The Last Honest Man

BOOK REVIEW
The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy
by James Risen & Thomas Risen 2023

About the Authors
James Risen is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Throughout his career, Risen’s explosive investigative reporting has triggered a series of political firestorms. Among his best-selling books are State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration and Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.

Thomas Risen has spent years reporting on U.S. politics and national security, including the intelligence community, digital surveillance, and the War on Terror. He currently works as an aviation journalist and lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife and daughter.

About the Book
“With The Last Honest Man, James Risen has proven himself to be not just one of America’s greatest investigative reporters but also a great modern historian. And his cast of characters in this page-turner could not be any richer: from its protagonist, Senator Frank Church, one of the most consequential lawmakers of the 20th century, to Kennedy, Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover and from Martin Luther King to mobster Sam Giancana to the CIA’s notorious ‘poisoner in chief,’ the sinister Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Above all else, Risen documents the outrageous abuses of government power that the Church Committee exposed, especially at the CIA and FBI—crimes, and disclosures, that continue to shape our world today.”―Philip Shenon, New York Times bestselling author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

“A timely and long overdue reassessment of perhaps the most important congressional investigation of the last century, The Last Honest Man resurrects Frank Church and reveals his quest to expose and remedy the overreach of US intelligence agencies before 1975. This book should be required reading for any elected official seeking to pick up where Church & Co. left off nearly fifty years ago.”―Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“James Risen has at last brought us the richly reported biography that Frank Church, one of the most consequential senators of the 20th century, deserves. At a time when so many lawmakers are predictably partisan and deferential to the executive branch, Risen reminds us of another era: when a liberal could represent Idaho, a Democrat could challenge his own party’s presidents, and a senator could assert Congress’s role in national security.”―Jonathan Martin, New York Times best-selling co-author of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle For America’s Future

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines Senator Frank Church, the man at the center of numerous investigations into the abuses of power within the American government.

For decades now, America’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable.

Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power—and winning—in The Last Honest Man.