The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA [Hardcover]

Burton Hersh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1992

The initial publication of "The Old Boys" in 1992 raised so much dust that it has taken a decade for the air to clear. Subtitled "The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA," the work laid out the involvement of the lawyers who founded civilian intelligence in the United States -- 'Wild Bill' Donovan, Allen and Foster Dulles, Frank Wisner -- with several generations of reactionary, even Nazi-lining clients. Abetted by counterparts from the diplomatic side of the sheets, from Bill Bullitt to George Kennan and the notorious Carmel Offie, the founders incorporated both practices and personalities long associated with the Third Reich into their anticommunist crusade, and by so doing undermined almost everything they attempted. Patriotic and well-intentioned men, they played into the hands of forces that threatened us.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A sprawling chronicle that details how a clutch of Ivy- educated Wall Street attorneys and their associates--the ``Old Boy network''--created the Central Intelligence Agency and influenced the formative decades of the cold war. Hersh (The Mellon Family, 1978, etc.) has performed a prodigious job of research, conducting more than 100 interviews and burrowing through mounds of archives and declassified documents. His narrative runs from the 1919 Versailles conference, where the young Dulles brothers observed uncle Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state, to the Bay of Pigs operation and the frustrating retirement years of its principals. Six men occupy the foreground here: sanctimonious John Foster Dulles and his hedonistic younger brother Allen, who before their heyday as Eisenhower cold warriors were well-heeled corporate lawyers who ran interference for German firms instrumental in the Nazis' prewar rearmament; legendary OSS chief ``Wild Bill'' Donovan; Frank Wisner, ultimately CIA operations chief; New Deal diplomat William C. Bullitt; and Carmel Offie, the dandyish assistant to Bullitt and Wisner and a master of diplomatic sleight-of-hand. Hersh hopes to show how these latter-day Wilsonian ``global salvationists,'' aching to roll back the Communist menace, forged an intelligence apparatus intoxicated with the black arts of covert activities- -loosely supervised, often amateurish, sometimes harebrained. He sheds light on the frantic wartime operations of Allen Dulles and Wisner in Europe, as well as on how much the Americans benefited from the bulging Soviet files of ex-Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen. Yet time and again, Hersh projects his insouciance until it begins to grate (e.g., George Kennan was a ``brilliant, mavericky, neurasthenic cheese-parer''). Dulles & Co. deserve a more straightforward treatment than this arch account that bites off more than it can chew. (Eight-page b&w photo insert--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"...skillfully captures what is probably the most important conclusion to draw about Donovan, Dulles, and Wisner..." -- New York Times Book Review, 1992

"...thoughtful portrait of the CIA as an often amateurish, usually misguided bureaucracy...most revealing." -- Baltimore City Paper, 1992

"Burton Hersh has brought to life the dark and secret world of American intelligence in its formative years." -- Daniel Schorr, NPR political analyst

"...skillfully captures what is probably the most important conclusion to draw about Donovan, Dulles, and Wisner..." -- New York Times Book Review, 1992

"...thoughtful portrait of the CIA as an often amateurish, usually misguided bureaucracy...most revealing." -- Baltimore City Paper, 1992

"Burton Hersh has brought to life the dark and secret world of American intelligence in its formative years." --Daniel Schorr, NPR political analyst --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 536 pages
• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons (March 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684193485
• ISBN-13: 978-0684193489
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #98 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > True Accounts > Espionage

More About the Author

Burton Hersh Literary Background

After a rousing undergraduate career at Harvard, during which he won the History and Literature Prize, the top Bowdoin Prize, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Burton Hersh pushed off into a life as a professional writer animated by occasional triumphs and more or less constant controversy. After college he spent a year in the Black Forest as a Fulbright student, then a stint in the military as a radio operator along the Czech border and a high-clearance German translator and intelligence specialist for the Seventh Army. Then, newly married, he moved to the Austrian Alps and wrote his still - fortunately - unpublished first novel.

He returned to the United States in 1961 just as John F. Kennedy was taking over the presidency. Throughout the subsequent decade he specialized in well-paid magazine articles on skiing, culture and politics for a variety of magazines from Horizon to Esquire. After four years in New York and New Haven he wrote his first published novel, The Ski People, and the widely anthologized Esquire piece on the fledgling Senator Kennedy, whose life would generate three books by Hersh over the next four decades.

The first, The Education of Edward Kennedy, with its moment-to-moment breakdown of the events surrounding the Chappaquiddick cookout, was regarded by right-wingers as a whitewash of Kennedy's stumbling performance that terrible evening. The book was followed up by the bestselling The Mellon Family and, in 1992, after a decade of massive interviewing and research, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. Bitterly resented inside the Agency for spilling all its secrets though cherished by the likes of John Le Carre, the group biography is now required reading for every incoming officer and in evidence on most desks at Langley, its institutional history.

