Back Channel

Back Channel is a new thriller by Yale law professor Stephen L Carter set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It posits that the agent of back channel communications between Kennedy and Khruschev was actually a nineteen-year-old Cornell co-ed, whose cover was having an affair with JFK. It's very well-constructed, with an extensive note at the end detailing the ways in which he adjusted the timeline to suit his story and dramatize events. Nonetheless, Carter slips through a couple of anachronisms --- he has our point-of-view character use a Princess phone three years before they were available, and have a Kodak Instamatic camera two years early. He also assumes ubiquitous direct-dial long distance calling, which wasn't available in the New York area until 1964. Most grating of all, our heroine is African-American: even though Cornell was co-ed since it's founding, and also integrated early-on, a black teenager being able to navigate Washington circles without extra comment at the beginnings of the civil rights struggles --- six months before the letter from the Birmingham jail and a year before the March on Washington --- strikes me as unlikely. I solved that major suspension of disbelief by merely ignoring Margo's race for much of the book.

    That all said, it is a very well-told story, with a lovely convoluted plot. As hawks on both sides beat their drums for war and saner heads try to prevail, we get to watch the President and his brother and his national security advisor try to keep the lid on the boiling pot. Carter has clearly drawn some from An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek's biography of Kennedy, and from the White House tape recordings in the JFK library. We watch JFK's efforts to steer the middle ground elegantly, with steel resolve, against the cajoling of McNamara and LeMay; we watch Bobby playing the devil's advocate to see the sense of the room; and we see a fictionalized McGeorge Bundy both advising and plotting.