She previously worked as researcher for authors John le Carré, William McPherson and Anthony Summers. Ms. Swan contributes to Vanity Fair, and numerous other periodicals - among them Marie Claire, Easy Living, Woman’s Day, The Irish Times, and The Sunday Independent [Ireland]. Her work has also appeared in Life, the London Independent, The European and The National Journal.
Home About Robbyn What critics say Recent work Contact
Robbyn
Swan
Award winning non-fiction author and journalist
Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for History
About Robbyn Swan
"Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting"
William Randolph Hearst
Robbyn Swan with her husdband Anthony Summers
Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan at their home in Ireland
home about robbyn what critics say recent work contact
Swan has been a consultant on documentaries for PBS, A&E, The History Channel, CNN, and the BBC.
Swan is married to author Anthony Summers. They live in Ireland, on the bank of the River Blackwater, and have three children.
Prior to her marriage Swan spent five years running a shelter in Washington, D.C. - living with mentally ill homeless women as part of a unique project to create housing for the long-term homeless population.
Swan’s latest book, A MATTER OF HONOR, Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame & a Family's Quest for Justice, tells the story of Pearl Harbor scapegoat Admiral Husband Kimmel. A Matter of Honor is a heartbreaking human story of politics and war – and epic history. » details
Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan
Anthony Summers, the author of seven best-selling non-fiction books, is a former senior journalist with BBC television. His speciality was coverage of the United States, the Middle East, and the Vietnam War. He smuggled cameras into the Soviet Union to obtain the only interview with Andrei Sakharov when he won the Nobel Prize. He contributes articles to Vanity Fair as does his wife and co-author, the American journalist and author Robbyn Swan.
Together Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan have written:
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden
Sinatra: The Life
The Arrogance of Power [a biography of president Richard Nixon]
Official & Confidential [a life of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover]
Mr. Summers is also the author of:
Goddess [a biography of Marilyn Monroe]
Honeytrap [with Stephen Dorril, on Britain’s Profumo spy scandal]
Not in Your Lifetime [an investigation of the assassination of president John F Kennedy]
The File on the Tsar [on the fate of the Romanovs, Russia’s imperial family]
Robbyn Swan has worked some of the world’s biggest crime stories – from the Mafia, to the Hiss spy case, to the assassination of JFK. She’s delivered scoops on the excesses of FBI Director Hoover, Frank Sinatra’s links to Lucky Luciano, and Watergate. The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden, written with husband and co-author Anthony Summers, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the CWA Gold Dagger. Looking for Madeleine, Swan’s account of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, made worldwide headlines. Her latest book, A Matter of Honor [2016] unravels the mysteries of Pearl Harbor.
Robbyn Swan takes pride in having worked some of the biggest stories of this century and the last - from the rise of the American Mafia, to the Hiss spy case, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. She's delivered scoops on FBI Director Hoover's sexuality, Richard Nixon's White House pill-popping, and Frank Sinatra's links to Lucky Luciano.
Her research has added significant elements to what we now know about the Kennedy family’s dalliance with organized crime to turn the 1960 election and Richard Nixon's cynical manipulation of the 1968 Vietnam peace talks to win that year's presidential race.
She tracked down and interviewed the Washington madam alleged to have been at the secret - sexual - core of the Watergate scandal, and plumbed the role of women soldiers in the prisoner abuse scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Swan's 2011 book, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. The book won the prestigious Gold Dagger for non-fiction on the subject of crime.
Swan is the author of two other bestselling books:
Sinatra:The Life (2005) and
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000).
She has written feature stories for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair, Talk, Marie Claire, The Irish Times, The Telegraph, Woman's Day, The Daily Mail, and the Miami Herald.
Quest for redemption
Richard B. Frank
31.6 (March-April 2017): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/
A MATTER OF HONOR
Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame, and a Family's Quest for Justice
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
896 pp. HarperCollins,
2016. $35.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A MATTER OF HONOR IS a passionately and thoughtfully developed defense of Admiral Husband S. Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Although other officers were technically responsible for fleet defense in port, blame from Washington cascaded overwhelmingly on Kimmel due to the devastating loss of Pacific Fleet ships and men. Within days of the attack, the U.S. Navy relieved Kimmel, reduced him in rank, and made him a scapegoat.
Building on decades of work by Kimmel and his descendants, this book itemizes numerous instances, some egregious, where Washington failed to forward important information to Kimmel. This was despite the solemn pledge by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark that Kimmel would receive all relevant information. The authors emphasize previously known decrypted Japanese messages to illuminate the failure of U.S.-Japan negotiations in 1941, special Japanese interest in Pearl Harbor, and last-minute cables containing signals that war was likely to erupt the morning of December 7--though not where. But the authors also adduce new evidence that Washington failed to forward a report revealing that British planes in November 1940 had successfully employed aerial torpedoes in shallow water like that of Pearl Harbor--a feat previously regarded as technically impossible. It is not so clear, however, that Kimmel necessarily would have taken note of the reported torpedo launch points or the chart's depth notations.
A Matter of Honor is persuasive that Kimmel suffered gross injustice in multiple ways, but the authors' analysis falters on one critical point. Washington had sent "war warnings" to Hawaii, though these specified other locations as likely Japanese targets. The destroyer USS Ward reported that it had sunk a submarine (undoubtedly Japanese) about an hour before the Japanese air armada arrived. Kimmel's headquarters squandered this tactical warning. The authors further reduce the problem of detection of the incoming Japanese aerial onslaught to issues involving radar sets. The real failure, however, was not the want of radar warnings, but the absence of an effective air information center that could properly analyze the messages and muster defenses before the attack arrived. Even after assigning the very damning responsibility due officials in Washington, the failures of the local Hawaiian commanders, including Kimmel, to react to these tactical warnings cannot be wholly exonerated under the stern U.S. code of command responsibility. Thus, scapegoating was inexcusable; accountability was not.--Richard B. Frank is a historian of the Asia-Pacific War and a member of the Board of Presidential Counselors of The National World War II Museum.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Frank, Richard B. "Quest for redemption." World War II, Mar.-Apr. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479548150&it=r&asid=74e7b1185b51c98aef87e8922ca8e554. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479548150
Pearl Harbor: 75 years later
Gilbert Taylor
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
As we approach the 75th anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor L on December 7, 1941, two books reach opposite conclusions about why the U.S. was unprepared.
Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack. By Steve Twomey. Nov. 2016.416p. Simon & Schuster, $30 (9781476776460). 940.54. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Pulitzer Prize winner Twomey offers a thoroughly researched and freshly dynamic narrative covering the activities of key officers, diplomats, and politicians in the immediate prelude to the surprise Japanese air strike on Pearl Harbor. At the center of Twomey's telling of the story are the American commanders in Hawaii on whom officialdom pinned responsibility for the disaster, General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel. A summary of their careers sets up Twomey's depictions of their reactions to information received from Washington about Japanese strategic intentions during the diplomatic crisis of 1941. Highlighting a central controversy about Pearl Harbor, the intelligence that army chief George Marshall and navy chief Harold Stark did and did not supply to Short and Kimmel, Twomey nevertheless adheres to conventional conclusions that the latter pair were negligent in not preparing to meet an attack. Touching on communication miscues and American complacency about Japanese naval capability, Twomey ably captures the tragic element in the Pearl Harbor saga.--Gilbert Taylor
A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor; Betrayal, Blame, and a Family's Quest for Justice. By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. Nov. 2016.494p. illus. Harper, $35 (9780062405517). 940.54. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Over the course of the 75 years since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, government investigators and historians have sought fault for the debacle. The first official inquiry, in early 1942, pilloried the army and navy commanders in Hawaii, and no others, for dereliction of duty. Conducting their own research, Summers {The Eleventh Day, 2011) and journalist Swan consider the validity of the accusations against the admiral involved, Husband Kimmel. Their route to the truth goes through the intelligence on Japanese intentions and capabilities that Kimmel received. They show incontrovertibly that Kimmel was privy to very little of the secret information available to Washington, including important facts about weaponry and what Japanese diplomatic and espionage messages revealed after their codes were broken. Analyzing how the decryptions were handled, Summers and Swan imply that the preponderance of responsibility for the Pacific Fleet's vulnerability to surprise air assault lay with Washington officials. Kimmel himself believed that, and his efforts to reverse the original verdict of his culpability, now continued by his descendants, conclude a levelheaded and persuasive presentation of the Pearl Harbor affair.--Gilbert Taylor
YA RECOMMENDATIONS
* Young adult recommendations for adult, audio, and reference titles reviewed in this issue have been contributed by the Booklist staff and by reviewers Poornima Apte, Michael Cart, Laura Chanoux, Joan Curbow, Kristine Huntley, Eloise Kinney, and Mary Ellen Quinn.
* Adult titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curriculum value; YA/S, for books that will appeal most to teens with a special interest in a specific subject; and YA/M, for books best suited to mature teens.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taylor, Gilbert. "Pearl Harbor: 75 years later." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 15. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771218&it=r&asid=d1d79d339c2ebc82ef55b6992e2f8017. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771218
Remember, remember the seventh December
263.39 (Sept. 26, 2016): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor 75 years ago; two new books explore what happened and who was responsible.
A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor; Betrayal, Blame, and a Family's Quest for Justice
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. Harper, $35 (464p) ISBN 9780-06-240551-7
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The married investigative team of Summers and Swann (The Eleventh Day) make an airtight case that Adm. Husband Kimmel, "the man with overall responsibility for America's Pacific fleet" at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, should not have been blamed for the catastrophe. Through the extensive use of primary sources, including some previously unavailable materials from the National Archives, the authors delineate who in the U.S. government and military knew about Japan's intentions in 1941. Tragically, there were dots that American intelligence did not properly connect that would have informed Kimmel of what was to come. But even had he gotten such an alert, the limited resources available to him--despite frequent requests, he lacked tools of defense such as a radar warning net--would have been insufficient. In the wake of the disaster, Kimmel was scapegoated and slandered without basis by people as eminent as then-senator Harry Truman. Eventually, a naval commission of inquiry found that Kimmel had not been derelict, but that exoneration came too late for his reputation. Even today, his grandchildren are fighting to have his rank posthumously restored to four-star admiral. This sad story reads like a thriller, thanks to the authors' evocative prose and careful use of detail. (Dec.)
Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack
Steve Twomey. Simon & Schuster, $30 (384p) ISBN 978-1-4767-7646-0
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Pulitzer-winning journalist Twomey teases readers with his subtitle before delivering a fine account of the players and events in the years leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Twomey churns up plenty of minor characters and little-known incidents over the course of 16 unchronological chapters, but he emphasizes the major figures on both sides, including such star-crossed commanders in Hawaii as Adm. Husband Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short; their superiors in Washington, Adm. Harold Stark, Gen. George C. Marshall, and Pres. Roosevelt; and Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto and ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura. These are lively, astute portraits that rock no boats. No longer considered scapegoats, Kimmel and Short come across as intelligent commanders, aware that war was imminent--if only because of repeated warnings from Washington--but hampered by the widespread feeling that a Japanese attack would be suicidal and stupid. Twomey's admiring portrait of Adm. Yamamoto is outdated: plenty of colleagues shared his reluctance to provoke the U.S., attacking Pearl Harbor did turn out to be foolhardy, and Yamamoto's subsequent career was unimpressive. The story of Pearl Harbor has been done to death, but Twomey's vivid work rates high nonetheless. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Remember, remember the seventh December." Publishers Weekly, 26 Sept. 2016, p. 81. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465558257&it=r&asid=86dd5e4f978107a7fe1b0bfae1b7a071. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465558257
Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: A MATTER OF HONOR
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan A MATTER OF HONOR Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) 35.00 11, 29 ISBN: 978-0-06-240551-7
This evenhanded expose of the scapegoating of the commander in chief of the Pacific fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor challenges official memory.Adm. Husband Kimmel was roundly blamed for the destruction of the fleet at Pearl Harbor and loss of 2,403 lives on that terrible day of Dec. 7, 1941, but as co-authors Summers and Swan (The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11, 2011, etc.) show, he was conveniently used to hiding many missteps by his Washington, D.C., superiors. Both Kimmel and the Army’s Hawaiian commander, Lt. Gen. Walter Short, were forced into retirement after the debacle. The subsequent official fact-finding commission (the first of nine), the Roberts Report, blamed them for “dereliction of duty,” and they were charged with having failed to “confer and cooperate” with warnings by Washington leading up to the surprise Japanese attack. Kimmel dedicated the rest of his life to challenging these charges and vindicating his name. The truth, as close as the authors can ascertain, is that the intercepts cracking a Japanese supercode were not adequately shared with Kimmel, although Washington officials assumed that they had been. The key middleman in this failure to pass on valuable intelligence information was Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark, who was ostensibly Kimmel’s longtime friend yet withheld critical information from him—e.g., the telltale Japanese dispatch of Sept. 24, which requested that Pearl Harbor be divided into special zones for the location of specific kinds of ships. Moreover, Kimmel was out of the loop in knowing about the deterioration of diplomatic negotiations between Japanese representatives and Washington in the final weeks leading to the attack, while the traffic analysts guessed that Japanese heavy carriers (which no one could locate) must be in home waters. In the end, the authors find enough blame, high and low, to go around. A solid demonstration of how an insistence on secrecy proved to be a fatal breakdown as the Japanese attack loomed. A good complement to Steve Twomey’s Countdown to Pearl Harbor (2016).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan: A MATTER OF HONOR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216037&it=r&asid=ecb9a2ac501c056c0101dcaca53ac80e. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216037
A quartet of histories that will live on Pearl Harbor, 75 years later
141.15 (Sept. 15, 2016): p98.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Harding, Stephen. Dawn of Infamy: A Sunken Ship, a Vanished Crew, and the Final Mystery of Pearl Harbor. Da Capo. Nov. 2016. 224p. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780306825033. $24.99. HIST
Japan's declaration of war, the attack on Pearl Harbor, started just before eight o'clock in the morning (Hawaii-Aleutian Time) on December 7, 1941. With this latest work, Harding (The Castaway's War) investigates whether a Japanese submarine may have fired some of the first shots of the day, between Seattle and Honolulu. The book, originally published in the UK as Voyage to Oblivion, traces the history of the freighter SS Cynthia Olson from her origin as a military cargo ship built too late to be used in World War I up to her final voyage carrying lumber for the U.S. Army. Harding's thorough research reconstructs the Cynthia Olson's last days through military records and personal narratives of the crew of the I-26, the Japanese submarine that sunk the ship. While the story of the Cynthia Olson often appears as a side note in other histories about Pearl Harbor, this harrowing account brings it to the fore, telling how a Japanese submarine was able to sail close to the U.S. mainland and sink an unarmed ship in the hours before America entered World War II. VERDICT Harding's detailed history of the Cynthia Olson and her connection to Pearl Harbor will appeal to nautical and military historians alike--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
* Nelson, Craig. Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness. Scribner. Sept. 2016. 544p. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781451660494. $32; ebk. ISBN 9781451660517. HIST
Nelson (Rocket Men) combines first-person accounts with evidence from more than 60 volumes of federal reports to tell the story of the attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor from the point of view of both American and Japanese forces. Based on over five years of research by Nelson, this exhaustive account weaves time lines from Tokyo, Washington, DC, and the Hawaiian island of Oahu to present as close to a complete history as possible of the events leading up to the December 1941 bombing. Roughly half of the book focuses on the planning, diplomacy, spying, and miscommunications that happened in the months and days leading up to the attack. While Nelson doesn't demonize Japanese actions, he does present the savagery of war, including the Japanese aggression in China, in graphic detail. Later chapters outline the response from the U.S. military, including a small-scale raid on Tokyo in April 1942, and the overall effects of World War II on the American psyche. VERDICT This comprehensive account doesn't shy away from the horrors of war, successfully providing an even-handed chronicle of the events that led up to Pearl Harbor. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Summers, Anthony & Robbyn Swan. A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor; Betrayal, Blame, and a Family's Quest for Justice. Harper. Nov. 2016. 544p. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780062405517. $35; ebk. ISBN 9780062405531. HIST
On December 7, 1941, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel commanded the Pacific Fleet. He stood in his office and watched the attack on Pearl Harbor destroy battleships, planes, and buildings--and the lives of more than 2,400 military personnel. When a spent bullet bounced off his chest, he muttered, "Too bad it didn't kill me." Within hours, the race to find someone to blame for the catastrophe was in effect. Kimmel became the subject of several Congressional inquiries and was demoted in disgrace. At the time, he insisted that he'd been denied crucial information and was being scapegoated by the U.S. Navy. He, his sons, and grandsons worked for years to clear the admiral's name, eventually gaining some measure of success but failing to have his rank restored. Pulitzer Prize finalists Summers and Swan (coauthors, The Eleventh Day) attempt to make sense of the decades-long saga of missed messages, faulty memories, long-classified documents, and official inertia--with some success. VERDICT Casting light on a controversial episode in history, this difficult yet important human interest story is likely to be of interest to large World War II collections. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16.]--Edwin Burgess, Kansas City, KS
Twomey, Steve. Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack. S & S. Nov. 2016. 384p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781476776460. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781476776507. HIST
Smoke could be seen coming out of the Japanese embassy in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1941, as employees followed the latest instructions from Tokyo to burn their codes, ciphers, and any confidential documents. The same scene was playing out in Japanese consulates in Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, and London. The smoke was one of several indicators of an imminent attack by the Japanese, but American military leaders assumed the Japanese were planning to attack the Asian continent. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Twomey charts the decisions and actions of U.S. government officials and military leaders in a chronological retelling of the 12 days leading up to the early morning attack in Hawaii. VERDICT Twomey's highly recommended exploration of the miscommunications and racist assumptions of the U.S. military sheds light on the missteps of military leadership and provides much-needed context for why the American fleet was unprepared for Japan's devastating raid. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16.]--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A quartet of histories that will live on Pearl Harbor, 75 years later." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 98. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463632566&it=r&asid=296a9970d7f2230f306d7362187d72b4. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463632566
The master's voice; Frank Sinatra
376.8435 (July 16, 2005): p82(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
IN 1966, Gay Talese, an American writer, produced "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", probably the best piece about the singer ever written. In fewer than 15,000 words Mr Talese managed to capture the man, the music, the life, the actor, the style, not to mention the booze, broads, brawls, the spills and, as the man himself might have said, the thrillsville of it all.
Now, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have produced a brick--with almost 200 pages of acknowledgments, references and sources, as if the accretion of detail would add up to at least as much as the man, maybe more. It does not. It adds up to far, far less. This is Kitty Kelley heavy.
In "Sinatra: The Life", you never for a minute get a feel for the man, or, most important, his music. Even when the authors discuss his career, the singing and the acting that made him the greatest performer of the 20th century, there is always an agenda; the book's stated purpose is to uncover the truth about Sinatra's politics, his womanising, his violence and, most of all, his ties to the mob. There is some interesting history, especially about Sinatra's Sicilian roots. But whenever the authors reveal the fruits of obsessive investigation, especially where it concerns the Mafia, the tone is snide, even self-satisfied. (Told you so!)
The examination of Sinatra's left-wing politics promises revelations about a little known part of the singer's life. But in talking, say, about "The House I Live In", a liberal anti-racism anthem recorded in the 1940s, the authors are only too eager to say that some people turned it into a jingoistic anthem. They offer no context, nor do they make the obvious comparison with the attempt by the American right to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA".
Never the most elegant writers, Mr Summers and Ms Swan do not understand the potency of style which was so important a part of the Sinatra genius. (For a great book on the subject, try "The Way You Wear Your Hat" by Bill Zehme.) He liked sharp tailoring and monogrammed shirts, the authors say of Sinatra; they could be speaking about many men in 1942, or 2005 for that matter. No detail, no context.
The objective of "Sinatra: The Life", to uncover so-called shocking facts, especially about the Mafia, is certainly met. But a single line on the blurb is a giveaway: "Sinatra was much more than his music." The truth, though, is that without the music, Sinatra is meaningless. It may be that the huge life gave it context, excitement, intrigue, but it is the music--and only the music--that made it matter. You just keep thinking: did Lucky Luciano, or any other hood, give Sinatra the voice, the musical taste, the genius for phrasing that turned a three-minute pop song into a story of love, loss, weariness, joy?
In other words, if Mozart did it under the table with girls at court, does it matter? Curiously, the epigraph the authors have chosen for "Sinatra: The Life", puts it rather better than the weighty tome--"Right from the beginning, he was there with the truth of things in his voice"--Bob Dylan.
Sinatra: The Life.
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The master's voice; Frank Sinatra." The Economist, 16 July 2005, p. 82(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA134087470&it=r&asid=2baf08504d6838f8b0e3bb6788538d0d. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A134087470
Golden lads and girls
Frederic Raphael
298.9234 (July 30, 2005): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
In the first century BC, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon's mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe--and, more recently, in the Mr Governor of California--contests. He had only to flex himself for the rest of the field to wilt.
Fantastic is the lid-off Arnie of Thal, an Austrian village in which his father, once of the Nazi party, was postwar police chief. Laurence Learner's low-down becomes a pedestal on which Arnie's occasionally lovable hunkishness is jacked up even higher. How high can he go? Although the Constitution of the United States expressly requires a presidential candidate to be born on US soil, what's an iron rule when the Terminator gets his hands on it?
In the present climate of American justice (in which, as Gary Indiana says, the Supreme Court can decree George W. Bush 'elected' president, because it saves wasting time on recounting votes in Florida, but with the rider that their "verdict' should not be taken as a precedent because it's a phoney), why shouldn't an inarticulate, inanely ambitious lout not imagine that he can muscle his way to the White House?
