Grand Inquest; The Story of Congressional Investigations

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Fair. xviii, 358, [6] pages. Occasional footnotes. Appendices. Historical Note on Outlawry. Notes to the Text and Appendices. Sources and Acknowledgments. Index. DJ is worn, torn, soiled, and chipped. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Helmut Sonnenfeldt's copy (signed on fep). Telford Taylor (February 24, 1908 - May 23, 1998) was an American lawyer known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his outspoken criticism of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Following the outbreak of World War II, Taylor joined Army Intelligence as a Major on October 5, 1942, leading the group that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from intercepted German communications using ULTRA encryption. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1943 and visited Bletchley Park in England, where he helped negotiate the 1943 BRUSA Agreement. He was promoted to full Colonel, and was assigned to the team of Robert H. Jackson, which helped work out the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. At the Nuremberg Trials, he served as an assistant to Chief Counsel Robert H. Jackson when he was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case. Helmut Sonnenfeldt (September 13, 1926 - November 18, 2012), also known as Hal Sonnenfeldt, was an American foreign policy expert. He was known as Kissinger's Kissinger for his philosophical affinity with and influence on Henry A. Kissinger, the architect of American foreign policy in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He was a veteran staff member of the National Security Council, and held several advisory posts in the U.S. government and the private sector. Later in life he was a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Guest Scholar at The Brookings Institution. Sonnenfeldt entered service in the U.S. Department of State in 1952 as a member of the staff of the Office of Research on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and served as the Director of that Office from 1963-1969. Within days of the 1968 Nixon election, Henry Kissinger picked him to serve on the National Security Council staff. He was a senior staff member of the National Security Council from 1969-1974. In 1974, he was appointed Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, where he served from 1974, continuing after Nixon's resignation for the duration of the Ford administration. During his time in the National Security Council and in the State Department, he was a close assistant and adviser of Kissinger and became known as "Kissinger's Kissinger". Derived from a Kirkus review: This""- says the able and thoroughly informed author ""is a study of the powers and purposes of legislative investigation, not of the merits or demerits of particular inquiries"". He has explored a range of Congressional investigation, dating back to Major General St. Clair's disastrous defeat in our early years as a nation. He has approached the subject from multiple angles, the variety of types of investigation, the relation to the constitution, the use of investigation to reduce the presidential control of the executive branch, impacts on the judicial branch, and the infringement of constitutional rights. He has analyzed the permissible scope of processes within investigation- and the refuge taken by witnesses in the Fifth Amendment. He considers the points at which states rights have been involved. He presents his own suggestions, leveled at the starting and stopping points of investigation. There is no evasion of the central issue today,- an issue involving others than just Senator McCarthy and others of his stripe. Blame attaches, he feels, to weakness of decision in the White House, to panic action by an almost unanimous Congress in outlawing the Communist Party- and so thrusting it underground, in various failures to restore restraint, commonsense and courage, in lack of leadership never so much needed as today. This should be read and used as a spur to solution of the problems that confront us. This book is an expansion of an address on the powers of legislative investigating committees presented in December, 1953, as a symposium at Notre Dame University and printed as an article in the following issue of the Notre Dame Lawyer, and of other addresses and lectures on the same subject delivered in 1953 under various auspices.