The Hellfire Club

Political junkies will thrill to this journey into the sordid months of 1954 when Sen. Joe McCarthy was steamrolling civil rights and Puerto Rican nationalists shot at congressmen on the floor of the House of Representatives. Young veteran Charlie Marder is named to a vacant House seat and starts out strong by lobbying against federal funds being given to a business that made shoddy war equipment. He awakens the demons of a modern Hellfire Club whose members seek to control the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned against. While rubbing elbows with the Kennedys, Estes Kefauver, Roy Cohn, and other notables of the era, Charlie puts his own moral compass to severe stress. His wife, a zoologist doing fieldwork with the ponies of the Chesapeake Bay, adds a perky fillip to the plot as she stands by her man.