D.H. Lawrence, despite his faible for manly men, once wrote a poem 'The Gods, the Gods' about a time when 'all was dreary, great robot limbs, robot breasts/robot voices'. Arnie, thou art the deity. Why should the pap-fed audience not believe--key word in the modern soundbite, pseudo-evangelical pol-speak--Our Hero to be as fantastic as he finds his own steroid-assisted ascent? Has he abused women? They love it really. Is he an admirer of the late-lamented Adolf's rhetorical skills? Relax: our guy wants to be a paranoid psycho for good causes. Is there any point in repeating about Arnie what Karl Kraus said about Hitler: when I think about him I find I'm thinking about nothing? Hey, listen, Adolf killed real people, and Arnie only slaughters extras and computer-generated grockles. Plus, Arnie has contributed generously to the Simon Wiesenthal institute and--let's hear it for him--he has a lot of Jewish friends. Heil, Arnie! Why not?
As an antidote, try the only slim volume in this bunch. Gary Indiana's Schwarzenegger Syndrome is a polemic in which a little guy whom Arnie would call a girlie-man dishes all the necessary scheisse on the Terminator, his crap movies and all the meatheads who think Arnie really is an action hero. Indiana vents his spleen with a plethora of anal imagery and accurate scorn, but when he comes to cite his list of heroes of our time they include the 'noble' (sic) Eric Hobsbawm, your very own Companion of Honour, who still thinks that the Soviet Union was a 'worthwhile experiment'. OK, so Arnie's dad was in the SA and his kid uses his own private Austrian army tank as a runabout: he didn't run the Gulag, did he? I'd sooner shake Arnie's hand than Hobsbawm's.
Next up for Hero of Our Time, Sinatra, Francis Albert, the Chairman of the Board, ole blue eyes, the greatest performer in pop history, with a voice that, like an old flamenco singer's, grew more moving as it lost its cords. Anthony Summers and his wife Robbyn Swan add candour to the usual candy in the comfortable knowledge that, Sinatra gone, two guys from Sicily won't come calling to sew up their loud mouths.
Sinatra's fascination with tough guys can be traced back to the native village of one side of his family, which pretty well shared a cradle with Lucky Luciano, a fellow never at a loss when it came to chipping his way out of a concrete bunker. Sinatra perjured himself to avoid obviously valid charges of consorting with mafiosi (whose bagman he sometimes was), but that was because people were out to get him if he didn't.
Like Macbeth, Frank was from his mother's womb untimely (and not very skilfully) ripped, and he bore the scars for ever. The little guy had a golden voice, but his career needed a little help from his friends, and got it. When he smiled, the girls swooned; and when he saw red, smart traffic stopped in its tracks. If Frank had been given (or built) a body like Arnie's and kept the same temper, he probably would have been riddled with bullets before he came of age or swung a mike.
Sinatra did things his way, and it was often despicable, but he made tawdry lyrics into poems and self-pity a kind of manliness. He was Nicophon in a small size, except--so myth insists--for his sexual equipment. Summers and Swan, although diligent collectors of dirt, don't quote one of Frank's mistresses (friend of a friend of ours) who, asked what he was like in bed, replied, 'Frank? Strictly push and squirt.' With others, he may have been the great lover, but Ava Gardner was a greater leaver and he never got over it, poor little sonofabitch.
No doubt, the career was mob-assisted, but then so, thanks somewhat to Francis Albert, was Jack Kennedy's. Joe Kennedy was the Irish Luciano, but Frank had from-way-back connections with the mob in Chicago. The presidency won, Jack and Bobby thought it prudent to lose the Italian connection: Frank was the gopher who had to go. Jack was Hal to Frank's skinny Falstaff-cure-fall-guy. A genuine Roosevelt democrat (his mother was a ward boss in Hoboken), Sinatra switched to the Republicans and sang along with Ronnie Reagan and the older Bush.
The ladies in Hollywood are seldom on top, and then briefly. Jane Fonda stayed there longer than most, due partly to her father Henry's renown (lineage counts, even when the crowns are tinsel). He gave her a bankable name, but small affection. Her often absentee mother, once a beauty, grew neurotic and sick and killed herself when Jane was 11. Her father was otherwise involved 'romantically', and acting in Mr Roberts, in which I saw him give a cool performance on Broadway in 1949.
Without ghostly help, Jane makes a seemingly honest attempt to spell out all her lives, attitudes and follies. From the charming Roger Vadim (who introduced her to threesomes and stole her money), through left-wing Tom Hayden (egalitarian enough to screw their baby's nurse), to the darn-tootin', right-wing vanity of Ted Turner (who kept his money where he could see it, in 20 different 'homes'), she has played in just about every sexual position (some of them on camera) into which a plain Jane--as she sees herself, or says she does--could hope or fear to twist herself.
It all comes down, pretty well, to a girl whose heart belonged to daddy and whose daddy has a heart of stone. Even Katie Hepburn, a tough old fighter, got bruised when, late in the day, she tried to get cosy with Hank while they were all making On Golden Pond, which won Katie and Fonda pere valedictory Oscars, and made a bunch of change for producer Jane.
She makes a good case for her once-scandalous visit to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam war, though she concedes that it was bad PR to be photographed in the hot seat of an anti-aircraft gun when, supposedly, a US raid was in progress. She just needed to sit down was the truth. It says here.
Goldie Hawn, by contrast, is a hundred and one pounds of honest-to-God fun. Her dad was a cornered loner and her morn a loud-mouthed embarrassment (but you have to love her for yelling 'Bored!' as an exit line at a celebrity audience). A rag-doll promoted to stardom, Goldala danced her way damn near to the top, and tells her story in cute detail and, OK, with heart-warming modesty, until--just when she needs it--she finds true love with Kurt Russell (a Mr Nice Guy just her size). Music up, and out!
Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger by Laurence Leamer (Sidgwick & Jackson, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 421, ISBN 0283070242)
Schwarzenegger Syndrome by Gary Indiana (The New Press, 19.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 140, ISBN 1565841515)
Sinatra: The Life by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (Doubleday, 20, pp. 576, ISBN 0385609248)
My Life So Far by Jane Fonda (Ebury Press, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 599, ISBN 0091906105)
A Lotus Grows in the Mud by Goldie Hawn with Wendy Holden (Bantam Press, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 446, ISBN 0593053575)
Raphael, Frederic
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Raphael, Frederic. "Golden lads and girls." Spectator, 30 July 2005, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA135126981&it=r&asid=f1a4416df119d2bd3dc80f2080e23401. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A135126981
Day of reckoning: many saw disaster coming, including Philip Hensher, but no one did anything
Philip Hensher
317.9549 (Sept. 3, 2011): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
The 9/11 Commission Report: The Attack from Planning to Aftermath
with a new afterword by Philip Zelikow
Norton, 9.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 544, ISBN 9780393340136
The Eleventh Day: 9/11--The Ultimate Account
by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Doubleday, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 604, ISBN 9780385612814
No one could say that we didn't have warning of these events in the most specific terms. A month before 11 September 2001, the President's daily intelligence brief was headed 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.' Other official warnings from this time and earlier were so specific, and so specifically ignored, that a former National Security Adviser at the White House, Sandy Berger, would on four separate occasions in 2002 and 2003 abstract official top secret documents from the National Archives by stuffing them in his socks. (Because of Berger, we now don't know what these warnings consisted of).
There were any number of commentators, too, who saw exactly what was coming. Peggy Noonan wrote in Forbes magazine in 1998 that terrorists agreed that
the great city of the United States is ...
the dense 10-miles-long island called Manhattan
... If someone does the big terrible thing
to New York or Washington, there will be a lot
of chaos ... it could happen tomorrow.
After the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, a US Defense Department panel gathered views, and a prescient panellist called Marvin Cetron observed that airliners could easily be flown into large public buildings:
Targets such as the World Trade Center not
only provide the requisite casualties but,
because of their symbolic nature, provide
more bang for the buck. In order to maximise
their odds for success, terrorist groups
will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous
operations with the aim of overtaxing
a government's ability to respond.
These are only the most specifically accurate predictions. Many more commentators were saying, before September 2001, that disaster was coming. I myself wrote after the Taleban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in the spring of that year that large and spectacular acts of destruction would come to us, and this act of vandalism would pale into insignificance. My friend Thomas Ades, invited to write a piece for the New York Philharmonic to celebrate the millennium, submitted a bad-taste cantata called America: A Prophecy to Mayan texts, including the words 'Your cities will burn'. The sense of something big coming down the track was apparent to every thinking person in vague or specific terms.
And if anyone had been paying heed to the activities of the perpetrators, their purpose would have become clear. Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad in August 1996 did draw attention, one American listener saying of the disconcertingly elegant Arabic that 'it sounds like Thomas Jefferson ... it reads like our Declaration of Independence.' Bin Laden had the habit of interrupting family weddings to recite poems that ran: 'The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles/Had you seen it with your own eyes you would have been very pleased.' And there was the distinctly peculiar behaviour of the hijackers acquiring the necessary skills. One dozy pair, learning to fly, told their instructor that
they wished to fly jets--Boeing airliners--although
they had no previous experience.
They had no interest in take-offs or landings.
When taken up in a Cessna, one of them began
praying loudly.
The 9/11 Commission Report , first published in 2004, was greeted rapturously at the time and became a bestseller. John Updike said, with pardonable exuberance, that 'the King James Bible was our language's lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this year's 9/11 Commission Report '.
It is now reissued in a new edition, including an afterword by Philip Zelikow, the Commission's executive director. If it remains authoritative, certain areas of its study have started to seem incomplete, and the restrictions of its purpose have become clearer--some articulated by Zelikow.
Various readers, for instance, at its publication, were concerned about the account of the career of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called 'mastermind' behind the attacks, offered in chapters 5 and 7 of the report. It appeared that he had been everywhere, from Khartoum to Bosnia, and had heard everything. A caveat was offered up by the Commission that this account rested on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's testimony, produced under torture--the 'sensitive interrogation process', as it was euphemistically referred to in the report.
We could draw our own conclusions about its reliability. The Commission's attitude to interrogation and torture is now made clearer by Zelikow, who says that 'how the United States handled the detention and treatment of Muslim captives ... was a problem doing more damage to US interests in the world than any other.' The Commission recommended that the US adopt 'the minimum standard of humane treatment found in the Geneva Conventions.' It was one of the few recommendations that Bush's government openly rejected.
Other areas of the Commission's purpose, restricted by intention, by remit, or, quite possibly, by political concerns, have left the way open to some awkward questions. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have written a very decent and inquisitive account of 9/11 which draws attention to real gaps in the official account. The Commission declared that it hoped to avoid the wisdom of hindsight, now peculiarly reiterated by Zelikow--'rather than assuming 20/20 hindsight, we instead assumed ... that hindsight blinds.' The Commission's general tendency to present evidence of prior briefing and knowledge, but not to blame, certainly displeased some very knowledgeable agents who felt that their warnings had been thoroughly ignored. Summers and Swan have no need to be similarly restrained: Richard Clarke, the White House 'counterterrorism co-ordinator' for his part, claimed that 'most senior officials in the incoming [Bush] administration did not know what al-Qa'eda was'.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The role, too, of Saudi officials in the attacks was left by the Commission at the status of 'We have seen no evidence to suggest ...' Summers and Swan have no hesitation in suggesting that individuals connected to Saudi public services were in it up to their necks, and that two of the hijackers, Mihdhar and Hazmi, were in the employment of the Saudi Intelligence service--as it turned out, apparently, not as double, but as triple agents, keeping an eye on what the Saudis and the Americans knew about al-Qa'eda.