In 1997 Hersh published The Shadow President, a treatment of Kennedy's subsequent twenty-five years that drew raves from critics from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to Tom Wicker to Daniel Schorr. A novel, The Nature of the Beast, that explored the ethical substructure of the CIA and was widely praised by critics up to the Agency's own Inspector General, came out in 2003. In 2007 a book that came out of a whole career of journalistic, social, and at times political involvement with the Kennedys and explored the secret family connections to the underworld that undoubtedly led to Jack Kennedy's assassination, Bobby and J. Edgar, brought down a tsunami of attacks from both the left and the right. Insults - but nothing specific ever to refute the details of who killed JFK and how - have poured in ever since from ignorant commentators.

In 2010 a thoroughly edited and much expanded and updated version of the two previous books on Edward Kennedy came out, Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography, and was generally hailed as definitive on Kennedy's life and career. It contained the ins and outs of the very nearly lethal vendetta between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the reminiscences of the woman who had been Kennedy's great love during the most trying years of his middle life.

Much additional detail is available on Burton Hersh's website, www.treefarmbooks.com. He vents his opinions on a more or less weekly blog, What's Left Out: http://burtonhersh.blogspot.com/ Keep reading!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars essential for anyone interested in US intell history, December 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (Paperback)

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable writer. It caused howls of protest from the CIA and US media elite when first published, but there is no doubt that Hersh has the goods: the book is now on the CIA reading list!
Hersh himself clearly did vast independent primary research and interview work for the book. His anatomy of the Dulles brothers, Frank Wisner, Wild Bill Donovan, Bill Casey,and the creepy but omnipresent Carmel Offie is superb. Wall Street staffed the US intelligence elite, in 1941 as in 2001---and oil and high finance were and still are that world's elixir. Lastly, the index and notes are a boon to future researchers. [Interestingly, none of the Dulles-adoring biographies published of late cites any of Hersh's work. Hmmmm.]
Hersh has a novelist's skill in bringing this cast of real characters to life: the descriptions are unforgettable, but the research, especially to me, a fellow digger in contemporary intelligence history, is awe-inspiring. Hersh has not written a book predicated on others' books: there is a treasure trove here of original research, especially in relation to the Wall Street connections to Nazi business and, critically, to the SAFEHAVEN investigation, rediscovery of which of course broke the Holocaust gold story some years back.
But most of all, this book is hugely entertaining and not a little amusing, told in a confidingly baroque language, it's true, but imagine you're hearing these stories in a clubland chair, from someone Who Knows Stuff, of a long and fascinating evening. Listen carefully: your attention'll be rewarded.
This is nuanced, detailed writing about complicated history: one's reading effort, I found, rewards---this is an important book laying open the defining people and defining events of the US intelligence empire. It's no surprise Hersh is in high demand as an intelligence expert since Sept 11th, as the CIA and its watchers look for answers.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful stuff, May 2, 2007

By 

Iceboxlogic (Stratford, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (Paperback)

I first consulted THE OLD BOYS some years ago, in connection with some tricky wartime research for the investigative unit of the CBC. Since then, I've re-read it---twice. THE OLD BOYS is a book that rewards rereading, in no small way because it's authoritative, painstakingly researched, and---no mean thing in history as potentially arcane as this---richly amusing. Not only can Hersh engrave Aubreyesque portraits of players major and minor with a novelist's eye but his depth of psychological insight into such complex characters as the Dulles brothers, not to mention the men who carry the OSS into the CIA of more modern times, like Helms and Casey, is, bluntly, masterful. Those who knock this book clearly haven't heard what a freshly retired Director of Operations at the CIA has said on the record about THE OLD BOYS: it's a masterpiece he gives copies of to the uninitiated every Christmas. Buy it. Pass it on. And, while you're at it, get a copy of BOBBY AND EDGAR, Hersh's new book on the long war between Bobby Kennedy and J Edgar Hoover, with Joe Kennedy Sr lurking behind the arras...

19 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Important, but too much eloquence, sarcasm and obscurity, October 28, 1999

By 

"bolide" (Littleton, CO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (Hardcover)

I was born in 1950, so most of the key players in the story were dead and buried before I even started to learn what a bunch of assholes they were. There is certainly much in this book to support that attitude, a good deal more than I realized even as a screaming anti-Viet war protester in 1969-70. The comprehensive fascist economic,legal and social entanglements - especially the Dulles Boys, in Germany, Italy, England, Rumania, etc. are laid bare, with 64 pages of footnotes! Before, during and after the big bad war. Hersh provides the basis for a rather more realistic appraisal of the early-mid cold war, but only hints at the outrage aroused in the Soviets (not just bad old boy Stalin)when we scooped up all those Nazis- Gehlen and hundreds more, and put them right back to work on our payroll, within months if not weeks after VE Day. However, most of the names dropped by Mr. Hersh mean nothing to me, or to the very large majority of the literate population alive today. I occasionally had a very tough time understanding his repeated but highly variable references to dozens of old Wall Street law firms, German corporations, and the go-betweens and flunkies skittering around in every chapter. A big chart with arrows and color coding would be helpful, and a few lists of the old characters. A glossary would also be good, to define the arcane Brit, Frenchy and German lingo that is tossed in like pepper on your salad. At times even my unabridged dictionary was no help. I suppose that 20 years from now, almost no one will have the motivation to plow through the pointless bric-a-brac to find the fascinating historical data. A pity.