BY KAREN BOSSICK
“The Last Honest Man.”
That’s what two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen calls the late Idaho Sen. Frank Church.
Church was a statesman of notable stature from 1957 to 1980 in a time when there were notable statesmen on both sides of the political spectrum, including Sen. James McClure, another Idahoan with lots of clout.
Risen has penned a book, “The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia and the Kennedys—and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy.”
And he will present some of his findings at 5;30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17, at Ketchum’s Community Library. RSVP at https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/10521628. It will be livestreamed and recorded to watch later at https://vimeo.com/event/3781745.
Church, Risen says, was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and was a scathing critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious. He announced his candidacy for the national presidency in the tiny mountain mining town of Idaho City.
Church showed historic strength when, in the wake of Watergate, he was tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable, says Risen.
Risen, who lives in Washington, D.C., conducted hundreds of interviews and unpacked thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, unpublished letters, notes and memoirs to tell the story. Other books in Risen’s portfolio are “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration” and “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.”
Risen earned a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2006 for his stories at The New York Times about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program. He shared another Pulitzer with his colleagues in 2002 for his paper’s coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The talk is being held in partnership with the Frank Church Institute at Boise State University where Risen will be a keynote speaker at the 39th Annual Frank Church Conference on Oct. 19.