On a literary level, for reasons of factual accuracy and hoping to assert nothing that cannot be rooted in the evidence, The 9/11 Commission Report remains solidly external in its observations. Summers and Swan are able to say that someone 'thought' something, when they really mean 'said, when questioned some years later, that he believed he had thought.' The Commission Report never elides like this. Perhaps more fruitfully, however, Summers and Swan are free to venture into the personal motivation of the hijackers in ways which the Commission evidently regarded as indecent.
One striking example of this is the Commission's observation that 'Ziad Jarrah alone among the hijackers appears to have left a written farewell--a sentimental letter to Aysel Senguen.' Sentimental is the word we use for an emotion we are declining to share, which is fair enough in this case. But Jarrah, who died on United 93, is the one hijacker whom it is possible, on the evidence, to understand
Almost all the rest were ignorant zealots with no feelings, and they can justifiably be passed over with scorn. But Jarrah was an anomaly, and a recognisable human type. He was Lebanese, and had lived a busy life in the fleshpots of Beirut before turning to his insane faith. He had a longstanding on-off relationship with a Turkish woman, Aysel Senguen, largely driven by her impatience with his demands that she should become more observant in her religion.
But his youthful extremism would surely have passed in time. And his letter, dismissed unquoted in The 9/11 Commission Report , is given in full by Summers and Swan. It is not really sentimental, just stupid, childish and dreamy:
We'll have a beautiful eternal life, where
there are no problems and no sorrow, in
palaces of gold and silver ... Ich bin deinen
Prinz ... deinen Mann fur immer
.
One look at the handwriting shows how unformed Jarrah's character was, leaning to left and right, linked up and separated. He could, one feels, so easily have walked away from the whole thing, as his 3,000 victims could not, and we are in Summers' and Swan's debt for allowing the imagination to proceed in that direction.
Hensher, Philip
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hensher, Philip. "Day of reckoning: many saw disaster coming, including Philip Hensher, but no one did anything." Spectator, 3 Sept. 2011, p. 34+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA266347541&it=r&asid=eb160d46f9e79f8c56609bca27ef3b23. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A266347541
Elements of style: what to read this month--and what not to
Benjamin Schwarz
296.1 (July-August 2005): p125.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Atlantic Media, Inc.
http://www.theatlantic.com
SINATRA by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan Knopf
Here is a subject for a great American biography. Frank Sinatra is, along with Cary Grant, the most sublime American performing talent produced in the twentieth century. He utterly and permanently transformed American song; for three decades he was a central, and often driving, force in the entertainment industries--radio, gambling, records, and movies; he was both emblematic of and a vehicle for organized crime's reach into nearly every aspect of American public life; he was the single most important model of masculinity for two generations of Americans. The popular culture, politics, gender relations, and style (in every conceivable aspect) of the American century can't be fathomed without him. He was also an exquisitely complex personality. The public always knew the basic contradictions: Sinatra was vicious and sweet-hearted; he hated racial and religious bigotry and consorted with killers; he was a man of easy elegance and he was a lout. But while those paradoxes contributed to his mystique, they never defined it. Indeed, in what endures as the most adroitly drawn portrait, the 1966 Esquire article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" Gay Talese observed Sinatra as he awed, cowed, and beguiled his circle and those outside it, and revealed how Sinatras bullying and charm and vulnerability shaded into one another, and so let readers discern Sinatra as a man, even as Talese made plain that Sinatra's charisma remained impenetrable. With quiet authority Pete Hamill's elegant 1998 meditation, Why Sinatra Matters, locates its subject in the wider social and cultural currents of his times, but Hamill maintains that Sinatra "matters" chiefly as an artist. And while his slim book is the smartest, most precise, and most moving assessment of Sinatra's music, especially his greatest work (the incomparable Capitol Records albums of his early mature years), it is by definition an incomplete picture (which is deeply unfortunate; no writer can navigate as nimbly through Sinatra's world of politicians, mobsters, immigrants, musicians, and starlets as Hamill, who knew Sinatra well--a fact that probably explains his reluctance to write a full biography).
Until now that has left the reading public with Kitty Kelly's sensational 1986 scandal sheet of a book, an unreliable but not necessarily false work, though one devoid of insight. Regrettably, Summers and Swan's chronicle is a more or less tatted-up version of Kelly's. True, the authors employed a band of assiduous researchers, and they've mined the scant FBI and other government files now available. Their evidence suggests not merely that Sinatra palled around with and aided the Mafia (especially and most crucially in its relationship with John F. Kennedy) but that he was its creature. But here, as in so many other areas of Sinatra's life, the authors string together (often previously published) assertions, usually without corroborating evidence. The authors do confirm an already overwhelmingly persuasive picture of JFK as brutally coarse, doped up, and mobbed up (the survival of the Camelot myth is truly one of the world's incomprehensible mysteries), and they've added colorful detail to what was already an elaborate picture of some aspects of Sinatra's private life--his marriage to Ava Gardner, his kindness and cruelty to his hangers-on, and his energetic and soulless philandering. But although Summers and Swan have laid some important groundwork for the considered and sprawling biography their subject merits, this slackly written, cobbled-together book is third-rate Vanity Fair fodder, not a biography (in fact, the heavily and deftly reworked excerpt in that magazine is far better than this book). The authors devote a mere handful of pages to what was, after all, the one constant in and the main preoccupation of Sinatra's life--his music. A man often barely in control of himself, Sinatra was nevertheless indisputably a careful, obsessively committed, and hardworking artist. And when the authors do very briefly touch on some aspect of Sinatra's music (a paragraph on his fanatical attention to his transcendent phrasing, for example), they usually depend on quotations from authorities or other writers to make the point. Now that some valuable legwork has been done, an enterprising editor should ask Hamill to overcome his scruples and take another shot.
Benjamin Schwarz is the literary editor and the national editor of The Atlantic.
Schwarz, Benjamin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Schwarz, Benjamin. "Elements of style: what to read this month--and what not to." The Atlantic, July-Aug. 2005, p. 125+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA133280237&it=r&asid=154545148aef4d6a4441c11e974d9e79. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133280237
Sinatra: The Life
Eric Monder
399.5 (June 20, 2005): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Penske Business Media, LLC
http://variety.com
SINATRA: THE LIFE ANTHONY SUMMERS AND ROBBYN SWAN KNOPF; 576 PGS.; $26.95
Sinatra: The Life" begins with a fascinating tidbit about the teenage Frank Sinatra's earliest recording and the reason it has never been released. The rest of this faulty biography concerns the juicy details of Sinatra's private life, which, sadly and unjustly, overshadow the entertainer's extraordinary career.
At least authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan did their homework. There are references to the previous books about Sinatra, from the hagiographies written by daughters Tina and Nancy to Kitty Kelley's "overly negative" tome to Gilbert L. Gigliotti's academic "A Storied Singer: Frank Sinatra as Literary Conceit."
There are also new interviews--500 of them--with everyone from Jerry Lewis and Janet Leigh to mob-connected folks to distant relatives (the immediate Sinatra clan chose not to participate) to a smattering of fellow musicians and former girlfriends.
In a coup of sorts, Summers and Swan quote from the never-before-published transcripts of interviews with Ava Gardner, Sinatra's second wife, who reveals insights into Sinatra's moodiness and surprisingly "gentle" love-making techniques.
Packed with information as "Sinatra: A Life" seems, however, much is missing. In particular, Sinatra's career--not to mention his place in American popular music--is given short shrift. Some films rate a mere passing mention ("Guys and Dolls," "The Manchurian Candidate"), a few are totally ignored ("On the Town"), and there is no filmography or discography. Other industry lore is neglected, including why Sinatra bowed out of making such dissimilar projects as "Carousel" and "Dirty Harry." The authors examine the saga behind Al Martino's thinly veiled portrayal of Sinatra in "The Godfather," but only because it relates to their obsession with Sinatra's alleged Mafia associations.
Most regrettably, they decline to critique Sinatra's work as a vocalist or actor.
For all the book's emphasis on the salacious, however, there remain curious gaps even in this area: no citing of Kitty Kelley's bombshell about Sinatra's reputed White House affair with Nancy Reagan, just a line referring to Kelley's expose that Sinatra's mother performed abortions during Frank's Hoboken youth.
While "Sinatra: A Life" offers some valuable new material, it leaves a sour aftertaste about the man himself. The uninitiated may wonder why so much care has been lavished on a book about so controlling and unpleasant a person.
Readers are advised to play Sinatra's recordings during their scrutiny of this highly flawed, albeit smoothly readable work.
Monder, Eric
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Monder, Eric. "Sinatra: The Life." Variety, 20 June 2005, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA133704245&it=r&asid=73ebf5a00bb528fe73bf9ed3c8543034. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133704245
'Sinatra: The Life'
Gregory McNamee
389.19 (May 31, 2005): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 e5 Global Media, LLC
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
'Sinatra: The Life'
"He's the most fascinating man in the world. But don't stick your hand in the cage."
So said bandleader Tommy Dorsey in 1940 of the 25-year-old crooner who fronted his orchestra. The young man, Frank Sinatra, already had impressed many of the musicians with whom he worked with his drive, to say nothing of his talent.
Within a few months of signing Sinatra, Dorsey was having trouble with his prize. So was drummer Buddy Rich, who'd had run-ins with Sinatra onstage as each tried to steal the other's thunder. The rivalry quieted after two big men beat Rich up on the street. The beating, singer Mel Torme later remembered, was "coldly efficient and professional."
Rich thought that Sinatra was behind the attack. According to British journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, whose previous books have been on the likes of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, Sinatra confessed as much, saying he'd asked a couple of "Hoboken guys" for a favor.
Read the Mafia, whose reach, by the authors' account, extended into Sinatra's life to some genetic level--part of Sinatra's family hailed from the same Sicilian village as Lucky Luciano's, after all. The bred-in-the-bone proposition is arguable, but the authors make it clear that the music business--and the film business, and the gambling business, and the politics business and every other enterprise in which Sinatra would take an interest over a long life--was thoroughly mobbed up in Sinatra's day.
But did Sinatra jump into crime, or was he pushed? It depends on who asks and who tells. Jerry Lewis, among other speakers in this narrative, gives solid reasons why a singer like Sinatra might have wanted to play along once a capo's attention had landed on him, there being more than a few corpses, Mario Lanza's among them, to testify what could happen otherwise.
Summers and Swan offer up a Sinatra gladly beholden to organized crime at the dawn of his career, and in frequent contact with and debt to organized crime figures over six decades to come. And when, in their pages, he isn't doing the mob's bidding--carrying cash out of Cuba, fixing up a certain president with a certain alleged moll--Sinatra is cheating on a wife, humiliating a mistress, punishing a friend for some perceived slight, ordering up a beating and, always, drowning himself in bourbon.
Summers and Swan have done sturdy work in lining up evidence, but they mostly add detail to a portrait sharply sketched two decades ago by Kitty Kelley, whose book "His Way" details the childhood traumas, sexual and physical assaults, crime connections, failed marriages, broken friendships and temper tantrums that are the fuel for Summers and Swan's morality play.
