Reconstructing the murder, investigation, trial, and aftermath, Who Killed George Polk? offers a penetrating analysis of the willingness of the American media - including CBS and a committee of prominent journalists headed by Walter Lippmann - to accept the government's version of events despite numerous inconsistencies. The book also explores the fate of the handful of journalists who had questioned the original coverup and shows that even when additional developments turned the official version on its head, they were no longer in a position to press for a new investigation. All had become victims of anticommunist witchhunts. Arguing that the mainstream media and U.S. government were so blinded by cold war political considerations that they overlooked the most obvious culprits for the Polk murder, Elias Vlanton proves that Polk was likely killed neither by the communists, as originally charged, nor by corrupt Greek government officials, as claimed by a recent book and a CBS 60 Minutes broadcast. Instead, based on evidence uncovered during Vlanton's nineteen-year investigation of the case, the author presents the only plausible scenario of how and why Polk was murdered.
In war-torn Greece, the murder of a young American reporter sent a shock through the West and set the stage for the four-decade Cold War; now with a new introduction by the author Greece in 1948 was a country reeling from two major conflicts. The Nazi occupation and World War II had left it weakened, and the Greek Civil War—already raging for two years—had torn it apart. One of the earliest clashes of the Cold War, Greece’s civil dispute pitted the American-backed royalist government against the Soviet-funded Greek Communist Party. Reporting at the front lines for CBS News, George Polk drew the ire of both sides with his uncompromising and incisive coverage. In mid-May, days after going missing, Polk was found dead, shot execution style with his hands and feet bound. What transpired next was a mad scramble of finger pointing and international outrage. To appease its American backers, the Greek government quickly secured the dubious confession of a Communist journalist—though the bulk of the evidence pointed to the royalists. An influential moment in the early days of the Cold War and a powerful force in the formation of the Truman Doctrine, the Polk conspiracy was emblematic of the ideological conflict that would embroil the globe for the next forty years.
An engrossing and richly panoramic novel from a major new writer, based on a true story... In 1948, the body of an American journalist is found floating in the bay off Thessaloniki. A small-time Greek journalist is tried and convicted for the murder...but when he's released twelve years later, he claims his confession was the result of torture. Flash forward to contemporary Greece, where a rebellious young high school student is given an assignment for a school project: find the truth. And as he begrudgingly takes it on, he begins to make a startling series of gripping discoveries--about history, love, and even his own family's involvement. Based on the real story of famed CBS reporter George Polk—journalism’s prestigious Polk Awards were named after him—The Scapegoat is a sweeping saga that brings together the Greece of the post-World War II era with the Greece of today, a country facing dangerous times once again. As told by key players in the story—the dashing journalist’s Greek widow; the mother and sisters of the convicted man; the brutal Thessaloniki Chief of Police; a U.S. Foreign Office investigator, and, finally, the modern-day student, in the novel's most stirring narration of all--The Scapegoat confronts questions of truth, justice, and sacrifice...and how the past is always with us.
Returning for its second year but reimagined in a new impulse format, with a new title, new cover, new mission, and new sensibility, here is The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi with Her Bare Hands, a pithier, quirkier collection of the 164 best page-turning obituaries from The New York Times. Written by top journalists, each story is a gem of a bio, a full life in miniature. There’s the famous: Steve Jobs, including the story of how he was reunited with a sister he never knew, the novelist Mona Simpson. And the almost famous: Ruth Stone, a poet who worked in relative obscurity until she won the National Book Award at the age of 87. The behind-the-scenes, like Arch West, inventor of the Dorito, who pulled America’s snacks out of the 1950s doldrums and created a $5-billion-a-year product, and the out-there, like self-styled anarchist and maverick artist (and real estate mogul and museum director) Bob Cassilly, who died at the controls of his bulldozer while building “Cementland” in St. Louis. And because of the chronological organization of the book, the stories, one next to the other, make for an addictive-as-salted-peanuts book: Mark O. Hatfield, the celebrated antiwar Republican senator from Oregon, next to Nancy Wake of the title, the impoverished New Zealander who grew up to become a high-society hostess and heroine of the French Resistance—the socialite who did, indeed, kill a Nazi with her bare hands.
Electrifying investigation of White House lies about the assassination of Osama bin Laden In 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, the man the United States had begun chasing before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost President Obama’s first term and played a major part in his reelection victory of the following year. But much of the story of that night, as presented to the world, was incomplete, or a lie. The evidence of what actually went on remains hidden. At the same time, the full story of the United States’ involvement in the Syrian civil war has been kept behind a diplomatic curtain, concealed by doublespeak. It is a policy of obfuscation that has compelled the White House to turn a blind eye to Turkey’s involvement in supporting ISIS and its predecessors in Syria. This investigation, which began as a series of essays in the London Review of Books, has ignited a firestorm of controversy in the world media. In his introduction, Hersh asks what will be the legacy of Obama’s time in office. Was it an era of “change we can believe in” or a season of lies and compromises that continued George W. Bush’s misconceived War on Terror? How did he lose the confidence of the general in charge of America’s forces who acted in direct contradiction to the White House? What else do we not know?.
