Two Great Books where Communist Sleeper Agents Become President
03/06/2025
O'Rourke, thou shouldst be living at this hour! And McCarry, too.
I usually like to leave famous people alone, but these are two who I'm really glad to have briefly met, and sorely miss. P.J. O'Rourke once gave a reading in the bookstore at my office building. Someone asked him about authors he recommended. He answered that "a U.S. trade representative in a country with nothing to trade" (get it?) once told him that the only realistic spy novelist was Charles McCarry, and since then, he'd been reading McCarry. But McCarry was much more than that (and if the bulk of what he wrote was considered realistic, I shudder to think ...).
I already knew of McCarry from his novel Shelley's Heart, which was very popular here in the Washington area when it came out in 1995. The Washington Post's great Jonathan Yardley called it "the best novel ever written about life in high-stakes Washington," and argued that the real hero of the book was the United States Constitution. The Baltimore Sun called it "a blazing litmus of critical politics." The exact meaning of that phrase is hidden behind a paywall, but its individual words are all apt.
To me, when I read it in the 90s, what it was really about was how our elite communicates, signals and coordinates to mobilize society "gradually, then suddenly" to bring about utopian social and political changes that we're taught to aspire to in our adolescence, then spend decades pretending not to take seriously. Key parts of this dynamic were described in Hayek's landmark essay, "The Intellectuals and Socialism," and Joe Sobran's and Tom Bethell's recurring metaphor of "The Hive," which is compelling and hits home even if, like me, you disagree with them on most policy issues. (If you teach people what broad goals to aspire to, and teach them techniques and public smoke-signals for furthering them in due time, then you don't have to have a conspiracy — or "collusion.") But Shelley's Heart puts the finishing touches on all of it.
Re-reviewing Shelley's Heart in 2009, D.G. Myers described this as "the machinery for refining an agenda and crafting a message before the public is even aware that it is the target of an orchestrated campaign." He called the book "an ambitious attempt to describe the American Left from within and without, to catch it in the act of revealing its true character, aims, and methods. ... the culture 'must be conquered camp by camp—first academia, where minds were formed; then the news media, the churches, and the arts, which transmitted the orthodoxy to lesser minds; then a whole new apparatus of special interest groups ...'" He continued:
When [President] Mallory expresses a polite skepticism that the organized Left might seek to grab power through unelected means, his political mentor is incredulous. “Right,” he says. “All that crowd has done in our lifetime is take over the federal budget, the universities, the schools, the do-good movement, the civil and foreign service, the news media, world literature, the theater, the ballet and the opera, plus the Democratic Party and organized religion minus the evangelicals. Why would they try for the big hit?”
Though McCarry distrusts abstract ideas, he is masterful at dramatizing their influence. Written in a fluent and sharp-toothed prose modeled upon W. Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, Shelley’s Heart succeeds in creating an utterly believable world in which ideology has run amok.
McCarry’s portrait of the inner experience of an American radical is entirely convincing ...
Given how many of McCarry’s wild surmises have become reality since its initial release, however, no one should make the mistake of attempting to compartmentalize his remarkable novel.
Or as Michael Dirda later put it, "... “'From an early age Hammett had wanted to change the world, and he had always realized that it could only be changed piecemeal ...' Consequently, over many years, he has quietly installed his students and acolytes in positions of power in the government, the media and, especially, the judiciary."
Besides all that, I found Shelley’s Heart's plot and settings inspiring. And the leading villains, "smug Whiffenpoofs", and other players, were unsettlingly familiar — "people in my neighborhood," as they used to say on Sesame Street.
But I found much of the dialogue and seemingly minor characters odd and stilted -- a couple were what they now call "cringe" -- and the tired jibes at hippie culture unworthy of the author's own standards, so I couldn't fully agree with the reviews.
After O'Rourke led me to rediscover McCarry in 2004, though, those characters and their family, central to the other books, became some of my favorites, and I think I've read everything he wrote about them. His books are full of people who play very long games, whose goals may only become clear at the end of their careers, after several more books. They and their world have been equated with "Faulkner's microcosmic Yoknapatawpha County."
Then there was McCarry's Lucky Bastard. Lots of fun with none of the faults I found with Shelley's Heart, and without the unending chain of complexities of his Christopher Family novels (i.e., most of his books). While recovering from PT-109, Jack Kennedy gets a Navy nurse pregnant. She goes home to her blue-collar community in a smallish state in the interior of the U.S. Her son, father unknown, grows up to be governor, then President, by way of Boys' State, Georgetown U., a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, and Yale Law. (Oh, sorry, that's Columbia and Harvard, allegedly.) He has "the irresistible smile, the remorseless sexual drive and the gift for politics of his namesake." The narrator is his handler, who arranges for the Rhodes Scholarship before Bill (sorry, that's "Jack") has even met him, with the help of a professor who is always on the lookout for rare talent and reports:
''The point is, Jack has a great natural gift. Since childhood, he has studied people, found out what they wanted, and made them believe he was giving it to them even when he wasn't. Without money, without influence, without connections, he has risen to the top every time. He has this uncanny gift for making others like him. Trust him. Want to help him. It's like a spell he can cast at will.''
Oxford leads to side trips to Europe, where Jack "accidentally" meets Peter, the charismatic leader of a group of talented young people working for a transcendental vision of tomorrow that they think nobody over 30 can even comprehend. Also "accidental" and "unrelated" is a honey trap that produces some incriminating photos. Peter reports to his superiors, "The same people who beatified Alger will discover and love Jack." These were ''the Unconscious Underground,'' whose members ''manned the junction boxes of influence and opinion.''
When Jack returns to the U.S. and law school, he is introduced to his full-time, exclusive, lifelong live-in handler, a remarkable young woman ...
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times concluded, ''Lucky Bastard reads like a Primary Colors written with imagination ... a corrosively penetrating view of the contemporary cultural ethos."
Last year, the Post's lead book reviewer looked back at Shelley's Heart, musing:
Was McCarry unnervingly prescient ...? Or could his book have actually provided ideas, even a blueprint, for those who have brought about the political upheavals of the past several years? If so, it would seem that history — that jokester! — has reversed many of the novel’s left-right polarities. ...
... Hammett calls to mind Theodor Adorno’s definition of the authoritarian personality: “A man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” ...
1995 L.A. Times reviewer Jonathan Kirsch eerily anticipated 2025:
But what really distinguishes Shelley’s Heart, what makes the book such a hot read, is its zaniness rather than its scholarship. Rather like the best of [Manchurian Candidate author] Richard Condon’s novels, the experience of Shelley’s Heart is akin to waking up in someone else’s fever dream, an Alice-in-Wonderland world where even the wackiest stuff seems to make sense right up until the moment when the ax man’s blade falls.