Back Channel

by Stephen L Carter

  As to how I got wind of this story, it began at my father’s memorial service a few years ago, when I overheard an African-American woman of some years, a member of what Claudia Jensen would have called one of the old families, asking another woman, someone she hadn’t seen in decades, if she knew what had become of little Margo.

  “Who?”

  “The one who had the affair with JFK. You remember.”

  This line naturally intrigued me, but when I approached them, both women clammed up. After that I returned to my other work, but the notion that some black woman had been involved with the thirty-fifth President of the United States continued to tantalize. I pored over a couple of Kennedy biographies but found no mention. One was written by an acquaintance of mine, but when I asked him, he only laughed. “That rumor’s been around forever. Nobody believes it.”

  Acting on the assumption that Margo, whoever she was, would also have been a member of one of those old families, I studied genealogy tables until I narrowed the possibilities to three. When I learned that Margo Jensen had actually worked in Washington briefly during the Kennedy Administration, I went back to my friend the biographer, who in turn directed me to a Kennedy retainer who’d been one of his sources. This man, now over ninety but with a mind clear as a bell, remembered that Margo had once been arrested at the White House. Nobody knew why, he said. But the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, was the one who got her out.

  Armed with this skimpy information, I still wasn’t sure what I had. Certainly there wasn’t enough here to justify a direct approach. Once more I put the research aside. And once more it wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Finally, I gave in. I had to have the details. Before I made my approach, I visited Vera Madison, an old friend of my parents, who has a lovely condominium in a retirement community on Hilton Head. After a bit of prodding, she was kind enough to share her late husband’s diaries. After that, I was home free.

  I tracked Margo to Garrison, where she still summers at her late grandmother’s house. She was surprised that anyone had worked it all out, and even helped me frame my central question in a way that was relatively inoffensive. Only later did it occur to me that she had been eager to talk to someone about what had happened, if only to set the record straight. She had heard, she said, that I was sniffing around. Sooner or later, the tale might come out, and she wanted her version on the record.

  Margo wasted no time in denial. We sat in her grandmother’s old study, surrounded by silver-framed photographs of her late husband, her three children, and her four grandchildren. A big nervous sheepdog kept padding in and out, perhaps to make sure that his mistress was being well treated. Margo gave me tea, along with cookies from the same bakery Priscilla Littlejohn had frequented, in Poughkeepsie—now run by the niece of the original owner—and as we sat in the corner, with a view down to the river and the same ruined dock, she told me her story, much as I have told it to you.

  I returned the following morning, and the morning after that, until I had it all.

  Or almost all.

  “You haven’t told me what you thought of Kennedy,” I said toward the end.

  “He was a great man,” she said, with a winning smile. “He would have done great things if he’d survived.” The smile vanished. “And you know, Mr. Carter, in the missile crisis, I don’t think there was anyone else who could have held the middle ground so well.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.” I pondered the safest way to put the question. “I couldn’t help noticing how, toward the end, you got sort of vague about the details of your meetings with Kennedy. Particularly on that last Friday and Saturday. Those accounts sounded a little, um, truncated.”

  “I told you everything I remember,” she said slyly. “Everything relevant.”

  “So there might be things that happened that were irrelevant?”

  “Most of life is irrelevant, Mr. Carter.” A lovely wink. “Although I must say those often tend to be the more wonderful parts.”

  She had been working for decades on a double dactyl about the Kennedy years, she said, but somehow couldn’t get it done.

  The last question I asked was why she had decided to accept the offer to spend the summer of 1963 working for Bundy.

  Margo smiled.

  “Was it just the experience you wanted?” No reply. “Did you maybe miss the excitement of being on the inside?” Still she had nothing to say, but her smile never wavered. “Or was it maybe because Kennedy wanted you nearby?”

  At the door, she made me take a bag of those marvelous cookies.

  “When you write your book,” she said, “do me one favor.” The hazel eyes grew solemn. “A way to make my life a little easier.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make it a novel. Change all the locations. Which university I’m at. Which towns and cities. Where I’m from. All that. Most important, change the names. Mine especially.”

  So I did.

  Author’s Note

  Readers of my other fiction will remember Jack Ziegler as the villain of The Emperor of Ocean Park. His backstory is slightly different there than it is here, but Ziegler was always skilled at inventing a cover. Of course the heroic Major Madison of the instant novel is the Colonel Madison of Emperor, Misha Garland’s father-in-law: his daughter Kimberly, a toddler here, grows up to be Misha’s ambitious wife. Vera Madison is also in both novels, as is little Marilyn, who by the time of Emperor is known as Lindy. Agent Stilwell, the conduit to J. Edgar Hoover, plays a similar role in Palace Council. Eddie Wesley, mentioned briefly here as Claudia Jensen’s godson, features prominently in that book. There, as here, he works briefly in the Kennedy White House, exiting well before the events in the present story. Torie Elden, who oversees Margo’s work at the Labor Department, is present in several of Palace’s scenes. And poor Tristan Hadley, dismissed as an idiot by Lorenz Niemeyer in chapter 3 of the instant tale, is in Palace Council the spurned suitor of Aurelia Treene. Finally, readers of my novel Jericho’s Fall will of course know what fate awaited Jericho Ainsley later in life.

