What if the President of the USA acted more level-headed than the current one?
Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel Night of Camp David has a particular distinction: one of the few novels I’ve ever seen that does not have its title on its cover. The novel is a reissue; Knebel was a novelist of some repute in the ’60s, as well as a famous journalist and liberal firebrand. The reason I’m taking the time to discuss this book, as well as the reason the book was reissued to begin with, can be seen on the cover: “What if the President of the USA went stark raving mad?” Made frustratingly, infuriatingly, and frankly depressingly relevant in the light of the current administration (it was reissued initially during the first Trump term), it has been brought back by Penguin Random House to make more money off of our national dysfunction.
Knebel’s novel has become “retroactive alternate history,” i.e. fiction that was, at the time it was written, a speculation of future events, but has now been surpassed by the inevitable march of time. This type of fiction is often of interest to those of us who are fans of alternate history; it provides insight into just how the past could have changed, if only from the vantage point of people in said past. There have been online works speculating about the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example (I wrote one in high school, and it won an online award). The end result is a sort of genre shift over the course of the work’s existence, one that was probably foreseeable by the author, who wrote a lot of political fiction (by that point, works akin to proto-Tom Clancy had already been written, such as George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking or Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands). As such, they have more in common, to the contemporary reader, with modern speculative work.
This novel stars a senator from Iowa with political aspirations who is asked away from the busy hubbub of national politics in Washington to speak with the President late at night at Camp David (the presidential retreat in rural Frederick County, Maryland, northwest of Washington) to talk about the upcoming national election. The President asks the Senator if the latter wants to be his running mate, as his current Vice President is under the cloud of scandal. During this meeting, the President voiced his support for a law legalizing the warrantless recording and storage of all telephone calls in the country. That is the first of many erratic, authoritarian things that the President expresses over the course of the novel, leading the senator to look to see if something is amiss.
The 21st-century reader will note that we already have a system of warrantless collection of information that dwarfs anything beyond a simple pile of telephone call transcripts; if anything, this being the sign of looming insanity comes off as quaint, its proponent as rather tame next to the many horrible real-life cases that would follow, and the book's author as somewhat naive. This is one of a number of things that show the limits of Knebel’s imagination: he is that sort of white liberal writer who believed that ‘it’ could not happen here, in America, land of the free and home of the brave. He had an implicit faith in the American people that I don’t think has ever been warranted.
The novel works well as a depiction of the backrooms of high-level Washington politics, and it’s clear that Knebel knew his facts. He’s acutely aware of the wide variety of strange personalities that populate that world, from lawyers to activists, and how they grease the wheels of politics. Here, Knebel does not come off as so naive, as he shows you how even the most virtuous-seeming people in politics have skeletons in their closet (including the bright young senator around whom the narrative revolves). It does, though, show its age in how most of the politicians and indeed people on the Hill are white men, although there are women outside of formal positions who are nevertheless quite influential to the proceedings. There’s also a paucity of nonwhite characters. Knebel does have enough foresight to have a Black man as a major figure in Congress, but he seems to be the only one. Given that this was written in the ’60s, I’m not really sure we could have expected any better, but it’s noticeable.
Knebel is very good at pacing, and the book’s plot ticks along like a metronome. He was an accomplished writer of political thrillers and it shows here. There’s an economy to how this book uses its scenes, and not a single of them feels wasted, even ones that clearly diverge from the main plot. A drive around the country to find evidence feels earned, as does a vacation jaunt to the Bahamas for the senator. There’s an adept combination of different plotlines in the Bahamas, so that an absence never feels like an absence, but rather a suspension of the presence in the main plot that lets you look back at the significance of what has occurred up to that point. Many lesser authors could have made such a detour feel superfluous, but Knebel knew how not to.
Night of Camp David is both a perfectly enjoyable political thriller and a cautionary tale about speculating on the future. Like so many works that came before it, and not a few that came after, the passage of time has only laid bare a certain lack of imagination, less so of the author and more so of the age in which they worked. Knebel’s great weakness was assuming that the ‘normalcy’ of mid-century America would last forever, or indeed that it was ever really a thing to begin with. I absolutely see why the folks at Penguin Random House chose to reissue this novel so recently, but if anything, it serves to emphasize the sheer madness of the current administration, if not in actual mental state, certainly in its outlandishness. We’re living through times that our progeny will write lurid historical novels about, unfortunately, and an actual novel does as good a job as any to lay that truth bare.
Reference: Knebel, Fletcher. Night of Camp David [Penguin Random House, 1965].
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
