Michael V. Hayden

The role of the intelligence community is to inform the President of potential and actual threats to the United States. There needs to be trust, respect, and honesty between any given president and the intelligence community. The intelligence community and the President's team must function seamlessly during the transition between administrations. The intelligence community in many ways represents the cadre career professionals that remain in place while Presidents and their administrators change every 4 to 8 years. As a group the intelligence community take an international -ist view of the world. After explaining this in detail, Hayden examines how the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have worked with the intelligence community. Hayden is an equal opportunity critic. Each president is subjected a withering attack on the decisions they made. His arguments changed my opinion of effective the Obama administration foreign policy was. The majority of the book is dedicated to the deconstruction of the Trump administration. Hayden starts with Trump's candidacy and walks the reader through his current actions as President in detail. I think the book does a good job of examining the contrasting needs of the intelligence community with the peculiar personalities of the various office holders. In a lot of ways Hayden portrays the intelligence community as the secret heroes of the nation. He demonstrates how they are the whipping boys subject to each President's view , and uses of the truth the community presents to them. Overall this is a scary book.… (meer)