Kennedy tried to stop him without sparking a nuclear World War III. His new novel, “ Back Channel,” re-imagines those harrowing days in October 1962 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sought to install nuclear missiles in Cuba and President John F. One of his attorneys was a young African American woman, surely a courtroom rarity in those days. In 2012, “ The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln” imagined Lincoln surviving the assassination attempt only to face impeachment from a hostile Congress. “ Jericho’s Fall,” which I reviewed in 2009, concerned a former CIA director who, although dying and possibly insane, had a number of people trying to kill him. His novels - this is his sixth - are often fast-moving, fanciful looks at the upper levels of American politics. His nonfiction books offer serious reflections on politics, race, religion and law. Carter, the author of this fictionalized account of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, is both a law professor at Yale and a prolific writer. (There was in fact a back channel during the crisis, but the negotiator was a male journalist with ABC news.Stephen L. The primary purpose of her meetings with the president is not to provide pleasure but to save the world: Margo is the back channel by which Kennedy negotiates with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He makes the 19-year-old a student at Cornell University named Margo Jensen, and he leaves vague whether or not her relationship with the president was ever sexual. While at least one JFK biographer reports that the president did have an affair with a 19-year-old, Carter reimagines this situation in some intriguing ways that drive his novel's plot. Carter takes some liberties with the timing and details of political events during the tense autumn of that year, but the broad contours of roles played by key figures emerge from the historical record. Kennedy, and the secret negotiations are a possible means of preventing the Cuban missile crisis from escalating into a devastating exchange of nuclear warheads. The year is 1962, the president is John F.

Back channel stephen carter