"Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson
have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It
is American history.”
―George Stephanopoulos
Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets.
Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret
City.
For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted
Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed
reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War,
fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of
international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the
federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the
secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power.
Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified
documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from
presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a
chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story
of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and
the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of
the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each
successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth
century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long
witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI
to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the
rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of
the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of
American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet
abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a
“homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election
victory.
Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret
City will forever transform our understanding of American history.
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