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Book Summary and Reviews of Bomb Power by Garry Wills

Bomb Power by Garry Wills

Bomb Power

The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

by Garry Wills

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  • Published:
  • Jan 2010, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

In Bomb Power, Garry Wills reveals how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots - by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state - in ways still felt today. A masterful reckoning from one of America's preeminent historians, Bomb Power draws a direct line from the Manhattan Project to the usurpations of George W. Bush.

The invention of the atomic bomb was a triumph of official secrecy and military discipline - the project was covertly funded at the behest of the president and, despite its massive scale, never discovered by Congress or the press. This concealment was perhaps to be expected in wartime, but Wills persuasively argues that the Manhattan Project then became a model for the covert operations and overt authority that have defined American government in the nuclear era. The wartime emergency put in place during World War II extended into the Cold War and finally the war on terror, leaving us in a state of continuous war alert for sixty-eight years and counting.

The bomb forever changed the institution of the presidency since only the president controls 'the button' and, by extension, the fate of the world. Wills underscores how radical a break this was from the division of powers established by our founding fathers and how it in turn has enfeebled Congress and the courts. The bomb also placed new emphasis on the president's military role, creating a cult around the commander in chief. The tendency of modern presidents to flaunt military airs, Wills points out, is entirely a postbomb phenomenon. Finally, the Manhattan Project inspired the vast secretive apparatus of the national security state, including intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA, which remain largely unaccountable to Congress and the American people.

Wills recounts how, following World War II, presidential power increased decade by decade until reaching its stunning apogee with the Bush administration. Both provocative and illuminating, Bomb Power casts the history of the postwar period in a new light and sounds an alarm about the continued threat to our Constitution.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"The original premise is often lost here, but any tract from Wills will delight his readership. This book is among his most timely, if not among his best." - Library Journal

"As usual with Wills, provocatively argued and elegantly written." - Kirkus Reviews

"Wills's conception of 'bomb power' is a weak explanatory principle for this sketchy take on post-war American history .... [an] unfocused jeremiad." - Publishers Weekly

This information about Bomb Power was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Alan MacDonald

The inverse of Bomb Power
While Wills described the early 21st century world, but a decade later, the nature of ‘Bomb Power’ was overturned.

Putin has engaged himself in a global propaganda war, which he is utterly unprepared to fight or even less so to win.

Gary Wills’ “Bomb Power” 2010 no longer pertains regarding the nature of War, or ‘special military action’, it’s ‘propaganda war’ that has rewritten the rules of war today.

With the aligned propaganda powers of America, the United Kingdom, the EU, and poor little valiant Ukraine under attack for its very life — Putin is not only out-gunned, but out-peaced.

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Author Information

Garry Wills Author Biography

Garry Wills was born in 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia.  He graduated from Campion High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951 and received his PhD in classics from Yale in 1961. In 1995, he received a L.H.D. from Bates College. He received an honorary doctorate from the College of the Holy Cross.

A historian and author of more than 20 books including What Jesus Meant, he is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. In 1998, he won the National Medal for the Humanities. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He is an ...

... Full Biography

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