Fletcher KnebelRezensionen

The very complicated mystery of this book was interesting but it felt like there was a rush to wrap things up in the last chapter.

This is a political thriller about the procedures of the choice of a presidential candidate. The staffers are really the area of interest, but it is a relatively painless primer to that phase of the American system. Knebel and Bailey were an eye-opening team for me. Like the big winner "Advise and Consent", this book ie irreplaceable.

Real-life is crazier than fiction.

This book was revived to market it as "What if the President Went Stark Raving Mad?" The frightening thing about this book is the evidence of against the President in the novel is very thin, and Trump in the first ten minutes of a Fox News interview or a brief tweet is much more insane than what happens in this book.

As an artifact of the 1960s, it can be quite enjoyable. The main character is a Senator who doesn't seem to have a whole lot of work to do. The women are portrayed from a sixties point of view, which means in rather dismissive and sexist terms. I think if I were the author's wife and I was reading how complacent and forgiving the wife character in this book is about a mistress, I might start doing a little detective work on my husband. The Senator does have an adorable teen daughter nicknamed "Chinky"(worst name ever) who regularly uses the endearment, "Pops." To top it off, the President doesn't seem all that insane.

If I had edited it, I would have sent the author back to work on the plot and suspense level because this could use a little juice.

After recently reading that several senior members of the Trump Administration had at one point questioned the President's mental stability, I initially assumed the novel was based on current events. The book, "Night of Camp David" looks at what might happen when the President becomes mentally unstable. But it was only after reading the book that I discovered it was originally written in 1965. However, the comments made and the questions raised by Trump Administration insiders, and the questions addressed in this 50-year old book do draw a strange parallel.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had stated that Justice Department officials had discussed recruiting cabinet members to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein noted that he'd need a majority of 15 cabinet officials to make that happen, and thought he may already have the support of some of the members. Of course, that was never pursued, as far as we know, but the fact that it was even discussed is unnerving.

And remembering that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump "dumb as a rock", and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump and "idiot" and thought he was "unhinged", and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis indicated that Trump had the understanding of a 5th or 6th grader, you start to wonder what's going on behind the scenes.

GOP Senator Lindsay Graham reportedly said of Trump that he considered him a kook, crazy, and unfit for office. Both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former chief of staff Reince Priebus supposedly called Trump an idiot. Former economic adviser Gary Cohn was said to have referred to Trump as “dumb as shit,” and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster was another who reportedly said the president was a “dope", with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,”. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in November 2017 that Trump was “like an 11-year-old child.

These are Trump's people, not his political detractors or opponents.

It's all pretty scary that real people, political allies of the President, are making comments such as these. It makes the book all the more relevant, and does make you wonder just how difficult it would be to ever invoke the 25th Amendment to remove any President from office.

Good mystery of sorts and terribly timely for a 1965 novel in 2019.

So in the event the POTUS does actually have a nervous breakdown, or goes stark staring nuts the guys who run Washington got it all covered, no problem .....right?!

USA, 1972
De syv dage i maj starter en søndag. Oberst Martin J. Casey arbejder i forsvarschefens stab.

???

This is a thriller written in the 1960's about what would happen if the president of the United States went stark raving mad. In light of current events, it was recently reissued, and when Rachel Maddow referred to it on her show, I thought I would give it a reread. (I read it back at the time it was originally published, but had forgotten most of the details).
Wow is it dated, and not in a good way. It's boringly simplistic and poorly written. Definitely not worth a reread, and not worth reading in the first place either.½

A good story. There was a little too much emphasis on the affair between the senator and the secretary. I also thought the end was somewhat anti-climatic. What really stuck with me was the portrayal of government leaders as such honorable people. While I'm sure this was an overstatement at the time, it seems completely laughable today that more than a small handful of elected representatives would behave in such a manner.

This could have been written today. It is as timely now as it was in 1962, maybe more so. The military is planning to take over the government. Due to the eye of Colonel Jiggs Casey who questions some things he sees in his role as the director of the Joints Staff, he goes to the President with his thoughts. This is the story of how the President prevents a Constitutional crisis.

This is a fast-paced political thriller. I could not put it down as the week went by. I was on the edge of my seat to see what would happen. The characters are good. The President is shown philosophizing at times as to what he, as President, should and needs to do--often alone. I am amazed at how this was kept secret for as long as it was--on both sides. Well worth the read.

The book is very dated. It's chief interest is as a reminder of what sexual mores were like in the mid-60's. Even though I lived through the era, it is hard to remember how, for want of a better term, patriarchal it was. As for the political message: The story probably was powerful in its day - do we have the wherewithal to deal with a mad president? However, it is hard to treat the fictional President Hollenbach as mad -- on one of his good days, Trump makes Hollenbach seem the picture of sanity. What I take as the message now, is not that the book is prophetic, but that it shows how low we've fallen. In the fiction, members of his own party band together out of concern for the nation to take a mentally incapacitated president down. Now, it is members of his own party who prop up an arguably unqualified and possibly mentally incapacitated president as long as he advances their agenda and has the support of their party's base.

