Goodreads metadata is 273 pages, rated 3.73 by 453 citizens.
Genre: Cold War espionage fiction.
In 1949 West Germany entered its first post-war democratic election with an unspoken bipartisan agreement not to mention the only issue that mattered: reunification. Incumbent chancellor by appointment Konrad Adenauer, der Alte, was expected to win easily. Into this milieu Blackford Oakes (aka the alter ego of William Buckley, Jr.) is dropped.
Start with that name: Blackford Oakes, a New England wanna be aristocrat who is suave, so resourceful that he makes MacGyver look like a boy scout, a lady killer in every way, and never, ever at a loss. (See his Wikipedia entry for more hyperbole.) He is tall, lanky, handsome, multi-lingual, and just about perfect for a CIA agent. James Bond is an uncouth oaf in comparison. Oh, and Blackford is humourless, unlike Mr. Bond.
The neatly arranged German apple cart is threatened by Prussian Count Axel Wintergrin who has formed a reunification movement and could well best Der Alte at the polls. Such an outcome might prompt the Soviets to intercede. As always, Washington decides to interfere. The D.C. intercession has three parts: (1) diplomatic as the USA tries to convince the USSR to accept the situation, (2) while itself working feverishly to discredit Wintergrin with all kinds of Pox News from this spotless past (he sat out the war in far north Norway), and (3) by inserting the polymath BO into his entourage as an engineer employed through a Marshall Plan grant to restore the Wintergrins’ private chapel. BO is the backstop if all else fails. See that coming…?
The reader realises far sooner than the smug and self-confident BO that the final phase of the Washington plan will be to murder Wintergrin to keep the Soviets from invading. BO finally does figure this out and there are pages and pages of his crisis of conscience. He likes, he respects, he has a man-crush on Wintergrin and the prospect of pulling the trigger on him gives him sleepless nights. Let us pause here and reflect.
Wintergrin is a mirror for BO: two peas in two pods. Both devastatingly attractive, omni-competent, far-seeing, in short, god-like. If Wintergrin had been a working class stiff, say like the real German opponent of Der Alte, Kurt Schumacher, it seems doubtful to this reader that BO would have thought twice about murdering him for the greater good. By the way Adenauer is named in the novel, but the Socialist Party leader is made fictional, and not named as Schumacher. Go figure. I read a biography of Schumacher so long ago I have forgotten whatever I learned from it.
Spoiler. In the end all of BO’s posturing is pointless since his superiors, after having wasted much time and effort in priming him, arranged another end for Wintergrin, whose omniscience extended to his own Christ-like death.
Loose ends are many: the resident KGB agent is left in place, the nuclear weapon Wintergrin had purloined are not retrieved, the election outcome is not mentioned (Der Alte won by a whisker), and Wintergrin was wrong about his own death. Yet the closing is reverential. This is the second in a series of ten of these potboilers. Not sure I can brook another bout of BO’s smug complacence. Far better on a similar theme is A Small Town in Germany (1968) by John le Carré.
In fact, I read this one eons ago and forgot it, until I read Buckley’s Unmaking of a Mayor. That prompted me to try again with the same reaction: what a tiresome prat is BO.