Lucky Bastard Book

The premise of Charles McCarry's suspenseful and hilarious below-the-beltway novel is this: What if John F. Kennedy sired a love child who later became a presidential candidate himself -- someone possessed of enormous charismatic charm and unsatisfiable sexual appetites? And what if this "horny bastard" had also been recruited by the KGB during the 1960s? Indeed, two maverick Soviet agents recognize young John Fitzgerald "Jack" Adams's innate talents early in his career and put their considerable resources at his disposal, pulling strings so that he evades the draft (his best friend, in fact, is sent to Vietnam in his place). And that's just beginning of the KGB fringe benefits. Jack is groomed for a career in politics, schooled as an Ivy League lawyer, and married to a strong-willed radical feminist who masterminds her husband's rise to power while fretting that his relentless libido will screw up his career.

Now, if you read the newspaper this morning, you know this isn't any crazier than what's been going on with our active president, you-know-who. And Charles McCarry is no science fiction writer. In fact, he's is more of a Washington insider than Seymour Hersh. After all, McCarry knows who killed JFK (but more about this later...).

Charles McCarry knows so much because he was a spy himself from 1958 until 1967. In 1973 McCarry wrote his first espionage novel, The Miernik Dossier, inaugurating the Paul Christopher spy series, which includes The Tears of Autumn, The Secret Lovers, The Last Supper, and Second Sight. McCarry is the American Le Carré. Except McCarry writes better. And Paul Christopher is cooler than Smiley.

Now, about JFK: In The Tears of Autumn, Christopher discovers who really killed President Kennedy -- the Vietnamese. McCarry was a spook in Vietnam during the early '60s, so his logic makes sense. Are we sure the novel is fiction? I figure that McCarry must be privy to the truth, so he knows the events he postulated in his novel never really happened.