30-01-2015, 11:14 PM
Jim Hargrove Wrote:That sounds very interesting. I'll plan on reading it.
Does Helppie write about the actual HSCA witness slaughter?
HarveyandLee.net
Yes, he does. I'm only about 1/3rd into it. The plot jumps back and forth between 1978 (when McCarthy is hiding in a flophouse in New Orleans while a hitman is tracking him down) and various years starting in the late 1940s as we follow his personal life and career. His wife is a friend of Jackie Kennedy. McCarthy meets JFK and Bobby when they are starting out in politics (he thinks Jack is a shallow womanizer, but he likes Bobby), J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, David Atlee Phillips, Joe McCarthy and will probably meet a lot more people.
Obviously McCarthy is a fictional vehicle designed to move the plot along so the reader can learn about Iran, Guatemala, MK-ULTRA, the U-2, the fake defector program, Cuba, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, Vietnam and other events. Helppie has really done a lot of research, though he probably relied on Hersh's Dark Side of Camelot a bit too much.