The question of why Sinatra ever came to the world's attention seems not to interest them, though. Why did the American public, a notoriously conservative and moralistic bunch, not disown the singer at the first news of bad behavior? How did a man called at one time or another a draft dodger, a hack, an adulterer and a gangster make so much money entertaining them for so long?
Because, the answer might come back, he could sing, and he could act, and he seemed to live a life that sizable numbers of a couple of generations thought the best there could be--a life of staying up until the wee hours without adult supervision and no consequences, a life of doing whatever you damn well please.
Grownups know that life doesn't work that way. And Sinatra, by some accounts, was pleased to see enemies' legs and faces broken. But by many more accounts, there was far more substance, intelligence and skill to him than this overwrought tome allows--which means, among other things, that there's room on the shelf for a life that honors the art while admitting the artist's clay feet. This isn't that book.
details
"Sinatra: The Life," by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (Knopf. 588 pages, $26.95)
the bottom line
The dossier that the FBI never got around to writing, depicting the late singer-actor as a gangster, bully and all-around bad guy.
Gregory McNamee is The Hollywood Reporter's literary critic. He can be reached at gin@gregory mcnamee.com.
McNamee, Gregory
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McNamee, Gregory. "'Sinatra: The Life'." Hollywood Reporter, 31 May 2005, p. 88+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA133319201&it=r&asid=fcbcbe306655ddc93d85e890f0ad67cc. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133319201
Summers, Anthony and Swan, Robbyn. Sinatra: The Life
Margaret Flanagan
101.18 (May 15, 2005): p1612.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Summers, Anthony and Swan, Robbyn. Sinatra: The Life. May 2005. 580p. illus. index. Knopf, $26.95 (0-375-41400-2). 782.42.
Veteran show-biz and political biographer (of Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and Marilyn Monroe, among others) Summers teams up with his sometime collaborator Swan, shining an illuminating spotlight on Old Blue Eyes in this irresistible chronicle of the late, great crooner. Emphasizing the extreme manifestations that defined Sinatra's essential character--his ambition, his volatility, and his fervor--the authors paint a portrait of an astonishingly gifted singer who beat the odds by surviving and thriving over the course of several generations and a number of profound shifts in musical tastes and audience expectations. Aside from his natural abilities, Sinatra the man defied easy classification. Undeniably promiscuous, violent, and self-serving, he could also be tremendously compassionate, loyal, and generous. Beset by insecurities and inner demons and worried by the apparent death of his career in the late 1940s, he made several nods toward suicide but bounced back both emotionally and professionally. His host of love affairs, irrefutable Mob ties, singing and acting careers, political forays, and slow decline are all recorded in fascinating detail. This well-researched version-the authors have included more than 100 pages of notes--of Sinatra's life packs a powerful punch but is more balanced in tone and approach than Kitty Kelley's juicy, unauthorized expose.--Margaret Flanagan
Flanagan, Margaret
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Summers, Anthony and Swan, Robbyn. Sinatra: The Life." Booklist, 15 May 2005, p. 1612. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA137503139&it=r&asid=5cc97544818169ec15041a661c686a17. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137503139
Sinatra: The Life
252.19 (May 9, 2005): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Sinatra: The Life ANTHONY SUMMERS AND ROBBYN SWAN. Knopf, $26.95 (580p) ISBN 0-375-41400-2
The second collaboration for the husband-and-wife team (after their Nixon bio, The Arrogance of Power) is hardly the first book about Frank Sinatra, and despite their claim to be the only objective biographers to address the crooner's final years, the book's later chapters feel rushed compared with the lengthy passages covering Sinatra's well-trod glory days. Furthermore, since Sinatra's musical genius and acting skills have been thoroughly analyzed by previous writers, Summers and Swan put in minimal effort there. Where their work does stand out is in firming up the evidence of organized crime's "continuing interest" in Sinatra, from affirming that the famous scene in The Godfather only slightly exaggerates how he got his breakthrough role in From Here to Eternity to exploring his possible role as a go-between for the mob and John F. Kennedy. The pair also break new ground in depicting what they describe as Sinatra's alcoholism, pointing out that he frequently drank all night long, and his abusive treatment of women, for which they cite cases. Yet even when the authors say Sinatra raped a woman or fathered another woman's child out of wedlock--and they make good cases for both--their delivery is a lot closer to objective biography than tabloid sensationalism. A&E's airing of a linked documentary, timed to coincide with the book's publication, as well as a first serial in Vanity Fair, will create significant interest in this latest Sinatra saga. 32 pages of photos. (May 17)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sinatra: The Life." Publishers Weekly, 9 May 2005, p. 64+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA132467463&it=r&asid=1e6998a6c6bcda5f4f4a778cff9f20c2. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A132467463
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
Karl Helicher
125.18 (Nov. 1, 2000): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Summers, Anthony with Robbyn Swan. The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Viking. 2000. 640p. permanent paper. photogs, index. ISBN 0-670-87151-6. $29.95. BIOG
Summers's reputation as the controversial biographer of Marilyn Monroe (Goddess) and J. Edgar Hoover (Official and Confidential) is furthered by this ,investigation into the lies and life of Richard Nixon. Summers divides Nixon's career into lies--Mafia connections, illicit campaign contributions, murky relations with eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes--and BIG lies--planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the murder of Fidel Castro, advising South Vietnam's President Thieu to boycott peace talks while Lyndon Johnson was a lame duck president because President Nixon would assure South Vietnam a better deal, Watergate, and the author's most controversial claim, that Nixon severely beat his wife, Pat, after his unsuccessful 1962 election campaign for California's governor. This may be the most negative book about Nixon written to date and contrasts sharply with such sympathetic works as Irwin Gellman's The Contender (LJ 8/99), Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered (LJ 7/94), and Stephen Ambrose's three-volume biography, Nixon (LJ 10/15/91). Many of Summers's conclusions derive from interviews with Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, and from many other interviews compiled by Summers and his researchers. The narrative is bogged down by an overabundance of detail, and the bombardment of interviews gives the book a "he said, she said" feeling. Public libraries should purchase if interest warrants.
--Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Helicher, Karl. "The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2000, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA69659153&it=r&asid=b3260cea5e4dd1624d817589979d4e96. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A69659153
Mad-and bad
GODFREY HODGSON
129.4507 (Oct. 9, 2000): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
THE ARROGANCE OF POWER: THE SECRET WORLD OF RICHARD NIXON
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan Victor Gollancz, 640pp, [pound]20
[pound]16 at www.newstatesman.co.uk(+15% p&p)
No one can fairly accuse the American news media of not knowing how to forgive. For all they ears of his political life, Richard Nixon hated the media. His private conversation boiled with anger towards journalists, and these savage resentments would erupt into his public discourse. When he lost the election for governor of California, he told the assembled reporters: "Well, gentlemen, you won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Privately, he exulted that "I gave it to them right in the ass".
Twelve years later, he was forced to resign after narrowly avoiding criminal indictment for obstruction of justice and impeachment. Yet, when he died in 1994, both press and politicians hailed him in tones at once portentous and reverential. President Clinton ordered a day of national mourning. Dr Henry Kissinger, who suffered as much as anyone from Nixon's bizarre behaviour, called his former boss -- with characteristic ambiguity -- "a man, take him for all in all". Time magazine, like many other editorial judges, acclaimed him as the greatest American statesman of the century.
Summers links Nixon's close but inexplicable friendship with the financier Bebe Rebozo to the Mob. He has found a document suggesting that Nixon, who claimed to be poor, shared a secret Swiss bank account with Rebozo that had millions in it. He believes that Nixon and Rebozo were the owners of the bridge that linked the Mafia-controlled casino on Paradise Island to nearby Grand Bahama.
Of Nixon's intelligence and political ability, there can be no doubt. There are those, however, who are determined that the Nixon rehabilitation must not pass unchallenged. Anthony Summers, in a narrative buttressed with 120 pages of detailed source notes and 250 interviews, has succeeded in exposing the Nixon myth for the self-interested rodomontade it always was. Nixon, according to Summers, was from the beginning the creature of a clique of moneyed Californian businessmen. At every critical moment of his career, he was sustained by the active financial support of organised crime bosses, including Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles gambling capo, and the great Meyer Lansky himself. He received financial help from foreign interests, including the Greek fascist colonels.
Summers energetically marshals evidence that Nixon was not only financially dishonest and politically unscrupulous, but psychologically unstable. Journalists meekly accepted assurances by Nixon's aides that "the Boss" toyed with an occasional "light white wine". In fact, according to Summers, Nixon drankheavily. A mere couple of drinks could turn him nasty, even violent. Under the influence, the author alleges, he roughed up aides, security men and even his wife. He habitually used violent language, too, urging staff to "tear" opponents "in pieces". Of senators and congressmen who opposed his Vietnam war policy, he once said: "One day ... we'll get them on the ground where we want them. And we'll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist."
There have long been reports that Nixon was incapably drunk during the Middle East crisis of 1973. Summers shows that this was no exception. On more than one occasion, Nixon is reported to have urged bombing, including nuclear strikes, when in his cups. Once, in 1969, he is said to have ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea. Aides, including Kissinger, became used to ignoring or evading presidential orders delivered when Nixon was drunk. One of Summers's more startling revelations is that the defence secretary James Schlesinger took measures, including removing the nuclear command codes and alerting elite military units, to forestall Nixon resisting his removal from office, in the event that he had been impeached.
Nixon seems to have been aware, at some level, that he was crazy. He took elaborate precautions to conceal that, for many years, he had consulted a psychotherapist, Dr Arnold Hutschnecker, who denied that Nixon was "psychotic", but confirmed he had neurotic symptoms. Nixon consumed, unprescribed and often laced with whiskey, thousands of capsules of an anti-epileptic drug, Dilantin, which he used as a tranquilliser.
Summers's research has been voluminous. In some instances, I felt he had not conclusively proved his point, but the overall effect of this book is incontrovertible. The question now is not whether Richard Nixon was unstable and dishonest, or a man who never understood the spirit of democratic institutions, but how the American people put up with him for so long.
