Presidents' Secrets
The Use and Abuse of Hidden Power
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Narrated by:
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David Heath
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By:
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Mary Graham
About this listen
How presidents use secrecy to protect the nation, foster diplomacy, and gain power
Ever since the nation's most important secret meeting - the Constitutional Convention - presidents have struggled to balance open, accountable government with necessary secrecy in military affairs and negotiations. For the first 120 years, a culture of open government persisted, but new threats and technology have long since shattered the old bargains. Today, presidents neither protect vital information nor provide the open debate Americans expect.
Mary Graham tracks the rise in governmental secrecy that began with surveillance and loyalty programs during Woodrow Wilson's administration, explores how it developed during the Cold War, and analyzes efforts to reform the secrecy apparatus and restore oversight in the 1970s. Chronicling the expansion of presidential secrecy in the Bush years, Graham explains what presidents and the American people can learn from earlier crises, why the attempts of Congress to rein in stealth activities don't work, and why presidents cannot hide actions that affect citizens' rights and values.
©2017 Mary Graham (P)2017 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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In Deep
- The FBI, CIA, and the Truth about America's "Deep State"
- By: David Rohde
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Three-quarters of Americans believe that a group of unelected government and military officials secretly manipulate or direct national policy in the United States. This sweeping exploration examines the CIA and FBI scandals of the past 50 years - from the Church Committee's exposure of Cold War abuses, to Abscam, to false intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, to NSA mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden. It then investigates the claims and counterclaims of the Trump era, and the relentless spread of conspiracy theories online and on-air.
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Pure Propaganda
- By S Wilkey on 05-21-20
By: David Rohde
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Broken Government
- How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches
- By: John W. Dean
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In his eighth book, Dean takes the broadest and deepest view yet of the dysfunctional chaos and institutional damage that the Republican Party and its core conservatives have inflicted on the federal government. He assesses the state of all three branches of government, tracing their decline through the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.
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Attention Policy Wonks - This is the book for you
- By Neal on 09-19-09
By: John W. Dean
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The Corruption Chronicles
- Obama's Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government
- By: Tom Fitton
- Narrated by: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Judicial Watch, America's largest nonpartisan government watchdog, has investigated the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Judicial Watch is the group that helped impeach Bill Clinton and took the Bush White House secrecy all the way up to the Supreme Court. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, this grassroots group has filed over 700 open records demands and dozens of lawsuits, including a successful fight over the secret Obama White House visitor logs.
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Unbelievable
- By Bill Redfield on 01-30-17
By: Tom Fitton
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Hubris
- The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
- By: Michael Isikoff, David Corn
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 18 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This fast-paced, behind-the-scenes narrative tells the inside story of how the Bush administration used bad intelligence to sell and then justify the Iraq war. Veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn take the reader behind the scenes at the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress, where controversial decisions and turf battles were fought in the highest circles of the Bush administration.
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Hubris
- By Pamela on 12-19-06
By: Michael Isikoff, and others
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Putin's Kleptocracy
- Who Owns Russia?
- By: Karen Dawisha
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.
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Who owns Russia
- By Amazon Customer on 11-09-14
By: Karen Dawisha
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Stalin's Secret Agents
- The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government
- By: M. Stanton Evans, Herbert Romerstein
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Most Americans have grown accustomed to accept the version of history that the Soviets were our noble allies and took the brunt of the casualties during World War II. But after decades of research by veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans and intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, the truth has come to light and is now exposed in Stalin's Secret Agents. Evans and Romerstein focus on the role of secret Communist Alger Hiss at the crucial Yalta Conference of 1945, where vast U.S. concessions were made to Russia....
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Stalin actually ran our war policy!
- By WSV1975 on 07-04-13
By: M. Stanton Evans, and others
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The Restless Wave
- Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations
- By: John McCain, Mark Salter
- Narrated by: John McCain, Beau Bridges
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In a time when Washington, DC and the country are more polarized than they have been for decades, John McCain is the rare public figure who has earned the respect of people on both sides of the aisle. He is a model for bipartisanship and political integrity. In his 40 years in politics, McCain has never been afraid to buck trends or ruffle a few feathers. His words are more important today than ever.
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A true patriot
- By Diane Peresie on 05-29-18
By: John McCain, and others
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One Man Against the World
- The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
- By: Tim Weiner
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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Based largely on documents declassified in only the last few years, One Man Against the World paints a devastating portrait of a tortured yet brilliant man who led the country largely according to a deep-seated insecurity and distrust of not only his cabinet and Congress but the American population at large. In riveting, tick-tock prose, Weiner illuminates how the Vietnam War and the Watergate controversy that brought about Nixon's demise were inextricably linked.
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A worthy listen, if a bit sensationalized.
- By Reza on 06-20-15
By: Tim Weiner
What listeners say about Presidents' Secrets
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-20-23
It’s okay
I heard Mary Graham interviewed on a podcast, The West Wing Weekly, and was inspired to listen to this book.
Unfortunately it did not lead up to the hype. Not a bad listen, but eh is how I would sum it up.
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- Philo
- 07-04-17
Helpful; covers a lot of ground pretty well
This topic is massive, detail-laden, and troubling. It touches on the best and the worst of how our system works in practice. I like the basic approach taken here: the trade-offs of secrecy are dealt with from the very start (Washington's administration), through a series of pivotal US history scenes. There is enough historical color alongside the facts to keep it interesting and flowing well. The author mostly chooses to let the stories tell the story, i.e., does not layer on some big abstract economics theories (which might have been interesting, as in, interplay with game theory, agency problems, and information asymmetry). The approach is pretty common-sense, with, on one side, the pull of democratic public demands to know important facts, set against leaders' rationales to conceal them. As the story moves into the 20th century, the secrecy scales up dramatically with Woodrow Wilson and later, late WW2 through today, with such events as arrival of atomic weapons, and the Cold War, leading to vast secret bureaucracies and covert actions (while presidents' attitudes and oversight varied, as did Congress's). I like the book best from Truman through George W. Bush. As we pivot to Obama, and into post-Obama, the explanation is reasonable, but I still had a lot of unanswered questions. Obama's earnestness and deliberative legalistic nature and concern don't, in my mind, afford him the relative pass he gets here. But none of this is simple. This book gamely takes on a big swath of material and handles it deftly, carefully, and without shrillness. It still asks the challenging questions of all the presidents' choices. I feel better grounded in this whole topic.
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