Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

THE PRESIDENT AS A WORTHY CHARACTER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
by Terry Heath, 2007

Have you noticed that every successful writer of the adventure or political thriller genre who uses the setting of Washington as the focal point of their story will, at some point in the fictional tome, use a rather unique character that has become synonymous with America. The President of the United States.

The presidency and the man, plus an occasional woman for literary diversity, who occupies that lofty political position has been featured in numerous novels, mysteries and action thrillers this last half-century as this specifically American individual plays a central part in the works of many writers seeking an exciting resolution to their story.

So any fictional page turner involving intrigue, tension, drama and the potential for world destruction involving America will almost certainly feature a portrayal of the President of the United Sates, whether in a lead or supporting role, and the decisions that figurehead makes always plays a major part in the usually successful resolution of the events taking place.

The job of being the nation’s chief executive brings with it tremendous responsibility as he/she maintains the security and safety of America. So the character of the president usually shows up most in the action-oriented thriller, as his unique expertise and authority is needed to prevent some potential global cataclysm. Most writers want the best of their presidential character to shine and the decisions they must make in their stories to help out the leads while others may emphasize the detrimental aspects of their officeholder as a creative way to show off unresolved internal conflict in that individual when it comes time for the chief executive to make the big decisions for the climax.

Fictional presidents come in two varieties in those literary settings. Anonymous ones with or without a generic character name and those featuring real chief executives in fictional plots. The non-descriptive unnamed chief executive plays a major role in resolving the events of the story yet remains ambiguous enough so the reader can’t readily determine who that White House occupant is really supposed to be. The second type is a president who is not only identified but is a recognized figure from history.

Either way that president is usually involved in some type of crisis, whether it be domestic or foreign, and always plays a key role in helping the main protagonist favorably resolve the story in America’s favor.

The modern presidency began with the tenure of Franklin Roosevelt and most novels featuring a strong chief executive we are now familiar with and accept were by writers emanating from that World War Two generation who gave us an onslaught of action stories of this vein beginning in the 1950’s. Allan Drury’s ‘Advice and Consent,’ Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey’s ‘Seven Days in May,’ and Robert Serling’s ‘The President’s Plane is Missing’ represent many of the authors from that group who used the authority of a strong president to propel their story to an exciting conclusion.

The plot line for ‘Seven Days In May’ best exemplifies how a fictional president can play a pivotal role in an action novel and shows you how a chief executive should act in a time of crisis and one you can believe. The novel was published in 1962 and the character of Jordan Lyman was probably a composite representation of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower who confronts a potential coup by renegade military officers who are defiantly opposing his plans for a nuclear weapons reduction treaty and an end to the Cold War with the then Soviet Union.

Then there are the books where a president or candidate for high office finds himself the target of a plot to kill him. These themes began in the post JFK world when conspiracies on how a chief executive meets his end became popular. The book ‘Libra’ by Don Delillo, ‘The Star Spangled Contract’ by JFK investigator Jim Garrison and ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ by Richard Condon are the best of that genre in which the plot is usually foiled right before the foul deed can be committed.

Tom Clancy made his fortune by taking his heroic character Jack Ryan from being a lowly CIA analyst to end up the President of the United States. Talk about moving up the ranks of the political bureaucracy! His breakout first book was ‘The Hunt for Red October’ that featured an unnamed president who plays a major role in the novel seeking an plausible resolution to this country’s dilemma of allowing a defecting Russian submarine into our territory but, interestingly, is not even mentioned in the subsequent movie version. Ryan then progresses in power and prestige in each additional tome Clancy penned as he climbed the Washington chain of power. Finally, in the book ‘Debt of Honor’ when terrorists destroy the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress and kills everyone there, the previously selected vice-president-designate discovers he’s now become the commander-in-chief.

Clive Cussler has also featured a chief executive appearance in many of his action tomes that usually has the world on the edge of your seat cataclysm, especially in the novel ‘Deep Six’ in which the president is kidnapped by the Russians, brainwashed, then returned to Washington to do the Kremlin’s bidding before being outed by the main protagonist and stopped.

Surprisingly, the late Robert Ludlum very rarely featured a presidential appearance in his thirty bestsellers as he usually emphasized on characters representing the average Joe American in solving the world crisis given to each. It was only in his Covert-One series that began after Ludlum’s death that a presidential figure appeared to send highly trained government agents on a regular basis to save all of us.

