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Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman, "The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)
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- [00:00]
Matthew Guariglia
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Brian Hochman
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Brian Hochman
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- [01:12]
Matthew Guariglia
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- [01:20]
Luca Trenta
welcome to New Books Network. My name is Luca Trenta. I'm an Associate professor of International Relations at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. Today we welcome Matthew Gorilla and Brian Hochman. They are the authors of the new book the Church Committee Report, an edited version of the Church Committee Report and its Investigations, published by Norton Company. This is a topic that is very close to me and dear to me and to my research. But before going any forward, let me say a few words about our guest today. Matthew Guariglia is a historian and Senior policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier foundation, where he focuses on surveillance, privacy, and the civil liberties implications of emerging technologies. He also serves as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Emory University. He is the co editor of the Essential Kerner Commission report, published in 2021, and the author of Police and the Empire City Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, published in 2023. Brian Hochman is the Hubert J. Klok Director of American Studies and Professor of American Studies and English at Georgetown University. He is the author of the A History of Wiretapping in the United States, published by Harvard University Press in 2022. The book was named one of Publisher's Weekly 20 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 and Pop Matter's Best Books of 2022. The book was also awarded the Surveillance Studies Network Book Prize in 2023. His first book, savage the Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, published in 2024. In 2014, sorry, was a finalist for the American Studies Association's Laura Romero Prize in 2015. Matthew Brian, thank you so much for doing this, for writing the book and for being on the show with me.
- [03:27]
Matthew Guariglia
Thanks so much for having us. It's a pleasure.
- [03:29]
Brian Hochman
Very happy to be here.
- [03:32]
Luca Trenta
So just for our listeners who are not aware, let's start with the basics. What is the Church Committee and how does it come about? I found quite interesting that in your introduction you take a sort of unorthodox approach to this. You suggest that the origins of the committee long Predate a famous 1974 newspaper story by Seymour Hersh denouncing surveillance on American people. Can you tell us a bit about this longer story?
- [04:05]
Brian Hochman
Well, I think the longer story kind of predate the immediate catalysts for the Church Committee report and has to do with a decade or more of growing mistrust in federal law enforcement, in the intelligence agencies, which go back to, you know, in addition to the Pentagon Papers, these leaked revelations that the Department of Defense, the government, had lied about the Vietnam war, also the 1971 break in the media, Pennsylvania FBI field office which revealed COINTELPRO and the FBI's large scale investigations and surveillance against the civil rights movement and the anti war movement. So I think there were a number of scandals back really at least six or seven years leading up to the Church Committee report which resulted in a kind of straw that broke the camel's back in the revelations of the family jewels and all the kind of wrongdoings that had happened at the CIA in the immediate 1974 moment.
- [05:15]
Matthew Guariglia
So the only thing to add to that is just to answer, I suppose, the first question, which is what is the Church Committee investigation and what is the Church Committee report? Matthew has set the stage. And after the Seymour hearst revelations of 1974, which was a series of New York Times front page articles detailing CIA surveillance operations on American soil, a number of investigative committees organizations are formed both in the White House, in the Senate and the House of Representatives, The Church Committee emerges out of this moment and very quickly its investigations, which begin in early 1975, start to metastasize. They move beyond the investigation, moves beyond merely CIA surveillance and begins to uncover cover all manner of abuses of authority and possible illegal activities and certainly unethical activities on the part of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the Department of Defense. It was a 12 month investigation initially. It was later extended to 16 months. And after a series of hearings in the fall of 1975, the committee publishes a landmark multi volume report in April of 1976. The long lead up to the Committee. This cycle of scandal and investigation dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s was both a blessing and a curse for the Committee. On one hand, it gave the Committee something of a roadmap. And obviously the Watergate hearings and the Watergate investigations are the most immediate precursor for the investigation and the hearings on the part of the Church Committee. But also as a result of this long standing growing gathering mistrust, the Committee really, by the time it holds its hearings in 1975 is, is starting to receive a great deal of public pushback. Americans were somewhat tired of the cycle of distrust. And as a result, by the time the Committee publishes its report in 1976, there is something of a backlash beginning.
- [07:57]
Luca Trenta
I mean you mentioned Brian in your answer that the areas of investigation sort of metastasized. They certainly exploded fairly quickly. But can you guys give us a brief overview of what those areas of investigations were? What were the main topics that the Committee investigated?
