EPILOGUE
I was drifting in the waters off British Honduras on a balmy afternoon in late November when I turned on the radio:
… Shots have been fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade as it left downtown Dallas this afternoon. … The president was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:50 P.M. … Police have arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a known Communist sympathizer, who is believed to have fired from an upper-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. … Authorities are seeking no further suspects. …
Within three hours of the assassination, fully loaded American bombers were on their way to hit targets inside Cuba and all U.S. forces were placed on DefCon 3, which is a telephone call away from launching an all-out nuclear attack. The Soviet Union went to full alert, also, and the party was ready to get into full swing when somebody at the Pentagon took it upon themselves to call the planes back, just seconds before they entered Cuban airspace. No one could say in the confusion following the assassination who had ordered the planes back or—more to the point—who had ordered the attack in the first place.
Dallas was a poor substitute for Berlin. The public will swallow a lot, but asking them to buy Dallas, Texas, as the breeding ground for a Communist conspiracy was too much. I used to wonder if those planes would’ve been called back had the president been shot in Berlin instead of Texas. But history has a way of writing itself in stone. Once it’s happened, it’s hard to imagine it occurring any other way, and it’s pointless to speculate. Still, I like to think that maybe Horst and Sam and Josef and me, maybe we did change the course of history, after all.
The men who killed Kennedy lit up cigars that day in November and slapped each other on the back, but they didn’t get the country they wanted. America’s strange form of democracy survived, as vibrant as ever—probably a lot more vibrant. The real coup took place not with bombs or bullets, but with ideas, and the irony is that the social revolution of the sixties probably wouldn’t have happened, at least not in the same way, had Kennedy lived.
When Johnson created the Warren Commission to look into the assassination, he told its reluctant chairman that there was evidence of Soviet involvement in Kennedy’s death. Unless people were convinced that Oswald acted alone, he said, the country might have to go to war, putting forty million lives at stake. Johnson was a first-class operator.
The FBI, under the watchful eye of Johnson’s friend, neighbor, and ally J. Edgar Hoover, was the sole investigative body for the commission. Six weeks after the president was killed, Johnson exempted Hoover from mandatory retirement, making him director for life. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John Kennedy.
No awkward questions were asked.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My mother was a librarian, my father a history teacher. When my brother and sisters and I were young—and I mean very young—our bedtime stories consisted of tomes like The Iliad and The Odyssey. When I was ten years old, my father handed me Churchill’s War Years. Well, he didn’t actually hand it to me because it was six thick volumes. I eventually made my way through three and a half of them and produced my first “book,” a significantly condensed account of the conflict that I called Hitler’s War. It took me four decades to get around to my next effort—this one—but I’m certain that I owe Homer and Churchill a thank-you. And Mom and Dad, of course. Thank you.
Henry Ferris, at William Morrow, has been everything I could’ve hoped for in an editor—enthusiastic, supportive, honest, creative, and smart. He has made the experience of going from manuscript to book a great pleasure. Thanks, Henry, for not hitting the delete button on that first e-mail.
It was an act of faith for Maggie Phillips to take me and the book on. I was an unpublished writer and I now share shelf space at the Ed Victor Agency in London with some very talented and notable authors. The fact that Maggie had faith gave me faith and, on top of that, she’s a very classy lady.
Thanks, too, to Bill Contardi, in New York, for his help and support. He’s not only a talented agent, but he’s a great pleasure to work with.
Although we haven’t met, I want to acknowledge Richard Aquan for designing such a beautifully evocative cover. Thanks, too, to the early readers of The Berlin Conspiracy. Simon, Ian, Amelie, Dick, Carola, and Francie, your ideas and words of encouragement were greatly valued. And, of course, Julia, who day after day puts up with the man hunched over a computer in the other room. She gets a big thank-you from him.
As for Jared, Jake, Max, and Sophie—you’re what it’s all about.