Jack Goldsmith is a conservative lawyer who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel in Justice Dept. in 2003-4. He had just prior been a lawyer for the DoD, and so was familiar with the national security legal issues.

Goldsmith does an excellent job of depicting the problems of ensuring the government acts legally but at the same time protects Americans from attack. He understands and shares his understanding of the terrible state of mind of those in the government who read the daily threat matrix and are responsible for preventing new attacks on the US from an enemy that can hide easily. The Bush administration, contrary to public opinion, has been greatly concerned over the legality of its efforts to stop terrorism, and relies heavily on the OLC to know what is legal and what isn't. The hiistory of legal restraints on the intelligence services and the military has beem confusing pver the ;ast 50 years. Goldsmith summarizes: "The executive branch and Congress press the [intelligence] community to engage in controversial action at the edges of the law, and then fail to protect it from recriminations when things go awry. This leads the community to retrench and become risk averse, which invites complaints by politicians that the community is fecklessly timid. Intelligence excesses of the 1960s led to the Church committee reproaches and reforms of the 1970s, which led to complaints that the community had become too risk averse, which led to the aggressive behavior under William Casey in the 1980s that resulted in the Iran-Contra and related scandals, which led to another round of intelligence purges and restrictions in the 1990s that deepened the culture of risk aversion and once again led (both before and after 9/11) to complaints about excessive timidity, which after 9/11 led to renewed aggressive action, which once again (following the interrogation and rendition and terrorist surveillance controversies) is leading to retrenchment by the intelligence community in the face of complaints that it has gone too far."

Goldsmith talks about the legal basis that the administration thought it had for several of these activities, and reviews them in the context of previous crisis Presidents and their actions. When Goldsmith took over OLC he reviewed some of the legal decisions by previous OLC staffers, and found a couple of them so problematic that he withdrew them and rewrote them.

Overall, Goldsmith gives a balanced view of the Bush administration. He explains much of what is driving it, and so makes some of their decisions more understandable. On the other hand, he compares Bush unfavorably with the administration of FDR, and how FDR was successful in obtaining public consent for changing the previous direction of policy. The Bush administration was so focused on enhancing the power of the Presidency, which Cheney and others viewed as having been diminished because of the turmoil over Nixon, that they did not ever seek Congressional approval or public understanding of their actions.

An interesting, well-written book with a fascinating and historically important perspective ( )