Book Review: Michael V. Hayden’s Playing to the Edge (New at Reason)

Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden makes the case for the expansive power of the American security state. In a review of Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, from the August/September issue of Reason magazine, Brett Max Kaufman finds Hayden’s justifications and metaphors less than compelling:

Playing to the Edge is Hayden’s grand statement, the case for himself as a mover and shaker, a humble but aggressive visionary, a team player, an honorable man, and, most of all, right about everything. If we disagree with him, it’s only because we don’t know what he knows—and this is a problem. He’s concerned, he says, that “critics, observers, and just average citizens don’t know as much about intelligence as they want or should.” (Intelligence, in this context, means just about everything the NSA and CIA do.) If the public misunderstands what intelligence does, we might not want intelligence to keep doing it. He wants to show us that we should.

But it is not a good sign when your memoir’s central metaphor breaks down in the foreword. Hayden’s conceit is that those who run intelligence have a duty to “us[e] all the tools and all the authorities available, much like how a good athlete takes advantage of the entire playing field right up to the sideline markers and endlines”—the edge. As he’s said elsewhere (he’s been on this kick for nearly a decade), “Playing back from the line protected me but didn’t protect America. I made it clear I would always play in fair territory, but that there would be chalk dust on my cleats.”

The first problem is that if you get chalk on your cleats, it means you’re out of bounds. (Or at least you are in football, Hayden’s obvious inspiration.) That this has apparently gone unremarked to Hayden over the years—even by Dan Rooney, the owner of Hayden’s hometown Pittsburgh Steelers and Hayden’s high school football coach, with whom he watches too many Super Bowls in this book to count—is notable in itself. That it goes entirely unexamined in the book’s numerous invocations of the image is, alas, characteristic.

Worse still is that “taking advantage of the entire playing field” is a pretty odd way to describe the main thing that good athletes do. Of course, spraying one down the right-field line or throwing it deep and wide can sometimes help the team. But they are hardly required to win the game. Hayden never bothers to explain why pushing it to the edge is a main point of his duty as a public servant. Like so much in the book, it is simply assumed that people of good faith will agree.

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