Most readers who are checking this review and others, likely know a bit about the history of Fletcher Knebel’s 336 page “Night on Camp David” (NCD), but I will review and possibly expand that awareness a bit before getting into a review of the book. Knebel wrote the book in 1964 and published it in 1965. The story references both Kennedy and Johnson as former Presidents and focuses on current President Mark Hollenbach: there is no specific story year mentioned but it would seem to take place in the mid-60s. It was a best-seller at the time. In its review the NYT commented that it was “a little too plausible for comfort”. Knebel wrote “Seven Days in May” and about a dozen other books. He was a journalist who served as Washington Correspondent for a number of newspapers. In 1965 he served as President of the Gridiron Club. The book went out of print but was brought back in 2018 following a number of press stories about its remarkable parallels to current events.

There is one other bit of history that is particularly worthy of note. One issue that surfaces in NCD deals with Presidential succession, specifically the 25th Amendment. It was first proposed in Congress on January 6, 1965 and ratified February 10, 1965, and deals not only with Presidential succession grounds but Vice-Presidential succession as well. NCD mentions historical “letters of agreement” between Presidents and Vice-Presidents, laying out specific cases in which a VP would become President if only in a temporary role. In fact, Eisenhower and Nixon had such a written agreement, though it was subsequently determined not to have legal authority. Though Eisenhower was subsequently incapacitated for a brief period by a heart attack, Nixon never assumed a Presidential title.

So, are there in fact “remarkable” or “startling” parallels between the 1965 NCD and today (Feb. 2019)? Let me point out a few behaviors of President Hollenbach and I’ll let you be the judge:
- Several cases of incredible rages, during one of which he attempts to throw an inkwell at the Secretary of Defense
- Whispered confidences that “they are out to get me”
- A suddenly scheduled (solo?) meeting with the Russian premiere that no one in the Cabinet seems to know about, and all become concerned over what deal may be agreed to
- A speech by the President whose delivery is described “as good as a professional actor”
There are others, but that should be enough to help you make your own assessment.

The story begins at annual Gridiron dinner during which the President makes a rather shocking proposal. As he exits, the president taps rookie Iowa Senator Jim MacVeagh on the shoulder and suggests a quick get-together. What follows is the first of their one-on-one meetings at Camp David. The President talks, and the Senator mostly listens, and is stunned. Ruminating about it and a subsequent phone call over the next few days, MacVeagh begins to doubt the President’s sanity. But what to do next? Whom to share this with? How build a credible case? And that in a nutshell is the plot. A rather good one, timely, and with the behaviors mentioned above, some interesting and creepy scenes spread throughout. So why have I rated it only 3 stars?

The prose is rather dull and simple. The story often drags, and there are some scenes that just don’t feel right. One of the major characters is having an affair, is caught by his wife, and a “scene” unfolds. But it is rather unemotional, as is a surprising amount of the book. The Mrs gets over the whole thing in a matter of a few hours and vows to “stand by her man”. The book gave me the feel of a made-for-TV-in-the-60s script; there seem to be a lot of missing characters. I think the coincidence of events of 50 years ago is interesting but just barely. MacVeagh never grows in the story and it seemed like the author switched protagonists about two thirds of the way through the book. And the ending is lame, very lame – but is it a foretelling of future events?

One more note about me. I read a lot - fiction, history, politics. And I write reviews of what I have read, more than 600 of them. While I have very strong opinions about current events, I have not let those biases impact this review. I have not read other reviews but given today’s climate and the writing here, I would be a bit skeptical of one star and five star ratings. This book is only so-so; I do not have a recommendation to offer.

Thirty-eight-year-old Iowa Senator Jim MacVeagh is certain his political star is on the rise when the president, Mark Hollenback, begins taking him into his confidence. But late-night summonses to Camp David, where the president rants about enemies and conspiracies, lead the young senator to worry about the man’s growing paranoia.

Concerned, he speaks to presidential advisors and other political stalwarts, but no one seems to be aware of the president’s mental decline and they ignore his warnings. What do you do when no one listens and you’re the only one who fears for the sanity of the Commander-in-Chief?

Tension builds as unfolding events seem to corroborate MacVeagh’s concerns, but these worrisome actions would hardly raise an eyebrow in today’s political milieu. The mostly-unlikable characters are not fully drawn and the women are little more than window-dressing or impediments to the aspirations of the men. But the inner workings of the Washington bureaucracy remains spot-on and the story does raise a chilling question. What would we do if the president of the United States went stark raving mad?