- [08:16]
Matthew Guariglia
So it's easiest to imagine two general arenas of investigation, two avenues that the committee began pursuing. A foreign avenue and domestic avenue. The foreign avenue concerned. It concerned the CIA and the NSA especially. And it uncovered both plots to assassinate foreign leaders. Experiments with toxic substances and illegal drugs. The so called MK Ultra findings in which the CIA had been essentially experimenting with LSD and other substances on non volunteer human subjects. The NSA's partnerships with global global telecommunications firms to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance. This is the general orbit of the foreign intelligence investigations. But also the Committee had half of its staff and half of its attention was directed towards what was going on at home. And that really turned the committee toward the predations of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The COINTELPRO abuses of the 1960s, going after the anti war movement, the civil rights movement. Also of course the FBI's long campaign of surveillance and harassment against Martin Luther King Jr. Especially. So this was a real litany of abuses. The worst sins of Cold War intelligence both domestically and abroad. And to the extent that the United States remembers the Church Committee and remembers its finding, it's like the canonical abuses of the Cold War period are a product in part of the Committee's work and its eventual report.
- [10:24]
Luca Trenta
Yeah, I mean you guys mentioned that there was some work going on also in the Executive. And I think Ford of course established a presidential commission initially to try and if not necessarily prevent congressional investigation, certainly to avoid another full blown scandal. And this didn't do the trick to a certain extent. So what is in your opinion the reaction of the Executive initially to the scandal and later on to the congressional investigations?
- [10:57]
Brian Hochman
Yeah, I mean we know there was some clearinghouse at the CIA. There were, you know, initially the new director of the CIA had ordered the family jewels in part because of previous scandals and was interested in the litany of misdeeds that had been done previously. And obviously that report kind of became the foundation of the public's anger toward the CIA. And similarly, after the 1972 death of J. Edgar Hoover, there was a lot of moving happening at the FBI. A lot of his kind of secret files had been destroyed in the immediate aftermath of his death. So there was a lot of covering up happening even leading up to the 1975 Church Committee report. But we know from inside the White House that the Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Cheney had been tasked with kind of handling the White House's response, response to these commissions. And all requests for White House documentation and participation had to go through him. And I believe the National Security Archive had published documents in the last few years kind of dictating how Dick Cheney was under explicit instruction to kind of obfuscate and to steer the commission away from certain classified things and to kind of slow down the process in general.
- [12:21]
Luca Trenta
Yeah, I mean I always thought it was quite the choice and opposed to Watergate environment to put all the misdeeds of the CIA in one single document for anyone to leak. That was always quite an interesting idea in the book. You divide and Brian, you mentioned this in your answer as well. You divide the work of the committee in the domestic component, looking at the rights of American citizens in foreign intelligence component and a component on the recommendations, the recommendations that a committee made to the US Government. We'll come to the recommendations themselves later on. But what is the rationale between this division? Is it simply that it reflects the work of the committee or was it your editorial choice?
- [13:13]
Brian Hochman
It reflects the actual work of the committee which is divided into books. Book one being the kind of internationally focused, focused and book two being then the mass surveillance and the violation of constitutional rights on the domestic front. And I think that is part of the rationale is that you know, people on U. S soil have constitutional rights and, and legal protections that the US Code just does not extend to people overseas. So there are. There are specific laws that they were monitoring being violated in the domestic front, which doesn't carry over to kind of violations of international sovereignty in book one. But I do think. I mean, it kind of foreshadows something that we still very much deal with, which is the blurring lines and overlap between looking at problems that are domestic and supposedly foreign. So, I mean, one of the rationales behind all of the. Part of the administration's rationale behind all the surveillance of domestic political and social movements is that it could. It had this tinge of internationalism to it that, you know, anti colonialism, anti war efforts, racial justice efforts, had either you know, supposed ties to communism abroad or other international movements. And so that then also gave the CIA entree to do domestic surveillance as well. So there's kind of a blurring of lines between foreign and domestic operations, which I mean, obviously still very much at extent to this day. It only got blurrier as the world globalized.
- [14:55]
Luca Trenta
I'm very much guilty of this myself when I think about the Church Committee. I think primarily at the CIA and its misdeeds. But you've already mentioned a few other agencies, the nsa, the fdi. Can you tell us more about these other agencies that are involved and sort of how they feature in the investigations?
