Title: Back Channel: The Kennedy Years
Author: William Bertram MacFarland
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781463556945
Pages: 298, Paperback/Kindle
Genre: Memoir/Historical/Political
Reviewed by: Jason Lulos, Pacific Book Review
Book Review
“At 12:30 p.m., three shots rang out from the Texas Book Depository facing Dealy Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The President had been assassinated. Not one of the shots was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“Back Channel: The Kennedy Years” is fascinating for historians and novices alike. It is an autobiographical work by William Bertram MacFarland, “Bertie Mac,” a man of numerous talents who worked intimately with John F. Kennedy and whose work was so covert, his name was often omitted, even in the most private of conversations. He was simply referred to as “Special Assistant.” A ghost in name but an historically effectual agent. This is someone you’ve never heard of. An agent whose work was too classified to have even been given a label such as “agent.” Thus, the seemingly innocuous and infinitely vague “Special Assistant” moniker was bestowed upon Bertie who more than worked the Back Channels; he was the Back Channel. Bertie was the quintessential agent/action hero but a humanist and therefore cursed with self-awareness.
The opening teaser above is clearly aimed at JFK conspiracy theorists, but this book is more broadly a memoir by one who called JFK his best friend. Give whatever credence you want to any particular historical analysis, any interpretation of history. Books like Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States aim to delegitimize traditionally accepted versions of history (as complete or absolutely true) by legitimating other perspectives. Historians and authors offer different perspectives on particular moments in history, but they tend to do so from positions outside of that history. Such scholarship is useful but perhaps can only be truly legitimized by a personal narrative from one who has been intricately involved in that history. This is what Back Channel is. It is a memoir but it is also an institutional analysis of overt, covert and personal interrelations of governments and, at the risk of sounding redundant, the politics of politics. In other words, what you get is a personal perspective of the personal and social mechanisms of transparent andinvisible diplomacy.
This memoir chronicles Bertie’s work as JFK’s Special Assistant as a prelude to his career as a covert operative under nine presidents (supplemented by an appendix of administration documents and communications). Bertie’s life is jump started after an “escape” from the infamous Russian Lubyanka prison, evidently the only ever to have done so. Subsequently, among many other operations, he became the unofficial channel between Kennedy and Khrushchev. A ‘Back Channel,’ which MacFarland claims to have coined during a 1962 conversation with JFK, is covert method of communication between nations: under the radar of the media and under the radar of formal or official international relations.
This was quite an interesting and entertaining read, somewhat of a personalized Jason Bourne. The lasting impression was the personal and philosophical perspectives on Kennedy and some historically significant moments of his era; namely, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the assassination of JFK.
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