Burning with Intrigue

Burning with Intrigue

JAKE TAPPER ’91

WITH HIS FIRST NOVEL, CNN ANCHOR TAPPER LEAPS BACK IN TIME and into a Washington, D.C., swamp of corruption and double-dealing. The protagonist of The Hellfire Club is Congressman Charlie Marder, an idealistic WW II veteran who goes to D.C. and loses his moral compass. Questionable compromises, sinister conspiracies, and violence ensue.

“The political system is rotten,” Tapper tells DAM. “It requires corruption and obsequiousness in a way that wears down good people and wears down their principles.”

The novel takes its name from the real-life Hellfire Club, a clique of 18th-century British aristocrats who engaged in secret orgiastic revels. “The elite would engage in the most debauched activities and also forge alliances that had an impact on English society,” says Tapper. “Finding out that Ben Franklin attended at least one of those bacchanals planted a

seed in my head: What if that continued? What if there were secret societies like that today? I can’t imagine that there aren’t.”

A history major at Dartmouth, Tapper set his story in 1954 at the height of McCarthyism. He depicts his characters interacting with Sen. Joe McCarthy, his henchman Roy Cohn, Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Kennedy brothers. The Hellfire Club is filled with unlikely but accurate details such as McCarthy’s habit of eating a stick of butter to blunt the effects of alcohol. Dartmouth gets a shout-out in a reference to the 1953 Commencement address by President Eisenhower. The author of three nonfiction books (2012’s The Outpost, on the war in Afghanistan, is being made into a movie), Tapper has achieved celebrity for his aggressive interviewing style. “This was even more fun,” he says, “because it was a rollicking adventure, and I could really go to extremes and push the boundaries.”

Tapper sees parallels between the 1950s and our own era. “Obviously, McCarthyism and Trumpism are very different. But the idea of smearing people and lying about people and having no regard for the truth—that is something that they have in common,” he says. “Something else that they have in common is an entire political and media world unsure of how to react.”

You can read an excerpt at our website.

Julia M. Klein