The only thing that is deliberately fictional about Charles McCarry’s new political thriller Lucky Bastard is his disclaimer that the book is “a work of imagination in which no character is based on anyone who ever lived.” It is, in fact, a fantasy about Bill and Hillary Clinton — who, in McCarry’s fictional account, were once Russian spies and who are now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, agents for Red China. The book is basically a right-wing equivalent of Joe Klein’s anonymously published Primary Colors and about as blatantly biographical.
Bill Clinton appears as Jack Adams, the draft-dodging Democratic governor of Ohio and former state attorney general, who wins the presidency and who secretly believes he’s John F. Kennedy’s bastard son — a sort of American, male, would-be Anastasia claiming royal ancestry. Hillary Clinton appears as Morgan, his wife — and also his handler for an offshoot of the KGB run by a fisher of men, codenamed “Peter,” who so controls the pair that they won’t have sex together without his approval.
The Soviets provide money, laundered through a savings and loan Jack and Morgan buy. They provide women for Jack and men for Morgan. And once the Soviets go broke, the Chinese pick up Jack’s tab and funnel him money to pay for his run at the presidency. All that is missing is McCarry’s explanation of the secret causes of the Buddhist temple donations and the White House coffees.
The book’s pacing and style are vintage espionage novel — with dead drops and people who drop dead. Whenever the action lags, bizarre sex scenes rescue it. McCarry, formerly an intelligence agent, does a presumably better job with the espionage than with the politics: He focuses on Jack’s college days with Morgan and hyper-active sex life, and he seems to lose interest in the narrative by the time Jack runs for president, giving the campaign only a few dozen pages at the end of what increasingly becomes a porn novel. The book is best recommended as psychotherapy for any right-winger not satisfied by Kenneth Starr: If you believe in UFOs, the Trilateral Commission conspiracy, a United Nations plot to poison our water supply, and a government cover-up of contact with extraterrestrial life, then you’ll love Lucky Bastard.
How close do Jack and Morgan come to Bill and Hillary? About as close as the last asteroid came to Earth. Jack Adams’s zipless encounters — so frequently aided by Vaseline that the reader begins to wonder whether a product-placement fee was paid — reflect a use ’em and throw ’em away attitude that’s more typical of Kennedy than Clinton. Jack Adams doesn’t care if he is loved; all he wants is sex. It seems more likely that Clinton wants sex in order to feel loved. Part-Kennedy and part-Clinton, McCarry’s Adams is a halfway house for conservatives who can’t quite decide which one they hate more. Morgan runs her husband’s life like a dictatoress, controlling the spigot of Communist money he needs to fuel his ambitions. Driven by a true belief in the revolution, she comes across more as Madame Mao than as Madame Clinton.
On its own terms, Lucky Bastard is a good read with lively sex, vivid if inaccurate character sketches, and a twisting plot. But one cannot escape the sense that McCarry wants it to be taken more seriously. His portrayal of Russian Communists bemoaning the collapse of their cause unwittingly strikes close to home: The reader surmises that McCarry himself longs for the good old days of cloak and dagger. Don’t be surprised if you see him at the Russian Tea Room in New York, swapping tales with a former KGB adversary. McCarry seems to use writing as vent for his nostalgia and his political fantasy about the Clintons as a way of establishing his relevance, even if only to fiction.
But don’t let reality deter you. If you want to get lost in a whopper of a political tale and harmlessly indulge your deepest paranoia, read this book. Buying Lucky Bastard is really a less pernicious way of acting on a hatred of the Clintons than other things one might do.
Dick Morris, a political columnist, was President Clinton’s chief political advisor in 1995 and ’96.
