Burnham, David. A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS. New York: Random House, 1989. 419 pages.

The jacket says it's "the first full-scale investigative book on the Internal Revenue Service," an agency that is "twice as big as the CIA and five times larger than the FBI." David Burnham has chapters on presidents who used the IRS, and on the willingness of the IRS to help the CIA and FBI suppress dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. There is nothing about the flip side: The IRS will drop investigations if the CIA complains that they are getting too close. All told, the book is fairly comprehensive.

Burnham reported for the New York Times for fifteen years, where he developed an interest in nuclear safety issues (Karen Silkwood crashed on her way to see him in 1974). Two years later he joined with George Lardner of the Washington Post and Jeremiah O'Leary of the Washington Star and led the successful attack to dump Richard Sprague, general counsel of the new House Select Committee on Assassinations (Lardner was the last person to see David Ferrie alive in 1967). In 1983 Burnham's "The Rise of the Computer State" appeared, an alarmist book which didn't foresee the microcomputer revolution and consequently locked out some unthinking liberals by treating all computers as a threat to the privacy of the little guy. Reporters can be hazardous to your health, so at PIR we congratulate Burnham on this latest book and hope he stays interested in the IRS.
ISBN 0-394-56097-3

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