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Stephen Kinzer
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BIOGRAPHY

Senior Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University. Foreign correspondent, New York Times (1983-2005). Author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future; The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire; and others.

Primary Contributions (1)
Mohammad Khatami
One spring afternoon in 1997, the telephone at the New York Times bureau in Istanbul rang. I was then serving as bureau chief, and the caller was my boss, the Times foreign editor. An election was soon to be held in Iran, he said, and he had chosen me to cover it. “Get yourself a visa,” he told me,…
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Publications (3)
The True Flag Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire
The True Flag Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (January 2017)
By Stephen Kinzer

The bestselling author of Overthrow and The Brothers brings to life the forgotten political debate that set America’s interventionist course in the world for the twentieth century and beyond.

How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide. Sometimes we burn with righteous anger, launching foreign wars and deposing governments. Then we retreat—until the cycle begins again.

No matter how often we debate this question, none of what we say...

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All the Shah's Men An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
All the Shah's Men An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2008)
By Stephen Kinzer
"A very gripping read . . . a cautionary tale for our current leaders."
—The New York Times

As zealots in Washington intensify their preparations for an American attack on Iran, the story of the CIA's 1953 coup—with its many cautionary lessons—is more urgently relevant than ever. All the Shah's Men brings to life the cloak-and-dagger operation that deposed the only democratic regime Iran ever had. The coup ushered in a quarter-century of repressive rule under the Shah, stimulated...

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Overthrow America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
Overthrow America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (February 2007)
By Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow provides a fast-paced narrative history of the coups, revolutions, and invasions by which the United States has toppled fourteen foreign governments -- not always to its own benefit

"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American...

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