How Gerald Ford’s Big Mouth Helped Uncover Insane CIA Abuses

The CIA didn’t have to answer to any federal oversight for a long time and had an extensive list of offenses to show for it: spying, alleged disappearing, and assassination plots, to name a few.

That changed when Senator Frank Church, a Democrat who rose to political prominence in the 1950s, entered the scene. Church was the guy who later led what is known as the Church Committee, which, according to Frank-Church-expert and author James Risen, brought the intelligence community under the rule of law and imposed congressional oversight for the first time.

But according to Risen, who joined this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast to talk about Church and his new book The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy, the lead up to the hearings were vital to them happening in the first place thanks to a few whip-smart journalists, and President Gerald Ford opening his big mouth.

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In 1974, a journalist named Seymour “Sy” M. Hersh published a piece that exposed the CIA for spying on American anti-war leaders.

“Hersh’s story came out right before Christmas in December 1974, and it immediately led to calls for congressional investigations,” Risen tells TNA co-host Andy Levy.

“The Senate and the House both began to talk about congressional investigations. Jerry Ford, who was the new president, wanted to try to stop that. He wanted to try and figure out how to tamp down this growing scandal. And so he called in the executive editor of the New York Times, Abe Rosenthal, and a few other editors from the New York Times who had just broken this story. He sits down with them and tells them, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of things that should stay secret. If you only knew about all these other things, we gotta keep ’em secret.’ And Abe Rosenthal said, ‘Like, what?’ And Ford, sitting in the Oval Office says, ‘Well, like assassinations.”

Risen shares the full story on the show, along with a look back at how Church became so influential, the specific role that he played in holding the CIA and FBI to account, and his impact on civil rights when it came to juries.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.