Powers, Thomas 1940–

(Thomas Moore Powers)

PERSONAL: Born December 12, 1940, in New York, NY; son of Joshua Bryant (a publisher) and Susan (Moore) Powers; married Candace Molloy, August 21, 1965; children: Amanda, Susan, Cassandra. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1964.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Knopf Publicity, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. E-mail—weisshky37@yahoo.com.

CAREER: Rome Daily American, Rome, Italy, reporter, 1965–67; United Press International, New York, NY, reporter, 1967–70; freelance writer, 1970–. Also makes appearances as lecturer.

MEMBER: PEN American Center, Council on Foreign Relations.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, Columbia University, 1971, for five-part series on Diana Oughton and the Weathermen; American Book Award nomination, Before Columbus Foundation, 1980, for The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA; Olive Branch Award for outstanding coverage of the nuclear arms issue, 1984, for "What Is It About" in Atlantic.

WRITINGS:

Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1971.

The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People, 1964–68, Grossman (New York, NY), 1973.

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Knopf (New York, NY), 1979.

Thinking about the Next War, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

(Compiler, with Ruthven Tremain) Total War: What It Is, How It Got That Way, Morrow (New York, NY), 1988.

Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

The Confirmation, Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.

Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of essays to periodicals, including Commonweal, New York Review of Books, and Rolling Stone. Contributing editor, Atlantic.

SIDELIGHTS: Piecing together interviews, public records, newly released documents and other published accounts as well as personal insights, Thomas Powers constructs examinations of recent history and current events. His books confront contemporary issues such as radicalism in the late 1960s, the 1960s antiwar movement, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the threat of nuclear war and reveal how people act and react within these contexts. In each study, Powers's investigation allowed him to add new information to the available material on his chosen topic and to draw new conclusions sometimes contrary to previously accepted analyses.

In 1971 Powers and Lucinda Franks earned a Pulitzer Prize for their series of articles on a young, upper-middle-class student-turned-revolutionary. Powers's first book, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, is his expansion of those articles. Born in 1942, Diana Oughton was the daughter of an influential landowner, banker, restaurateur, and prominent citizen of Dwight, Illinois. She prepared for college at a private school in Virginia, completed her undergraduate study at Bryn Mawr, and pursued a graduate degree at the University of Michigan. Her social concern led her to work in Guatemala and then to teach at a special school in the Philadelphia inner city. She joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and later became a member of its Weatherman faction. Oughton died March 6, 1970, when the Greenwich Village townhouse in which she and other Weathermen members were manufacturing bombs exploded.

Diana is a study of the young middle class of the late 1960s and the social currents that moved them. The background of this generation offered them the freedom to pursue higher education, education that informed them of inequality and injustice; their background also placed them among the oppressors. "Revolutionary ardor became a kind of absolution from class," wrote Susan Brownmiller in the New York Times Book Review. They organized to push for social reforms and policy changes. Dissatisfied with the results of nonviolent protest, however, many became increasingly radical and some formed splinter groups given to extreme tactics. These splinter groups "came to embrace the fantasy that by violent action they could precipitate revolution," noted Fred J. Cook in the Saturday Review. What they did not understand, said Cook, is that "in America, wedded to a democratic system, violence has always been self-defeating."

Powers reveals this progression by profiling Diana Oughton and her involvement with Weatherman, a violent offshoot of the SDS. "At [Weatherman's] center (with Diana as a paradigm) was a consuming desire both to eradicate their privileged pasts and transform their impotent presents," George Abbott White observed in Commonweal. The group turned to "obliterating the past with exemplary bombs and the present with obsessive sexuality that was finally as cruel and brutal and barbaric as the evils they were fighting," added White.

Through focusing on the individual, Powers hopes to illuminate his or her larger framework: the groups, movements, and issues of that particular era. As Brownmiller commented: "It works, and brilliantly, for Diana's story is the evolution of Weatherman, and by placing her in a political, rather than a personal or psychological, context, her inexorable descent into the basement workshop of the townhouse becomes a history lesson of critical importance, a tragedy of alienated rage performed by some of America's most brilliant, sensitive and privileged youth." In the 1960s, protest accelerated much positive social reform and policy change, as Powers demonstrates in his second book, The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People, 1964–68. But where the protest turned violent, it went wrong.

In his third book, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Powers again addresses larger issues by first focusing on the individual. A biography of former CIA director Richard Helms, the book offers a history of the CIA and a discussion of the agency's relationship with other government branches. "It is an intelligent collection of mostly well-told tales about the CIA, its cold war origins, oddball personalities, plots against [Cuban dictator Fidel] Castro, connections with Watergate culled from private interviews, public records… and previously published works about intelligence and Watergate by more than 80 authors," observed David M. Alpern in Newsweek.

