American Exception

A gifted student of history, Aaron Good digs deep into its underbrush of confusion to bring out lucid insights into the American Empire--and the reasons for its behavior. This work again reminds us of the pernicious impact of intelligence and security forces and their role in undermining our integrity as a country. --Oliver Stone, author and Academy Award-winning director, producer, and screenwriter Aaron Good has written a penetrating and highly original study of American exceptionism--the systematic overriding of law, often for the sake of national security. Recognizing that the records-based methods of academic historians are insufficient for an era of covert action agencies and plausible deniability, he surveys facts, normally suppressed, about the increased role of criminality in political activity, citing specifically assassinations, the 'October Surprise' of 1968, and the crimes of Watergate. He also critiques and advances on the efforts of previous thinkers like C. Wright Mills to conceptualize what he calls the tripartite state--'comprised of the democratic or public state, the national-security state, and the deep state.' This is a valuable and much-needed book, an unparalleled synthesis of the emerging new critical perspective on American hegemony. --Peter Dale Scott, English professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Coming to Jakarta and The Road to 9/11 In The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and I countered the dangerous myths of unbridled American rectitude and imperious exceptionalism. In American Exception, Aaron Good takes this a big step further, producing something we might call untold social science, a work that brilliantly illuminates the deep political forces that have animated the American empire throughout its volatile, troubled, and often violent history. --Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University Why does the US wage war and project coercive machinations abroad no matter the party leading Congress or the president in office? Good offers a piquant, rich, and memorable answer by excavating the hidden faces of power within the American state--or rather, states, each defined by their embedded interests, public countenance, and corporate stakeholders that operate in the hidden spaces of the national political economy. There is no triumphalist narrative here, only a grim but necessary recounting of how financial and security interests shaped US foreign policy at every turn across the past half-century. --Sean Yom, associate professor of Political Science at Temple University and senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute