What if a sitting president became dangerously unstable? The 1965 novel Night of Camp David makes for uncanny reading today
- Written by Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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.
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.
Emil Stach/AAP
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.
AAP
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.
Authors: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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