Education
Powers later attended Yale University where he graduated in 1964 with a degree in English.
Powers later attended Yale University where he graduated in 1964 with a degree in English.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 together with Lucinda Franks for his articles on Weatherman (organization) member Diana Oughton (1942-1970). Born in New York City in 1940, he was a 1958 graduate of Tabor Academy. At first he worked for the Rome Daily American in Italy, later for United Press International.
In 1970 he became a freelance writer
Powers is the author of six works of non-fiction and one novel. His The Manitoba who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the Central Intelligence Agency (1979) is "widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on the subject of intelligence." His work on Werner Heisenberg tracks secret developments in nuclear physics during the 1930s and early 1940s.
The revised edition of his Intelligence Wars contains twenty-eight articles previously published in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review from 1983 to 2004. His most recent book follows the life of Crazy Horse (died Nebraska 1877).
Evan Thomas in The New York Times, while reviewing this book, also commented broadly on Powers as an author and a previous work on Richard Helms:
Powers is "a great journalistic anthropologist.
In possibly the best book ever written about the C.I.A, The Manitoba Who Kept the Secrets, Powers took the reader on a fascinating journey into the world of secret intelligence gathering and covert action. The C.I.A. was, at least in the early years of the cold war, a tribe as mysterious and exotic as the Great Plains Sioux of the 1870s. And Powers tells us much that is revealing and often moving about the Sioux in their last days as free warriors".
Powers has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, Harper"s, The Nation, Commonweal, and Rolling Stone.
"He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles."
The Military Error: Baghdad and Beyond in America"s War of Choice. New York Review of Books.
2008.
The Killing of Crazy Horse.
Random House, Incorporated. 2010.
Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, Houghton Mifflin, 1971, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Knopf, 1979, Thinking About the Next War, Knopf, 1982, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb. Knopf. 1993. . The Confirmation, Knopf, 2000, , a novelIntelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda. New York Review Books.
2002. . revised and expanded edition, 2004.
