A 19-year-old black college coed finds herself impossibly entangled in the middle of negotiations to end the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, facilitating secret communications between Kennedy and Kruschev. There are people on both sides of the negotiation who would like to see them fail for a variety of reasons and will try anything. ( )

This is a work of fiction about the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. I was 9 years old then and living in rural Manitoba. We didn't even have a TV then so I never heard very much about the crisis. Although this is a work of fiction I learned a lot about the crisis and US/USSR relations at the time. Even knowing that nuclear war was averted I felt the fear and unease that gripped people in the US at that time.

Margo Jensen is a 19 year old black girl going to Cornell University in Ithaca New York. She is intelligent and principled. One of the classes she is taking is Conflict Theory from Professor Niemeyer who used to be in the secret service and still has ties to many people in government. When Niemeyer takes her aside after class and tells her that her government may need her assistance Margo is incredulous. Soon she finds out that there is a genuine job that she, and only she, can do. Famed chess master Bobby Fischer is going to Bulgaria to play in a Chess Olympiad and liase with a Russian who has information about missiles in Cuba. Bobby refuses to go unless Margo, who he considers a good luck charm, accompanies him. Margo is talked into this job by Niemeyer who claims to have known her father who died during World War II. Niemeyer implies that her father was working behind enemy lines and that he would be incredibly proud of Margo. The Bulgarian trip is just the beginning of Margo's service for the US government. Soon she is a conduit for information between Kruschev and Kennedy and she is in great danger.

Apparently there was a back channel for negotiations between Kruschev and Kennedy although it was a journalist not a young college girl. Carter weaves fact and fiction into a compelling read. I had trouble putting this book down. My one complaint is that Margo's ability to extricate herself from difficulties seemed a little too far-fetched. Mind you, if this was a James Bond story her accomplishments would be much greater.

Recommended. ( )

Another alternate history novel involving a President who was assassinated; this time John Kennedy. It doesn’t deal with his death however, but the Cuban Missile Crisis and the idea that nuclear war was averted because of back channel negotiations. It’s an idea that has promise and mostly was executed well, but making the back channel a 19-year-old girl I think was a mistake in credibility which had to be made up entirely by her value as a sex object, something I don’t know was intended or was what he ended up with because there wasn’t any other plausible alternative.

See, she has no standing. None. Other than as a piece of ass which is the cover they use to get her and Kennedy together. At the end, the man who initially recruits her says he chose her to make up for treating her father badly in the war, to salve his conscience, but it is too little too late. Not having been alive when Kennedy was President, I don’t know the extent to which his extramarital affairs were common knowledge, but in this world they are. Our heroine, Margo, is humiliated by it in a way I think few women would be today, but she goes along because they convince her she’s the only one who can save the world.

That’s the strongest part of the story; the lies and manipulation that go into putting an operation like this together. From her professor/recruiter, to her first handler to the White House administration; everyone lies to her and the manipulation is on a grand scale. Despite being the critical person in the whole plot, she’s entirely burnable and suffers her betrayals with a stoic patriotism that I didn’t quite buy. If you can let go of what Carter calls the novel’s central conceit; that a back channel can be hidden as an illicit affair with a nobody college student, I think it’s enjoyable and a cracking illustration of political chicanery at its finest. ( )

This is an amazing book. Back Channel crackles with energy as Stephen L. Carter develops an alternative history plot that startles the reader and yet seems all too plausible. The protagonist, 19-year old Cornell sophomore Margo Jensen, is an unlikely person to form the back channel between Khrushchev and JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis but her naivete and spunk is what really fuels the book. The dialog rings true, the characters all feel real, and the historic backdrop is dramatic and accurate. Back Channel is a must read. ( )