Don’t Shoot We’re Republicans

You’re wrong if you think sunglasses and a dark suit is all that an FBI agent is about. He’s also about loving danger, pulling pranks on colleagues, and true bravery, willingly putting himself in harm’s way for the sake of his country. Retired Special Agent Jack Owens has written a fastpaced, funny, and irreverent accounting of his thirty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. William Westberg, his former boss in the Bureau, says, "If you thought you knew the FBI, prepared to be surprised, enlightened and entertained … side splitting humor."

Don’t Shoot We’re Republicans is an inside look at the FBI and how it really works: how you train to become an agent, the do’s and don’t’s of Bureau office protocol, and how Bureau culture changes with each new FBI Director. For example, the complex and mysterious J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau’s first chief, could be despotically picayune – he once placed a ban on brown-bag lunches for agents, angrily declaring, "Brown bags are unprofessional. The practice must stop now! Today! Agents don’t brown-bag!" But there was also the more modern-thinking and democratic Louis J. Freeh, who brought women into the Bureau and who initiated fitness programs for his agents.

Agent Owens, a member of the FBI’s first ever SWAT team, takes the reader with him on stake-outs, chases and hunts for murderers, spies and robbers through Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, ranging from the infamous case of Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer, to Jerry, an Army deserter in the Alabama hills caught sleeping with his boots on between his nude wife and girl friend. We learn about the rigorous boot camp firearms training the young FBI candidates endure, and the pranks they pull on each other as well as on those in command. We accompany him through his training as a counterspy. We glimpse the sometimes unfortunate toll taken on family life when one chooses the FBI as one’s career, but we also come to appreciate the one-for-all-all-for-one brotherly feeling that develops through time among the agents.

Don’t Shoot We’re Republicans is a humor-laced read for those who like fast paced, "insider" books; and for the FBI aficionado, it is a unique book on the modern history of the Bureau.

During his time in the FBI, Jack Owens was a Special Agent in the American Southland and worked undercover in counterintelligence in New York. His final years were spent recruiting women and minorities for the Bureau. In retirement, he has written for Atlantic Monthly, Alabama Heritage and other magazines. He was, also, a cast member of the CBS-TV reality show Big Brother for 36 episodes.

Don’t Shoot We’re Republicans, 9781933909677, trade paper, will be published by Chronology Books, a new imprint of History Publishing Company, pub date, August 15, 2009 and will be in bookstores nationally.

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Contact: Don Bracken, Publicity,

djb@historypublishingco.com, 845-398-8161