If he had never taken a dime from a gambler or drunk a single whiskey, the achievements on which his reputation rests are either disgraceful -- as in his treatment of Chile -- or essentially insubstantial, as with the opening to China that, 28 years later, has left a communist dictatorship in power. Rather than a statesman, it seems, Richard Nixon was the nimble but undeserving beneficiary of exaggerated American fears of domestic communism and Republican cravings for hegemony. The mystery is why the US media persist in treating him like a statesman.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
HODGSON, GODFREY. "Mad-and bad." New Statesman, 9 Oct. 2000, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA66240340&it=r&asid=4523803a7562b37e82af592d86b81049. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A66240340
THE ARROGANCE OF POWER: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
247.35 (Aug. 28, 2000): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
ANTHONY SUMMERS WITH ROBBYN SWAN. Viking, $29.95 (640p) ISBN 0-670-87151-6
* Summers's hefty, Well-researched and unrelentingly negative biography seeks to make one thing perfectly clear: something was wrong with Tricky Dick all along, and the misdeeds that marked his presidency flowed naturally from his flawed character. Nixon, he argues, became a captive of his own pride and ambition, driven to demonstrate "guts" and keep his power, no matter whom he hurt. Summers paints the Nixon of the '50s as racketeer-influenced: he supports his claims with material on early adviser Murray Chotiner, presidential pal Bebe Rebozo, crime boss Meyer Lansky, eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes and other shady affiliates. Nixon's outwardly tranquil marriage to Pat drove her to secret chain-smoking, Summers writes, and nearly to alcoholism. In the Oval Office, Summers notes, Nixon was sometimes "rendered unstable by fatigue, alcohol and medication," such as the psychoactive drug Dilantin. His White House cabal pulled off more and stranger dirty tricks than the public record has shown; and flights of irrational belligerence led him to order off-the-cuff "acts of war"--orders his aides had to scramble to intercept. After news of Watergate broke, Nixon's incoherence grew worse; top aides shielded him even while questioning his sanity. Summers (Official & Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, etc.) talked to hundreds of sources, some previously untapped--among them Nixon sometime confidant and psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Though he sometimes construes as nefarious schemes what others might call normal politics, Summers's impressive research largely backs up his condemnatory attitude. With almost 150 pages of carefully spelled-out documentation and notes, the volume is no hit-and-run job; it's the most thorough case against Nixon yet, reminding us both how complex our 37th president was and how much damage he ultimately did. 32 pages b&w photos. First serial to Vanity Fair (Aug. 28)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"THE ARROGANCE OF POWER: The Secret World of Richard Nixon." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2000, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA64994218&it=r&asid=71b13c9ea54fad614a77530767e7e183. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A64994218
Another 'October Surprise'
JON WIENER
271.14 (Nov. 6, 2000): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
THE ARROGANCE OF POWER:
The Secret World of Richard Nixon.
By Anthony Summers, with Robbyn Swan.
Viking. 640 pp. $29.95.
Poor Anthony Summers--he writes a 600-page book on Nixon based on massive and exhaustive research, including interviews with a thousand people and 120 pages of documentation--and all the media care about are the couple of pages he devotes to pill-popping and wife-beating. The same thing happened with his J. Edgar Hoover bio, which is remembered mostly for that unforgettable cross-dressing story.
But The Arrogance of Power has historical significance. It shows definitively that during the last weeks of the 1968 election campaign--when Nixon was challenging Vice President Hubert Humphrey--Nixon secretly sabotaged peace talks that might have ended the war at that point. Nixon went on to win one of the closest elections in history, after which he kept the fighting going another five years, during which more than 20,000 Americans and perhaps a million Vietnamese were killed.
The general outlines of the situation were well-known at the time: On October 31, just a week before Election Day, Johnson ordered the bombing halt that the North Vietnamese had said was a prerequisite to their entering into peace talks. Nixon had been eight points ahead in the Gallup poll, but two days after the bombing halt, his lead had fallen to two points. One poll even had Humphrey pulling ahead of Nixon then.
But the talks did not begin, because two days after the bombing halt South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu refused to participate. He had good reasons to prefer a Nixon victory--Thieu's regime was kept alive only by Washington, and Humphrey had told him that prolonged US aid was "not in the cards." Observers at the time, and historians subsequently, have speculated about whether Nixon conveyed private assurances to Thieu in those crucial two days. Of course Nixon denied it, and LBJ's memoirs, published three years later, declared that he had "no reason to think" that Nixon "was himself involved in this maneuvering, but a few individuals active in his campaign were." Among historians, Stephen Ambrose has been the most explicit in making the case, along with Clark Clifford, Defense Secretary for LBJ at the time, in his 1991 memoirs.
But no one had the smoking gun--not until Summers. His chapter on Nixon's maneuver provides a fine example of historical detective work. The key messenger, he argues, was Anna Chennault--the Chinese-born widow of an American World War II hero, 43 years old at the time, a prominent Washington hostess and vice chairwoman of the Republican National Finance Committee and co-chairwoman of Women for Nixon-Agnew. She also had connections to Southeast Asian leaders like Chiang Kai-shek and Ferdinand Marcos, as well as those in Saigon. In interviews with Summers, she said she met with Nixon and his campaign manager (and future Attorney General), John Mitchell, who told her to inform Saigon that if Nixon won the election, South Vietnam would get "a better deal."
Meanwhile, President Johnson deployed the full resources of US intelligence to see whether Nixon was telling Thieu not to go to the peace talks. The CIA had a bug in Thieu's Saigon office, the National Security Agency was intercepting South Vietnamese diplomatic cables and the FBI had wiretaps and physical surveillance at the South Vietnamese Embassy.
It's certainly possible that Anna Chennault was exaggerating her historical importance when she told Summers (and hinted to others earlier) about her role. But here's where the smoking gun appears: Summers reproduces an FBI memo he obtained in 1999 under the Freedom of Information Act. It's dated November 2, and it reports on the results of a wiretap on the phone of the South Vietnamese ambassador: Chennault had contacted the ambassador and "advised him that she had received a message from her boss"--who was described in the memo as "not further identified." The message was "hold on, we are gonna win." Then follows the most tantalizing line: "She advised that her boss had just called from New Mexico." With a little more work, Summers sealed his case: Spiro Agnew made a campaign stop in Albuquerque that day, and the times match. Summers points out that Agnew could not have taken such a crucial step without explicit instructions from Nixon himself.
Summers found that he was not the first to piece this evidence together: Deep in the LBJ Library he found an "eyes only" memo to LBJ showing that national security assistant Walt Rostow had used the same sources to come to the same conclusions. Outraged, Johnson shared Rostow's insight with candidate Humphrey, but they decided not to go public with it in the last days before the election. (They may not have thought the documentation convincing enough and worried that it was too late to have an effect, regardless.) After Election Day, they apparently believed it would be too disruptive of the US political system to reveal what they knew about how the new President had helped himself win.
Wisely, Summers does not argue that his evidence proves Nixon prolonged the war--although he points out that more than a third of all US casualties during the war occurred during Nixon's presidency--a total of 20,763 Americans killed. That was also the period when the most intense bombing occurred, resulting in the deaths of perhaps a million or more Vietnamese. Summers acknowledges that Thieu "very probably" would have balked at peace talks even without prodding from Nixon. However, he argues forcefully and persuasively that it was wrong for a private citizen to interfere with a major diplomatic peace effort for his own political advantage.
Nixon's actions just before the election prolonged the war in a different way: Thieu took credit for Nixon's victory. Thus when Nixon reversed course and tried to push Thieu to the peace table on the eve of the 1972 election, Thieu stalled at the critical moment, arguing that Nixon was in his debt.
The rest of the book amounts to a series of investigations into other suspected crimes or offenses of Nixon's. Here Summers is equally energetic in his research, but with uneven results. For perspective on Nixon's Vietnam policy, the best new analysis is not Summers but rather Jeffrey Kimball's prizewinning book Nixon's Vietnam War, which presents compelling evidence that up to 1971, Nixon and Kissinger believed the war was winnable. Summers's Watergate chapter doesn't add anything of significance to Stanley Kutler's work, and his effort to show that Nixon had a Swiss account linked to a criminal bank in the Bahamas isn't convincing.
The Alger Hiss case was Nixon's first foray into national politics, as a member of HUAC in 1948; it gets a thorough examination by Summers. John Dean, who reviewed the Summers book in the Chicago Tribune, found this section especially noteworthy. Dean occupies a small but significant place in Hiss history for reporting that White House aide Charles Colson remarked that Nixon had told him, "The typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case"--which, if true, meant Hiss was framed by the FBI, since the crucial physical evidence that he had been a spy came from documents typed on what the prosecution said was Hiss's typewriter. Summers devotes five pages to the forgery-by-typewriter theory; Dean concludes that Summers has "reopened the debate on whether Hiss was framed."
The book has also made news for its reports that Nixon was seen by a psychotherapist while he was President. However, the media excitement over this has missed the more significant story about a President's search for help. The men around Nixon, Summers shows, were alarmed by Nixon's mental condition, especially when he was deciding to invade Cambodia. After meeting with Nixon to discuss a possible invasion, Henry Kissinger told an aide, "Our peerless leader has flipped out." There were disturbing reports of Nixon drinking heavily during these days. And after a Pentagon briefing on the first day of the invasion, Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland commented obliquely that "the president's unbridled ebullience...required some adjustment to reality."
It was at this point that Nixon called Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a psychotherapist who had treated him during the fifties. Nixon had read Hutschnecker's bestseller, The Will to Live, written for people "in the grips of acute conflict." Since Nixon had become President, Hutschnecker had seen him only once, and then to discuss Hutschnecker's views of crime and world peace. Hutschnecker's 1970 White House visit was kept secret, but when the two met, the doctor did not realize that Nixon was seeking treatment. So Hutschnecker started pitching his world peace plans, and Nixon abruptly dismissed him. The President knew he needed help--but didn't get it.
Two days later, with protests engulfing the country, Kissinger worried that the President was "on the edge of a nervous breakdown." This is the point at which the pill-popping story becomes significant. Jack Dreyfus, a Nixon friend and supporter (and founder of the Dreyfus mutual funds), had given Nixon a bottle of a thousand Dilantins--an anticonvulsant Dreyfus claimed helped overcome anxiety and depression. Dreyfus said he told Nixon they should be prescribed by a doctor, but Nixon replied, "To heck with the doctor."
Dilantin had been approved by the FDA, but for the treatment of epileptic seizures. Documented side effects include "slurred speech...mental confusion, dizziness, insomnia, transient nervousness." Instead of getting treatment from the one therapist he trusted, Nixon apparently took the Dilantin Dreyfus had given him. He later asked Dreyfus for--and received--another bottle of a thousand 100-milligram tablets. Dilantin didn't help: Summers reports that concern about Nixon's mental state in 1974 led Defense Secretary James Schlesinger to order military units not to react to orders from the White House unless they were cleared with him or the Secretary of State.
Ever since Ronald Reagan showed how right-wing a Republican President could be, Nixon-haters have been reconsidering their position. Under Nixon the Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA were created, Social Security payments went up and funding was increased for education, health and the arts. On the welfare issue, Nixon proposed a guaranteed annual family income--far to the left of all his successors, Democratic as well as Republican. And, of course, Nixon ended two decades of official hostility toward China and brought about detente with the Soviet Union. To understand why Nixon took these positions it would be necessary to look beyond Nixon himself to the larger social and political context of the late sixties and early seventies. Summers's narrow focus prevents this kind of broader understanding.
