The President's Book of Secrets

January 11, 2016
Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer, turns the potentially dour history of the president’s daily intelligence briefing into a stimulating, if uncritical, account. Every day, a CIA officer travels to the White House to deliver a top-secret summary of international events. The practice was initiated under President Truman when the CIA first circulated a “Current Intelligence Bulletin.” It wasn’t highly regarded, according to Priess, but Eisenhower would still read it. Kennedy preferred to get his news from the press; in response, CIA officials produced a shorter document that held his attention. Lyndon Johnson ignored it, so it was trimmed further to just a few pages and renamed the president’s daily brief. Johnson approved. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nixon preferred to learn about the world through Henry Kissinger. Presidential successors from Ford onward have taken the document more or less seriously. Readers accustomed to CIA skullduggery will be surprised to find it admiringly portrayed as an organization of experts devoted to delivering unbiased information to a grateful president. Priess notes with regret that the briefing has failed to predict several crises, but dismisses critics who maintain that some presidents pressured the agency to slant evidence in favor of presidential policies.

December 1, 2015
A history of the president's secret daily national security summary. Since the John F. Kennedy administration, the CIA has produced a daily summary of news and analysis for review by the president and a handful of senior officials. The President's Daily Brief, known colloquially as "the book," is classified top secret and contains nearly up-to-the-minute intelligence from human agents, electronic intercepts, and other sources. Former CIA intelligence officer Priess interviewed more than 100 former senior U.S. policymakers and intelligence officials to produce this history of the PDB, describing its formats, production process, distribution, and daily presentation to the president over the course of half a century. Presidents have responded to the PDB with varying degrees of enthusiasm; Richard Nixon distrusted the CIA and often ignored it, while George H.W. Bush, a former director of Central Intelligence, devoured it every morning in the company of at least one agency briefer. Barack Obama gets his on an iPad, a change in format that permits near real-time updates and hyperlinks to more thorough analysis. Despite his extensive research and clear prose, Priess is disadvantaged by a serious limitation. Because the contents of the PDB are classified, he can't discuss any of them. As a result, while he lays out in considerable detail how the book has been assembled, who saw it, whether the president preferred an accompanying briefing or read it alone, and so forth, Priess is not permitted to explain how or why the PDB ever made any difference to anyone. Readers hoping to gain insight into how CIA briefings have affected specific national security decisions will be disappointed; the president's book retains its secrets. The author is also loath to criticize any of the book's first customers, even when their overextensive circulation of the book jeopardized its integrity or when they scorned it altogether. The CIA may value this deferential piece of institutional history, but civilian readers will learn little of interest from it.

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Starred review from February 1, 2016

The U.S. president is tasked with making calculated decisions about international policy. As Priess, a former intelligence officer, divulges here, these decisions are often assisted by consulting the "President's Daily Brief" (PDB). The PDB is a succinct roundup of pressing issues facing American foreign policy. Priess's book is not a history of the material contained within these documents, but rather an investigation into how John F. Kennedy through Barack Obama consumed and disseminated the PDB. This may disappoint those who want to find out about American clandestine operations. However, this volume provides greater understanding of how presidents' minds operate and dissect information. It also humanizes their decisions by detailing the intricacies of how the PDB is handled. With the September 2015 release of the Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson PDBs, this publication is timely. If paired with Ivo H. Daalder and I.M. Destler's In the Shadow of the Oval Office, one may come to recognize how foreign policy is created within the executive branch. VERDICT Recommended for those interested in a different perspective on the U.S. presidency, political scientists, and historians.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

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