Professional History

THOMAS POWERS is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose new book is The Killing of Crazy Horse, published by Knopf in November 2010. His previous eight books include most recently The Military Error: Baghdad and Beyond in America’s War of Choice (2008), a collection of essays published (with one exception) in the New York Review of Books over the last several years. It was preceded in 2003 by Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al Qaeda, consisting of essays written over the previous 20 years. Both books were published by New York Review/Granta Books.

Other books include a novel, The Confirmation, published by Alfred Knopf in June 2000, and several works of non-fiction. Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (Knopf, 1993), was widely reviewed and sparked a continuing controversy, inspiring British playwright Michael Frayn to write his Tony-award winning play Copenhagen about the 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr. The play opened in London in 1998 and on Broadway in 2000. Foreign editions of Heisenberg’s War also appeared in Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Taiwan.

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Powers’ first book on intelligence history, was recognized by the National Intelligence Study Center in Washington as the best book on the subject of intelligence in 1979, the year it was published. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and his reviews and articles have also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other periodicals. In 1971 Powers won a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for articles written about the Weatherman terrorist Diana Oughton, killed when a bomb exploded in a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village the previous year. These articles were later expanded into a book, Diana: the Making of a Terrorist (Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

Other books by Powers are Thinking About the Next War (Knopf, 1982), a collection of essays mainly on nuclear weapons, and The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People (Viking, 1973). Powers has been a freelance writer since 1970. He is graduate of Yale University (1964) and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives with his wife Candace in Vermont, where he was one of the four founding partners and editors who established Steerforth Press, a literary trade publishing house, in 1993. As a writer he is represented by Lynn Nesbit of the Janklow-Nesbit Associates, 445 Park avenue; New York city 10022-2606; 212-421-1700.

life and times

Powers was born in New York City in 1940, grew up in the nearby town of Pelham, and went to Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts before going on to Yale. After their marriage in 1965, Powers and his wife Candace lived for two years in Italy where Powers worked for the Rome Daily American, an English language daily newspaper owned by the CIA, a fact which none of the paper’s staff knew at the time. It was not until twenty years later that Powers and Adrian Milne, another writer on the paper in the mid-1960s, figured out what the Agency valued about the paper.

Struggling with this question one evening in Vermont, where Milne was visiting, they remembered a night during the 1966 World Series when news of one game’s winner came over the wire only minutes after the paper had been “put to bed” – sent downstairs to the quite substantial print shop to be run off. Powers and the editor at the time, Bayley Silleck, rushed down to issue the classic order – “Stop the presses!” Aldo, the print shop foreman, said it was too late – the paper had already been printed up for the following day.

“What?” said Silleck and Powers incredulously. “Already printed up? How could you print thirty thousand copies of the paper in fifteen minutes?!”

“Thirty thousand?” asked Aldo. Now it was his turn to be surprised. “We don’t print thirty thousand – it’s three thousand.”

In this manner the young journalists learned that the advertising department of the Daily American had been blowing smoke about circulation. They lingered to chat with Aldo. So, if it only took fifteen minutes to print the paper, what did the print shop do the rest of the day?

Job printing, said Aldo – mostly local papers, magazines, newsletters, special pamphlets and the like for a host of cultural and political organizations throughout Italy – hundreds of them. Like what? Well, like the Italian-American Friendship League, the Northern Italian Lawyers League for s Free Society, the anticommunist free labor union movement, etc. etc.

Mulling this over in Vermont, Powers and Milne finally understood what the agency valued about the paper – it offered a perfect channel for invisible subsidies to a host of anti-Soviet political groups in the ceaseless war for hearts and minds at the height of the Cold War.

The Sixties and After

UPI 1969

On returning to New York in the fall of 1967, Powers found a job on the New York desk of the United Press International, then still a vigorous wire service. For three years on the street he covered a wide range of stories, including many demonstrations against the war in Vietnam – a subject that gradually became a specialty. Powers spent the spring of 1968 covering a building takeover at Columbia University by the radical Students for a Democratic Society and later wrote about the group’s leftward shift into the underground activist, and briefly terrorist, group known as the Weathermen. In the fall of 1970 Powers and another UPI reporter, Lucinda Franks, joined to write a multi-part series about a Weatherman member, Diana Oughton, who had been killed when a bomb she had been assembling detonated in her hands in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The series appeared in hundreds of papers and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971. After additional research Powers rewrote the story as a book, Diana: The Making of Terrorist (1971). By that time Powers had left the UPI to become a freelance journalist and writer. In 1982, despite the success of his third book, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Powers concluded that he could not afford to live in New York City between books. With his wife and three daughters – Amanda, Susan and Cassandra – he moved to Vermont, where he and his wife had built a house on a family farm purchased by his parents in 1938.

He and his wife live there still.