This kind of book is right up my alley: informative, detailed, and written engagingly enough that descriptions of cabinet meetings didn't put me to sleep. As a raving left-winger Alterman's book just added more fire to my "politicians are evil" fire, but aside from that I loved the amount of detail about the four historical instances he covers that I previously knew little about. Alterman reveals, long after the fact, the back-door machinations and manipulations that went on surrounding the Yalta Accords, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the Iran Contra Scandals, and carefully builds his facts to show you, in the end, how these situations all got us to exactly where we are now.
Eye-opening, and a bit painful, this is the kind of stuff we should learn in history classes, in the hope that someday we can get some people in office who aren't corrupt and lying liars. ( )

The reader should remember that Alterman wrote "Bush's useful idiot" about Nader in Nation magazine, 2004. ( )

I learned a lot of history in general when reading this book and also that being a politician really means learning to lie with panache (unless you're Jimmy Carter) ( )