The Story Of Henri Tod – William F. Buckley, Jr., 1984 ★½

Why Spy Fiction Should Be Left to the Professionals

Throughout the 1980s, while helming American conservativism’s flagship journal, National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr. also had going a lucrative and well-regarded side project. It involved CIA agent Blackford Oakes, who gallivanted about the globe dealing with trouble.

This foray into spy fiction offered Buckley a chance to do two things: Emulate Frederick Forsyth, whose Day Of The Jackal Buckley greatly admired; and commentate on his trademark political concerns from a different perch.

As a showcase for Buckley’s wit, and a means of getting his conservative faithful to fork over something more than their annual NR subscription fee, Oakes books seem an inspired stratagem, but how are they for actual reading? Having just finished The Story Of Henri Tod, I can’t say I was much impressed.

Buckley wrote almost a dozen Oakes thrillers. Henri Tod was the fifth, published in 1984. Here, Oakes goes to Berlin in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, making contact with an anti-communist resistance force led by a legendary man of mystery, one Henri Tod. As those familiar with 1961 may know, the Berlin Wall is days away from becoming reality, after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev has met young JFK for the first time and judged him too weak to stand up for himself or his country. Can Oakes and a band of anti-Communist East Germans stop Khrushchev’s plot against freedom-loving people everywhere?

Tod, we learn, is a man both of ideas and of action: “The mortal enemy of freedom, he generalized, was the inertial conspiracy which denied the alternative.”

Buckley here is very much in polemicist mode even when supposedly taking his ease. The “inertial conspiracy” Tod speaks of is personified by President Kennedy himself, who dithers and orders another Coca-Cola while the fate of millions is pulled deeper into the chasm of communist rule.

Kennedy as Buckley presents him here is very much the lightweight Khrushchev takes him for, shrugging off Soviet aggression in between recollections of his college conquests: “He’s not up to beginning a nuclear war,” Kennedy thinks of Khrushchev. “Among other things, Poppa Marx wouldn’t like that. A nuclear war with maybe only Patagonians left over isn’t going to do much to validate the Marxist theory of class struggle.”

To the extent Henri Tod works at all, it is as hard-charging satire of Kennedy. Every now and then, Buckley pulls back inside the young president’s head as JFK frets over his manners and how lucky it is that the Latin term “casus belli” has such a seemingly pleasant sound to it. Kennedy, like Buckley, was a product of the Eastern Establishment-Yale-Choate axis, and Buckley clearly uses what he knows to often savage effect.

Yet he can only do so much of this before the requirements of spy fiction return his attentions to the plot underway. It is here Henri Tod falters badly. The story moves at a glacial pace for four-fifths of the way. Buckley takes his time setting up the crux of the story, that Tod has a long-lost sister he will do anything to rescue from her apparent communist captors. Oakes, meanwhile, discusses philosophy, has a pro-forma tryst with a lovely woman he meets on a train, and finds himself in his usual agreement with the editorials in National Review.

At times, I wondered if Buckley might be having a laugh, not really knowing his Oakes work. But no. Buckley doesn’t just have Oakes quote himself as an authority, he does so in the form of a full-length National Review editorial which urges American resolve at the time of the Berlin Wall crisis. After he finishes reading the editorial, Oakes points it out to his companion as wise counsel that will go ignored by the powers that be in Washington.

The Berlin Wall goes up in 1961, under the passive gaze of the West. Image from http://schoolworkhelper.net/rise-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/

Buckley further pushes this point in the form of Tod, whom we learn early on was a German-Jewish refugee of Hitler’s and who sees in Communism the same totalitarian beast that seeks to enslave the individual, “only under another name.”

Buckley’s storycraft is poor throughout. The central element of the story involves how Tod gets an inside track on the East German command’s thinking, which involves him literally stumbling into a hideout where the leader’s disaffected nephew happens to be holed up. It just so happens this hideout used to be Hitler’s railroad-car headquarters, which really threads the needle, but anyway.

In another writer’s hands, this illogical convenience might have served at least to enliven the story. Buckley just lets it sit there instead. Tod learns from the nephew that Khrushchev has forbidden the East Germans to respond militarily if the U. S. and other forces in West Berlin move to stop the wall going up. This becomes the critical information Oakes must bring back to Kennedy, which would seem to set up some dramatic possibilities Buckley doesn’t bother about. It turns out he’d rather dun his target Kennedy with more of that appeasement rap.

The deeper into Henri Tod I read, the more I found myself thinking about John le Carré. For much of his career, le Carré’s brand of spy fiction presented ambiguous moral dilemmas with disaffected protagonists where the question wasn't a simple matter of rooting for the good guys. Buckley was on record saying he wanted to write a different kind of spy story, and if nothing else, he certainly manages that here.

Over time, le Carré’s political identity, the polar opposite of Buckley’s in so many ways, took over. Just as with Buckley here, later le Carrés have become overtly polemical in a way that makes for stale reading, left-wing polemics rather than right-wing polemics but polemics all the same. Just as Buckley has his evil communists, le Carré has his repellent Americans.

For all his crochets, le Carré remains a master fiction writer. Buckley, on the other hand, too often comes off here as a facile plate-spinner. Oakes spends so much time in his mind revisiting past associations that Buckley seems more inspired by Marcel Proust than Ian Fleming. Much of the story is spent watching Tod recuperate from a bullet wound while Oakes recalls his adventures in past novels and JFK satisfies his thirst with another Coke and a friendly secretary in the Oval Office.

When the story does finally move, very late, it does so in such a rote and depressing way as to make the effort of reading it seem not just wasted but insulted. It’s tempting to give out spoilers, secure in the belief there isn’t much in The Story Of Henri Tod to spoil. Suffice it to say that Buckley doesn’t bring his novel to a close as much as shut it down in as downbeat a manner as possible. The result is tired and embittered, and a labor to read.

Yet the major failure here comes back to Buckley’s politics. Henri Tod is so determined to present the case against international communism that it ceases to engage as a story. It becomes instead a kind of Punch-and-Judy affair in which the reader winds up the one getting pummeled, both by the heavy-handed message as well as by the illogical twists of a blinkered plot.