- [15:15]
Matthew Guariglia
So the NSA is a really good case in point here. Most Americans, even Americans who worked in Washington for the federal government, had never heard of the NSA in 1975, 1976. And the joke going at the time in the Beltway was that NSA stood for no such agency. It didn't exist. Its doings were so secret that even those who were a part of the federal intelligence establishment, had no window into what was going on there. So the nsa, as a result of a series of insider tips on the part of former NSA officials and on the part of CIA documents that alluded to an agency that was conducting foreign intelligence basically on American soil. The Church committee starts to do some digging and eventually finds a great deal of information. And its public hearings on the nsa and its report on the NSA in the final document was somewhat abbreviated, given the high level of classification involved in national security surveillance at the time. And the committee was very, very, very concerned about its use of classified information and bringing it to the public. But this was the first opening for Americans. And over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly due to the investigative spade work of a former NSA official, Navy reservist surveillance operative named James Banford, the story of the NSA and its full post war history ends up coming out. So all of this is to say that Church Committee's work investigating all of these agencies, be it the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and others, was merely a beginning. And I think one of the things that we've been keen to highlight for readers is the extent to which its findings have served as something of a skeleton key for future historians who have looked to the Church Committee as a kind of starting point for their own historical research. And Luca, of course, you're one of those historians who's profited from their work.
- [17:53]
Brian Hochman
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- [18:24]
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- [19:37]
Luca Trenta
If we look at some of the key themes, I think the first one that has been mentioned already is, and this is certainly your territory I think is the issue of surveillance and spying on American citizens. What are the main findings here? What are the main revelations, and to what extent do they, I don't know, reverberate within the American public? To what extent is the American public taken in or shocked by these revelations?
- [20:07]
Brian Hochman
Yeah, I mean, I think they were revelations, but they weren't. I guess, I guess I should say is they weren't so much revelations as they were confirmations. Right. For years, for decades, there was a inherent suspicion that the FBI had been spying on people for their political beliefs, their political participation in left wing movements. And this was kind of egged on by J. Edgar Hoover and by the FBI who had very sophisticated public relations operations inside of the FBI. So they would routinely say things like how many members of the Communist Party of the USA were undercover informants? Which that number may or may not have been inflated to stoke fear. They, they often talked about how, you know, they had files, there were 6.5 million files inside the FBI archives. They would do things to kind of scare people into thinking that the FBI was kind of omnipresent. You know, agents would go to parties, would go to cocktail parties and, and would, would not really blend in all of that well. And so when the revelations came out that there was wide scale mass infiltration of left wing movements, that there was mail reading, telegraph, listening to phone tapping, they had done illegal black bag jobs where they broke into people's homes to bug places. They had done things like the tactic called snitch jacketing where they would make it look like somebody was in a FBI informant by leaving kind of incriminating documentation in their car or in their house or on their person so that people would find them. They, they sabotaged, they blackmailed, they, you know, famously left a letter trying to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide. All of this was kind of suspected for years. But I think the church committee really became a confirmation that what had essentially been a kind of a folk belief and a theoretically irrational fear was actually quite rational and actually really happening. And this extended too to the CIA and the nsa, which collected information in a wide scale mass surveillance apparatus that, you know, really hoovered in, I guess, pun intended. Telegrams and telecommunications records and mail openings and all of this data on people in the United States because of their politics.
- [22:50]
Luca Trenta
I mean, it's a conspiracy until it turns out to be true, with the whole spying of American citizens and so on. Another key topic for the church committee, and I think there is a separate report on it, is the issue of chemical and biological weapons. I think this is one of the topics discussed by the committee in which there is a Publicly televised hearing, still showing class to my students. The segment in which William Colby passes the gun to Church and I think you have it on the COVID of your book. What was found there. Is it one of those cases in which the CIA was actually acting as Frank Church, famous rogue elephant?
