The Origin of the Idea for the Book:
In 1982, while an Assistant Professor at West Point teaching International Relations and Middle Eastern Politics and Government, I was temporarily loaned to the State Department to work with the Palestinian Autonomy Talks Team led by the late Ambassador Richard Fairbanks.
One day I was having lunch with a senior aide to Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and commented that on the morning news I had seen that Pope John Paul II had returned to his routine schedule and was apparently fully recovered from the gun shot suffered the year before during an assassination attempt. The official I was having lunch with responded with a classic Washington phrase: “Well, as you know,” – a common preamble meaning, “Of course, you don’t know this, but given I’m more ‘in the know’ than you are, I’m going to let you in on a secret.” He then continued, “John Paul’s election in 1978 was orchestrated by President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was a Polish thing.”
Being a young Army Captain, I was impressed, but also quite doubtful. Why would President Carter’s National Security Advisor, who had a very full plate in October 1978, decide he should invest time and energy in such an effort? And how would one influence the votes of such a select, secretive, and small electorate from around the world? But still, the thought never quite left my mind that if there were any truth to this “revelation,” it would make an interesting story.
In future years I would become a good friend to Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s sons, Ian and Mark. Ian served in the Pentagon as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush, and Mark served as the US Ambassador to Sweden for President Barak Obama. When I repeated the story to them, both thought it was as amusing as I had upon first hearing it. But, still, I thought, there’s possibly an entertaining story here.
So after much creative thought, and no small amount of research, regarding the circumstances of the late 1970s, emerging technologies, and the papal election process of the Catholic Church, I wrote Conclave. Some of the characters in the book are actual historical figures, whose actual perspectives I have tried to use – and occasionally extrapolate into fictional actions; some of the characters, such as Carter Caldwell and Katherine O’Connor, are based on friends and colleagues of mine; others, such as Dimitry Zhukov, the KGB analyst, are purely fictional.
