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An Interview with Peter Schechter, political consultant and author
of Point Of Entry 1. You've helped presidents get elected around the world and have been privileged enough to have been in behind-the-scenes world power-broker meetings (both in America and abroad) to make your life a nice subplot on The West Wing. Do your kids think you're a spy? My kids think that I'm a weird combination of silly and cool. Depends on the time of day you're asking. But, they do get irritated by the interruptive nature of my job. Clients call at weird times asking for advice. What do you tell a six and eight-year old when a client calls in the middle of bedtime reading to discuss responding to Venezuelan President Chavez' threats against his company. My kids don't get what can be better than that gripping moment when Harry Potter puts on his invisible cloak. But, it would be difficult to imagine doing anything else. I've been privileged to see things, hear things and do things that I could only have dreamed about. The experience runs from the sublime to the ridiculous. It's been a real ride; from writing a eulogy for an assassinated South American presidential candidate to organizing a balloon launch in a provincial Nigerian town to inaugurate a political campaign. 2. Point of Entry primarily deals with the horrific reality of a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear device on U.S. soil. With our current climate of skepticism over just how thorough a job our government can do in protecting its citizens, why go there, now? The most basic social compact in democracy is a government's pledge to protect the safety of its citizens. To be effective, there must be credibility -- citizens must believe that the government is doing its best, with the best people, to insure that protection. Here in the US, that trust has been chinked in the past months. We live in a scary world -- natural disasters, contagious diseases that spread on the back of modern transportation and terrorism. But, nothing is more worrisome than the spread of nuclear arms to terrorists. Nothing. Point of Entry looks at a very unusual scenario for smuggling nuclear materials into the United States. But, it's not implausible. After all, the Colombian drug mafia has a stellar track record of knowing how to get illicit materials into our country. Every day. All the time. Are the agencies that protect us from the illegal spread of nuclear materials looking South as well as East? Who knows? I think they should. But I'd be humbled if this story spurred our non-proliferation specialists to look at a new angle. 3. The novel contains the unbelievable: Fidel Castro aiding the US during a time of urgent need. Do you think this could really happen? Would he really step up to the plate, if the U.S. were in desperate need of help? Sure, why not? And, if it would happen, we'd never know about it because up to now both countries' politicians have vested interests in our mutual hostility. But, what we see on television is the staged, highly choreographed, perfectly planned posturing of government. What happens behind the scenes in the shadows is vastly more interesting. Strange things happen in the shadows. We just re-established relations with Libya. Few knew those negotiations were happening. During the Cold War, an improbable, aging U.S. oilman named Armand Hammer was the principal conduit to the Soviet Politburo. Or, how about the fact that while they were bitterly accusing each other in public, Ariel Sharon's son was, for years, his father's personal secret emissary to Yasser Arafat. I know of a number of instances in which Cuba has indirectly helped the US and the US has thanked Cuba for its help. The reverse is also just as true. But, always in the shadows. |
