What if a sitting president became dangerously unstable? The 1965 novel Night of Camp David makes for uncanny reading today
Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books.
The Gridiron Club is one of the oldest, most exclusive journalistic organisations in Washington, D.C. Much like the White House Correspondents’ Association, this secretive, members-only group hosts an annual dinner where writers and politicians exchange playful barbs and raise their glasses in a spirit of conviviality. Tradition dictates the sitting president attends, making it a key fixture in Washington’s social and political calendar.
A fictitious account of this annual dinner features at the start of Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 novel, Night of Camp David, which is back in the cultural spotlight (again). Fiction has an uncanny way of anticipating reality, and this bestselling political thriller – about a US president spiralling into paranoia and delusion – feels eerily relevant in the era of Trump 2.0.
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Everything appears to be normal as Knebel’s story gets underway. President Mark Hollenbach, a charismatic Democrat who fought in the Korean War, has just stepped up to the microphone at the Gridiron club. Before him sit “the elite of America’s delicately interwoven political-industrial society, the men who ran the political parties and the big corporations”.
Having taken a few lighthearted potshots at the press, Hollenbach sets his sights on his political rivals. After a brief pause to take a sip of water, he quips that the Republican party’s
capacity for solemnity constantly mystifies me. Perhaps the clue lies in what they say to one another. I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought, and I think I’ve hit on a way to find out.
Hollenbach, who is up for reelection, suggests the FBI be empowered to maintain an automatic tap on all telephones in the country. With a standing wiretap, “we Democrats could learn what mysterious substance provides the glue for Republicanism, what indeed it is they say to one another that makes them so gloomy”.
The audience erupts in laughter, assuming Hollenbach is joshing. But he’s deadly serious. He admits this to the novel’s central protagonist, Jim MacVeagh, an ambitious young senator from Iowa, when he later invites him for a nightcap at Camp David, the secluded presidential retreat nestled in the Maryland mountains.
It would have to be done carefully, with great legal restraints and protection, naturally. But no respectable citizen would have a thing to fear. It’s the hoodlums, the punks, the syndicate killers, and the dope peddlers we’re after. Automatic wiretapping, aided by computers to store the telephone calls, would drive them all out of business.
MacVeagh can hardly believe what he’s hearing. He tries to reason with the president, warning the vaguely Nixonesque scheme, “could be an awful weapon for evil in the wrong hands. Who knows what type of man may succeed you?”
These appeals fall on deaf ears. Dismissing MacVeagh’s objections with a wave of his hand, Hollenbach shifts the conversation to a topic he considers more pressing: his choice for a vice-presidential running mate.
With a sly grin, Hollenbach dangles a tantalising carrot before MacVeagh, suggesting he might be the ideal person for the job. Flattered but unsure, MacVeagh demurs. He is soon summoned back for another meeting, where it becomes alarmingly clear something is deeply amiss with the president, who rants about nefarious journalists and insists there’s “some kind of conspiracy afoot to discredit me in the eyes of the country.”
These petty grievances are only a prelude to his grander ambitions. With feverish intensity, Hollenbach unveils his vision to make America great again. He speaks of forging
the mightiest core of power the world has ever known. Not just an alliance, but a union – a real union, political, economic, social – of the great free nations of the world.
At first, MacVeagh is unsure what he’s talking about. However, it turns out Hollenbach is referring to a takeover of America’s northern neighbour:
The mineral riches under her soil are incredible in their immensity […] Believe me, Jim, Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.
Fletcher Knebel.
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Hollenback argues America also needs to take control of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland – by force if necessary. These predominantly white countries “will bring us the character and discipline we so sadly lack.”
MacVeagh is stunned by the president’s alarmingly erratic behaviour, messianic posturing and white supremacist rhetoric. He decides he has to act. Yet how does one move against the most powerful man in the world without being branded a traitor? As MacVeagh struggles to find allies in Washington, the reader begins to wonder: will anyone believe him before it is too late?
A climate of dread
While Night of Camp David clearly resonates in the here and now – especially in its prefiguration of some of Donald Trump’s more outlandish foreign policy pronouncements such as wanting to annex Greenland – the book is also very much a product of its time.
A plane carrying Donald Trump Jr. lands in Nuuk, Greenland, last month.
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The political and socio-cultural climate in the 1960s was marked by a deep sense of suspicion. Cold War anxieties, panic regarding perceived subversion from within, and high-profile political assassinations were on the minds of many.
Historian Richard Hofstader captured the zeitgeist in his influential 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In it, he suggests American political life had long been susceptible to modes of conspiratorial thinking and exaggerated fears about internal enemies.
Arriving a few months after Hofstader’s study, Knebel’s novel plays directly into this mindset, presenting an all too plausible scenario in which the greatest threat to the foundations of American democracy comes not from a shadowy external adversary, but from the seat of highest office itself.
This climate of dread and distrust permeated 1960s popular culture, as seen in films like The Manchurian Candidate, where a decorated war veteran is unknowingly brainwashed into becoming a sleeper assassin, and Seven Days in May (adapted from a 1962 novel Knebel coauthored with Charles W. Bailey II), which follows a Pentagon insider who uncovers a right-wing military coup against the leader of the free world.
Peter Sellers in the title role during production of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
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Elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove satirised the terrifying possibility of nuclear destruction, with the deranged figure of General Ripper embodying the fear of unstable leaders wielding absolute power. The 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, meanwhile, fuelled intense anxieties about the process of presidential succession.
Set against this tumultuous backdrop, Night of Camp David posed several germane and decidedly unsettling questions: what if a sitting president became dangerously unstable? And more urgently, what could be done about it?
Knebel’s novel was, in fact, published just two years before the ratification of the 25th Amendment, which clarifies procedures for removing a president deemed unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. It was enacted as a direct response to the political chaos following in the immediate wake of the Kennedy assassination.
Different eras
Knebel, who died by suicide in 1993, was, in the words of JFK, “Washington’s most widely read and widely plagiarized” commentator. Whether read as a relic of the Cold War or as an urgent warning, his novel still has much to say about the fragility of our democratic institutions and the dangers of unchecked authority.
By the same token, the contrast between Knebel’s fictional president and Trump highlights a key difference between their respective historical and political eras.In Night of Camp David, the president ultimately makes a decision that shows him to be weirdly scrupulous and patriotic, despite his hunger for a new world order. One simply can’t imagine such a scenario under Trump.
Hollenbach, for all of his delusions and grandiosity, still sees himself as acting in the nation’s best interest – however warped or dangerous his vision may be. Trump, on the other hand, operates with ruthless, transactional logic, focused above all on his power and survival.
Even as some of Trump’s proclamations on international affairs – whether renaming the Gulf of Mexico or quoting Napoleon to justify his purging of the government – veer into the realm of the bizarre, his approach is less about untrammelled paranoia and more about calculated dominance.
When it comes to Trump, the concern is less psychological instability than a remorseless, calculated reshaping of institutions to serve his own ends.
In this sense, Night of Camp David – the narrative of which might strike the contemporary reader as somewhat tame – may feel oddly quaint and old-fashioned.
Its cast of characters, irrespective of party and persuasion, are ultimately driven by duty to the nation, where’s today’s political landscape in the United States is increasingly defined by ideological entrenchment and loyalty tests.
Knebel imagines a president’s instability as a crisis to be resolved; with the second coming of Trump, instability has itself become a governing principle. Läs mer…