THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504270447
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER LEE PHILIPS
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
THE ONLY THING TO FEAR
DAVID POYER
Forge. 432 pp. $22.95.
IT'S BEEN DONE before. Frederick Forsyth put Charles de Gaulle in peril of an assassin's bullet in The Day of the Jackal. Jack Higgins sent German commandos to kill Winston Churchill in The Eagle Has Landed. Now, in The Only Thing to Fear, veteran novelist David Poyer (The Med, The Circle), a resident of Virginia's Eastern Shore, offers a fictionalized assassination attempt on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The biggest twist in Poyer's book, however, is the narrator - a 27-year-old PT-boat officer named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
In spring 1945 the Nazi war machine is in shambles. Adolf Hitler's most prolific henchman, Joseph Goebbels, plots to kill Roosevelt and implicate the Russians, whose forces are laying siege to Berlin. A sadistic Russian defector from the Soviet secret police and a disillusioned one-armed German veteran are dispatched from a crippled U-boat off the Virginia coast to carry out the elaborate assassination plot. But one assassin has orders for a double cross. When his betrayal fails, the two men are left to their individual devices, all the while fearful of discovery and arrest.
Meanwhile, young JFK is in Washington being decorated for his service in the Pacific. After a severe dressing-down by his commanding officer, Adm. William D. Leahy, Kennedy is assigned to the president's personal staff, to work with decoded German and Japanese diplomatic traffic in the Map Room, where FDR's top-secret briefings are produced. Kennedy is ordered to watch for an unlikely traitor, someone who is very close to the president.
Also converging on the scene is Hollywood movie star Lauren Wolfe, who, after storming off the set of her latest B-movie, undertakes a rebellious, secretive journey that brings her to Warm Springs, Ga., where FDR is trying to restore what remains of his fragile health.
Poyer's use of JFK as the first-person narrator provides some fascinating fodder for historical fiction. He draws Kennedy's relationships with his father, Joseph, his younger brother Edward and his mother, Rose, like an accomplished biographer. Poyer's fictional adventures with the future U.S. president show him suffering wrenching back pain as a result of the PT 109 incident and discomforting symptoms of an undiagnosed illness, while enjoying seemingly painless tumbles with women. His mastery of historical detail gives Poyer the continuity he needs to expertly launch the assassination plot.
Poyer also uses historical bit-players to great effect. People such as veteran news reporter Merriam Smith, Texas congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, Hollywood star Ronald Reagan and No. 1 G-man J. Edgar Hoover are mentioned in passing or make cameo appearances, with Reagan and Hoover getting quite unflattering characterizations. His rendering of New Deal-era Washington politics is also right on the money.
The scenes sketching out FDR's relationship with the press and his last exhausted days after the Yalta Conference border on poignancy. But at times the detail is simply too much. Do we really need to know that the radio knobs on Lauren Wolfe's Packard convertible were made of Bakelite?
Perhaps we do. After all, it is the detail that makes Poyer's The Only Thing to Fear so entertaining, along with the chance he takes on letting the young JFK carry the story to its suspenseful conclusion. MEMO: Christopher Lee Philips, a graduate of Old Dominion University, is a
special-projects editor at United Press International in Washington,
D.C. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by JOE CURCIO
Jacket illustration by JEFFREY TERRESON
by CNB