DETROIT — Last fall, I unexpectedly found myself overnight in Battle Creek, and picked up a novel I’d been sent: Secret Service Journals: Assassination and Redemption in 1960s Detroit.
That isn’t the world’s most catchy title, and I might not have started reading it at all, except I knew the author’s first book, a gripping true story of a dramatic and too-little known incident in labor history: Bob Morris’s Built In Detroit: A Story of the UAW, A Company and a Gangster (Universe Books, 2013).
Built in Detroit had a lot of eye-opening information about the mob and their attempts to assassinate Walter Reuther and other labor leaders, one of whom, the author’s father, Ken Morris, also played an important role in building the United Auto Workers union.
So I decided to read a few pages of Secret Service Journals before that night’s World Series game started. Four hours later, long after midnight, World Series forgotten, I made myself put the book down and go to bed so I could drive home the next morning.
The next night, I finished the book, which I realized would be perfect for a long airplane flight for anyone with the slightest interest in the assassinations of the 1960s: The Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the mysterious 1970 death of Walter Reuther.
The book, which is mostly set in Detroit, begins with the discovery of a set of journals kept by Bill Simpson, a young Secret Service agent, the son of a UAW official, who had built up a good record busting counterfeiting rings in the Motor City. (The Secret Service was, after all, founded to fight counterfeiters and only later added protecting the Presidents, their families and other top leaders to their mission.) Eventually, he is assigned to protect President Kennedy, and is noticed and liked by the President.
But after an ominous secret exercise having to do with a supposed assassination attempt, and then the actual events of Nov. 22, 1963, Simpson finds himself in mysterious trouble. Framed for crimes he didn’t commit by people he had trusted, he ends up being sentenced and sent to the federal prison in Milan, Michigan.
His family and his life destroyed, he somehow keeps his sanity, and eventually, through a combination of amazing but somehow plausible events and circumstances, solves the riddle of what happened, not only to him but what was behind all the major assassinations –and suspected assassinations — of the 1960s.
That might be reason enough to read Secret Service Journals, but what makes this book different is the incredible richness of the author’s research and recreation of an amazingly accurate vision of 1960s America, especially Detroit; not only are the facts correct, it all feels right. Morris, who was a teenager then, manages to capture the spirit of the times, and even crafts romantic scenes that manage to be both erotic and tasteful. Anyone reading it will get a new appreciation for how powerful the UAW was back then, when it had four times its current membership and was seen as the cleanest and least corrupt union in the country.
Interestingly, the author’s late father, Ken Morris, a UAW regional director, has a cameo role in the book, as does Reuther himself. But how did the author, a retired lobbyist for public interest and public policy groups, come to write it?
“Well, whenever I spoke to groups about (my first book) someone would always ask whether Walter Reuther’s death was an assassination or an accident,” he said. He toyed with the idea of investigating it, but he also wanted to write a novel. “Then the Covid pandemic hit, and, stuck at home, the novel got written.”
The publishing world isn’t what it once was, and first novels seldom get much attention or make it into chain bookstores, and this one hasn’t. But you can find Secret Service Journals (Pathfinder Publishing, $26.99/$16.99) on Amazon, the way — let’s face it — much of America buys books these days.
By the way, I don’t need to risk a spoiler alert before telling you that I couldn’t believe the shocking and surprise ending this book has; I have read widely on the assassinations, and tend to believe the official stories, except perhaps as regards Martin Luther King. But in any event, the author hints at a sequel.
If he writes one, whether I love it or hate it, based on this book, I know one thing:
I’ll buy it.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
