Book details of 'Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK's Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton'

Title	Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK's Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton
Author(s)	Arlen Specter, Charles Robbins
ISBN	0060198494
Language	English
Publisher	HarperCollins

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Few people have been as involved in the major political investigations of the last 40 years as Senator Arlen Specter, the independent and tenacious Republican from Pennsylvania. With the help of his former press secretary Charles Robbins, Specter tells all, beginning with his prosecution of the Philadelphia Teamsters during Robert Kennedy's anticorruption investigations and ending with his role in President Clinton's impeachment proceedings. Specter is perhaps best known for his controversial opinions. As a member of the Warren Commission, he authored the Single Bullet Theory, which supported the charge that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman. And as Anita Hill's Senate questioner, he declared that Clarence Thomas's accuser had committed "flat-out perjury." But his book presents a picture of an evenhanded man who has merely acted according to his belief that the nation's "political and social health ... rests on government's doggedly following facts to find truth and then acting on that truth to create public policy." In fact, his purpose in publishing the behind-the-scenes activities of the Warren Commission, Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination, the Ruby Ridge investigation, the Thomas-Hill proceedings, and the presidential impeachment, is to restore the public's faith in government and end conspiracy theories born of incomplete facts. "Had congressional oversight on Waco been as effective as it was on Ruby Ridge," he writes, "the militia movement would have been less motivated to mobilize. It is even conceivable the Oklahoma City bombing could have been avoided." This is not a self-glorifying tale, nor remotely boring. Like the best of books, it opens with a bang: the dramatic re-creation of a little-remembered event--the day General Patton, at the behest of President Hoover, turned his guns on WWI veterans demonstrating for their promised bonus. This was an eye-opening event for Specter, whose family desperately needed the money. Since then, his mission has been to "push government to treat its citizens justly" and to demand the truth. To that end, he sifts the evidence surrounding each controversial event and searches for the lessons to be learned. He makes no demons or heroes out of the actors in these true-life dramas (in fact, he genuinely seems to like most everybody on either side of the aisle). He even acknowledges the ignorance of the "group of aging white males" in the Senate Judiciary Committee (including himself), who, in confronting Anita Hill's allegations, "didn't understand the explosive nature of the [sexual harassment] issue." He writes, "I had not known how painful it was for women who were watching the questioning, so many of whom had been victims of sexual harassment and saw themselves, almost through transference, in Hill's position." While Specter admits his mistakes, he offers no apologies, for it's not forgiveness he holds faith in, but the undying belief that "trust is the glue that holds a democracy together."
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Book description:

Imbued with rugged individualism and fierce independence from his youth on the Kansas plains, Arlen Specter became a renowned big-city prosecutor and then a respected, powerful U.S. senator. His remarkable forty-year career has encompassed such milestones as originating the Single-Bullet Theory for the Warren Commission; derailing Judge Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination; interrogating Anita Hill; and playing an important role in President Clinton's impeachment proceedings. In this brutally honest book, Senator Specter analyzes these and other controversies, assessing each through both a legal and a historical lens. Throughout, he tells the truth, naming names, identifying where the system worked and where it failed -- and even admits to his own mistakes. This illuminating memoir is vintage Specter. thoughtful, provocative, and deeply informative. Specter opens Passion for Truth in 1959, recounting his beginnings as a newly minted assistant district attorney prosecuting union racketeers -- and earning the recognition and respect of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who would later call on Specter to serve on the Warren Commission. He describes his election to the office of district attorney at the age of thirty-five and how he structured what would become the model for the modern prosecutor's office. He also details his landmark crusades to promote the legal rights of victims at sentencing, to preserve evidence for rape prosecution, and to expose the inhumane treatment of America's prison population. I Elected to the Senate in 1980, Specter continued his tireless fight for crime control and judicial reform at the national level. His wisdom and experience would prove invaluable in such measures as the creation of the office of CIA inspector general -- the only tangible reform to follow the Iran-Contra scandal -- and the investigation of the killings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, which in turn led the FBI to change its rules of engagement on the use of deadly force. And as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee on Terrorism, he held top Pentagon officials accountable for the truck bombing of Khobar Towers, which left nineteen Americans dead at the U.S. Air Force base in Saudi Arabia. In this gripping political masterpiece, Arlen Specter brings all of these events to life, taking the reader into the courtroom, the cloakroom, and the Senate chamber, and offers a clear and honest vision for reforming the way Main Street and Wall Street are governed.