Jack 1939
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
Charming. Reckless. Brilliant. Deadly.
A young Jack Kennedy travels to Europe on a secret mission for Franklin Roosevelt as the world braces for war.
It’s the spring of 1939, and the prospect of war in Europe looms large. The United States has no intelligence service. In Washington, D.C., President Franklin Roosevelt may run for an unprecedented third term and needs someone he can trust to find out what the Nazis are up to. His choice: John F. Kennedy.
It’s a surprising selection. At twenty-two, Jack Kennedy is the attractive but unpromising second son of Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain (and occasional political adversary). But when Jack decides to travel through Europe to gather research for his Harvard senior thesis, Roosevelt takes the opportunity to use him as his personal spy. The president’s goal: to stop the flow of German money that has been flooding the United States to buy the 1940 election—an election that Adolf Hitler intends Roosevelt lose.
In a deft mosaic of fact and fiction, Francine Mathews has written a gripping espionage tale that explores what might have happened when a young Jack Kennedy is let loose in Europe as the world careens toward war. A potent combination of history and storytelling, Jack 1939 is a sexy, entertaining read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
President Franklin Roosevelt recruits 21-year-old John F. Kennedy to be his personal spy in this imaginative, well-researched mix of fact and fiction. In February 1939, FDR meets secretly with a sickly Jack, whom one of his Harvard professors has commended as "an independent thinker," at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria hotel. FDR wants Jack, who's about to travel through Europe to research his senior thesis, to stop a courier bringing German money to America, part of Hitler's plan to defeat FDR in the 1940 election. FDR can trust few people, certainly not J. Edgar Hoover, the ambitious FBI chief, who may be bugging the Oval Office, nor Joseph P. Kennedy, his unreliable ambassador to Britain. Mathews (The Alibi Club) provides an intriguing look at pre-WWII politics, both in the U.S. and Europe, as well as a meticulous character study of the future president, who, overshadowed by his more promising older brother, is eager to prove his own worth.