  Historical Note and Acknowledgments

  This is a work of fiction, not a work of history, so there would be little point in listing all of the changes I have made to the chronology of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I have shoved around the dates and times of the meetings of the ExComm to suit my narrative, I have moved the Soviet responses to places where they better fit the story, and I have rewritten the remarks of the participants—and occasionally their identities. I have tried to remain true nevertheless to the thrust of the roles of particular historical figures in resolving the crisis itself. Some events—such as the evacuation of the White House on October 24, 1962—never occurred. On the other hand, the premise of my fictional evacuation—the false report of the launch of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile—did indeed happen, and on that very day. (The other two false reports that I mention were also delivered during the crisis, but not on that Wednesday; my point was to imagine the panic had all three reports come in at once.)

  The conversation about the Bay of Pigs between President Kennedy and former President Eisenhower really did take place at Camp David, largely along the lines that I describe in chapter 29. Kennedy actually received the intelligence report that the Soviet Union was burning its papers—considered a prelude to war—on Saturday, October 27, not Monday, October 29, as in my novel. The report turned out to be false. The comments that I attribute to Curtis LeMay after the end of the crisis actually combine two separate communications. The subsequent deal to remove the IL-28 bombers from Cuba was reached much as I describe it.

  The quotations from documents are all accurate. In a debriefing from before the missile crisis, Oleg Penkovsky, known as YOGA, really did try to persuade his handlers to attack the Soviet Union. The last National Intelligence Estimate before the missiles were discovered really did go disastrously wrong—not the last time that has happened! The letter from Khrushchev really did call Kennedy a
degenerate. And so forth.

  And there really was a back channel, with several of the meetings held at the Yenching Palace restaurant, which closed its doors in 2007. The real back channel involved John Scali of ABC News, rather than a nineteen-year-old college student. But the Soviet end was indeed Aleksandr Fomin (whose real name was Alexander Feksilov), the KGB rezident in Washington, who had been involved in recruiting the Rosenbergs. The details of his life that Fomin vouchsafes to Margo, both in Varna and on the Mall, are uniformly and without exception false: wisps, as Doris Harrington might have called them, spun perhaps to make GREENHILL more comfortable following his lead.

  How important the back channel really was in resolving the crisis has been debated by historians. Certainly there is no evidence that the Soviets ever tried to persuade Kennedy to mothball the TX-61 “gravity bomb.” The United States in fact completed development of the weapon, which evolved into the B61, a variable-yield thermonuclear warhead that remains part of what is known as the “enduring stockpile”—nuclear weapons that the nation chose to retain following the end of the Cold War. (By the way, Fomin’s English was quite good, but not nearly as perfect as in my tale. His NPR interview and his autobiography are both fascinating.)

  The military activities that I mention, from the Neptune P-2H that buzzed and photographed the Poltava during its September journey, to the U-2 overflights of Cuba, to the movement of troops and planes to Florida, all took place largely as and when I describe them. Lorenz Niemeyer’s tales about both sides shooting down the other’s surveillance planes are all matters of public record. According to declassified CIA documents, it is a fact that the eleven survivors of the C-130 downed over Soviet territory were never heard from again. A 1993 report suggested that as of that date, some might still have been alive in Soviet custody. On the other hand, the story of the Soviet aircraft that overflew Kuskokwim Bay, although accurately reported by Niemeyer, actually took place in March of 1963, not March of 1962, and did not remain secret. I chose to advance the start date of Operation Jedburgh by a year or so, to allow Niemeyer and Donald Jensen to be part of it. Civil-rights leaders, by the way, really did complain about the refusal of OSS to send black operatives into the field. One source does mention an unnamed black truck driver who was recruited in a manner that provides the inspiration for Donald’s story here. (Several OSS headquarters employees were black, among them Ralph Bunche.)

  Jack Ziegler’s discussion of CIA digraphs in chapter 5 is accurate. The digraph for the Soviet Union was indeed AE; JM was the digraph for Cuba. The significance of QK is not publicly known, but I decided to appropriate it for Bulgaria because the Agency’s operation in the 1950s aimed at psychological warfare against the Bulgarian regime was known, at least initially, as QKSTAIR. (The code name of this operation was later changed to BGCONVOY, but BG is a very unlikely digraph for Bulgaria: the Agency never chose letters suggestive of the name of the target.)

  In the same chapter, my reference to the chain of command in the KGB reflects the teaching of declassified CIA documents. A major really would give commands to a full colonel in appropriate circumstances. The reference in chapter 9 to Department T of the First Chief Directorate may not be accurate, as some sources suggest that responsibility for “direct action” was not handed over to T until 1963. The reassignment of direct action to the infamous Department V came shortly afterward.

  The mention of secure telephone lines at several points in the narrative is anachronistic, if the term is understood in its contemporary sense. The first telephone capable of scrambling and unscrambling voice communications, the STU-1, was not developed until the late 1960s, and did not go into widespread use until several years thereafter.