Readers should not consider “Night at Camp David” a roman à clef since it is a re-issue of the 1965 political thriller that spent eighteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Although written accurately for the state of the nation in 1965, some now-anachronistic elements do not fare well in the telling of the tale and several words, depictions, and attitudes tend to jolt today’s readers out of the story.

Despite an ending that largely feels like a cop-out, fans of political thrillers may enjoy this throwback tale of political intrigue, but readers looking for an answer to that terrifying premise will be sorely disappointed.

Comes in like Gangbusters but loses momentum around the halfway mark and eventually rolls to a stop rather than ending.

The book's prescience isn't as eerie as the marketing might have you believe, but it is a timely reminder of the dangerous reverence and trust that is placed in the office of president.

Sometimes, it's invigorating to read a novel that it is utter and complete fiction -- a tale that simply could never happen (insert smiley face). The re-configured cover of this 1960s novel says it all: "What would happen if the president of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad?" Put simply, I loved Knebel's book. I figured it would take me a few weeks to finish "Night of Camp David," as I typically read two or three books at a time. I ended up polishing it off in one-third the time. I do wish the author had spent a bit more time developing the character of President Mark Hollenbach. It also becomes a bit redundant in spots. Finally, I didn't love the ending. But the numerous twists held my interest from beginning to end. The book raises some intriguing questions and, quite frankly, stirs mild anxiety. For this reason, what may have been a three-star rating is bumped up to four stars.

The story about this book goes something like this: Published in 1965 and a best-seller at the time, this was not Fletcher Knebel's best work. That would be Seven Days in May, a successful thriller about a military coup d'etat in the United States, later made into a film. Night of Camp David was deservedly forgotten for several decades.
And then its copyright owners noticed, somehow, that sales of used copies were soaring. There was a demand for the book. Why? Because the basic premise is that the President of the United States is insane. Crazy, right?
So Vintage Books decides to re-brand the book with a new cover, all in black, without the title or author name (Knebel is no longer a household name anyway) and puts this instead: "What would happen if the President of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad?"
It probably worked. Sales are no doubt going well. I was even tempted to buy a copy myself, and did. But my advice to you is: don't.
This is book of its time, with shallow, two-dimensional cut-out characters, full of casual sexism, a plot that plods and what may be the most unsatisfying ending ever written to a political thriller. A missed opportunity.

Fletcher Knebel''s Night of Camp David is one of the more obscure entries on the list of decades-old novels that have become newly relevant and interesting in the era of the Trump presidency. This 1965 political thriller, written while Congress was crafting and debating the 25th Amendment, concerns a senator's growing belief that the President of the United States is dangerously paranoid and mentally unfit to remain in office.

President Mark Hollenbach's erratic behavior, delusions of grandeur, and conspiracy theories prompt the junior senator from Iowa, James MacVeagh, to conclude that the President evidences the clinical definiton of paranoia: "The individual feels that he is being singled out and taken advantage of, mistreated, plotted against, stolen from, spied upon, ignored, or otherwise mistreated by his 'enemies'." Can such a man be trusted with the ability to order the firing of nuclear weapons? And eerily similar to Trump's summit with Putin in Helsinki, here MacVeagh determines that Hollenbach must not be allowed to proceed to a planned meeting in Zurich with the stoic and practical Russian premier Zuchek: "Who knew what fantastic secret agreement might emerge from such a meeting? Zuchek, a patient, 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 with the toy blocks of destiny."

The plot moves along swiftly enough, though the novel is often repetitive as the senator's suspicions are rehashed to everyone in the expanding cast of political characters, including a Supreme Court Justice named Cavanaugh(!), who weigh in on the issue and consider what action, if any, to take. The story promises confrontation and rancor, but ultimately delivers a tepid yet wholly reasonable resolution. Recommended largely for its prescient elements rather than any literary merits.½

It's the early 1960s, and the Cold War has heated up. Although the US and Soviets have signed an arms control agreement, the Soviets are cheating. Meanwhile, the top military brass are concerned that the US president is weak and ineffectual, and seek to take over the government in a military coup. Having stumbled on the plot, the US president has seven days to prevent the coup and to remove the treasonous military leaders from their positions without alerting the public. This made for a popular novel and a fine movie with George C. Scott as the president, and Burt Lancaster as the top renegade general.

I read this novel many years ago, and found it exciting; and so, I thought I'd try it again to see how it (and I) have aged. I liked it once again... found it exciting and suspenseful. Granted, the gender roles are traditional (something that a contemporary version would not have). While I cannot judge this work as if I'd not read the book before and seen the movie, I think it would hold up well today. As for the abridged version, I found it to be quite sufficient, with no noticeable gaps. I'd recommend it, or better still, the full version, for readers interested in political intrigue and believable counter-factuals.½

A fun, quick read. The casual misogyny really dates it.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2684868.html

This book is going for a penny plus postage on the online used book store of your choice, and I recommend you buy it now before the rush later this year. Written in 1972, anticipating the 1976 election, it concerns the story of Eddie Quinn, an obscure former Congressman and New Jersey Turnpike Commissioner who is unexpectedly thrust to national prominence when the failing Republican presidential candidate suddenly dies three weeks before the election and the party reaches desperately for a replacement; nobody, including the colourless Vice-Presidential candidate, wants to go down in history as the loser, and Quinn is good-looking, doesn't drink or smoke, and is not known for dangerous views.

