Jack 1939

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. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, the Sagalyn Literary Agency. (July)