Henry Kissinger once noted that President Richard Nixon believed the Central Intelligence Agency was “a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals opposed to him.” In the case of William Colby, who rose to become the director of central intelligence in 1973, Nixon was almost right. But this excellent and thorough biography by Randall Woods, a noted University of Arkansas historian of the Vietnam era in American politics whose biography of Senator William Fulbright was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, gives a more subtle and sympathetic analysis. Woods argues that Colby, a Boy Scout and devout Catholic who hated totalitarians of any stripe, was always loyal to the Constitution and to the president of the day.
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