I Pledge Allegiance: The True Story of the Walkers : An American Spy Family [Hardcover]

Howard Blum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1987

Here is an espionage story that is shocking because it is the true account of John Walker, a Navy Communications expert, who recruited his son, his brother, and his best friend to form the most damaging spy ring in American history. Will be presented as a 5-hour TV mini-series on CBS.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The author writes of Johnny Walker, the flamboyant mastermind of one of the most damaging spy rings in U.S. history, "His only loyalty was to the elaborate game he was playing." Unlike John Barron's Breaking the Ring ( LJ 4/1/87), Blum's extensively documented account concentrates on the personalities involved. Most attention is devoted to Johnny, a former Navy warrant officer who sold top secret codes and technical manuals to the Soviets for 17 years before his ex-wife exposed the operation, which by that time included their son Mike, Johnny's brother Art, and a friend. This astonishing tale of treachery is highly recommended for general collections. Kenneth F. Kister, Pinellas Park P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 438 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (October 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671626140
• ISBN-13: 978-0671626143
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,209,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Having started out my career as a reporter for the NY Times, I've moved on to being an author. And while I'm still writing non-fiction, I'm now more focused in writing books that are driven by characters and a sustained narrative. I live in Connecticut and am the father of 3 teenagers - one in college, one starting next year, and one still struggling through high school geometry. My tenth book will be published by Crown/Random House April 26. It's entitled THE FLOOR OF HEAVEN and its a true story about a cowboy turned Pinkerton detective who goes off to the Yukon Gold Rush to pursue a puzzling and suspenseful case. Twentieth Century Fox just bought the film rights, and I find the prospect of a movie based on the book to be exciting - as do the bursars at the colleges attended by my kids.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "An American Dream Gone Mad?", June 5, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: I Pledge Allegiance: I Pledge Allegiance (Paperback)

The 1980s have been judged as an age of backstabbing greed and flashy, free-spending avarice where they with the most pricey toys win. The June, 1985 arrest of retired Navy chief warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., his older brother James, only son Michael and close Navy friend Jerry Whitworth on federal espionage charges meshed perfectly with the era's predominantly materialistic values, especially after it was learned that in an incredible 17 years as a Soviet spy, Walker had earned and frivolously spent $1 million, his chief, if not sole, motivation.

Howard Blum's "I Pledge Allegiance" is a detailed, exhaustively researched and powerfully written chronicle of not only the rarefied, shadowy world of traitors, intelligence officers and spies, but a disturbing critique of American social values and how all too easily they are warped to serve selfish if not highly dangerous ends. Walker and associates over the years had handed over tons of highly-classified US Navy communications material, which, in the eyes of many defense experts, enabled the Kremlin to seriously damage if not completely neutralize our submarine and surface forces if it had so wished. Walker's spying had been so effective that it was also believed by some to have led to the unprecedented elevation of former KGB director Yuri Andropov to Soviet leader in 1982 and Moscow's downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 less than a year later.

Blum's strength as an author rests in his extensive knowledge of defense, foreign policy and intelligence matters as well as naval history, regulations and communications. This and his considerable reporting skill, demonstrated in his interviews of Walker family and friends, whose various fears, resentments, psychic injuries and strongly corrosive personal and family problems are drawn out and carefully woven into a chronicle of, as the book's jacket had said, "an American dream gone mad," makes for exciting and informative reading, something even the best works of reportage have a hard time achieving. And, the most gripping thing of all is that every bit of it really happened.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The True Life of John Walker the person, the Spy, November 25, 2008

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This book provides a more thorough and thus a more honest picture of John Walker than did his own self-serving book "The Life of a Spy." For those like myself in search of answers to what produces traitors like Walker, this book comes as close as one is ever likely to get to answering that question. Even though he did not mention it in his own book, in this one it is clear that at an early age, John Walker saw himself as "a nobody." It was a thought that would continuously invade his consciousness and haunt him for the rest of his life.

During his formative years, John was well "below average" as a student, poor in sports, un-liked, and thus had few friends. Mean while his older brother Art, was an honor roll student, "lettered" in sports; had pretty girl friends, cars, many friends and a job. At the earliest opportunity Art, went off to college and then thought better of it and joined the navy. John Walker, on the other hand, could not measure up in any of these areas and always knew with a certainty that he could not. He always needed an artificial advantage.

He thus developed, at an early age, compensatory behavior that took on a life of its own, turning him into an almost congenital "wannabe" personality. He wanted so desperately to belong, but never did. He wanted a beautiful refined girl friend but ended up marrying "Boston trailer trash." He wanted to become a war hero, but ended up becoming a notorious spy. As a result of his congenitally poor self-image, he saw himself as having no choice but to puff up his persona and enlisted others to join him in his fantasies at every turn of his life. What he lacked in talent and abilities, he made up through a false realty of fantasy, subterfuge, wholesale lying and exaggeration. Thus throughout his life, John Walker was the classical "sociopath" hiding behind a "phony persona." Even after ending up in prison for life, that is who he has remained.

This emerging sociopath had at least two problems that would follow him throughout his life: First he never was able to feel comfortable in his own skin. Even when he had everything, as he did when the Russians were paying him large sums of money for stealing U.S. secrets, he did not feel worthy, emotionally complete, or even real. Since childhood, he had become so used to "manufacturing a false reality," that was safe for him, and manipulating it to make himself the hero in his own self-styled drama, which is the only way he knew how to "be" or to feel real. So almost without knowing it, he had totally lost the ability to be in touch with whatever residual personality that "stood in" as his authentic self.

As his recent book "The Life of a Spy," demonstrates, as far as his limited abilities for self-knowledge and introspection went, there was no such thing as an "authentic John Walker." In his head, "the grass was always greener on the other side of the fence." From stealing a gun from a drunk in a theater and lying to his friends about how he got it, and about shooting a deer with it, to buying expensive boats, planes, jewelry and cars and recruiting his family as spies, whatever else might be said about John Walker, it must be said that he earned the right to be an incorrigible sociopath.

Second, at an early age, he learned all too well how to blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. In fact fantasy eventually became more real to him that reality itself. It his book, even though he admits hurting people in his family, he has no remorse for anything he did and looks upon his past life as a wonderful ride. He is still the star of the Johnny Walker "Red" show. But as this book makes imminently clear, becoming a spy was just another logical step in the progression along Walker's inevitable path to sociopathic oblivion, and on to the last station in that progression, prison.

Spying for John Walker was just a new more exotic entry point into his already well-established and well-developed ability to spin "alternative fantasized realities" of which he became the center of attention and the only hero. The exotic false world of spying which exists only on the outskirts of normal society and normal reality, suited Johnny Walker the sociopath, turned psychopath, quite well, and was preferable to anything that the "real" John Walker could ever hope to achieve in a normal life, could offer. The choice for John Walker was never that of living a life within the means of his god-given talents and abilities, but, as is true for many psychopaths, finding novel ways of stretching those limited abilities through fiat, and going out in a blaze of glory, orchestrating every act all the way down to life in prison.

Having an abusive drunk as a father, who sent the family into an economic tail-spin after an accident while drinking and driving, probably did add to the young Walker brother's insecurities, but in retrospect it is only a footnote to a "life path" anchored in a world of insecurities and self-doubts that he has yet to confront or face, even today. Thanks to this book we now know the full gory story of John Walker's life.

Five Stars