Aaron J. Leonard

Author | Historian

Now Available

Historians correctly remind us that, in the 1960s, America experienced cultural and political turmoil that still resonates nearly six decades later. But in Meltdown Expected, Aaron J. Leonard proves the overlooked point that events during the last years of the 1970s were just as crucial, from Jonestown to Three Mile Island, from the rise of the Religious Right to the growing threat of violence both at home and abroad. I frankly cannot conceive of a more important book for readers who want to truly understand not only how we have gotten to where we are today, but why.

—Jeff Guinn, author of The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

Aaron J. Leonard has produced a fascinating account of an era that is growing quickly away from contemporary public attention. He shows that the world we live in today had not yet taken definitive shape, that the fluidity of social movements still alive from the 1960s, in some ways still growing, had the capacity to enhance democracy but fell toward failure. The power on the other side proved too great. Still, the details offer important clues for what may yet become the dynamos of tomorrow's American promise.

—Paul Buhle, co-editor with Mari Jo Buhle of the Encyclopedia of the American Left

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In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that “There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose.” Yet in the ensuing months, a series of crises disturbed that fragile sense of peace, ultimately setting the stage for Reagan’s decisive victory in 1980 and ushering in the final phase of the Cold War.

Meltdown Expected tells the story of the power shifts from late 1978 through 1979 whose repercussions are still being felt. Iran’s revolution led to a hostage crisis while neighbouring Afghanistan became the site of a proxy war between the USSR and the US, who supplied aid to Islamic mujahideen fighters that would later form the Taliban. Meanwhile, as tragedies like the Jonestown mass suicide and the assassination of Harvey Milk captured the nation’s attention, the government quietly reasserted and expanded the FBI’s intelligence powers. Drawing from recently declassified government documents and covering everything from Three Mile Island to the rise of punk rock, Aaron J. Leonard paints a vivid portrait of a tumultuous yet pivotal time in American history.

Beginning at the turn of the century, and ending only with communism's collapse, the US government and major elements in the wider society undertook an unrelenting effort to suppress and criminalize domestic communism. This book will track those efforts; from the state laws of the twenties that imprisoned the fledgling communist leadership, the efforts by police and local authorities against communists as they fought for unions, racial equality, and the unemployed, the trials and imprisonment of communist leaders mid-century, the extra-legal efforts of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the sixties, and the ongoing, relentless attention by the FBI afterward. This is a long-overdue book about the most extensive, repressive effort ever undertaken by US authorities against a political organization which, however problematic, was largely operating within the scope of constitutionally mandated freedoms.

Coming—September 9, 2025

This comprehensive and sprightly story suggests that the ascendancy of today’s right wing is based in no small measure on their obsession of the previous epoch—anticommunism—which savaged progressivism under the guise of fighting Communists. This book is an important contribution.”

- Gerald Horne, author of Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party

The sordid story of the intense and prolonged repression of American communists has never been told better. Aaron J. Leonard’s compelling and highly illuminating book is a must-read for everyone interested in US political history."

—Geoffrey Roberts, Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and Member of the Royal Irish Academy

Aaron Leonard’s study of unparalleled political repression is both comprehensive and engrossing. For over sixty years, mass surveillance, sustained persecution, and frequent imprisonment were all used to silence American communists and, more broadly, cripple left-wing activism. Essential reading for students of American political history.

—Phillip Deery, author of Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York

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