Although the Democrats are well in the lead (with an intellectual Methodist state governor rather reminiscent of their real 1976 candidate, Jimmy Carter), Quinn launches a populist rearguard campaign, promising tax cuts, an end to the military draft for young people, a system of ombudsmen, and much else, which instantly earns him the displeasure of the Republican grandees (particularly the one who is nominally married to his lover) but catches the interest of increasing numbers of voters, leading to a dramatic conclusion to the election.

There are several particularly intense incidents: Quinn's opening speech, where he attacks vested political interests like the ones that have just nominated him; his gathering of a diverse group of trusted advisers; a confrontation with black radicals in Quinn's home town (which sounds a bit like my grandmother's home town of Plainfield); and a fatal car accident which Quinn refuses to allow his team to cover up. The author's tone towards lefties and feminists is a bit wearyingly snide (not to mention New Jersey, "a corridor of swampy weather and toadstool habitations that called itself a state"), but apart from that it's a real page-turner.

Of course, a book like this is always going to be partial wish-fulfillment. (See my list of Pope books; was Hadrian the Seventh the orignial Mary Sue?) But Knebel mounts a sharp critique from the liberal Right (a species that barely exists these days) of conventional American political wisdom, and challenges the reader to wonder how change might come? Things have now got worse, of course; I strongly recommend this recent article from The Atlantic, How American Politics Went Insane for a review of what has gone wrong, mostly since this book was written.

Apart from the death of the liberal Right, there are other major differences between how politics happened in 1972 and how it happens today. The most striking is that there was no twenty-four hour news cycle. The press corps did indeed follow the candidates around, but they were print journalists with their early evening deadlines; TV was much more cumbersome and had to be carefully arranged in advance. Minor gaffes by Quinn and his campaign staff are laughed off in a cordial way by all concerned, rather than becoming the focus of faux outrage by media talking heads. There is no chance that a candidate's love affair with a married Congresswoman could evade scrutiny today for as long as Quinn gets away with it in this book. (There is a sub-plot with a sex tape of which there is only one copy.)

Another point that hit me was that the only mention of TV debates is a brief reference to Kennedy/Nixon in 1960, with the strong implication tha that experiment would never be repeated. Debates are now of course an immovable part of the process, but we tend to forget that rather than 1960 that has only been the case since 1976, when Gerald Ford killed his own chances of re-election by mis-speaking about Eastern Europe. (Ford, who was the 1976 Republican candidate in real life, was also something of a dark horse given that in 1972 he was the fading House Minority Leader).

It's irresistible to compare the fictional 1976 scenario of Dark Horse with the real situation forty years after, where one insurgent from outside the party leadership came within a few hundred delegates of capturing the Democratic nomination, and another insurgent actually is the Republican nominee. Knebel's Quinn is closer in policy to Trump than Sanders, but has several redeeming points: he values intellectual input and thoughtful policy-making, he instinctively grasps the importance of reaching much wider than the white male demographic and challenges his own party on race and gender issues (even if he doesn't end up where we might want him to), and he doesn't tell lies. Immigration is a second or third generation issue, and the terrorists are domestic insurgents neutralised by negotiation. I would probably still have supported Quinn's Democratic opponent if I'd had a vote in this fictional 1976, but I would have found it a tough choice. Read the book for yourself, and see what you think.

Fascinating political thriller, slightly dated but still holds up well.

754. Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II (read 28 Oct 1963) This is an exciting book and I liked it and found it absorbing reading.

קראתי מזמן כילד אבל בימים אלה קראתי שוב כדי לנוח מקריאה כבדה יותר. סיפור של ניסיון הפיכה בארצות הברית המובל על ידי גנרל כריזמטי נגד נשיא שמנסה להתפייס עם הרוסים. מרתק.½

אחרי שנים רבות קראתי את הספר הזה שנית. בזמנו הוא היה רב מכר גדול אבל היום הוא מאכזב ביותר. כתוב רע - זה ברור. אבל מעבר לזה גם נאיבי ולא הגיוני במידה כמעט קיצונית. הדבר היחיד שאפשר לומר לזכותו שהוא מספיק מעניין כדי לקרוא אותו עד הסוף½

מותחן פוליטי על ניסיון לתפוס את השלטון בכוח בארה"ב על רקע התנגדות להסכמי פירוק נשק