Books, Arts & Manners: I Spy

Free Agent: The Unseen War, 1941-1991, by Brian Crozier (HarperCollins, 314 pp., $30)

AS HE TOURED the United States in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that whenever something important needed to be done, ordinary Americans got together and did it— without, as in France or Britain, depending on government or the nobility to do it for them.