Böcker av Edward Jay Epstein

"This memoir is the story of how curiosity led me to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, including the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome, and the diamond cartel in South Africa. To learn about them, I often found myself a fly-on-the-wall at the highest reaches of the establishment where I saw how presidents, tycoons, bankers, and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. Some accuse me of being a conspiracist, but that is not correct. I am essentially a puzzle solver ... My prime interest has always been in finding gaps in the conventional wisdom about an event. How I came to be a pursuer of lost truths is a curious story of self-actualization"--

President Bush has made the war against drugs the number one issue on the contemporary American political agenda. In this revised edition of his classic book, available for the first time in paperback, Edward Jay Epstein argues that the president has adopted the strategy of his forebear, Richard Nixon, in using the drugs war to blame foreigners for the crisis in America’s cities, and to provide a smokescreen for unrelated political activity designed to bolster executive power.The drugs crackdown has seen an almost hundredfold increase in the federal budget for narco-politics in the fifteen years since Agency of Fear was first published, while statistics on drug-running have been massaged. Epstein points out that, despite the massive budgets and public relations brouhaha, drug importation, as measured against wholesale price, has in fact grown.