Charles McCarry wrote “Tears of Autumn,” one of the best fictional treatments of the assassination of President Kennedy. Coming from a former CIA officer, the depiction of a plot against JFK as revenge for his Vietnam policy had a credibility.
Charles McCarry didn’t write many best-sellers, but among aficionados he was regarded as “the dean” or “poet laureate” of American spy writers and the country’s answer to such British masters as John le Carre. McCarry set several of his books during the Cold War and often contrasted political idealists with those out in the field, observing in “The Better Angels” that “Evil was permanent” and that the job of intelligence was to trick it “into working for your own side.”
Source: Seymour Tribune (Ind.) Charles McCarry, prescient spy novelist, dead at 88