During World War II, Helms worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a CIA precursor; he joined the CIA at its inception in 1947. In 1952 Helms became a chief of operations and in 1966, director of the CIA. President Nixon dismissed him in December, 1972. Powers offers a portrait of this career agent who rose to the top. "He gives us a patriotic bureaucrat," commented novelist John le Carré in the New York Times Book Review, "and a man of determined plainness, who loved his service and his country and preferred to obey 'one President at a time' rather than puzzle over the fine print of the Constitution." Helms was, according to Best Sellers contributor Joseph A. Cawley, "the very model of a secret agent."

In 1975 Helms was indicted for perjury for testimony he had given a Senate committee inquiring into CIA operations. He was found guilty of lesser charges: not offering complete and accurate answers to Senate questions. Powers finds that Helms's choice not to divulge any agency secrets was not surprising. "For Helms … secrecy was not just second nature, it was his element, the very basis of his personality," explained le Carré. Added Alpern: "In the end, Powers concludes, Helms kept the CIA's secrets to protect himself, salvage what he could of public trust in the CIA and maintain that curtain of illusion essential to intelligence operations."

The Man Who Kept the Secrets also "includes the personalities (careers, dreams) of the people on the first and second levels who ran the agency, how they performed, how they regarded themselves and each other," pointed out Eliot Fremont-Smith in the Village Voice. What Powers found was not a group of cloak-and-dagger spies or sophisticated "James Bond" agents; nor were mystery and intrigue at the heart of the agency. Powers "has written an excellent book on blankness and banality," observed John Leonard in the New York Times, "the best book on the C.I.A. ever written. The blankness at the middle is a blankness of character, of careerism."

Through Helms and other agents emerges the history of the CIA. "[Powers] came away from the effort respecting the quality and caliber of the spymasters but questioning the evolution of the CIA's role," Charles Madigan wrote in the Chicago Tribune. At the time Powers was writing this book, the CIA was under great pressure to account for its involvement in plots to remove foreign heads of state from power. Assassination plots against General Kassem of Iraq, Lumumba of the Congo, and Castro of Cuba, as well as schemes to overthrow Sukarno of Indonesia and Allende of Chile, had been uncovered. The prevailing view was that the CIA had gotten out of control, devising and implementing its own foreign policy with no regard for government policy. As Michael Ledeen wrote in Commentary: "Powers effectively demolishes this demonology and focuses our attention where it belongs: on the ideology and conduct of the President and his colleagues in the executive branch."

"The problem, according to Powers, is that the CIA has become so closely tied to the Oval Office and subordinate to its demands that the agency often finds itself trying to bend the world to please the President instead of pursuing its intended goal: the collection of unbiased, accurate information," explained Madigan. Powers maintains that Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each used the CIA to pursue their personal policy interests when overt actions were too risky. In Powers's analysis, the plots against foreign leaders represent not the independent actions of a "rogue elephant" (in Senator Frank Church's words), but rather the pet projects of presidents and their staffs.

The conclusion that the President was ultimately responsible for the misdeeds of the CIA raised controversy in some circles. In one issue of Commonweal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., voiced his objections to Powers's analysis. Schlesinger wrote: "Every executive agency of course is nominally accountable to the President. But government agencies develop interests, purposes, constituencies, commitments, codes of their own…. This is an elementary rule of bureaucracy." Schlesinger suggested that Powers's conclusion indicates a shift in public perception influenced by the events of the day. "No doubt the inordinately uncritical reception accorded the Powers book reflects a widespread desire to believe that the CIA's past excesses were due to the iniquity of Presidents and not to the internal dynamism of over-financed and under-supervised intelligence organizations," he concluded.

Powers's response in a subsequent Commonweal article cited a Senate investigation to substantiate the author's analysis. "In its study of the covert operations conducted by the CIA," wrote Powers, "the Church Committee focused, in exhausting detail, on Indonesia, Cuba, and Chile. In all three cases the Committee found that presidents and their advisors had pressed the CIA relentlessly for results. In every instance CIA complaints were the same: they were being pressed to do too much, too quickly, by men with too little understanding of what really might be accomplished by covert action." In a specific case—President Kennedy's involvement in the many CIA plots to assassinate Castro—Powers offers his interpretation of the situation's dynamics. "It is conceivable that a failure to say no [to a Castro assassination] was taken by the CIA as permission to go ahead…. But I think it more likely that Kennedy allowed himself to say yes, shrank back from the details, and then absorbed this seemingly small assent as one more of those awful freedoms which power cannot justify, but allows."

