For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush by Christopher Andrew - March 1996

New York: HarperPerennial, March 1996. Paperback. Near Fine. Interior pristine. Light shelfwear. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. xii + 660 pages.

This impressive survey assesses the extent to which U.S. secret intelligence has been influenced by the personalities and policies of our presidents. Although George Washington and Woodrow Wilson made good use of secret intelligence, the author shows there was no official American intelligence community until WWII, when Franklin D. Roosevelt relied more attentively on intelligence collection and analysis than any previous president. But, Andrew notes, only Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and George Bush showed a flair for using intelligence. Eisehower's wartime command experience exploiting covert resources served him well when he became chief executive; JFK presided over the most spectacular intelligence success of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, but also the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. As for George Bush, the first former CIA director elected to the White House, Andrew demonstrates that he had a better grasp of intelligence capabilities than any of his predecessors.

Contents: Introduction: the president and intelligence -- From George Washington to the twentieth century -- The First World War and after: from Woodrow Wilson to Herbert Hoover -- Franklin D. Roosevelt: the path to Pearl Harbor -- Roosevelt at war (1941-1945) -- Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) -- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) -- John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) -- Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) -- Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) -- Gerald R. Ford (1974-1977) -- Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) -- Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) -- George Bush (1989-1993) -- Conclusion: intelligence after the Cold War.