As I write this, I am wearing a watch. Leather strap, black face, white numerals. It looks just like the one my oldest brother wore. I wear it for him.
His name was Gary S. Jordan. On February 24, 1967, Gary was killed by a sniper in Vietnam. Then soldiers came to our door. I was eight years old.
I don’t remember what the officers said. I remember the uniforms. I remember my mother’s hands going still. I remember a flag folded into a triangle and handed to her as if it were supposed to explain something. There were nine of us in that house. After that day, it went quiet, and the quiet stayed for years.
The story we were given
They told my mother her son died for his country. For freedom. For democracy. To stop the spread of communism. They gave her a flag, a Purple Heart and a story, and she kept all three in her line of sight for the rest of her life. She believed that story until the day she died.
I believed it too. For a long time. Too long.
Then the pieces started coming, the way they always do—slowly, like water through cracks. I was thirteen when the Pentagon Papers were published. I didn’t read them. But I heard the adults talking, and I heard the word “lied” in the same sentence as “Vietnam.” Later came My Lai. Later still, the records showing that the men who sent my brother knew the war could not be won, and kept sending boys anyway.
Gary’s death was real. The flag was his. But the story wrapped around it belonged to someone else.
Why “the call is coming from inside the house”
You know the old horror story. A babysitter alone at night gets a threatening phone call. She calls the police. They trace it. The call is coming from inside the house.
That is the feeling I spent decades trying to name. The danger to the American republic was never mainly outside it—not in Moscow, Beijing or Havana. It was here. It was built by Americans, paid for by Americans and made normal by American institutions, one decision at a time, over a hundred years.
The book follows that call from the beginning: Edward Bernays teaching America how to “engineer consent,” Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, the slow purchase of Congress, the war that took my brother—and then the calls of our own time, each one a promise, an enemy or a demand that came from inside the house.
Why I finally wrote it
I am not a historian. I am not a journalist. I am a citizen who lost a brother to a story, and then watched that story get rewritten again and again with different names and different enemies. I read the records. I kept notes. I started asking the questions I had been trained not to ask.
This is not a book about one president or one party. It is about the house every president walks into, and who prepared the room. It is not a conspiracy theory, either. Nobody needs a secret meeting when enough people at the top already benefit from the way things work.
I wrote it for my mother, who never knew who “they” were. I wrote it for Gary. And I wrote it for anyone who has ever felt that the people explaining things were explaining at us, not to us.
The phone is still ringing. My hope is that this book helps you recognize the voice on the line.
— Robert Eugene Jordan
The Call Is Coming From Inside the [People’s] House: How America Was Sold, and Who Bought It is available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover.
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