Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's Sweeping Anti-War Novel

"John D. Negroponte, a career diplomat and national security official, is something of a Forrest Gump figure in the sordid annals of postwar American foreign policy. Having entered the Foreign Service in 1960, he joined the US delegation at the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 as an assistant to Henry Kissinger-where he apparently clashed with his boss over the latter's insufficient commitment to continuing the Vietnam War."

"Later, he threw his weight behind the North American Free Trade Agreement as George H.W. Bush's ambassador to Mexico. And in 2005, he was appointed by Bush the younger as the United States' first director of national intelligence, an office in which he inherited a sprawling infrastructure of CIA black sites and the practice of "enhanced interrogation techniques," the latter of which he defended as "not that big a deal" as recently as 2012."

John D. Negroponte's career spanned roles including work at the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, ambassadorships in Honduras (1981–1985) and Mexico, and service as the first director of national intelligence in 2005. In Honduras he helped conceal right‑wing death squad operations and facilitated US support for the Nicaraguan contras; in Mexico he supported NAFTA; as intelligence director he inherited CIA black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques later defended as "not that big a deal." Your Name Here moves between New York, Berlin, London, and the Middle East, examines collaboration and literature's function, and takes a meandering, self‑reflexive form born of frustration with a parochial publishing industry.

Read at The Nation