- [23:35]
Matthew Guariglia
I think so. So this was one of the most explosive pieces of the Church Committee's investigation and still to this day remains something of a shorthand for the Church Committee's workings. There are roughly, I'd say the findings vis a vis chemical and biological agents. I think roughly fall into two camps. There's the story of the F. The F or, I'm sorry, the CIA's long standing effort to experiment with toxic substances and illegal drugs on non volunteered human subjects. This is a series of programs first called Bluebird, then Artichoke and MK Ultra that emerged out of the Second World War and are an attempt to counter what was seen as the possible uses of similar substances and devices on the part of the Soviet Union. And this was a set of programs that were extremely secretive, classified. Only a few individuals at the CIA knew that they were going on. And famously the majority of the documents pertaining to these operations were destroyed by the principal architects involved, most notably Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was a CIA chemist and also an operative who was at the center of that story from the 50s into the 60s. Some Americans, I think had, I mean, certainly didn't know the extent of like say the LSD operations. But the, the casualties, some of the, the, the main names involved, including the, the death of an army scientist named Frank Olson. That was a story that had already essentially been in the headlines. And the CIA was, was, or I'm sorry, the Church committee essentially was filling in the details there. That's the first bucket. The second bucket has to do with the development and storage of chemical and biological agents on the part of the CIA and the National Defense Agency and its intelligence arms early in the 1970s. Luca, you may know the exact timing of this. I can't recall the date. Richard Nixon basically orders the CIA to destroy the tools that it had developed to conduct chemical and biological warfare over the course of the 1960s. And the church Committee very quickly discovers that that order had either been deliberately ignored or unintentionally ignored. It depends on how favorably disposed you are, I suppose, in interpreting the events. But very quickly they discover. The Church Committee investigators discover that the CIA has this cachet of shellfish toxins hidden at an army facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. And this finding was regarded internally among the members of the committee and also its staff as a perfect entry point into the lawless behavior on the part of the CIA in the 60s and even the 70s. Richard Nixon has said, you need to destroy these materials. And the material still exists. This was an explosive revelation and it served to encapsulate much of what the Church Committee hoped to demonstrate to the American public. And this is why in the first hearing in the summer of 1975, Frank Church holds up the gun, which was a sort of makeshift device that was meant to shoot darts laced with shellfish toxin. And he held it up on the dais and it was an image that is an indelible image of the 1970s and resonated with a lot of viewers.
- [27:56]
Luca Trenta
Certainly I always make a joke with my students about this supposed dart that can penetrate, because I think in the debate they say that it can penetrate skin without the target being aware that it has been penetrated and can cause issues like heart attack and so on. So I always joke with my students. Guess how? William Colby died a few years later. And of course he died of heart attack, but I think that's a conspiracy too far. Although one of his. Is it one of his sons that has made a documentary alleging that there is more to the death of his father? I think there is a documentary called the Man Nobody Knew or something like this by one of Colby's sons. But the rest of the family apparently has denied everything and so on.
- [28:42]
Brian Hochman
And they didn't just destroy the materials, they also destroyed eventually the paperwork. When the CIA Director, 1973 is getting ready to retire, he dictates that all the MKULTRA files should be destroyed. And in part, the rationale was that, you know, there was this wide reaching constellation of labs and universities that had been involved and to spare them embarrassment, should any of this information get out, they should destroy all the MK ULTRA files. Of course, as the product developed, it seems like their system of documenting what was happening was always pretty ad hoc and never quite as effective or complete as they wanted to be. And because of that, it seems like the files had been scattered in a lot of different places. And even though a lot of them had been destroyed every couple of years after that, it seems like they kept finding new secret repositories which had been stashed away in routine business files or other places.
- [29:45]
Luca Trenta
I mean, we'll talk about the reverberations of the investigations today, but I think something that is still ongoing is trials and lawsuits, especially involving Canada and the victims of MK Ultra In Canada. I believe some of these trials are still ongoing, unwitting victims of MKUltra, I think, and of the CIA collaboration with sort of, on the surface, legitimate medical institutions and so on. Another topic, of course, which is very close to my research, is that of assassination. I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts and your take as to why you think the committee gets stuck into assassination as the very first thing basically out of the gates. And what are, in your view, the key findings of the committee and the key recommendations?
- [30:45]
Brian Hochman
I, I mean, it's. It's hard to talk about with. With you, of course, because your book is so central on his question. I, I wish I could just ask you this question, but we can.
- [30:54]
Luca Trenta
We can talk about it. We can share views and we can talk about it.
