A great political history of the Cold War era focusing from post-WWII to JFK’s death. It wasn’t dry in the least and engaged the reader throughout—not an easy feat especially for an unknown writer. His sourcing was balanced between primary and secondary sources and in my opinion his analysis was spot-on in most places.

Some quotes I liked below:

“The federal government gave birth to large military budgets and mass income taxes at the same time and both live on together today as twin siblings of the war state.”

“Of the twenty-six billion dollars spent during the war to build plants, seventeen billion was financed by the government. Taxpayer money financed the growth of the private defense industry.”

“Electoral politics means very little, because it is not in the political parties or in Congress that the truly big decisions are made.”

“Since the dawn of civilization, though, there has been a close relationship between international banking and spying, because the people who work for banks that lend money overseas have a huge interest in knowing what is happening in the countries that they lend money to.”