Markers. - book reviews

National Review, June 11, 1990 by Jeffrey Hart

THERE ARE so many things that are good about this novel that it's difficult to know where to start. It has a wide cast of characters, including gangsters and former gangsters, Joe Kennedy (who falls into both categories), Lyndon Johnson (no comment Franklin Roosevelt Bobb Kennedy, assorted women, lawyers and judges, politicians of every stripe, two major central characters, and a strong driving plot that holds it all together.

We touch here a world with which most of us are entirely unacquainted. It is a palpable world and we get to inhabit it through Mr. Zion's gift of language, the medium in which a novelist works: "He is indeed a statesman, Mr. Abraham Roshevsky. A statesman in New Jersey being a person on whom the Statute of Limitations has tolled."

Or: "Four hours later, Walsh had Gambino alone in a suite at the Waldorf Towers. He slid a gun across the coffee table. Gambino said, Why?': Walsh told him, Read it.'

"It was enough to jump the old don's eyes, the rarest gun, not the bullshit kind where the numbers were scraped off, this one never had any numbers, this was a made-for, there were maybe a dozen like this in New York and Gambino couldn't get one, not even Gambino."

The title Markers may be a bit mysterious to those of us outside the world of pols and wiseguys. It seems to derive from billiards, where you put up a marker to register a score. But Zion's markers are more serious. They are a kind of currency, but not calculable in dollars and cents. What they mean here is that if someone does you a favor, you owe him; he has your marker. If you don't return the favor, you might have a discussion with someone like Meyer Lansky or Franklin Roosevelt, or, if your luck ran out completely, Frankie Carbo or Bobby Kennedy.

The two central characters in the novel, friends but polar opposites, are a brilliant journalist named Mike O'Rourke and a criminal lawyer named Jesse Frank. In Jesse Frank Zion has created a credible genius in the pages of a novel, no easy thing to accomplish, since you can't just say he's a genius-you have to show him being one. This Zion does, following Frank from a major sting on a grade-school teacher through his riveting courtroom performances as a defense lawyer.

Jesse Frank is a great criminal lawyer probably because he has a criminal mind himself. Mike O'Rourke is a very smart straight arrow. Central to Zion's novelistic imagination is puzzlement about whom to admire more:

Frank or O'Rourke. Your reviewer decided to ask Mr. Zion a few questions, and we met in the vast lounge of the Yale Club in Manhattan.

JH: Many readers are going to think your Jesse Frank is based on the late Roy Cohn. Is that so?

SZ: No, Jesse Frank is not based on Roy. People will probably think so because I recently published a biography of Roy. They are alike only in their brilliance and love of power for its own sake.... But Roy and Jesse were part of the inside world. They did collect markers.

Behind the Jesse Frank character, most of which I made up from my own experience, is-and this will surprise you-Willmoore Kendall. I knew him at Yale. What went into Jesse Frank was the way Willmoore was. I disagreed with Willmoore about just everything. But his mind was amazing. I tried to make Jesse Frank's mind amazing.

JH: You succeeded. Now I'd like to move into dangerous territory, the cultural minefield we come to in Chapter 15, which begins, "On a rainy afternoon in early December, 1959, Joseph P. Kennedy called on Abe Roshevsky at the Gramercy Park townhouse. The meeting was arranged at Kennedy's request on two hours' notice. It lasted forty minutes. The results are still being felt today." What this chapter says is that Joseph Kennedy called on former gangster Abe Roshevsky in order to put through a deal whereby a New Jersey Irish political boss, Roshevsky's son-in-law, would come out for Jack Kennedy's presidential candidacy. What Joe Kennedy told Roshevsky is that he had proposed-and Neville Chamberlain had accepted-a scheme to evacuate German Jews immediately after Kristallnacht. But FDR wasn't interested. Is this factual?

SZ: Entirely. I don't know who it's going to embarrass more: the Kennedy family or the FDR crowd. It was a surprise to me, the whole thing. I wanted to have this scene, in which Joe Kennedy pleads with Roshevsky to support JFK by getting his son-in-law, Charlie O'Rourke, a Jersey boss, to come out for Jack publicly. No one remembers that the Irish Catholic politicians were steering clear of Jack Kennedy. So I thought: Roshevsky was a powerful, very strong Jew; Joe Kennedy was America First, pro-Hitler, anti-semite. How could he even face Roshevsky? As I began to write that chapter I knew that he never would have set foot in that townhouse without an x factor: He had to have a marker. But what was it? So I did some research, and I found it. After Kristallnacht, Joe Kennedy met with Neville Chamberlain and worked out a plan to get the German Jews out-to America, Palestine, Africa, anywhere. Work out the details later. But there was "no comment" from the State Department, which really means FDR.