  Niemeyer’s classroom lectures are largely based on historical fact and the early writing of conflict theory. His hypothetical about the bank robber with the hand grenade is borrowed without attribution from an important early paper by Daniel Ellsberg. In his meeting with McGeorge Bundy in the White House basement, Niemeyer is relying upon the work of Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, among others. The story in chapter 3 about the Civil Defense planners failing to tell Ohioans that a mock evacuation was to be staged there is true. Niemeyer’s account in chapter 18 of the weakness in fallout shelters is drawn from the proceedings of a National Research Council symposium on the topic that was not actually held until 1965.

  The rumor that Bundy hired a Kennedy girlfriend for the National Security Council staff is repeated in at least two sources, but neither gives any detail. Esman’s story of the refusal of the Pentagon to let the White House see a copy of the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan is true. Oleg Penkovsky really was arrested in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Note that some historians do not believe that Bundy was aware of YOGA’S true identity.

  As to Bundy’s defense of Curtis LeMay, as far as I know nothing like it ever took place. LeMay was a narrow-minded man, of hateful politics, and his fury at the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a matter of record. On the other hand, although he is routinely cast as the villain in both fiction and nonfiction about the crisis, I found nothing on the record to suggest that he was ever anything but a thorough patriot who followed the President’s orders to the letter—whatever he may have said about Kennedy behind his back. The story about his successful single-handed efforts to build the Strategic Air Command from scratch is true.

  Where I could, I have tried to get minor details right. But some I intentionally changed. For example, the Trimline phone was not available to the public until 1965, and therefore the Madisons could not have had one for Margo to talk on. On the other hand, the term “limousine liberals” seems to have first appeared in a novel published in 1919, and was popularized by conservatives during the 1950s, so could certainly have come from the lips of Jack Ziegler, as it does in chapter 45.

  As in Palace Council, my previous novel set partly in Ithaca, I have tried to be true to the geography of both the town and Cornell University, but here I have also tried to be sensitive to the history. The football game between Cornell and Colgate that features in chapter 1 was actually played on September 29, 1962. Cornell lost, 23–12. Cornell abolished parietal rules for female students in 1962. For the sake of my fiction I kept them in place for another year.

  The facts that Margo reviews about the survival of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II are essentially true, but were not fully known until the opening of the Soviet archives after 1989. Also, there was no United States consulate in Varna at the time of the events of the novel. Jerry Ainsley’s recital of the result of the fifth game of the 1962 World Series is accurate, but the game was actually played on October 10.

  What about the chess? At the 1962 Olympiad, Yefim Geller really did replace Vasily Smyslov on the Soviet team without explanation, and, unlike Smyslov, Geller really did not speak any English. As far as I can tell, Smyslov never visited either Cuba or Curaçao in 1962. The notion that he might have run errands for Soviet intelligence is entirely invented. The gorillas aren’t.

  Bobby Fischer’s brilliant game against Robert Byrne was actually played in December 1963. I moved it two years earlier for the convenience of the story. (Bobby played the so-called Game of the Century, mentioned by Doris Harrington, in 1956, against Robert Byrne’s brother Donald.) My descriptions of Fischer’s games at the Chess Olympiad are accurate, although I moved the relevant dates on which the games were played, and also shortened the Olympiad itself.

  As to the other side of Fischer, I will freely confess to having exaggerated for the sake of the story what some call his quirks and others call early evidence of the mental illness that would later consume that remarkable brain. According to his biographer, Frank Brady, Fischer really did sail for Europe on the New Amsterdam for fear that his plane might be sabotaged. Most of the more bizarre comments I attribute to Fischer come from reliable sources, even though he certainly did not make all of them in 1962. Thus, for example, Fischer’s dithering over whether he should buy a car or
get a wife from Asia came to light in the recollections of former world chess champion Mikhail Tal. Fischer’s fascination with Mein Kampf was noticed by the immortal Samuel Reshevsky, but not until 1970. Fischer repeated his disdain for women in several published interviews, although several sources mention the rumor that his friends snuck a woman into his room at a chess tournament in Argentina. Nevertheless, on the chessboard Fischer was always his own sternest critic, and there is no suggestion in any of the sources that he blamed any woman—or anyone but himself—for spoiling the winning endgame against Botvinnik.

  Finally, what about the novel’s central conceit—that the President could have hidden the back-channel negotiations behind a faux affair with a nineteen-year-old college student? We have it on the authority of biographer Robert Dallek that Kennedy, while President, did indeed have an affair with a nineteen-year-old collegian—even though she was a white intern in the White House, not a black intern at the Department of Labor. Press accounts, including interviews with the woman in question, have subsequently confirmed Dallek’s account.

  As so often, the list of those I would like to thank could go on for some while. I will endeavor to be brief. Let me begin by acknowledging my loyal fans, many of whom have begged for years to learn more about the lives of Misha Garland and Kimmer Madison when they were younger. Many of the questions about Misha I tried to answer in my 2008 novel Palace Council, where we meet a good chunk of his family in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. (We meet a much younger Misha, too.) Although Kimmer was a minor character in New England White, the instant novel is my first attempt at fleshing out her childhood.