The Gemini Agenda
Page 47
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Historical Note
The Gemini Agenda is a work of fiction but there are certain historical elements which provide a foundation and framework for the story.
Winston Churchill. Churchill is portrayed as accurately as we know how, given that it occurs within a wholly fictitious adventure. Churchill traveled to Germany in 1932 to research his biography of his great ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough as depicted in the novel. While in Munich, Hitler backed out of a dinner with Churchill arranged by Putzi Hanfstaengl and, as Churchill later wrote, “Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me.” Even at age 57 in the novel, he was the crack shot we make him out to be as well as a man who was so thrilled at the possibility of being in danger that his Scotland Yard bodyguard rarely advised him of it when this was so. We have doubts about the accuracy of all his claims concerning his African hunting prowess in Chapter 89 but there is a photo of him with a white rhino. Churchill’s somewhat benign comments about Hitler in Chapter 90 are taken from a 1935 article he wrote and later included in his book Great Contemporaries. He was an ardent Zionist, however, and his advice to Hitler through Hanfstaengl on anti-Semitism at the dinner where Hitler was a no-show is accurately portrayed.
Those with only a casual knowledge of Winston Churchill may question his being cast as a key character in an historical thriller. They shouldn’t. Saving the world tends to overshadow lesser accomplishments but Churchill was a first-class athlete in his youth, an all-public schools fencing champion, and a championship polo player, a sport he played into his 50s. His detractors — of which there were many before 1940 — dismissed him as an “adventurer” and a “half-breed American.” He was both of those things and more. He fought Islamic warriors on the Afghan border and in the Sudan in the late 1890s, bloody no-quarter battles where he killed many men at close range. He escaped from a prison in South Africa during the Boer war in 1899 and made his way over hundreds of miles of enemy territory to freedom. He bagged a rare white rhino in Africa in 1908, drawing the admiration and envy of Theodore Roosevelt who tried to do the same but was not so fortunate. He became a seaplane pilot in the early 1910s after becoming, at age 38, the First Lord of the British Admiralty. In the First World War and temporarily out of office, he commanded a battalion in the trenches in the bloody Ypres salient where Corporal Adolf Hitler also served and where both men drew sketches in their spare time of the same bombed-out Belgian church. Contrary to some views, Hitler was a talented artist but Churchill was better, a gifted Impressionist whose works pseudonymously won awards in juried shows.
Bourke Cockran (1854–1923). Winston Churchill’s real life mentor and oratorical role model was the prominent turn-of-the century New York lawyer, statesman and Congressman William Bourke Cockran whose fictional son’s exploits (Cockran was childless) are depicted in The DeValera Deception, The Parsifal Plot and The Gemini Agenda.. Churchill’s feelings and comments about his mentor in Chapter 1 are accurately portrayed. A Democrat, a close adviser to President Grover Cleveland in his second term, and a contemporary of William Jennings Bryan, Cockran was acclaimed by members of both parties, including his friend and Long Island neighbor Theodore Roosevelt, as America’s greatest orator. He was Roosevelt’s chief economic adviser in the 1912 presidential campaign and subsequently reviewed galley proofs of the ex-President’s autobiography.
Churchill was only 20 years old when he first met Cockran, the two men being brought together in 1895 by Churchill’s mother, the American-born heiress Jennie Jerome, with whom Cockran had an affair in Paris in the spring of that year following the death of their respective spouses. Sixty years later, Churchill could still recite from memory the speeches of Bourke Cockran he had learned as a young man. “I owe the best things in my career to him” he once wrote to his first cousin (and Cockran’s brother-in-law) Sir Shane Leslie. Those wishing to know more about the Churchill-Cockran relationship are referred to Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor, by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, originally published in hardcover in the U.K. and the U.S. in 2007 by Greenwood World Publishing and in trade paperback in 2009 by Enigma Books.
Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s views on German politics in 1932 are accurately portrayed in the dialogue of Randolph Churchill and Kurt von Sturm as well as Hitler himself in Chapter 31.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism is well-documented in his own words, both written (in Mein Kampf) and spoken. In fact, a monologue on “the Jew as Parasite” by a fictional SS character in our last novel, The Parsifal Pursuit, was taken almost verbatim from Hitler’s private conversations in 1931 as recounted by a close confidant, Otto Wagener. But anti-Semitism was not a popular political position in Germany and Hitler was a skilled politician during the years 1930 to 1932 when he was on the cusp of power, tailoring his public and private comments to fit his audience. The fact that he did not utter anti-Semitic comments in private to people like Kurt von Sturm who did not share his racial views is accurately portrayed in the novel as is the absence of overt anti-Semitism in his public speeches during this period. He left that up to the likes of Goebbels and Himmler but there is no doubt that he was as anti-Semitic as any of the other Nazis.
