- Zabel, Bryce.
Surrounded by Enemies.
Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2013.
ISBN 978-1-62652-431-6.
-
What if John F. Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt
in Dallas? That is the point of departure for this gripping
alternative history novel by reporter, author, and screenwriter
Bryce Zabel.
Spared an assassin's bullet by a heroic Secret Service agent,
a shaken Kennedy returns to Washington and convenes a small group
of his most trusted inner circle led by his brother Robert, the
attorney general, to investigate who might have launched such
an attack and what steps could be taken both to prevent a
second attempt and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Surveying the landscape, they conclude it might be easier to
make a list of powerful forces who might not wish to
kill the president. Kennedy's actions in office had given
actors ranging from Cuba, anti-Castro groups in the U.S., the
Mafia, FBI, CIA, senior military commanders, the Secret Service,
Texas oil interests, and even Vice President Johnson potential
motivations to launch or condone an attack. At the same time,
while pursuing their own quiet inquiry, they must try to avert
a Congressional investigation which might turn into a partisan
circus, diverting attention from their strategy for Kennedy's
1964 re-election campaign.
But in the snake pit which is Washington, there is more than one
way to assassinate a man, and Kennedy's almost grotesque
womanising and drug use (both he and his wife were regular
patients of
Max Jacobson,
“Dr. Feelgood”, whose “tissue regenerator”
injections were laced with amphetamines) provided the ammunition
his enemies needed to try to bring him down by assassinating
his character in the court of public opinion.
A shadowy figure begins passing FBI files to two reporters of
Top Story, a recently-launched news magazine
struggling in the shadow of Time and
Newsweek. After investigating the allegations and
obtaining independent corroboration for some of them,
Top Story runs a cover story on “The Secret
Life of the President”, creating a firestorm of
scrutiny of the president's private life by media who
never before considered such matters worthy of investigation
or reporting.
The political implications quickly assume the dimensions of a
constitutional crisis, where the parties involved are forced
to weigh appropriate sanctions for a president whose behaviour
may have put the national security at risk versus taking
actions which may give those who plotted to kill the president
what they tried to achieve in Dallas with a bullet.
The plot deftly weaves historical events from the epoch with
twists and turns which all follow logically from the point of
departure, and the result is a very different history of the
1960s and 1970s which, to this reader who lived through those
decades, seems entirely plausible. The author, who identifies
himself in the introduction as “a lifelong Democrat”,
brings no perceptible ideological or political agenda to
the story—the characters are as complicated as the
real people were, and behave in ways which are believable
given the changed circumstances.
The story is told in a clever way: as a special issue of
Top Story commemorating the 50th anniversary
of the assassination attempt. Written in weekly news magazine
style, this allows it to cite memoirs, recollections by those
involved in years after the events described, and
documents which became available much later. There are a few
goofs regarding historical events in the sixties which shouldn't
have been affected by the alternative timeline, but readers
who notice them can just chuckle and get on with the story.
The book is almost entirely free of copy-editing errors.
This is a superb exemplar of alternative history,
and
Harry Turtledove,
the cosmic grand master of the genre, contributes a foreword to
the novel.
November 2013 