Books like The Room Where It Happened — picked by fans

If you want to go a little deeper, you can’t do much better than this outstanding study of how Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower sought to sustain public support for the Korean War.

Written by a historian who knows his sources like the back of his hands, this book is jam-packed with evidence of the ways in which presidents try to control the narrative about an ongoing war. And beyond its impressive use of archival materials, it also challenges the conventional wisdom about a president’s ability to lead public opinion using the “bully pulpit.”

Presidents can and do try to do that. But the Korean case illuminates the unique challenges of selling a limited war, in which the administration struggled to calibrate its mobilization campaign with the complex politics of waging war. 

In 1960, a planned summit meeting in Paris between the US, the USSR, England, and France was suddenly jeopardized when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia and the pilot captured. Khrushchev demanded an end to the flights and an apology. President Eisenhower agreed to suspend flights until the end of his term (nine months later), but the Soviet leader angrily denounced the offer and returned to Moscow. Ironically, President Kennedy’s concern in 1962 about “another U-2 crisis” convinced him to suspend U-2 flights over Cuba—a pause that lasted from late August to early October. JFK did agree to authorize one flight over western Cuba in response to pressure from CIA director John McCone—and the missiles were luckily discovered just before they had become operational.

Security is the prime issue in the international politics of the Gulf. Not just in the narrow military sense. In the broadest sense too. This book takes a comprehensive and in-depth look at the multitude of risks the Arab Gulf states faces, not only military kind (read Iran), but also food and water, environment and climate, sustaining standards of living in the face of a multitude of economic challenges and potential regional state failures. This book is unquestionably a must-read to have a deeper understanding of the complexity of problems the Arab Gulf states have to resolve, some of which are unique to the Gulf, some are not. It will be epic to survive them.

The possibility that Costa Rica did something significant and hugely beneficial by abolishing its military is generally dealt with by ignoring it, but sometimes by making excuses for it—by claiming that Costa Rica secretly really does have a military or claiming that the U.S. military defends Costa Rica, or claiming that Costa Rica’s example is unlike and unuseful for any other country.

We would all benefit from reading this fantastic book. Here, I learned not to ignore what Costa Rica means and learned that Costa Rica does not secretly have a military, that the United States military does not serve any function for Costa Rica, and that many of the factors that probably contributed to Costa Rica’s abolition of its military, as well as many of the benefits that have probably resulted, are probably subject to duplication elsewhere, even though no two countries are identical, human affairs are highly complicated,… show more.

I read The Mission because it opened my eyes to the real story behind the headlines.

Weiner takes you inside CIA missions from the 21st century and shows what was happening behind the curtain while the public only saw the surface.

I was struck by how different the secret history looks compared to the official version. He makes you feel like you’re finally getting the account that no one saw at the time. For me, that transparency is incredibly powerful.

This is an almost forgotten series of books which had a huge impact back in the 1950s and 60s, depicting as they did in fictional form the inside story of politics, science, and academia in Britain at the time. Snow was himself a distinguished chemist and academic, who often acted as an advisor to the UK government. He used his experience and inside knowledge of the corridors of power (a phrase which he coined) to brilliant effect in his novels. Again, as with the previous authors I have mentioned, it is that detail that comes with direct experience of the subject matter, and the personalities involved, which renders the writing authentic and captivates the reader.

This is a departure from the chase aspect; in this case, the book deals with the investigation of a murder, which turns out to have international terror connotations.

The investigator is Connelly’s Harry Bosch, which as far as I’m concerned, makes it worth reading. It’s discovered there is a terrorist aspect with a time limit, which increases the suspense. 

The suspense is a feature of its own, but I also liked the interactions between the characters.

The first of a two-book series by accomplished historian Richard Dolan, this volume explores a bizarre and mystifying phenomenon that has fascinated me since I was a young boy, and later inspired me to write my own sci-fi thriller. In his book, Dolan proves beyond doubt that the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the USAF held a far deeper interest in the subject than publicly stated, an interest that often bordered on fear when mysterious, intelligently controlled aircraft violated US-restricted airspace at will. And continue to do so. Well-researched and meticulously referenced, Dolan’s series should be enough to convince the die-hard sceptics that whatever is travelling across our skies, it is beyond our current understanding. 

The decade between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Global War of Terrorism was a decade of uncertainty for the U.S. intelligence community and an important part of intelligence history. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduction in national security budgets raised numerous questions about the purpose, focus, and funding of intelligence organizations during the 1990s. Loch Johnson’s book is an excellent and essential read to understand this period. One of the foremost intelligence scholars, Johnson also served on the Aspin-Brown Commission that considered the future of U.S. intelligence after the Cold War (he also previously served on the 1975 Church and Pike Commission). A commission covered extensively in this book.

This is a great book about former CIA Director Richard Helms and the agency he directed.  Helms was the quintessential CIA man, and Powers tells the story of his 30-year career in spying in this beautifully written book, which somehow captures both Helms’ elusiveness and his essence.