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Palace Council
By STEPHEN L. CARTER
Reviewed by Sarah L. Courteau






The author of The Emperor of Ocean Park pens a story of political intrigue in the era of Watergate.

It's easy to see why he was tempted here to apply his talent for sly commentary…to the broad canvas of a period he loosely construes as the '60s, when the civil rights movement, sometimes-violent radicalism, and the Vietnam War roiled the nation.


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Like all ambitious conspiracy theorists, Stephen L. Carter is determined to graft his tale of dark secrets to the grand events of history. And the period over which Palace Council unfolds -- from the early 1950s until the Watergate scandal's dingy twilight -- provides rich material for the conspiracy-minded. Carter's third capacious thriller offers a protagonist who promises to make the most of this territory: Eddie Wesley, a young black writer of upright parentage who arrives in Harlem in 1954. Over the next 20 years he makes his reputation covering many of the era's landmark events for big-name magazines and weaving its turbulent social currents into several novels. Much like the Johnny-on-the-spot devil in that Rolling Stones song, it's the nature of Eddie's game to turn up wherever something big is afoot.

He's approached by real-life Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and pressured by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to become a snitch. He's at the Cape Cod meeting in 1959 where John F. Kennedy persuades key supporters that he can win the presidency, and Eddie briefly writes speeches for Kennedy after the election. He exposes a CIA program of torture and murder in war-torn Vietnam and attends the final, chaotic convention of the SDS in Chicago in 1969. He's at Richard Nixon's side at Camp David after two key aides resign. He pals around with Langston Hughes and has an audience with Joseph Kennedy. In short, Eddie is a man of his times, many times over.