In our collective struggle to explain what ails the nation, we’ve developed an annoying habit of finding predictions of Trump in 20th century fiction. It was, back in innocent 2015, a lesser Sinclair Lewis novel about a populist-turned-fascist military takeover of America that foretold the dystopia brewing all around us. Since then, the male chauvinist theocracy of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale has reigned—even spawning an update aimed at the #MeToo era. And, of course, everything is “Orwellian.”
Like stoned teenagers transfixed by a late-night History Channel special on the Bible Code or the predictions of Nostradamus, we’re convinced that if only we’d paid attention to the signs, we’d have seen President Trump coming. If only we’d kept, say, Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 political thriller Night of Camp David, about a freshman senator’s backroom campaign to unseat a dangerously paranoid president, in print all these years! If only that one had been the vehicle for Burt Lancaster to play a seething sociopath, then perhaps we’d be prepared.
Better for the publisher that we weren’t, though.
Because now, just in time for holiday shopping, comes the robustly publicized re-release of Knebel’s less famous follow-up to Seven Days in May. The “eeriness” of its “prescience” is not to be missed. “It could happen. Someday it probably will!” the mid-’60s mass-market paperback promised. “What would happen if the president went stark raving mad?” the old tagline asked—and readers, evidently, want to know: Before its latest printing, brittle copies of old editions were going for $300 on Amazon and AbeBooks. With a library card, of course, the book is still free. And the copy I borrowed hadn’t been lent once since it was last fixed with a typewritten checkout card.
That might be because Night of Camp David, as at least one reviewer wrote at the time, is needlessly boring: It’s 1965, the Cold War is escalating, the draft is on—and the tense aftermath of the first presidential assassination of most Americans’ lifetimes offers ample inspiration for an author of political thrillers. And yet, the events Knebel strings together are so dully realistic, the New York Times reviewer noted, that they’re actually tamer than reality.
It opens on the 91st annual Gridiron Dinner—still a men’s club back then—where we meet a cleft-chinned freshman senator from Iowa, Jim MacVeagh, laughing along to President Mark Hollenbach’s toast. The secretary of defense, whose Jewishness Knebel lets define his character, blanches at an over-wrought joke about widespread phone surveillance. MacVeagh laughs it off, but the secretary is right to worry: On matters of surveillance and the unchecked executive, Knebel was prescient. (Just not about Trump so much as his predecessors.)
From the dinner, Hollenbach summons MacVeagh to Camp David for the first of a string strange nights alone together: They sip a very 1960s tomato juice concoction, while MacVeagh thinks of his foxy mistress Rita and Hollenbach spews paranoid theories. He confides his plan to request the scandal-dogged vice president’s resignation, and taps the Iowan to replace him. The outgoing veep Pat O’Malley—again, his Irish-American background is cast as a key to his character—gave a friend a competitive building contract years before to undermine the presidency, a crazed Hollenbach suspects.
MacVeagh tries fails to subdue his paranoia: There’s no stopping a manic Dutchman, MacVeagh’s narration informs us. The best insight into the Trump presidency Night of Camp David actually offers is its wealth of outdated slurs and stereotypes otherwise lost to younger generations
When Hollenbach reveals he suspects that European allies and a popular columnist of undermining him in a coordinated conspiracy, MacVeagh resolves to convince his colleagues the president’s lost it. He calls a secret meeting, where Southern senators joke collegially about segregation and dismiss MacVeagh’s conclusions. The psychodrama peaks when they leave him with no resolution, doubting his own sanity like a vapid midwestern Hamlet.
Meanwhile, Hollenbach’s planned a confab with the Soviet premier—“a steel-nerved negotiator utterly devoted to Russia’s self-interest, vs. Hollenbach, whose once brilliant mind was now obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.” Here, readers won’t miss the resemblance to modern reality. But Hollenbach also threatens to bring us into an uneven alliance with Scandinavian nations, whose superiority has become an obsession. Again here, modern readers should note another instance of “eerie prescience.” (At least when President Sanders plots to form a super-state with Denmark, students of the Hollenbach prophecy will be prepared.)
As in the infamous anonymous op-ed—that other vaguely real fodder for fantasy—talk of invoking the 25th Amendment carries the climax. In one pivotal interior scene, MacVeagh surveys his patriotic impulses with a swell of self-regard. “Jim MacVeagh, playboy turned patriot. Country before self. All right, he thought, it may be corny, but it’s true. Do something. Now,” he tells himself, smiling at the rise of own latent heroism.
All in all, the scariest comparison Night of Camp David conjures comes when you realize how much stabler Knebel’s America in crisis is than ours. The institutions that, in the novel, insulate paranoid President Hollenbach mid-crackup turn on him when they have to: They’re that sound. It takes not just MacVeagh and a clatch of colleagues’ willful patriotism but the paranoid president’s own sense of honor to right the ship. In the end, a plotline that was, back then, too realistic to be gripping is today too optimistic to be believable.
