Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government.

The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City.įor decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. Jason Matthews, The New York Times Book Review Post-World War II Jerusalem is the provocative setting for Stewart O’Nan’s atmospheric thriller.a richly-imagined story.may be one of O’Nan’s best. Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. City of Secrets makes for great summer reading.

It is American history.” - George Stephanopoulos 'Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history.

City of secrets