Tapper’s ‘Hellfire Club’ Takes Us Back to McCarthy-Era America

“That hairdo might be the worst cover-up in political history,” someone snipes in “The Hellfire Club,” a time-warping political thriller by CNN anchor Jake Tapper. The year is 1954, and the book is crammed with high-profile political figures of the McCarthy era. The spirit of the times is menacing. (“Has anyone actually gotten a look at the naval records of PT-109?” “It seems like too much of what’s in the news media is spoon-fed to journalists by various government factions with agendas.”) In Tapper’s view, it aligns all too well with the atmosphere today.

As a newsman, Tapper can be tough and quick. He’s the guy who recently said, “Go home, 2018, you’re drunk,” delivering the savviest analysis of the year thus far. As a nonfiction writer, he’s shown a wide range of interests, with subjects including a deadly battle in Afghanistan (“The Outpost”) and Jesse Ventura’s wrestler-to-governor transformation (“Body Slam”).

As a novelist, he makes the rookie mistake of loading every interesting fact he could muster into a plot that can barely support the weight. The first part of the book is devoted to a parade of Washington cameos. It begins with a thriller’s pro forma opening: Charlie Marder, newly minted congressman, wakes up drunk and muddy in Rock Creek Park with the following accouterments: tuxedo, dead cocktail waitress, wrecked Studebaker and high-powered lobbyist to help him escape the crime scene. Charlie, a war hero and former college professor, doesn’t wonder whether there’s anything fishy about this situation.

Cut to a big night at the theater, where everyone who’s anyone in Washington shows up. Herbert Hoover smells like mothballs. The Kennedys. The Nixons. “Isn’t that Joe Alsop?” “Where the devil is Kefauver, anyway?” In short order, all of these famous figures — minus the Nixons, but plus Lyndon B. Johnson, Roy Cohn, Margaret Chase Smith and even President Dwight D. Eisenhower — will be on cozy terms with Charlie, a new guy whose integrity makes a big impression. That is, until the pressures of political reality start leaching that integrity away.

While Charlie’s mounting heap of secrets drives a wedge between him and his very pregnant wife, Margaret, he gets a rapid education in Washington corruption. Tapper’s interweaving of the usual motives of power and money — to which Charlie is not susceptible — with the much more sinister pressures of the Red Scare ought to make for much more excitement than it does.

It doesn’t help that some characters are so conventionally drawn. Margaret’s great passion is for research on migrating ponies in the Chesapeake Bay area. And the head of the project, who has flirted with her for years, is described as having a “shock of thick, prematurely white hair, deep-set, sky-blue eyes, and a jawline so sharp it could cut wood.” He is said to resemble “more an international captain of industry or a New England governor than a zoologist.”

Red alert, Charlie. Not the McCarthy kind.

Tapper veers into Dan Brown territory with the secretive club for which the book is named. There was a Hellfire Club in Benjamin Franklin’s time, an ornate place dedicated to serious debauchery and created for the pleasure of rich, powerful men. The original English version has descendants, and whether there was one in Washington in the 1950s — or is one there now — is something Tapper may know more about than he’s saying. One of his many sources is a 1951 book called “Washington Confidential,” which he describes as “severely flawed” but rich with sleaze. Translation: It is presumably neck-deep in the kind of dirt that’s implied about the Hellfire Club and figures briefly here. One point that “The Hellfire Club” makes with blunt effectiveness is that Congress is home to institutionalized racial discrimination. Charlie’s best friend becomes fellow Congressman Isaiah Street, a former Tuskegee Airman who is technically banned from even eating with his peers in the official dining room. Isaiah, not someone to be interfered with, just ignores this rule. But Tapper uses him — and the upcoming Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — to underscore where Americans stood on racial equality in 1954. That, too, is a sobering message for these retrograde times.

Tapper’s odd little observations are much more interesting than his broad ones. He apparently has a highly developed snoot: He makes multiple mentions of fragrances that were popular in the 1950s, and even manages to weave one into the suspense plot. He has Charlie attend the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, aka the comic book hearings, which were detailed in David Hajdu’s “The Ten-Cent Plague” (2008). This is useful as a precursor to later examples of congressional alarmism; Charlie also gleans tactical advice from the proceedings. Tapper also recalls a mostly forgotten invasion of the Capitol by armed Puerto Rican separatists that yielded the casualties described in this novel. Tapper’s awkwardness with his fictitious characters can improve. His acuity with historical resonance doesn’t have to.

Tapper did not have to include endnotes clarifying facts he modified and details on sources, but the notes are very winning. They reveal his tremendous enthusiasm for this work, a near-excessive meticulousness (the book’s wild ponies of Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands are loosely based on Chincoteague and Assateague ponies) and things that probably didn’t need mentioning (the dishonest congressman called Phil Strongfellow is a lot like the real Douglas Stringfellow).

Finally, a conversation between Charlie and Eisenhower at the end of the book — by which time reader resistance to its wax-museum politicians has been worn down — turns out to have been derived from Eisenhower’s memoir, his farewell address, an article about his Oval Office’s décor, Stephen Ambrose’s book about Ike and espionage, David Nichols’ book about Ike and McCarthy, and more. All this for a single chapter about setting the course for Charlie’s future. At long last he’s grown into his role. If he and Tapper come back, it’s likely to be for a less awkward ride.

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Publication Notes:

‘The Hellfire Club’

By Jake Tapper.

342 pages. Little, Brown & Co. $27.