Then you have the fictional tomes by the Washington politicos such as Elliot Roosevelt, Margaret Truman, John Ehrlichman and Marilyn Quayle amongst others who write their stories with an insider’s look at the workings of the nation’s capital. It would seem that almost every politician who has spent time in that town probably believed they had an interesting story to tell but the most unusual of these books would have to be the novel written by the late former Vice-President Spiro Agnew who published ‘The Canfield Decision’ in 1976 after resigning that office in 1973 in a political scandal ten months before his boss Richard Nixon resigned his office over the Watergate spectacle. Agnew writes about a very conservative vice-president who has crossed paths with his temperamental boss and one of them pays the ultimate price! Were there elements of truth in that story? It’s too bad Nixon never tried his hand at fiction to see what speculation he would have created on what he knew about the inner workings of being a president possessing such self-destructive demons.

Elliot Roosevelt wrote a series of books featuring his famous parents 1933-45 stay in the White House where First Lady Eleanor solved crimes of murder while hubby Franklin ran the country. His unique knowledge of how a First Family lived under the national microscope and how a president ruled the nation while these fictional homicides were being solved makes an excellent read. Another writer who also once lived in the White House is Margaret Truman, the daughter of Harry Truman who held the presidency from 1945-53. Her books don’t involve the same characters from tome to tome but she does feature interesting perspectives of those individuals in her stories who hold high office and how they react in crisis situations. Could they be based on real politicians she encountered when growing up as a bystander to history?

Nixon administration deputy and convicted felon John Erlichman wrote a scathing novel upon being released from prison for his role in the Watergate matter featuring a chief executive obviously based on his disgraced boss called ‘The Company’ in which the fictional president and the director of the CIA are blackmailing each other amidst a growing political scandal. Was this an illusion to the real crimes he was convicted for or was he merely venting his frustrations that he and many others involved in those acts went to jail while Nixon did not?

Then there are the novels featuring an independent thinking president who gets elected as a third party candidate and tries to solve the problems of the nation without the rancor that the two major political parties do to each other when one is in power and the other is not. But usually the subplots of these books revolve around a conspiracy by government insiders who feel their power could be threatened by such an independent voice in Washington. ‘The Election’ by Sherwin Markman and ‘The Man’ by Martin Gross are examples of that variety. Another book also called ‘The Man’ by Irving Wallace featured the ascension of the first African-American president the country gets and how the nation reacts to that event during the racial turmoil of the late 1960’s.

Many real presidents from recent memory have appeared as pivotal characters in novels. John Kennedy is probably the most popular recent president to be used as a character in these fictional writings by authors as diverse as Taylor Caldwell to Jack Higgins. These writers usually tried to portray a president who survives his assassination or exploring the controversial personal choices he made in his life.

And about every president since has been used in a fictional tome. Mark Berent used Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in his Vietnam War novels, Larry Collins featured an unnamed character that seemed patterned after Ronald Reagan in ‘The Fifth Horseman,’ and Stephen Coonts wrote about a potential attack against George H.W. Bush and what would happen if Dan Quayle could ascend to the presidency in ‘Under Siege.’ Joe Klein, writing as ‘Anonymous,’ wrote about a Bill Clinton type character in ‘Primary Colors’ that is running for president and has to endure the troubles he brings on himself during that campaign.

The use of real-life presidential figures doesn’t only apply to mainstream novels. They can also be used as plot points in science fiction and alternative history novels. Whitley Streiber used the persona and political wisdom of Harry Truman in his novel ‘Majestic’ that offered one plausible explanation regarding an alleged UFO crash near the town of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and how the federal government covered up the incident to prevent massive public unrest if that news became generally known.

Another author of speculative fiction named Harry Turtledove has made a career in pursuing ‘alternate history’ stories featuring real individuals from certain events in time, yet giving them plausible alternative opportunities to choose that will enable unique personalities such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to act differently in his multi-volume series about how America is divided into two nations when the Confederates win the Civil War and the multi-book series entitled ‘World War’ featuring such presidents as Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy as they help lead the nations of the world take on invaders from another planet who’ve come to conquer Earth just when World War Two had begun.

The president has become a vital character in adventure stories with each writer of such a tale having their own opinion and theory of what that individual should do as the leader of our nation and the free world. That is apparent in their work and how they portray that presidential figure in their particular tome. It’s up to the reader to determine if the individual presented in that story is believable and offers a true representation of what such an officeholder should actually be.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com