SIS Book Talk : Alan McPherson, The Breach: Iran-Contra

About the Book:

On its 40th anniversary, Iran-Contra is more relevant than ever.

A president defying Congress. Disrespect for the law. Attacks on the press. Evasion in the courts. The privatization of war. Quid pro quos with foreign nations. The mounting dangers to American democracy have long been with us. But all these perils first emerged together during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush era. This opaque foreign policy mess has receded from history, a minor speedbump at the triumphant end of the Cold War. With American democracy in increasing jeopardy from the inside, however, Iran-Contra must be reassessed as a major step down that dark path.

In this gripping blow-by-blow account of the 1980s efforts to trade arms with Iran illegally, fund rebels in Central America despite a congressional prohibition, and dodge political and legal consequences once the truth emerged, Alan McPherson argues for the salience of six democracy-degrading behaviors throughout the fiasco. At the time, many warned of the broad attack on democratic norms, yet no one paid a real price or learned a lesson. Those failures left the country more divided than ever before, and ill-equipped for more severe assaults to come.

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About the Author:

Alan McPherson is a professor at Temple University's College of Liberal Arts. He specializes in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and teaches broadly in U.S. foreign relations and global history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 after receiving an M.A. in history from San Francisco State University (1996) and a B.A. in history and economics from the Université de Montréal (1994). Before coming to Temple, he also taught at the University of Oklahoma (2008-2017) and Howard University (2001-2008). He has published twelve books and dozens of articles and chapters and has been a fellow at Harvard University and twice a Fulbright Fellow.

McPherson's most recent books are "The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (2025) and Ghosts of Sheridan Circle (2019).

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