A ‘wild and weird’ decade: Why Jake Tapper set his new novel in the 1970s

By Jake Tapper, CNN

(CNN) — I originally had been reluctant to set my latest novel in the 1970s. I was wrong. That was one wild and weird decade.

“The Hellfire Club,” my first novel, published in 2018, set my protagonists, Congressman Charlie Marder and his zoologist wife Margaret, right in the thick of the McCarthy hearings. (Joe, not Kevin.)

A thriller about government shadiness and conspiracy fit neatly into that era, with its mien of normalcy and underpinning of discrimination, finger-pointing, and the rise of what President Eisenhower had warned about: the military-industrial complex. McCarthy’s unhinged fact-challenged rants were a perfect backdrop for the tale I wanted to weave and the history I saw rhyming, if not repeating itself.

In the 2021 sequel, “The Devil May Dance,” Attorney General Robert Kennedy blackmailed Charlie and Margaret into going out to Hollywood to see if Frank Sinatra was actually mobbed up or if it was more of a stylistic flourish. This, too, was set on a foundation of reality.

Ol’ Blue Eyes had wanted JFK to stay at his Rancho Mirage compound during his 1962 visit to Los Angeles, and AG Kennedy had been challenged internally on how credibly the Department of Justice could take on organized crime if his brother was hobnobbing with a guy who loved to pose with made men. This, too, allowed me to write about how much one can dance with the devil without the scent of sulfur rubbing off on you.

Truth is, I had planned to skip the 1970s altogether for the next book, which would feature Charlie and Margaret but star their kids, Ike and Lucy. Born As someone born in 1969, it would have been the first decade I would write about that I had memories of, and those memories — Watergate, urban blight, the energy crisis, a nation experiencing malaise — didn’t seem fun. But a fellow journalist encouraged me to give the 1970s a second look.

And then I spent a week fishing in Idaho with some devotees of Evel Knievel, specifically Jimmy Kimmel and P.J. Clapp (a.k.a. Johnny Knoxville), and some ideas popped into my head. Yes, this is the first thriller for which Kimmel and Knoxville served as muses. As far as I know.

The 1970s, it turns out, was not just “a gallstone of a decade,” as the characters from Doonesbury bid them farewell. They were insane. And 1977, as highlighted by Slate’s “One Year” podcast, was a year of madness in particular. In that one year, Elvis Presley died, Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, New York City experienced its great black out, Studio 54 opened, the Summer of Sam wreaked terror and gave life to tabloid journalism, “Roots” and the Nixon/Frost interviews aired, “Star Wars” changed film forever — and Knievel literally jumped the shark.

That’s right. In January 1977, Knievel jumped over a tank of sharks for a CBS special. This was, it is worth noting, months before one Arthur Fonzarelli did so on the TV show “Happy Days.” And for both, it signaled the same.

So for the third book in the series, “All The Demons Are Here,” Ike Marder is a 20-year-old AWOL Marine working on Knievel’s pit crew in Montana. His sister Lucy, 22, is a journalist joining a new D.C. newspaper, led by the British Lyon family, hoping to capitalize on the same tabloid journalism momentum propelling other media magnates of the era.

Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and other ’70s celebs make appearances in the book, which looks at how demagogues find followers and what motivates publishers to push stories that might be good for sales but bad for the republic. I think it has a bit of relevance and resonance to the world we’re all in now.

And I hope you find it fun. The ‘70’s were definitely that. At least when the aliens and Bigfoot weren’t trying to get us.

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