At the end of this acerbically amusing novel from 1998, Charles McCarry includes the following in a “To the Reader” note:

Lucky Bastard is a work of the imagination in which no character is based on anyone who ever lived and no reference is intended to anything that ever happened in the real world. ... [I]n our time history became fiction and fiction history. It is no simple matter to reclaim the one from the other.

McCarry probably felt compelled to write such a note, given that his novel’s main character is a hypersexual man who dodges the draft during the Vietnam war, gets a scholarship to study in Europe, returns to the U.S. and marries a woman he meets in law school (who becomes the breadwinner in the family), and starts a career in state politics, rising from attorney general to governor and then the presumptive favorite to become president.

Not like anything in real life at all. 

The twist in McCarry’s tale is that John Fitzgerald Adams, his protagonist, is the bastard son of JFK, conceived in a San Francisco hospital where JFK was recovering from wounds suffered in WWII. The further twist: Adams, in the late 1960s, is recruited by the KGB to become a Soviet agent, with the specific goal of becoming president.

Over the past 35 years, McCarry has written some of the finest espionage novels in the American canon. Although not as well known as the works of John LeCarré, the tone of McCarry’s novels is similar to LeCarré’s. Most of them follow the life and career of American spy Paul Christopher, from his time as a boy in Europe on the eve of World War II to the 1990s. (McCarry’s Bride of the Wilderness, set in the 19th century, features characters who turn out to be Christopher’s ancestors.) The “Christopher” books feature characters with a great affection for the Old World — both of Europe and pre-WWII America — but who are also pragmatic, and who see their spying as a necessary part of keeping first the Nazis and then the Soviets at bay. Lucky Bastard was a departure for McCarry, with a tone that is lighter and more satiric.

As a teenager, Jack Adams first demonstrates a trait that will mark the rest of his life: He single-mindedly pursues and has sex with as many women as he can. He is not interested in a relationship, just the sex. Jack is an honors student in high school and gets a full scholarship to Columbia, where he studies political science. This is also where, in the late 1960s, he first comes to the attention of Dmitri, a member of the KGB in deep cover in the United States whose mission is to find good candidates on American campuses who can be persuaded to work for the Soviets.

One of Dmitri’s “talent spotters” explains why Adams may be a perfect candidate for Dmitri’s mission. The talent spotter says, “Politics comes to [Jack] straight from the unconscious, in the same way that operas and symphonies came to Mozart. Whole concepts of how to use power just pop into his head, ready for orchestration. ... Jack doesn’t have an enemy in the world. He’s such a big dumb shit with such a dazzling smile that he excites to jealousy, not hostility. It doesn’t matter what he does. It’s uncanny. People will forgive him anything.”

Dmitri arranges for Jack to win a scholarship to study in Heidelberg, Germany, and uses Jack’s compelling (and graphically described) sex drive to put him into a compromising position (well, several actually) with another KGB plant named Greta. Then Dmitri’s handler, a high-ranking KGB officer known as “Peter,” confronts Jack and convinces him to work for them. “Them” isn’t really the KGB. “Them” is more like anyone who wants what used to be known as a “new world order” with a single government. As Peter explains, “In every country, there are people like us — a supernumerary nationality to whom patriotism is a shoddy product, to whom ideology means nothing, to whom the people and only the people mean everything. There are others like us everywhere.”

With the help of his KGB handlers, Jack moves back to Ohio and marries fellow Columbia student Morgan Weatherby, a woman very active in the anti-war movement and women’s liberation causes, who also is one of Dmitri’s agents. Morgan’s role is to provide a stable home life for Jack and monitor his actions as Dmitri and Peter arrange for Jack’s quick rise up the political ranks in Ohio.

The plot is outrageous and fast-paced, and McCarry sprinkles cynical observations about the American political process throughout. Jack’s sexual escapades grow more and more outlandish, but the rumors about them only make him more appealing — dare I say Kennedyesque — among many voters.

One of the tricky parts of Jack’s various political campaigns is how the KGB can pump money into them while making the money look legitimate. During his run for attorney general, Jack explains to his wife:

“I need the same things Kennedy had: ruthlessness and money. Especially money. We need more money.”

“We’ve already spent more than we can explain. It’s risky. And money may not be enough.”

Jack said, “Money is always enough if there’s enough money.”

“What about the ruthlessness?”

Jack said, “You get the money. I’ll take care of the ruthlessness.”

Jack’s rise to national prominence continues, carefully monitored by his KGB minders, even when the Soviet Union implodes. But Peter, the master minder, doesn’t need a country in order to “run” his agent. Peter moves his base of operations from Moscow to Miami, pulls in an infusion of cash from the Chinese, and Jack Adams is all but certain to be the 20th century’s last president of the United States.

McCarry’s tale is a rollicking one. An enterprising history teacher in the mid-21st century could offer it to her students as a secondary text, and the students would gain insights into 20th-century American politics that a shelf full of presidential memoirs couldn’t come close to matching.