Using the Cuban missile crisis as its tableau, Carter, the best-selling novelist, historian and Yale law professor, casts the hawks and doves surrounding President John F. Kennedy as the gods and demons communicating with their counterparts in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Kennedy really did use a back channel (a man) to negotiate with Khrushchev, Carter points out; shallow popular histories suggest that the United States “won” more in the events of October 1962; in fact, planting missiles in Cuba earned the Soviets the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy, and Kennedy also had to agree publicly not to invade Cuba (never mind the multiple attempts on his life). The ingredients of suspense are unmissable in “Back Channel” — the countdown to cataclysm, the threat of annihilation and the relentless exploitation of our deepest political anxieties, too — that the president is not in control, that hawks inside the establishment are a political faction without whose consent the president may not rule, rather than the other way around. Early civil rights organizers did speak out against the OSS’ exclusion of blacks, like Margo’s war hero father, from intelligence work, and the happy interweaving of these is provocative and provides much of the pleasure as well. [...] what other writer so thoroughly explores through history the class that the Obamas are in? [...] the campaigns against Obama, offstage and on, to discredit and even sabotage government doings are also compellingly explored in the fictionalized version of that first presidency that most exposed contemporary Americans to their ongoing infighting and their violent, even conspiratorial factionalism.
Reported by SFGate 19 hours ago.
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