I Pledge Allegiance: The True Story of the Walkers : An American Spy Family

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Summary: "An American Dream Gone Mad?"
Review: The 1980s have been judged as an age of backstabbing greed and free-spending avarice where they with the most pricey toys win. The June, 1985 arrest of retired Navy chief warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., his older brother, only son and close Navy friend Jerry Whitworth on federal espionage charges meshed perfectly with the era's predominantly materialistic values, especially after it was learned that in an incredible 17 years as a Soviet spy, Walker had earned and frivolously spent $1 million, his chief, if not sole motivation.Howard Blum's I Pledge Allegiance is an exhaustively researched and powerfully written chronicle of not only the rarefied, shadowy world of traitors and spies, but a disturbing critique of American social values and how all too easily they are warped to serve selfish if not highly dangerous ends. Walker and associates over the years had handed over tons of highly-classified naval communications material, which, in the eyes of many defense experts, enabled the Kremlin to seriously damage if not completely neutralize our submarine and surface force defense posture if it had so wished. Walker's spying was also believed by some to have led to the unprecedented elevation of former KGB director Yuri Andropov to Soviet leader in 1982 and Moscow's downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 less than a year later. Blum's strength as an author rests in his extensive knowledge of defense, foreign policy and intelligence matters as well as naval history, regulations and communications. This and his considerable reporting skill, demonstrated in his interviews of Walker family and friends, whose various fears, resentments, psychic injuries and strongly corrosive personal and family problems are drawn out and carefully woven into a chronicle of, as the book's jacket had said, "an American dream gone mad," makes for exciting and informative reading, something even the best works of reportage have a hard time achieving. And, the most gripping thing of all is that every bit of it really happened.