American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Today, the CIA has sprawled beyond recognition or control by the democracy it is supposed to serve. Secret budgets now support an astonishing 1,271 additional intelligence agencies that function under CIA control and 1,931 private companies engaged in spying, murder, kidnapping, espionage, sabotage, and torture. Over 30,000 spy agency employees, engaged in eavesdropping, intercept over 1.5 billion telephone conversations daily. The history of CIA activities during the sixties and seventies, when it had relatively insignificant budgets and power, gives us abundant reason to fear the awesome and unaccountable power of an agency that now poses the most daunting threat to American democracy and national security, a threat that dwarfs the peril to America from Islamic fundamentalism. My family’s grappling to bring that agency and its Pentagon collaborators under the control of our democracy was the central defining battle of the Cold War era.