William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925–2008)

Summary: Blackford Oakes teams up with mercenary Tucker Montana to block troops and arms flowing from North to South Vietnam.

The story opens early in 1964 in the jungles of Laos. Blackford Oakes has teamed up with soldier-of-fortune Tucker Montana to explore the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ostensibly at this time, the conflict in South Vietnam is a “civil war” between government and rebel forces. But North Vietnam has been supplying men and material with plans to move 20,000 men over the Trail show more every month. These two men have to figure out a way to stop it, and extricate themselves before they are caught and killed, which they barely do.

Montana thinks he knows a way to stop the flow of men and material. In addition to surviving against incredible odds, he has a knack for designing devices that work. He believes he can create sensors at key chokepoints to alert when the North Vietnamese are on the Trail. Eventually, Montana and Oakes will work separately on two supply routes–Tucker on the Trail, Oakes on shipping in the Gulf of Tonkin. Both report to Rufus, their control agent.

Their authority actually comes from much higher, from directives from President Johnson, given on a naked swim in his pool. These two men are caught up in the larger events leading to the later massive escalation of the war. In 1964, blocking the North Vietnamese efforts also play into electoral politics between hawkish Barry Goldwater and Johnson, for whom Vietnam represents the derailing of his Great Society. But he doesn’t want to be the president who “lost Vietnam.”

There is a kind of ticking time bomb in Montana. He was at Los Alamos, and in this version, designed the trigger to actuate the atomic bomb. Not only that, he was on the crew of the Enola Gay. Seeing the destruction, he leaves the Army, and nearly goes crazy, taking refuge in a monastery, before returning to military pursuits, concealing his Los Alamos work. That time bomb is coupled with a healthy sex drive. And he finds a girlfriend in Saigon who turns out to be a spy. The classic honey trap.

Meanwhile, Oakes is up to his own hi-jinks. He’s equipping junks with radar and metal detection equipment. But more than that, he’s part of an effort to go inside North Vietnam;s definition of international waters. Buckley portrays it as a plot worked out at the highest levels, including Johnson friend Abe Fortas. The idea is to trigger an “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin giving Johnson casus belli to pursue an expanded war.

Both men walk tightropes with their conscience. Do you keep your head down and obey orders? Or must one think of the larger ramifications of what one is doing? In Montana’s case, the girlfriend plays on the hovering cloud of an expanded conflict that could lead to nuclear war, raising the old phantoms for Montana. Oakes faces a situation that is more subtle. He suspects, and Rufus confirms the espionage going on with the girlfriend. But Montana is at a critical point in completing the project and going operational. They don’t want to derail him.

It all comes down to how Montana navigates the pulls of love and duty and conscience. And can Oakes protect both the operation and his friend?

Part of what makes this so interesting is the fusion of history and fictional plot. And even in the fiction, we begin to get a sense of how futile the cleverest U.S. efforts will be to stop a determined enemy. Buckley manages fiction at once instructive and diverting. show less

William F. Buckley Jr's postmortem of his impossible campaign to become mayor of New York is entertaining, thought-provoking and witty. The Unmaking of a Mayor has no right to continued relevance after the passage of sixty years; the personalities and many of the issues have disappeared like so much subway smoke rising from the grilles of Manhattan's streets. But Buckley's prose (which cascades rather than sparkling) continues to communicate its vital message and delights the reader every show more step of the way. Though many of the battles Buckley was fighting have been won (and lost again) since the 1960s, The Unmaking of a Mayor remains an enduring record of what happens when the critic mounts the hustings. Highly recommended. show less

Summary: The first of Buckley's Blackford Oakes espionage novels, covering his recruitment to the CIA and first mission, to ferret out the person high up in British government betraying atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Most people know William F. Buckley, Jr. as the founder of the National Review, for his witty and erudite conversations on Firing Line, and maybe for his God and Man at Yale. Inspired by Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, he decided to try his hand at the spy novel, show more creating Blackford Oakes, a Yale graduate, World WW II fighter pilot, breaker of rules and conventions who is recruited into the CIA. Saving the Queen is the first of eleven novels that Buckley wrote in this genre. Now, thanks to a collaborative arrangement between Mysterious Press and Open Road Media, the whole series is once again available.

The novel is framed by Oakes being subpoened to testify about the Agency during a congressional witch hunt. Will he tell he truth and possibly betray national secrets and personal friends? Will he "take the Fifth" and bring suspicion down upon himself? Here, as in his life growing up and first mission, Oakes finds a way to go outside the rules.

It began at Greyburn, a British boys school where he lasted only weeks, before a humorous and belittling drawing of a teacher, and a beating by the headmaster in front of his friend, Anthony Trust, results in his willing departure from the school. A brief but successful flight career, studies at Yale, along with time in France and family in London make him an ideal CIA candidate, recruited by his old friend trust.

After his initial training, he learns of his assignment, to insinuate himself into the top circles of British royal life, to discover who it is around young Queen Caroline, who is betraying atomic secrets to the Russians. His cover is as an engineer working for an American foundation. He succeeds beyond his handlers' expectations, first getting invited to a reception where he meets the Queen, who is taken by his tongue in cheek repartee. An invitation to Windsor Castle follows, ostensibly to examine engineering drawings in Windsor's archives. Just how far he succeeds in achieving intimacy with the Queen and her circle, I will leave to the reader, but he discovers the source of the leaks, a relative close to the Queen, who uses her to gain access to the secrets he is passing along to the Russians.

One of his handlers is "Rufus," a legendary operative from the World War II era. As Rufus ponders Oakes intelligence, he recognizes the explosive potential of this revelation, which could bring down the Queen and the throne, unless a way could be found to eliminate the source. In the climax to the novel, Oakes, whose own cover may be compromised, is called upon to finish the job, possibly losing his own life in the process.

Bond, a Catholic and a conservative, is no prude. This is an adult novel, in the vein of Ian Fleming's, Bond. Oakes seems a kind of American counterpart, with perhaps a greater shrewdness and less gadgetry. I suspect their are future Blackford Oakes books in my life. At very least, there are a couple more on my Kindle! show less

This is the second in William Buckley's series of spy thrillers, and is at least as good as the first. The post-war setting is vividly presented, the characters are interesting and well-rounded, and the plot makes the book hard to put down. The book also looks explicitly at a question that usually lurk well below the surface of spy novels -- what happens when national interest runs into personal morality? On to the next --