Traitors: 6the Worst Act of Treason in American History from Benedict Arnold to Robert Hans

by Richard Sale

Book Overview

In this time of great patriotism, no crime seems more heinous than that of treason. Yet many of us understand little of the full impact of treasonous acts, and the price our nation has paid for them.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425191850
• ISBN13: 9780425191859
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Roosevelt wasn't a dumb

I read this good book, here in Brazil.The main lesson of this book is that behind every (american) traitor , there's a bitter childhood. Failures of this book are small.To example, this book claims that communism is just an allucination.Well, if you go to Venezuela, you will see that communism remains alive, even being a fake. Again, this book claims that american president Roosevelt was just a dumb, making everything to support Stalin.In fact, Roosevelt wasn't a dumb.He was a wise man.He knew that american public had no stomach, to support millions of deaths, in a war against nazi Germany.Then, he gave eastern Europe to Stalin, in exchange of Soviet Union wipe out nazi Germany.The price was small to americans.Roosevelt wasn't the president of poles or rumanians.He was the president of United States.In any sense Roosevelt was worse to Stalin, than Winston Churchill.Roosevel was a realistic, not a dumb giving everything to Stalin.

Doing wrong things for the wrong reasons

The biggest frustration I had with this book is that the selection of traitors was simply too small. Sale writes in such wonderful, descriptive detail that you want to know the same sort of information about other traitors in American History. The chapters are mini-biographies that give the reader a wonderful look inside the life and mind of the selected traitors. I especially liked reading some of the background information about intelligence and "dirty war" tactics during the revolutionary and civil war eras which is not commonly taught in standard high school or college history courses. This book brought those eras into greater focus for me.Regarding the Walker case, I think most Americans just have no idea how one person can be so destructive. I would have liked to hear that our counter-intelligence community has learned some lessons from that case.

MUST READ

Mr. Sale's Traitors is a five-star performance of the very first class. He has written mini-biographies of some of America's most notorious scoundrels: Benedict Arnold, John Wilkes Booth, Alger Hiss, John Walker Jr., Robert Hanssen. But it is the way Sale has written about his people that has allowed him to produce such a gem of a book. Many writers on espionage complacently assume that the subject itself is enough to generate interest. Here Sale appears to assume the opposite. He appears to think that Arnold, Booth, even the Hiss case, have, for most Americans, long ago gone down to utter dust. Sale therefore fashions a narrative with the coloring and dramatic action of fiction that brings his subjects to life under his readers' very eyes. Sale's ambition seems to be to move the minds of his readers through their feelings. This requires him to be a dramatic artist with an ability to set a scene combined with a deft sense of when to change to a different perspective or approach the story through an additional character. Sale's transitions are excellent and you can tell that he has labored over certain dramatic effects so that their impact on the reader will be fresh, forceful, unimpeded and surprising. Sale succeeds so well that his scenes do move us, and his cameos cut to the quick.The scope of two of Sale's most important episodes, Whittaker Chambers and John Walker Jr. are amazing. In the first, Sale takes us through the Russian Revolution ("Lenin was a fierce little man with a balding bullet head and neck like a bull") then moves to show how Stalin used terror in the 1936 Spanish Civil War to crush the world's first genuine worker's revolution because it wasn't under Soviet control. Later we get a clear exposition of Franklin Roosevelt's incredibly mistaken policy that saw Stalin as a man who would not annex European land after the WW II (he would steal 500,000 square miles) and whom FDR viewed as more reliable than Winston Churchill in any post-war peace. None of this is abstract in Sale, because we see it all enacted through the personalities forced to undergo and suffer the policies and decisions. In the section on John Walker Jr., the Navy spy who completely compromised U.S. military communications for a decade, we find out just how unnerved the Soviets were by Ronald Reagan's reckless talk of war in 1983, becoming frightened to the point of beginning to burn secret documents in the Soviet Embassy in London. It is Walker's Russian handler who goes to the Presidium to tell the Kremlin that America is not poised to strike and there won't be a war because, thanks to Walker's treachery, the Soviet military know that U.S. subs are not in attack positions. The handler was forced to do this thee times and later grumbled to a CIA agent, "Your government owes me (a) medal."One of Sale's chief gifts is for description. Describing a Federal raid to free Union prisoners in Richmond, Sale writes: "The raid left on February 6, 1864, amid the cheerl

Good History Lesson

I heard the author on the radio, and decided to read his book. TRAITORS does a good job describing the most famous traitors in history. Looking at their childhoods (is it surprising that most had not so great family lives growing up?), and also looking at personality traits that can lead to a person becoming a traitor. Good history lesson, with some psychology thrown in.