Best Selling Books by Thomas Smith

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is one of the most fascinating yet least understood intelligence gathering organizations in the world

Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. In The Enemy Within, Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals—including those involving John C. Frémont’s administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butler’s in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department, government contracting, and the cotton trade—to deeper anxieties. The massive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation’s wars and in every period of the nation’s history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more insidious threats. In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens’ definitions of corruption manifested their specific fears: of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners’ most cherished beliefs and values.

In 1961—as America crackled with racial tension—the Washington Redskins stood alone as the only professional football team without a black player on its roster. In fact, during the entire twenty-five-year history of the franchise, no African American had ever played for George Preston Marshall, the Redskins’ cantankerous principal owner. With slicked-down white hair and angular facial features, the nattily attired, sixty-four-year-old NFL team owner already had a well-deserved reputation for flamboyance, showmanship, and erratic behavior. And like other Southern-born segregationists, Marshall stood firm against race-mixing. “We’ll start signing Negroes,” he once boasted, “when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.” But that was about to change. Opposing Marshall was Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, whose determination that the Redskins—or “Paleskins,” as he called them—reflect John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier ideals led to one of the most high-profile contests to spill beyond the sports pages. Realizing that racial justice and gridiron success had the potential either to dovetail or take an ugly turn, civil rights advocates and sports fans alike anxiously turned their eyes toward the nation’s capital. There was always the possibility that Marshall—one of the NFL’s most influential and dominating founding fathers—might defy demands from the Kennedy administration to desegregate his lily-white team. When further pressured to desegregate by the press, Marshall remained defiant, declaring that no one, including the White House, could tell him how to run his business. In Showdown, sports historian Thomas G. Smith captures this striking moment, one that held sweeping implications not only for one team’s racist policy but also for a sharply segregated city and for the nation as a whole. Part sports history, part civil rights story, this compelling and untold narrative serves as a powerful lens onto racism in sport, illustrating how, in microcosm, the fight to desegregate the Redskins was part of a wider struggle against racial injustice in America.

This multigenerational memoir sketches the lives of three generations of the author’s family that were involved with some of the most profound issues of the twentieth century. Smith’s paternal grandfather was present at the creation of General Motors Corporation and served as its Vice President and General Counsel. His maternal grandfather, William G. Maguire, was an entrepreneur and natural gas pipeline pioneer with a visionary grasp of natural gas’s significance in the twentieth century American economy. Smith’s father served as a senior diplomat under five presidents, working to constrain the nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia and to curtail proliferation of nuclear weapons.