Jon Wiener (JMWiener@UCI.edu), a contributing editor of The Nation, is the author, most recently, of Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (California).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
WIENER, JON. "Another 'October Surprise'." The Nation, 6 Nov. 2000, p. 25. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA66278493&it=r&asid=e24b0d224b913845e5c3f5ba681cba32. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A66278493
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
James Munson
278.1620 (Jan. 2001): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan. Victor Gollancz. [pound]20.00. 640 pages. ISBN 0-575-06243-6. The obsession of certain types of historians and biographers with the 'crimes' of Richard Nixon can be somewhat amusing. Poor Mr Nixon is seen as sui generis, as possessing a degree of evil only surpassed by Judas Iscariot. Richard Nixon was hardly saintly but he must be seen in context. The massive abuses of power of men such as Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan or Clinton; the electoral fraud and corruption of Lyndon Johnson; the immorality of men such as Kennedy or Clinton are conveniently forgotten. That some of Nixon's aides went to gaol proves they were caught, not that they were uniquely guilty. Here we have Nixon standing alone on his unique pillar of crime. This enormous book proves what its author set out to prove; it does add new information but as a biography it is inferior to that by Jonathan Aitken. It will be important to future historians not as a balanced portrait but as an example of an obsession with Richard Nixon. Dead horses are the most easily flogged.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Munson, James. "The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon." Contemporary Review, vol. 278, no. 1620, 2001, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA70396433&it=r&asid=13888dae6ade92dad3ddd25abd3823df. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A70396433
'The Life' slights the legend
(May 17, 2005): Lifestyle: p06D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Sinatra: The Life By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan Knopf, 576 pp., $26.95 --- Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan's 576-page biography Sinatra: The Life offers a well-researched, detailed analysis of the famous singer and his Italian heritage, his close association with Mafia hoods, his involvement with politicians of both parties -- from JFK to Ronald Reagan -- his mood swings, his four marriages, his generosity and his violent temper.
But it fails to explain why Sinatra the singer lives on.
Summers, a former BBC journalist, and his collaborator and wife, Swan, strive to explain his magic by repeating what has been said by music critics. Still, after finishing Sinatra, it is not the authors' words but a quote they include from Gay Talese's famous 1965 Esquire article on the singer and his work that resonates with the reader: "It was music to make love by, and doubtless much love had been made to it all over America."
For the Sinatra aficionado, this biography presents extensive documentation of the legendary crooner's involvement with the Mafia, particularly with Sam Giancana and Lucky Luciano. These ties, which began early in Sinatra's career as an aspiring singer, became dangerous and unnerving as he grew close to President Kennedy.
But it is no news to most readers that JFK was a compulsive womanizer whose father had unsavory connections with the underworld. JFK's relationship with purported Mob moll Judith Campbell Exner imperiled the presidency and hindered the pursuit of those gangsters by his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general.
Sinatra admired and feared the mobsters; he also emulated their manners, including an inclination to beat up people who offended him.
Although readable, the biography fails to present a comprehensive portrait. Instead, it presents segments of Sinatra's long, turbulent life and contradictory character.
In addition to Sinatra the wannabe don, we read of Sinatra the civil rights champion. He admired and financially assisted black artists such as Billie Holiday and Mabel Mercer. And he had a deep, if complicated, friendship with Sammy Davis Jr.
Then there are details about Sinatra the bickering son, the indulgent father, the husband who remained close to his ex-wives and the well-endowed, tender lover. And the coarse brute who, the biographers claim, raped a 20-year-old woman in Palm Springs, Calif., in 1969.
The portrait that emerges of Sinatra is a brilliant, emotionally volatile, unhappy man who spent his life addicted to alcohol, anger and Ava Gardner. (Though they were both beautiful and talented, Sinatra and Gardner took the fun out of dysfunctional with their alcoholic squabbling.) Yet, at the same time, Sinatra's agony fueled his ability to phrase a song or play a film role that moved audiences deeply.
Writing the biography of a pop icon such as Sinatra requires a deftness and musical insight that Summers and Swan simply do not possess. To put it bluntly, the reader wants more cultural context and fewer FBI reports.
By contrast, Gerald Clarke's outstanding biography of another legendary singer, Judy Garland, in Get Happy (2000), captured the singer's extraordinary gifts, tragic struggles and explained why her vulnerability both blessed her and doomed her.
Sinatra: The Life, though less mean-spirited than Kitty Kelley's exhaustive 1986 bio of Ol' Blue Eyes, is still most assuredly not the definitive work on this very complex man.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"'The Life' slights the legend." USA Today, 17 May 2005, p. 06D. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA132520493&it=r&asid=c6f6c7ba77ba36882e6cc64fd55ac5d1. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A132520493
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan: Sinatra: The Life
By Nathan Rabin @nathanrabin
May 31, 2005 12:00 AM
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Sinatra: The Life
Author: Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Publisher: Knopf
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To write a great biography, writers need a diverse set of skills, especially when describing an endlessly documented icon like Frank Sinatra. A good biographer has to be equal parts journalist, detective, psychologist, cultural historian, critic, and prose stylist; it might be possible to get by with a shaky grasp on one of those skills, but it's rare and disheartening when a writer lacks them all. That unfortunately seems to be the case with Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, whose fairly worthless new biography Sinatra adds little to the public's understanding of a preeminent American legend, unless the fact that Sinatra palled around with mobsters and enjoyed Jack Daniels, dames, and even the occasional broad constitute shocking revelations.
Sinatra eventually offers a blandly written, annoyingly judgmental Cliffs Notes version of Sinatra's adult life, but it first offers a revisionist take on his ostensibly hardscrabble upbringing, presenting him not as the tough street kid of popular imagination, but as the pampered son of a domineering mother with major political connections. As Summers and Swan present it, Sinatra's modest early success was attributable largely to the efforts of his mother and the Mafia, which are depicted as equally terrifying. Sinatra duly chronicles Sinatra's rocky romances, his journey from FDR Democrat to Nixon Republican, and his professional highs and lows, with a special emphasis on mob ties and politics, but it has little new to offer on either subject. The book inexplicably wastes a lot of space on the attacks Sinatra's New Deal Liberalism engendered from the radical right. But since his era's conservative attack dogs pretty much thought FDR was a traitorous Bolshevik taking marching orders directly from Uncle Joe, it's no revelation to say they disapproved of Sinatra's outspoken lefty activism.
The Sinatra that emerges here is a crude, hollow caricature of a complicated man who was capable of extraordinary kindness and sensitivity as well as violent fits of explosive rage. Sinatra presents the singer's life as seen from the cheap seats, bloodlessly conveying the larger-than-life themes and episodes of his contradictory existence with none of the magic or mystery that made him so much more than just a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, wannabe hood from Hoboken.
The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan: review
Toby Harnden reviews The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
By Toby Harnden
4:47PM BST 25 Aug 2011
It is hard to imagine a modern event about which more has been written than the September 11 terrorist attacks, and now, as the 10th anniversary approaches, we have a weighty volume billed as the “ultimate”, the “definitive” and the “first panoramic, authoritative” account of 9/11.
It is written by an Englishman and his American wife who live in Ireland. They have previously produced works on subjects including Marilyn Monroe, J Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon but have no significant background in intelligence or terrorism.
Their approach is almost exactly the one that Summers took with his well-done Kennedy assassination book, Conspiracy: dismissing the more fevered theories while casting doubt on the Warren Commission, or in this case the 9/11 Commission.
It is rather tiresome to have to wade through pages and pages of proof that the Pentagon was not hit by a missile and that the World Trade Center buildings were not brought down by demolition charges arranged by President George W Bush.
The authors, who are fond of quoting polling data, assert that large numbers of Americans are in thrall to such lunatic theories. I’ve reported from all 50 US states and have encountered no more than a handful.
To their credit, elsewhere they strive to be fair-minded, the occasional casual slight about Bush’s long vacations or his “infamous propensity to muddle his utterances” notwithstanding. Their principal criticisms are that the Bush administration was asleep at the switch on 9/11; that vital intelligence was ignored; that the FBI and CIA did not share information; and that Saudi Arabia was intimately connected to al-Qaeda and is sometimes overindulged by the US.
All these are valid points. All have been aired before. The conclusion that “with adroit handling, hard work and good luck” the 9/11 attacks might have been stopped is reasonable but has long been the general consensus.
Several old and far-fetched but still incendiary claims are examined. One is that the CIA met Osama bin Laden to “negotiate” with him in July 2001. Another is that the CIA was trying to recruit two of the 9/11 hijackers as agents, hid this from the FBI and then covered it up after the attacks. Despite the authors’ insinuations, however, there is no real evidence for either claim.
Their habit of posing portentous questions without answering them also grates: “Alternately, could it be that the CIA relied on information from another, foreign, intelligence organisation? If so, which organisation? One candidate, some might think, is the Israeli Mossad.”
There are small but telling mistakes, too. “Few in the United States saw the men and women of the Trade Center as they jumped to certain death.” “Most American editors ruled the pictures too shocking to be shown.” That’s not true. I saw the bodies fall on television, tears streaming down my face, as I tried to write Telegraph news stories while grappling with the enormity of what was happening.
The extent to which “innocent Arabs suffered humiliation or abuse” in America after 9/11 is grossly overstated and the assertion that “anyone brown and foreign-looking was vulnerable” conjures images of racist mobs that stalked US streets only in the minds of some Europeans.
It is also dubious at best that it is “rarely mentioned, if at all” that hundreds of non-Americans were killed, or that “dozens” of illegal immigrants died and are “remembered on no memorial”.
There is no denying that Summers and Swan have done their homework. The main 443-page text is laden with attributions from secondary sources. Official reports, transcripts, books and the often unremarkable statements of journalists are quoted exhaustively. There are also 116 pages of endnotes that take considerable effort to decipher.
The problem is that the authors haven’t done enough original research. Most glaringly, they seem to have interviewed no major figures in the Bush administration.
The narrative of the horrors inside the World Trade Center and of the bravery of the passengers of Flight 93, which they brought down before it could reach Washington, is well written and moving, but there needs to be more reason for a book than an anniversary.
* Toby Harnden is the author of Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan
The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11
by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
624pp, Doubleday, £20
Buy now for £18 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books
Review: Terrorism: The Eleventh Day by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Doubleday, £20
September 10 2011 5:00 AM
As New York comes to a standstill tomorrow to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, entombed below the footprints of the Ground Zero memorial lie thousands of fragments of broken humanity -- the minuscule remains of the 1,122 victims who have yet to be identified.
The lucky ones are those whose tiny scraps of life -- a single tooth, a charred bone, a woman's severed hand -- have led to identification and some measure of closure for a heartbroken family.
Those identified include Ronald Breitweiser, an investment banker from New Jersey, whose arms and hands were found in the smouldering remains of the South Tower. Or American Airlines flight attendant Karen Martin -- probably the first person harmed by the hijackers on 9/11 -- whose foot and part of a leg were found an agonising six years after the tragedy.
Re-living the final horrific moments of victims like Breitweiser and Martin -- and the macabre aftermath in recovering their remains -- is the gripping opening to a compelling new book on 9/11 written by the formidable husband-and-wife investigative team, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 is the painstaking result of five years of intense research into thousands of previously withheld official documents and testimonies about the decades-long run-up to 9/11, and the epic failure of American intelligence and law enforcement to prevent the hijackings.
The result is a gripping narrative that explains the genesis of Osama Bin Laden's hatred towards the West, the misguided motives of the troubled men hired by the al-Qa'ida leader to hijack the planes and the blunders and failures by US intelligence to stop the disaster -- despite impassioned warnings by officials like former Bush counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke that something "very, very, very big" was coming.