In the face of the Cold War nuclear threat posed by the superpowers' arms race, some analysts see the fear of mutual assured destruction as a powerful and adequate deterrent; some believe it makes nuclear conflict highly unlikely. Powers suggested in his book Thinking about the Next War that a limited nuclear war not only can happen but will happen. Powers explains: "Since 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union have been preparing to fight each other in a big war, and eventually they are going to do it." Nuclear weapons may inhibit some hostile actions, but as Joseph S. Nye noted in the New York Times Book Review, "Mr. Powers argues that deterrence of rational acts of aggression cannot prevent wars that no one really intends." Powers adds: "The next [war] will probably involve the use of nuclear weapons."

As in his previous books, Powers uncovers the details of this issue through its impact on people. "Powers approaches genocidal warfare from an intensely human perspective," observed David C. Morrison in the Progressive, "zeroing in on some unhappy truths along the way." Thinking about the Next War examines "the forces that drive us in this direction [toward nuclear war], the effect of this fearful prospect on our psychology (and, in the most moving essay in the book, on the minds of our children), the kind of war that is likely to occur and the consequences." Powers's "writing is without cliches or pretentions," concluded David Corn in Nation, "full of pessimism and, probably, truth."

From speculations about the wars that loom in the world's future, Powers turns his attention to the past in Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb. Called a "rich, exciting book" by New York Times Book Review contributor David A. Hollinger, Heisenberg's War weaves together two histories: the life of German scientist Werner Heisenberg, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for his "uncertainty theory" involving the predictability of atomic movement and the chief scientist in the Nazi efforts to construct a nuclear bomb; and the efforts of Allied governments to determine the progress of Heisenberg's efforts, including U.S. scientists' pressing concerns that the Manhattan Project keep ahead well of the German's on the atomic front. Powers's "account of Allied intelligence is the more thoroughly convincing of his two stories," according to Hollinger, who noted that it "contains a greater wealth of fresh material."

Dealing with numerous archives and other records, Powers is able to recount the efforts of the OSS to infiltrate the German scientific community and even establish communications with top scientists like Heisenberg, who communicated their small effort towards a nuclear weapon for use by Hitler. But some critics questioned Powers's belief that Heisenberg deliberately stalled such development for moral reasons; as Hollinger noted, the German scientist was "less an agent of fate than a vehicle for forces in the third Reich to which he, like so many others, was blinded by what Mr. Powers calls his 'love of country.'" Still, the questions surrounding the parallel efforts to develop nuclear weapons in the early years of the twentieth century have continued to fascinate historians.

In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, contributor David Wise cited Powers's work as a "richly detailed, impressively researched and wonderfully exciting study of one of the great unanswered questions of World War II: Why were the Nazis, whose scientists had first discovered atomic fission, unable to build the bomb?" In Heisenberg's War, according to Wayne Biddle writing in the Washington Post Book World, Powers "has produced a haunting study" of parallel scientific communities composed of young, isolated, politically naive scientists forced into one of the most morally questionable roles of their century, and "of how the problems of science and society are inseparable."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, January, 1980, Joseph A. Cawley, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA; March, 1983.

Books and Bookmen, June, 1980.

Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1979, Charles Madigan, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets.

Commentary, January, 1980, Michael Ledeen, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets.

Commonweal, October 22, 1971, George Abbott White, review of Diana: The Making of a Terrorist; February 29, 1980, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets; March 14, 1980, article by Thomas Powers.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 19, 1982; March 14, 1993, David Wise, review of Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, pp. 1, 11.

Ms., January, 1983.

Nation, January 29, 1983, David Corn, review of Thinking about the Next War.

National Review, March 7, 1980.

Newsweek, October 22, 1979, David M. Alpern, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets.

New York Times, April 12, 1971; October 11, 1979, John Leonard, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. C26.

New York Times Book Review, April 11, 1971, Susan Brownmiller, review of Diana, October 14, 1973; October 14, 1979, John Le Carré, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets; January 30, 1983, Joseph S. Nye, review of Thinking about the Next War; March 14, 1993, David A. Hollinger, review of Heisenberg's War, pp. 3, 11.

Progressive, February, 1980; May, 1983, David C. Morrison, review of Thinking about the Next War.

Saturday Review, May 1, 1971, Fred J. Cook, review of Diana.

Time, November 12, 1979.

Times (London, England), April 3, 1980.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), December 12, 1982.

Village Voice, September 17, 1979, Eliot Fremont-Smith, review of The Man Who Kept the Secrets; June 21, 1983.

Washington Post Book World, February 14, 1993, Wayne Biddle, review of Heisenberg's War, pp. 1, 14.