- [30:58]
Brian Hochman
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I guess in your research, I'm wondering what. What you have found is the extent to which the Church committee report really got the story right.
- [31:07]
Matthew Guariglia
Or.
- [31:07]
Brian Hochman
Or do you find that they've been. They were obfuscated, you know, and enough places and had. Away from this particular issue, which has always been kind of the speculation that it might not have. They. They might not have found the whole picture that, that you think reflected the reality inside the CIA.
- [31:29]
Luca Trenta
I mean, it's interesting that the. The podcast host has become the podcast guest in this thing.
- [31:35]
Matthew Guariglia
This was our design. This was all our.
- [31:38]
Luca Trenta
Okay, great. I mean, in my view, I think the committee got a lot of things right. I think they got the very important distinction between the CIA initiating certain plots, so being behind the scenes and directing and initiating plots, most famously against Fidel Castro, for example, and the very different situation in which actually the CIA is supporting, with all sorts of. Of aid, from material support to training to moral support, some local actors who want to engage in regime change. And as part of this, they contribute to the assassination of a foreign official. I always found that the committee in the final report tended to be very cautious, very often to take the position of the executive. I think the situation in Chile is very clear on this. They largely accept Kissinger's view about a division between the people that the CIA was supporting and the ones that ultimately killed Schneider, although we now know that there wasn't such a division, there wasn't such a firewall, and so on. And the other bit that I found quite interesting was also the cases that the committee chose not to explore in much detail. So, for example, Duvalier of Haiti only gets a footnote, I think, in the addendum to the report. Although the case isn't particularly different to others that have been analyzed by the committee. I was talking to a researcher, the wife, actually, of a researcher, McTernan Kahin, that looked very deeply at Indonesia, and she said that her husband had been called down by the church committee because they wanted to investigate the case of Sukarno in Indonesia. But then all of a sudden, they dropped it. So I thought that was quite interesting as well, the choices of what made it into the report and what was left out beyond generally accepting, in some cases, the view of the executive. Currently, I'm very much looking at the church committee as a lost opportunity, and we might get to a discussion of this later on. Also, in other areas, the legal recommendation of the committee were largely ignored. And I think we would be. We could potentially be in a different position today if those legal recommendations had been put in place.
- [34:19]
Matthew Guariglia
One thing I want to add here is that the members of the committee, and in particular their staff and the investigators involved in doing the lion's share of the spade work in the early months of the church committee investigation were not at all unanimous in the sense that assassination was a worthy topic of investigation. Many, in fact, believe that it was a distraction for the committee to get bogged down in these conspiratorial plots involving foreign leaders Trujillo Castro, Patrice Lumumba and others. And instead, they were much more interested in systemic abuses, particularly at the CIA. And there is a hint of, among the. The church committee investigators and their progeny that this may have been a mistake. And I think if you read, say, the interviews of church committee staffers conducted in 2014 by a wonderful Senate historian named Kate Scott, you'll see that a number of very key figures involved in the investigation really had real regrets for following the assassination storyline at the expense of what they believe to be more systemic abuses or even worse, abuses of executive authority. So I've always struggled with that idea. I mean, I think. Think you know better than we do in terms of, like, what the committee got right and what actually may have been left on the cutting room floor. But there may actually have been, at least from the perspective of church committee investigators themselves, a much bigger story at work that may have had nothing to do with assassination plots and foreign intelligence. And I think there's a whole realm of paranoid speculation as to, like, what that might look like and what that might be. But given the pressures of time and politics, the committee, I think, played very well the hand that it was dealt. But it was dealt this hand from the perspective of some of the investigators, and that possibly presents some other sorts of lost Opportunities.
- [36:55]
Luca Trenta
Yeah. I mean, one shouldn't necessarily exclude, I think, a partisan element to it. There is the whole. There is the famous slip of the tongue by Ford that brings up the issue of assassination with journalists. Kissinger in the White House repeats a couple of times that sort of like, yeah, let Church investigate assassinations because he left to drag the Kennedys through the mud. And it will be not just Democratic administrations that are under Republican administrations that are under the spotlight, but there will be Democratic ones as well. So I did catch on that point that some thought it was a destruction or a partisan ploy and so on. Considering that most of my research has built around the report, I'm quite glad that they did it if I recognize that it might have been a distraction for the exposure of broader issues within the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. We come towards the sort of contemporary reverberation of the investigation. We are sort of almost celebrating the 50th anniversary of the committee, its investigations, and the publishing of the report. What are in your views, the findings of the committee or the conclusions of the committee or even its recommendations that have actually had a political impact and have stood the test of time, and which ones are the one that fell by the wayside?
