Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

If you ever want to obliterate your love of reading, I highly recommend Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. I still have not recovered. I generally love reading history books, the bigger the better, but perhaps one person should have done the research, and another person should have written a book about what the researcher discovered, because it is so poorly written that it does not matter what shocking secrets are revealed. If you can’t make international murder schemes and screw ups interesting, then you should not be writing about them. Skill does not match ambition for comprehension.
I generally enjoy reading books about the CIA and FBI so when Malcolm Gladwell elaborated on an excerpt from Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA in his podcast, Revisionist History, I didn’t hesitate to request it. After a couple of months of averaging reading a book a week in 2018, it took me three renewals to finish it, and not because of the page length, but the way that the narrative is organized. Weiner could not make up his mind whether or not to organize it around the personalities of the head of the CIA and/or the President of the United States, chronological order or region. It results in a messy order that fails to fully convey a flavor of the period or the culture.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA boasts of the depth of its research and access to information never before seen by the public, which means there are a lot of people and places mentioned. Either you have to have a killer table of contents or be really good at consistently introducing a person and conveying that person’s story in succinct and memorable way if that person is going to be important later on. Unfortunately this book has neither. For instance, two brothers play a prominent role in the federal government, and when Weiner writes about the one that was more involved with the CIA, he uses his last name, then switches to only the first when both brothers are being discussed, which gets confusing, especially since one of the brothers’ first names is very similar to the last name of other people. If instead he had consistently referred to a brother in one way regardless of whether or not Weiner was discussing his sibling at the same time, it would have avoided a lot of page flipping. In another confusing move, he would discuss a person as if Weiner had already introduced the person then explain who that person was later. When people award the Pulitzer Prize, have they actually succeeded at reading the book? Do they read books for intellectual stimulation and enjoyment? Do they know that those functions are not mutually exclusive?
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA becomes more readable when we reach the Kennedys because it becomes a tale of the lack of synchronicity between the President’s goals and the CIA’s actions. Weiner makes the CIA directors and their underlings seem like real life Heart of Darkness meets The Office as they become warlords in different regions enjoying rewards for their aggression yet actually being extremely incompetent in doing their job, which is keeping the President informed of foreign intelligence. Competence is rewarded with disapproval—same as it ever was. In their fear of the left leading to the evils of communism, they just seemed to exchange devils and embrace the evils of capitalism and government with the veneer of democracy, i.e. fascism, while doing everything in its power to destroy democracy and burn former allies. It makes Presidon’t seem like a page out of their playbook, but on domestic shores instead of solely an invasion from a hostile foreign country. If the entire nation receives the judgment of the actions done by a few but funded by all of us, is this Judgment Day? On the other hand, the KGB was comparatively successful yet the nation still crumbled….only to rise again in its new incarnation.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA stops at George W. Bush’s presidency, and it should surprise no one that President Carter is one of the few that tried to make it a tool for good. Weiner is not partisan and excoriates the Kennedys as much as the Republicans. If the CIA is mad at Weiner’s characterization of their work, they needn’t worry since Presidon’t seems as skeptical as Weiner regarding the agency’s efficacy so Weiner is the least of their worries. Broken clock rule? Also the CIA does not need to worry about criticism if it is largely unreadable. If you air all the dirty laundry in the most boring way possible, then no one will care, and you get to boast of hiding nothing. Gasp, are they working together? It seems unlikely, but I can’t believer that Weiner’s chosen profession, for which he is handsomely rewarded and praised, is to write and communicate complex concepts to people without his expertise yet he does not do so and makes fairly rookie mistakes.
If I was younger, I would rip out all the pages, reread, reorganize and rewrite it to make it more palatable for readers. There is a good story in there if you can dig for it, but by the end, you won’t want to bother. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is an ambitious failure that feels like a clever way to counter access to controversial revelations with clunky exposition.