Eclipse of the Assassins investigates the sensational 1984 murder of Mexico's most influential newspaper columnist, Manuel Buendía, and how that crime reveals the lethal hand of the U.S. government in Mexico and Central America during the final decades of the twentieth century.
Threats to journalists carry many different lessons, but one is constant: People who would intimidate or kill journalists are usually terrified that someone might find out. Journalists who want to protect one another need do nothing more than what should come naturally to them: report on threats to journalists--big threats and small threats, whether they are directed against the international luminaries of the profession or small timers. Non-journalists can also play a big part in the fight to protect journalists. Next to tough and timely reporting that establishes the facts of a case, nothing protects a journalist so much as public outrage and public support. Ordinary citizens can play an enormous role by pressuring thugs and tyrants who would like to stifle the freedom of the press. The freedom of journalists is consequently the bedrock of freedom for all people. Chapters and contributors to 'Journalists in Peril' include: "The Clash of Arms in Exotic Locales" by Peter Arnett; "Press Freedom--Balkan Style" by Kati Marton; "Grim Prospects for Hong Kong" by John Schidlovsky; "Russian Reporters--Between a Hammer and an Anvil" by losif M. Dzyaloshinsky; "Defiant Publishing in Nigeria" by Dapo Olorunyomi; "Turkish Journalists on Trial" by Ahmet Emin; "In America, Justice for Some" by Ana Arana; and "Blood and Fear in Italy" by Candida Curzi. The tragic accounts detailed in 'Journalists in Peril' are poignantly written and are important reading for all concerned with democracy in the world, especially political scientists, government officials, and those involved in the various communications professions.
The Biographical Encyclopedia of American Radio presents the very best biographies of the internationally acclaimed three-volume Encyclopedia of Radio in a single volume. It includes more than 200 biographical entries on the most important and influential American radio personalities, writers, producers, directors, newscasters, and network executives. With 23 new biographies and updated entries throughout, this volume covers key figures from radio’s past and present including Glenn Beck, Jessie Blayton, Fred Friendly, Arthur Godfrey, Bob Hope, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Ryan Seacrest, Laura Schlesinger, Red Skelton, Nina Totenberg, Walter Winchell, and many more. Scholarly but accessible, this encyclopedia provides an unrivaled guide to the voices behind radio for students and general readers alike.
Boasting equal parts scholarship and style, "All Governments Lie" is a highly readable, groundbreaking, and timely look at I. F. Stone -- one of America's most independent and revered journalists, whose work carries the same immediacy it did almost a half century ago, highlighting the ever-present need for dissenting voices. In the world of Washington political journalism, notorious for trading independence for access, I. F. "Izzy" Stone was so unique as to be a genuine wonder. Always skeptical -- "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out," he memorably quipped -- Stone was ahead of the pack on the most pivotal twentieth-century trends: the rise of Hitler and Fascism, disastrous Cold War foreign policies, covert actions of the FBI and CIA, the greatness of the Civil Rights movement, the horror of Vietnam, the strengths and weaknesses of the antiwar movement, the disgrace of Iran-contra, and the class greed of Reaganomics. His constant barrage against J. Edgar Hoover earned him close monitoring by the FBI from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War, and even an investigation for espionage during the fifties. After making his mark on feisty New York dailies and in The Nation -- scoring such scoops as the discovery of American cartels doing business with Nazi Germany -- Stone became unemployable during the dark days of McCarthyism. Out of desperation he started his four-page I. F. Stone's Weekly, which ran from 1953 to 1971. The first journalist to label the Gulf of Tonkin affair a sham excuse to escalate the Vietnam War, Stone garnered worldwide fans, was read in the corridors of power, and became wealthy. Later, the "world's oldest living freshman" learned Greek to write his bestseller The Trial of Socrates. Here, for the first time, acclaimed journalist and author Myra MacPherson brings the legendary Stone into sharp focus. Rooted in fifteen years of research, this monumental biography includes information from newly declassified international documents and Stone's unpublished five-thousand-page FBI file, as well as personal interviews with Stone and his wife, Esther; with famed modern thinkers; and with the best of today's journalists. It illuminates the vast sweep of turbulent twentieth-century history as well as Stone's complex and colorful life. The result is more than a masterful portrait of a remarkable character; it's a far-reaching assessment of journalism and its role in our culture.
A national bestseller, this extraordinary work of investigative reporting uncovers the identities, and the remarkable stories, of the CIA secret agents who died anonymously in the service of their country. In the entrance of the CIA headquarters looms a huge marble wall into which seventy-one stars are carved-each representing an agent who has died in the line of duty. Official CIA records only name thirty-five of them, however. Undeterred by claims that revealing the identities of these "nameless stars" might compromise national security, Ted Gup sorted through thousands of documents and interviewed over 400 CIA officers in his attempt to bring their long-hidden stories to light. The result of this extraordinary work of investigation is a surprising glimpse at the real lives of secret agents, and an unprecedented history of the most compelling—and controversial—department of the US government.