- [38:28]
Brian Hochman
Well, I think one of the, I guess the two biggest lasting impacts of the committee, I guess three, I'll say one is like I saying earlier, the validation that the state has done these things kind of in a kind of truth and reconciliation sort of way, a kind of acknowledgment of the harms that had happened, acknowledgement of how the state operates, how they undermine social and political movements in the United States and abroad, was one of the lasting impacts because it meant that going forward from 1975, people were aware of what the state was capable of and were more, I think, reasonably suspicious moving forward on the left in the United States and overseas. The second thing is just the gift to historians of the Church Committee report, which I think has become an invaluable source for everybody writing about the American foreign policy and the Cold War in the United States and overseas, although so
- [39:37]
Luca Trenta
many of the documents are still classified.
- [39:39]
Brian Hochman
Yes, that's true. Yeah. And a lot have come out, obviously, since 1975. And the third is, and this is what, you know, Lock Johnson, who was an attorney on the. Or a researcher on the, on the committee, who we've talked to many times about this, this process of editing down the original report, has said, which is he believes that the most lasting impact is the creation of a permanent Senate Intelligence Committee that Before that, there was no real formalized mechanism of congressional oversight of intelligence where it was usually done kind of over a chummy dinner in a cigar filled room where somebody inside the CIA would let a senator know what's happening. But this became a really kind of formalized and bureaucratic and what was supposed to be an adversarial relationship between the oversight mechanism of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the, and the intelligent agencies. So I think these were kind of the, for me, the three big lasting impacts of the Church Committee report as to what the recommendations are. I mean, we can get into that, but there are so many left unfulfilled that as you had alluded to earlier, had they been addressed in 1975, we would not have had a tremendous series of scandals moving forward up to and including a lot of the 2013 revelations about domestic surveillance done by the NSA.
- [41:17]
Luca Trenta
Any, any final thoughts on the work of the committee?
- [41:21]
Matthew Guariglia
I think, you know, I'm ruminating on Matt's, I think, really excellent summary of the lasting effects of the Church Committee. And one of the things that I noticed, and maybe your listeners will notice, and you probably noticed Luca, is that he didn't mention some of the more legislative outcomes, the policy outcomes, and there are discrete policy outcomes that come from the Church Committee. The informal ban on assassinations on the part of the White House, on executive order preventing the military or other arms of the American state abroad from killing people. Of course there is the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act of 1978, which has its own tangled and frankly, from our perspective, I think, problematic history over the course of the last quarter of the 20th century and well into the 21st. But we have come to this project, I think, trying to put some of those debates about the influence of the committee aside and think about the report as a landmark historical document, a historical document that has, as I mentioned, served as a skeleton key to the American century for generations of American historians. And also quite frankly. And here this is the English professor and me talking. It's a really good read. And what we've tried to do as editors is take a massive multi volume report, some 3,100 pages of documentation, and boil it down to the key storylines that your average reader, the general public would I think find illuminating and I think quite harrowing given the context in which we're living. So I think there is, in short, a long standing set of debates about the Church Committee and its legacies, whether there were more missed opportunities than successes. I personally think there were. But from a broad perspective, from a social perspective from a historiographical perspective, from almost a literary perspective. This was I think an important success and one that we hope readers can engage with on those terms in addition to the standard political debates that surround the investigation and its progeny.
- [44:12]
Luca Trenta
I think that's an excellent point and I think Matthew is not dissimilar to the work that you're done on the Kerner Commission report in terms of making a claim about the historical significance of the document itself. And I can confirm that the book is not 3,100 pages is much more manageable than that. It is an excellent read. As Brian said, the material published by the Church Committee itself was an excellent read but I think in this much more digestible version and it's even better. Once again the book is called the Church Committee Report. It is published by Norton Company. Brian and Matthew, thank you so much for being with us and we'll talk soon.
- [44:59]
Brian Hochman
Thank you.
- [45:00]
Matthew Guariglia
Thanks so much. Take care.