The primary characters are all fictional. There are, however, several historical persons and locales portrayed in a fictional manner.
Senator Xavier Bushman, junior senator from Pennsylvania, is fictional. However, the subcommittee he sits on in this novel is not. The year of 1953 was the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into communism and homosexuality in the government. The former is commonly known as The Red Scare (and is more accurately called The Second Red Scare since one also happened right after the Russian Revolution of 1917) and the latter is lesser known and was later referred to as The Lavender Scare by former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming.
McCarthy was famously assisted by Roy Cohn and, for a brief time, by Robert F. Kennedy. McCarthy was friends with the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph, who persuaded him to bring on his son as assistant counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in December of 1952. McCarthy was censured in December of 1954 following the incidents that arose during the Army-McCarthy hearings and removed from the subcommittee in January of 1955.
Robert Kennedy worked for McCarthy until July of 1953.
I wish I could say that, as an informal student of this time in American history, I knew all about RFK and McCarthy.
However, I knew nothing about this until I heard an interview by Terry Gross with Larry Tye, author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. As I listened to Mr. Tye talking about this remarkable time in Kennedy's early adulthood, I suddenly knew he had to be included in the narrative of this story. In fact, I had been wondering how to explain why Nick wouldn't be testifying before the subcommittee and Kennedy's mediating influence was just the ticket to doing that.
The personal details about Kennedy were derived from Mr. Tye's descriptions. But any assumptions about what Kennedy would have said or done are completely mine.
More Information
Nick Williams Mysteries
The Unexpected Heiress
The Amorous Attorney
The Sartorial Senator
The Laconic Lumberjack
The Perplexed Pumpkin
The Savage Son
The Mangled Mobster
The Iniquitous Investigator
The Voluptuous Vixen
The Timid Traitor
The Sodden Sailor
The Excluded Exile
The Paradoxical Parent
The Pitiful Player
Nick & Carter Stories
An Enchanted Beginning
Golden Gate Love Stories
The One He Waited For
Their Own Hidden Island
Be the first to know about new releases:
http://nickwilliamspi.com/
The Sartorial Senator (A Nick Williams Mystery Book 3) Page 22
