Gentleman in the Shadows is a biography of Benjamin C. Evans Jr., a Central Intelligence Agency executive who operated at the top levels of the U.S. intelligence community during the darkest days of the Cold War. After serving as a covert case officer in revolutionary Havana, Cuba, and then managing The Asia Foundation, a sprawling CIA front organization, Evans was promoted to the CIA headquarters’ seventh floor, where the executive directorate team managed world-changing intelligence missions. A socially adept administrator, Evans was the CIA Executive Secretary for seven Directors of Central Intelligence under four presidential administrations. Evans was part of the tumultuous period that included America’s crusade to democratize Occupied Japan, the Korean War, nuclear standoffs with the Soviet Union, the anti-Castro counterrevolutionary movement that climaxed in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Family Jewels furor after the CIA’s dirty secrets were revealed. Through his marriage, Evans was a member of America’s elite, which figured so prominently in the U.S. intelligence services. Born and raised in a prosperous family in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Evans was imbued with conservative Hoosier values that celebrated servant-leadership. Following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Evans’s social savvy and encultured mores stood him in good stead in Occupied Japan, where he served as aide-de-camp to General Eugene Harrison, a decorated World War II intelligence officer and Occupation administrator. It was in Occupied Japan that Evans and the general’s stepdaughter, Jan King, fell in love, and later married. When President Harry Truman recognized he needed a foreign intelligence service, General Harrison was on the commission that established what came to be the CIA. Not too many years later, Harrison and his cohorts insured that his son-in-law Evans, by then a respected military intelligence officer, was offered a position in the agency.CIA families not uncommonly led double lives of sequestered thoughts, unasked questions, and intimate deception. An empathetic family man, Evans paid a psychological price for his emotionally isolated life in the clandestine service.Gentleman in the Shadows is a biography of Benjamin C. Evans Jr., a Central Intelligence Agency executive who operated at the top levels of the U.S. intelligence community during the darkest days of the Cold War. After serving as a covert case officer in revolutionary Havana, Cuba, and then managing The Asia Foundation, a sprawling CIA front organization, Evans was promoted to the CIA headquarters’ seventh floor, where the executive directorate team managed world-changing intelligence missions. A socially adept administrator, Evans was the CIA Executive Secretary for seven Directors of Central Intelligence under four presidential administrations. Evans was part of the tumultuous period that included America’s crusade to democratize Occupied Japan, the Korean War, nuclear standoffs with the Soviet Union, the anti-Castro counterrevolutionary movement that climaxed in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Family Jewels furor after the CIA’s dirty secrets were revealed. Through his marriage, Evans was a member of America’s elite, which figured so prominently in the U.S. intelligence services. Born and raised in a prosperous family in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Evans was imbued with conservative Hoosier values that celebrated servant-leadership. Following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Evans’s social savvy and encultured mores stood him in good stead in Occupied Japan, where he served as aide-de-camp to General Eugene Harrison, a decorated World War II intelligence officer and Occupation administrator. It was in Occupied Japan that Evans and the general’s stepdaughter, Jan King, fell in love, and later married. When President Harry Truman recognized he needed a foreign intelligence service, General Harrison was on the commission that established what came to be the CIA. Not too many years later, Harrison and his cohorts insured that his son-in-law Evans, by then a respected military intelligence officer, was offered a position in the agency.CIA families not uncommonly led double lives of sequestered thoughts, unasked questions, and intimate deception. An empathetic family man, Evans paid a psychological price for his emotionally isolated life in the clandestine service.

This book offers a highly original analysis of world events in the light of the Iraq War. It explores the history and development of relations between major countries in the international community and the impact that successive wars and changes in the global political economy have had on the way states relate to each other today.

Tracing the liberal state structure back to the closing stages of the English Civil War and settlement in North America, it argues that the rise of the English-speaking West has created rivalries between contender states that are never entirely put to rest. With each round of Western expansion, new rivalries are created.

Offering a truly global analysis that covers every area of the world - from Europe and America to China, the Middle East, Latin America and Russia -- he analyses the development of international relations post WWII, and questions whether the neoliberal project and its human rights ideology have collapsed back into authoritarianism under the guise of the 'war on terror'.

Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism.

Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion.

Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.