It also addresses the murky role of the Saudi regime -- an issue blurred by the 9/11 Commission -- and points to evidence that wealthy Saudis who funded Bin Laden included some members of the ruling Saudi royal family.
Most of all, The Eleventh Day is a damning portrayal of US government incompetence and indifference that will leave the reader outraged at the missteps that led to the deaths of more than 2,982 men, women and children -- and hundreds of thousands more in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that would soon follow.
According to the Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus, "In war, the first casualty is truth", a point reinforced five years after 9/11 when a New York Times/CBS poll found that only 16pc of respondents thought that Bush administration members had told the truth about what happened on 9/11.
Summers and Swan -- who live and work in Ireland -- begin their search for the truth by recounting the horrific events on the morning of 9/11, introducing the doomed players -- pilots, the flight attendants, the passengers on the planes and the innocent souls in the Twin Towers and Pentagon.
The authors include new chilling details: that in the months before their arrival in the US, al-Qa'ida "muscle men hijackers" -- hired to overpower the flight attendants and passengers -- honed their killing skills in Bin Laden-run training camps by methodically slaughtering sheep and camels with Swiss knives.
Through painstaking interviews Summers and Swan show convincingly that despite warnings from numerous foreign intelligence agencies and Bush's own counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, the Bush administration actively ignored warnings of a pending al-Qa'ida plot.
Even before he took office, George W Bush was briefed by outgoing president Bill Clinton on the dangers posed by Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida. Clinton, who says that his failure to kill Bin Laden in 1996 remains the "biggest mistake of my presidency", remembers that Bush "listened to what I had to say without much comment, then changed the subject".
The litany of missteps and blunders by the US government and intelligence agencies defy belief. Just two years before the attacks, The Eleventh Day recounts how the FBI received reports that terrorists were planning to send men to learn to fly in the US.
Despite an order by the FBI's counter-terrorism division to investigate, no probe was ever conducted.
In July 2001 the CIA briefed then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "there will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months". Rice was polite but seemingly unimpressed and no action was taken.
That same month, Mohammed Atta -- the leader of the hijackers -- was stopped for speeding in Florida. The terrorist was let go -- despite the fact that there was a bench warrant out for his arrest for a previous traffic violation.
The Eleventh Day is a gripping read, a book packed with cogent, forthright journalism and impressive research that puts to rest once and for all the hateful conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the many questions that have dogged the Bush administration's handling of the most serious terrorist attacks of modern times.
It is also a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of imperial meddling. To counter the Soviets, the Americans funnelled cash to Islamist militants, who then gave birth to al-Qa'ida and the Taliban.
That blowback -- as The Eleventh Day recounts -- was a long time in coming.
In 1998, President George H W Bush met with the moderate Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto who expressed sadness that "in our common zeal to most effectively combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, our countries had made a strategic decision to empower the most fanatical elements of the mujahideen".
"I am afraid," she told the father of future president George W Bush, "that we have created a Frankenstein's monster that could come back to haunt us in the future."
Book Review: The Eleventh Day, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Postmedia News | September 9, 2011 12:00 PM ET
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The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Ballantine Books
603 pp; $34
Reviewed by Tod Hoffman
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan tell us right up front why they wrote The Eleventh Day: “Our aim has been to make readable sense out of a kaleidoscopic story, to offer rational explanation where there has been confusion or unnecessary controversy, and to serve history as well as possible.” Let us, then, judge them according to these terms.
First, the book is absolutely readable. The authors have taken a huge mass of fact and conjecture and rendered them coherent and orderly. Notwithstanding that we all know how 9/11 turned out, their detailed and dramatic retelling of the plot that unfolded that unforgettable day is never less than gripping.
Second, as to a rational explanation, they effectively sift through and dispel the more far-fetched of the conspiracy theories that abound, including the notion that the stricken World Trade Center collapsed because of explosives planted throughout the towers and not from the devastating impact of the jumbo jets. Furthermore, they lay waste to the theories that the Pentagon was struck by a missile and that United 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field, was actually landed safely on some secret U.S. military base. These are the so-called MIHOP — made it happen on purpose — theories.
While, by their definition, “unnecessary controversy” may refer only to such fringe — though surprisingly popular — theories, The Eleventh Day doesn’t lack for controversy. Otherwise, what would be the point? Summers and Swan argue that the U.S. government is largely to blame for lingering doubts about what really happened leading up to 9/11, since it began telling lies almost immediately afterward by falsely assuring the public that the dust and debris coating Lower Manhattan did not constitute a health hazard. As it became clear that people were, in fact, becoming gravely ill from ingesting this toxic matter, everything the authorities said henceforth became suspect.
The authors are less dismissive of what they call the LIHOP — let it happen on purpose — perspective. In this respect, they take the 9/11 Commission and its final report to task for glossing over, or outright ignoring, critical evidence. Here, they succumb to the widely accepted notion that 9/11 was preventable if only the authorities had responded with proper vigilance to intelligence they had at hand.
The most damning element of the LIHOP story is that the CIA identified two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, as Al-Qaeda operatives and knew they had entered the United States months before the attacks. Yet, it alerted neither the FBI nor U.S. Immigration to the fact. Rather than condemning the agency for simple incompetence, Summers and Swan bring up far more fascinating hypotheses: that the two terrorists were posing as double agents for Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service or that the CIA believed they had potential for recruitment. In either case, they conclude, the agency purposely allowed them into the country and, obviously, committed a tragic miscalculation.
Whether the Saudis played a role in all this is unresolved. Indeed, the relationship between Saudi rulers and Osama bin Laden, progeny of one of the most influential families in the kingdom, is an enduring mystery. The 9/11 Commission made little headway in solving it, and the Bush administration did all in its power to prevent disclosure on this point. Information alleging Saudi support for Al-Qaeda remains classified.
While it appears the U.S. administration went out of its way to protect Saudi Arabia, it told outright lies to justify attacking Iraq on the false premise that it was behind 9/11. Pakistan, yet another of Washington’s supposed allies, also has a dubious history with bin Laden, right up to providing his sanctuary until U.S. forces tracked him down and killed him. In no conflict has it ever been more difficult to differentiate friends from enemies.
Finally, to the authors’ determination to serve history: So long as we incorporate their “as well as possible” caveat, they succeed. However, I take exception to the over-ambitious reference to the “full story” in the book’s subtitle. That, it definitely is not. As they make apparent, there is much information that remains secret and, undoubtedly, much that remains to be discovered. As with any momentous event, the true full story will probably not be told during the lifetime of any of the key participants.
The central narrative of 9/11 is pretty well established. Details get fuzzy on the periphery. In magnifying every inconsistency ever uttered by any suspect or witness, by insisting that the remaining questions have greater significance than those for which we know the answers, journalists and scholars can create endless fodder for themselves. As we approach the 10th anniversary of that fateful day, The Eleventh Day is but one full story. It is a good account of the state of our understanding to date. Revisions are sure to follow.
Book Review: “A Matter of Honor” (Harper, 2016)
Rufus F. / November 2, 2016 in Culture
a-matter-of-honorA dark cloud of conspiracy hangs over Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s book A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice (Harper, 2016). The authors make the wise choice, I think, in addressing it right off in an author’s note: various theories about the Pearl Harbor attack of December, 1941, hold that members of the American or British governments, up to President Roosevelt, had foreknowledge that the Japanese were going to attack the US fleet in Hawaii and allowed it to happen in order to bring America into the war. The authors contend that they researched all of the supposed evidence of a conspiracy and found none of it to be solid.
Instead, they found something more disturbing in some sense: many individuals at the highest levels of government should have known more than they did in the days leading up to the attack and failed more due to human weakness and error than duplicity. The results were catastrophic.
When the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December, they killed 2,403 Americans, wounded 1,178 others, damaged all eight battleships, sank or damaged eight other ships, and destroyed 188 planes. But the blitz also annihilated American invulnerability and erased the isolationist cause overnight. It could be said that what arose from the ashes of that horrible morning was the world of American power in which we live today, for better or worse.
Understandably, Americans wanted answers. Why was the Pacific fleet stationed in a harbor with such a narrow opening that the battleships could only leave in a single file? Some likened Pearl Harbor to a fishbowl that could be easily shelled from above. Why wasn’t there better reconnaissance? Why were Japanese losses so light and their mission so successful? Given that talks with the Japanese had recently broken down and the Pacific theater was so important for Japan’s expansionist aims, why wasn’t Hawaii on high alert? Above all, how such a thing could happen?
A great deal of the obloquy was fired directly at the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific fleet, Admiral Husband Kimmel. The Roberts Commission, convened by President Roosevelt, found Kimmel and Army Lieutenant General Walter Short guilty of dereliction of duty. The New York Times ran the headline:
ROBERTS BOARD BLAMES KIMMEL AND SHORT: WARNINGS TO DEFEND HAWAII NOT HEEDED.
Kimmel received letters urging that he kill himself, was stripped of his stars and command, and pushed to retire early. In Biblical terms, he was the goat sent into the wilderness after the sins of the people were laid upon it.
But was justice served? The authors contend that, in the aftermath of the day which will live in infamy, that infamy was unfairly distributed. In stark detail, they show the many ways the government failed Kimmel after he took command. He wasn’t given enough airplanes or materiel after numerous requests. The radar he was given was barely functional. The war plans he was given wouldn’t take effect until after war broke out. Military experts swore that torpedoes would be ineffective in water as shallow as the harbor, even with examples of successful bombing runs in shallower waters. They were convinced that a Japanese attack would be launched in the Philippines, instead of Hawaii. Most shocking of all, Kimmel wasn’t given access to the information gathered by the MAGIC cryptanalysis program, much of which strongly suggested that an imminent attack was planned for Pearl Harbor! In many cases, high officials simply assumed someone else informed him. No one had. The fleet was a floating target.
Summers and Swan do something remarkable in making the days leading up to Pearl Harbor into a nail-biter in which the tension is increased, rather than diminished, by the fact that we know how terribly it will end.
The authors do an exhaustive job, using a mass of documents and sources to show the numerous failures throughout 1941 in chapters that are darkly humorous, galling, infuriating, and very tense. Imagine a James Bond novel in which the spies and intelligence agents are either incompetent or altogether ignored. Summers and Swan do something remarkable in making the days leading up to Pearl Harbor into a nail-biter in which the tension is increased, rather than diminished, by the fact that we know how terribly it will end. It’s impossible to avoid the belief that the one man who did his job without error was the same who took the blame.
If I was to pick a nit, the book could use a bit more detail about Kimmel’s dishonor in the first chapters. We’re told that he was stripped of his stars and blamed for the attack to some extent, but without knowing the history, I wasn’t aware what a raw deal he was given until the final third of the book. Since, in the Internet future, we will all be infamous for fifteen minutes, (at least), the story of an outraged public responding with fury before the truth is in rings more than a little familiar.
With that said, the authors have done a mitzvah here: they’ve comprehensively exonerated a man who spent the last decades of his life trying desperately to clear his name. It’s extremely hard to read the book and not think the US President has a responsibility to restore Kimmel to his full rank.
[A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor: Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice will be released on November 15th. It is available for pre-order through Amazon.]