Kirjahaku

Airline pilots are often considered as cultural icons: focused, precise, and reliable. What airline passenger doesn't feel a sense of assurance when the confident informative voice of the captain issues out over the P.A. system? But what if your captain greeted you with these words: "Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Carlin. We have a routine flight plan today, but I'm totally strung out. You see, I couldn't sleep last night, haven't been able to sleep for over a month now. The mess I'm making of my life depresses me. I've screwed up my life, and I feel everything is falling apart. I really think I'm going crazy. Now, sit back and relax. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask." Suddenly the "friendly skies" take on an air of turbulence. "Mental problems" and "cockpit crew" are two phrases that should not share the same sentence. This book takes a hard look at an issue rarely discussed in the airline industry.

In the final days of the Watergate scandal, it was hard to determine who was in charge of the government. Power brokers, sensing a dying presidency, cared little about the office and worked to cut themselves the best deal in Washington. For all the right reasons, the President undertakes a wartime mission in opposition to his critics and his own policies. Amid the infighting, LtCol C.P. Doggett, USMC, is assigned to carry out the President's plans. He is thrust between agencies seeing him as an impediment. As such, Doggett's life becomes a commodity, and he has to survive by outwitting those who want him out of the way.

Pete Barre is young, intelligent, and idealistic -- a bad combination of traits for a person serving in the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Unable to sit back while lies are being told, he bucks the system and it bucks back. He is assigned hazardous duties without the support any soldier might expect. Scrambling to survive, he finds Dana Cohen, a doctor at a Catholic Hospital in Laos. She provides a lifeline, enabling him to endure the pressures placed on him by his countrymen. Her closeness to him is seen as a problem by the Americans, and her aid is cut off. With no place to go, help comes from and unlikely source. A French opium dealer, a remnant of the First Indochina war, intercedes in their behalf. Pete and Dana escape to become persons without a country.

Wilbur Baron is a president in need of constant affirmation. With a basic distrust of government employees who don't shower him with adulation, many of which he appointed, he steps outside the government and relies on powerful friends to help him shape his policies. The result is a dual information flow where his administration stumbles forward in chaos. Baron's erratic behavior is dangerous, but no one is willing to address it. Those in government sit by powerless, and his friends outside government continue to make money off his administration, so why change anything? The White House is run like a clown training school in which ADHD is rampant. By ceding his powers to his friends, for a profit, he allows Erik King to become the most powerful man in government. In War in the Time of PR you can read about their insidious plans and where you might fit into the brave new world they envision.

Eric King the CEO of International Surveillance, Security and Construction, ISSAC, received a call from Wilbur Barron, the president of the United States, requesting that he attend a meeting at the National Golf Club. Barron was vague but hinted that he needed King's business expertise in planning an election year strategy. King wasn't surprised by the call. The president always sought advice from friends outside of his staff. Barron didn't mention it openly, but those who worked for him knew he had a basic distrust of people who were attached to the system and worked for government paychecks. He wanted input from people whose wealth freed them from having to worry about their next government stipend and leaned on his rich friends for all sorts of tasks and advice. He vested some with cabinet level decision making powers without ever having to run them before congress for confirmation. Cabinet members and the presidential staff knew the president's friends could overturn their decisions with a phone call and of all the members of the president's kitchen cabinet, King was the most heavily relied on. He undertook jobs for Barron that were unadvertised, sometimes shady, and he was secretive enough never to let the press know what he was doing.