Eugenics. The pseudo-science of eugenics flourished in America during the first forty years of the twentieth century as nowhere else, frequently supported by prominent religious leaders, Protestant, Catholic and Jew alike, as well as politicians of both parties. Even Winston Churchill in the years 1910–1912 once supported sterilization of mental defectives as a method of securing their release from state institutions. While Great Britain never did so, 26 US states passed laws for the compulsory sterilization of mental defectives and through the 1930s, 35,878 men and women were sterilized or castrated. By contrast, Germany had no such laws prior to 1933. The Nazi eugenics laws passed early in 1933 after their ascension to power provided, among other things, for the involuntary sterilization of mental defectives. The Nazis based these laws almost exclusively on model state legislation drafted by American eugenics supporters. All the quotes about eugenics in the novel are accurate, those which begin Parts I through IV of the novel as well as the speech by Lothrop Stoddard in Chapter 2 and the articles Mattie and Cockran read to each other in Ch. 45. The support given to eugenics by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation actually happened and there really was a Eugenics Record Office and a Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, all backed by government financial support. The best and most comprehensive account of the eugenics movement can be found in Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America’s Campaign To Create A Master Race.
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer and Josef Mengele. Most people will recognize Josef Mengele as one of the sadistic Nazi doctors at Auschwitz, which he was. But he was also the protégé of Otmar von Verschuer whose background, articles and official positions are accurately portrayed in the novel. So is the high regard in which he was held by American eugenicists. Verschuer was a racist, an anti-Semite and a dedicated Nazi whose work both inspired and guided Mengele’s own. In essence, the experiments on American twins in the novel reflect exactly what Mengele did in 1942 with 3,000 twins at Auschwitz, only 160 of whom survived. Mengele routinely sent blood samples and eyeballs from murdered twins to Verschuer in Berlin. Neither man was ever tried at Nuremberg and, while Mengele was hunted as a war criminal the rest of his life, his mentor Verschuer saw his reputation rehabilitated and he lived in Germany until his death in an automobile accident in 1969. His death in the novel is the only time in our Churchill thrillers we have portrayed the death of an actual historical character before his time. We thought briefly of using another name for the Verschuer character but we really thought he should pay for his crimes against humanity if only in a novel. The most chilling account of Verschuer’s and Mengele’s work is Children of the Flames, Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheil
a Cohn Dekel.
The Army War College and Military Intelligence Division (MID). From 1919 to 1933, scientific racism was taught as part of the regular curriculum at the US Army War College and books by Charles Davenport, Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant were prominently featured in the courses taught and Davenport and Stoddard were often lecturers. General Ralph Van Deman, the founder of the Army’s Military Intelligence Division in 1917, did run a private intelligence network in America during the 1930s which worked closely with MID, the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence and local police departments.
The Graf Zeppelin. The famed German airship made an historic around-the-world voyage in 1929 sponsored by the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. From 1930 through the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937, it conducted regular passenger service between Germany and Brazil, safely flying well over a million miles. The Graf Zeppelin, however, was never used for regular service between Germany and America as depicted in the novel. We just like airships.
Autogiros. The Juan de la Cierva-designed autogiro was the next big thing in aviation when it was commercially introduced in the early 1930s. Fortune magazine devoted two articles to it in its March, 1931 edition, describing it as “a complex if not revolutionary addition to the science of aerodynamics.” It flew and handled like an airplane but could take off and land in short spaces at safe, slow speeds. Lift was provided solely by the blades of its huge hinged rotor, a common feature on today’s helicopters.
Michael McMenamin
Patrick McMenamin
November, 2011
Acknowledgments
We owe a debt of gratitude to many people who helped bring this book, our third Winston Churchill Thriller, to light. Katie McMenamin Sabo, our daughter and sister and the first writing teacher either of us ever had. With an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, she really is, as she often reminds us, Rose Wilder Lane to our Laura Ingalls. Kelly McMenamin Wang, our other daughter and sister who, with her MBA from Dartmouth, is a really good writer and editor herself and the engine behind the sisters’ website www.pixiesdidit.com which offers home and life organization advice based on Myers-Briggs personality types. Patrick’s wife Rebecca Perkins, the head make-up artist on Law and Order SVU and Michael’s wife and Patrick’s mom, Carol Breckenridge, an artist and art therapist, both of whom read and offered critical advice on numerous iterations of the book. Mystery writer Les Roberts, our close friend and ever-patient writer mentor, from whom Patrick took a college screenwriting course when he was a junior in high school and who, like any good mentor, validated our dream while continuing to give us candid and insightful advice. Robert Miller, the editor and publisher of Enigma Books, who published the first paperback edition of Michael’s book Becoming Winston Churchill and who agreed with us that the world really needed a series of historical thrillers set in the 1930s featuring Winston Churchill. Richard Langworth, the author of Churchill by Himself and a pre-eminent expert on everything Churchill. Josh Beatman and the other creative folks at Brainchild Studios/NYC who came up with another killer cover design. Alexis Dragony, Michael’s former assistant who typed many iterations of the book; her successor Bonnie Daanish who did the same as did Jo Ann Chapman, none of whom were shy on offering helpful advice. And, finally, to all our good friends and relatives who read our drafts and offered their comments.