THE LAST HONEST MAN

Vigorous biography of the Idaho senator who, “like an American Cicero, offered the United States a brief glimpse of what it would be like to turn away from its imperialistic ambitions.”

Democratic politician Frank Church (1924-1984), who was elected to the U.S. Senate before Idaho became a solidly Republican state, displayed a natural ability to maneuver through the knotty landscape of politics. As two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning political journalist Risen writes, he didn’t mind making enemies in the absence of allies: “Frank Church was a loner in the Senate…and didn’t go out of his way to cultivate close ties.” A strong supporter of John F. Kennedy, he went up against Lyndon Johnson on a number of key issues. Though he endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (and later regretted it), he proved a stalwart opponent of the Vietnam War. He came to equate that war with a covert program of American imperialism, and after helping conduct the Watergate inquiries, he formed a Senate committee that exposed the nefarious activities of the intelligence community, including the CIA’s alliance with the Mafia in an effort to assassinate Fidel Castro and its connection to many other killings—perhaps even JFK’s. Woven into Risen’s story are the still-unsolved murders of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and a made-man foot soldier, both of whom supplied the Church Committee with information. Church also examined presidents’ use of emergency powers to advance their agendas; in this as well as other discoveries of his committee, he arrived at “a difficult question: was the disgraced Richard Nixon really that different from his predecessors in the White House?” The answer is debatable, but Risen credits Church with preventing the rise of the deep state, which “remains a myth, a right-wing conspiracy theory,” precisely “because Frank Church brought the intelligence community fully into the American system of government.”

A welcome restoration of a largely forgotten politician who navigated issues that continue to reverberate.