THE SALON SERIES

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.

Ida, A Sword Among Lions and the Campaign Against Lynching received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.  Ida also received the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians; the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; and was deemed one of the best books of 2008 by the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. Ida also earned the first inaugural John Hope Franklin Research Center Book Award presented by the Duke University Libraries.      

In addition to Ida, A Sword Among Lions, Paula J. Giddings, the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor of Africana Studies (Emerita)  at Smith College, is the author of: When and Where I Enter: The Impact on Black Women on Race and Sex in America; In Search of Sisterhood, Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement; Burning All Illusions, (editor) and an anthology of articles on race published by the Nation magazine from 1867 to 2000.

While at Smith, Giddings was the editor of Meridians, feminism, race, transnationalism. a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Previously she had been a book editor at Howard University Press; a magazine editor at Encore American and Worldwide News, where she was the Paris Bureau Chief; and a journalist who has written extensively on international and national issues for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeune Afrique (Paris), and The Nation among other publications.

Giddings has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation; the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina; and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (unfulfilled). She has also been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Wesleyan University, Bennett College, and Howard University, and was named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. She is on the board of Nation Institute and the Authors League Fund and is a member of PEN.  Ms. Giddings was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.