Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia

by Andrew Friedman

The capital of the U.S. Empire after World War II was not a city. It was an American suburb. In this innovative and timely history, Andrew Friedman chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions created a U.S. imperial home front in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. In this covert capital, the suburban landscape provided a cover for the workings of U.S. imperial power, which shaped domestic suburban life. The Pentagon and the CIA built two of the largest office buildings in the country there during and after the war that anchored a new imperial culture and social world.

As the U.S. expanded its power abroad by developing roads, embassies, and villages, its subjects also arrived in the covert capital as real estate agents, homeowners, builders, and landscapers who constructed spaces and living monuments that both nurtured and critiqued postwar U.S. foreign policy. Tracing the relationships among American agents and the migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, and elsewhere who settled in the southwestern suburbs of D.C., Friedman tells the story of a place that recasts ideas about U.S. immigration, citizenship, nationalism, global interconnection, and ethical responsibility from the post-WW2 period to the present. Opening a new window onto the intertwined history of the American suburbs and U.S. foreign policy, Covert Capital will also give readers a broad interdisciplinary and often surprising understanding of how U.S. domestic and global histories intersect in many contexts and at many scales.

American Crossroads, 37

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Cultural

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very dense and academic read, but worth it. I had the weird sensation of for the first time reading something that was really about, as Joan Didion put it, where I was from. I feel like this book helps me make sense of the place I grew up, that strange way that national and international politics lived alongside, and interpenetrated with, the experience of 'standard suburbia.' And it's full of info and histories that I didn't know, or didn't know in detail - many of them appalling - that pull the picture together.

[Kimberly Te · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool analysis of the development of the Northern Virginia suburbs but also insanely dense. I was more interested in the political events that drove this development, but it's also laced with a lot of architectural analysis that wasn't the most interesting. Liked how it really went in on the Eden Center.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fun for kids of all ages, and you'll finally find out why that roommate you had in college from Mclean, VA had such weird family issues!

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though clearly coming from a certain point of view, Andrew Friedman convincingly connects the rise of the suburbs in Northern Virginia with the rise of the American national security state. He details how American foreign policy abroad, especially CIA actions, shaped personal and material space in the Dulles Corridor. This is essential reading for those hoping to understand how Northern Virginia came to be, a place of vast ethnic diversity, saturated with defense and intelligence agencies, and ever-sprawling.

He focuses on two periods of NOVA growth and CIA intervention abroad: Vietnam and Iran-Contra. The end of the Vietnam War led South Vietnamese, many high-ranking military and security officials, to Northern Virgina, encouraged by the CIA, making NOVA the third largest destination for Vietnamese refugees in America. Central American refugees to Northern Virginia, however, were the victims and enemies of the CIA and their right-wing Contra allies and were actively discouraged from staying in the area. In both episodes, however, Friedman shows how the America brings its empire home. One also can't help but feel sympathy for America's imperial cast-offs--South Vietnamese loyalists trying to keep the fight alive long after Vietnam was united, Salvadorans cooking and cleaning for those men and women who had destroyed their lives back home.

Friedman would have made a more convincing case about the uniqueness of the built environment in Northern Virginia if he had used some statistics as context or compared NOVA to other suburbs across America. While the landscape of suburbia may have dovetailed with the unique characteristics of CIA culture (open secrecy, separation from oversight, the intimate connection between work and home), this doesn't explain the growth of suburbs across America, from Palo Alto to Allentown.

[Quinn Monette · Rating 5 out of 5]

nova kids, meet your bible

[Edrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me tell you how much trouble this book had given me. I don't feel like I had enough time to dive into it and study it, but just flying through certainly made me feel very confused. I think I need one whole semester to read this book and have someone walk me through it in great detail. I don't care what others say but this is not easy to read! Has many strengths but storytelling is certainly not among them! The whole way I was like wow some people really have big brains and patience and can come up with such complex arguments. I don't know what it takes to get there but I certainly have no interest in going through that.

Other than that, I learned that bad and powerful people are really bad and powerful and there is nothing we can do about it and this made me feel really depressed.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

A uniquely interdisciplinary work drawing from (sub)urban landscapes, architecture, interior design, photography, literary studies, and 20th century history, Friedman contributes a fascinating study on the connections between empire, the CIA, and the suburbs of Northern Virginia.