Publisher's Synopsis
Witnesses were mysteriously murdered. The FBI, NSA, CIA, and even the IRS were on the warpath. It was 1975, and one little-known senator stood almost alone in the face of extraordinary abuses of power.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.In The Last Honest Man, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Risen tells the dramatic story of the unlikely hero who stood against the security state. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was a hardworking, upstanding Democrat who hadn't made much of himself in Congress. But in the wake of Watergate, he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The truth that Church exposed—from government ties to the mafia, to covert coups in South America, to the surveillance of everyday Americans—would shake the nation at its core. Based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of newly declassified documents, The Last Honest Man tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power—and winning.
