Night of Camp David

New York: Vintage Books [A Division of Penguin Random House LLC], 2018. First Vintage Books Edition [stated]. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. [10], 336, [6] pages. Front cover flap has a crease. Fletcher Knebel (October 1, 1911 - February 26, 1993) was an American author of popular works of political fiction. Knebel graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio during 1934. Upon graduation, he received a job offer from the newspaper Coatesville Record of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He spent the next 20 years working for newspapers, eventually becoming the political columnist for Cowles Publications. Knebel served in the United States Navy during World War II, attaining the rank of lieutenant. From 1951 to 1964, he satirized national politics and government in a nationally published column named "Potomac Fever". During 1960, he wrote a chapter on John F. Kennedy for the book Candidates 1960. This seemed to begin a passion for writing books and he began authoring book-length works. He wrote fifteen books, most of them fiction, and all of them dealing with politics, intrigue and social upheaval. His best-known novel is Seven Days in May (1962, co-authored with Charles W. Bailey), about an attempted military coup in the United States. The book was a great success, reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and was made into a successful movie also named Seven Days in May during 1964. Knebel committed suicide after a long bout with cancer, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in 1993. He is the source of the quote: "Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics." What would happen if the president of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad? Back by popular demand, The New York Times calls the 1965 bestselling political thriller by the author of Seven Days in May, A little too plausible for comfort. How can one man convince the highest powers in Washington that the President of the United States is dangerously unstable, before it's too late? Senator Jim MacVeagh is proud to serve his country, and his president, Mark Hollenbach, who has a near-spotless reputation as the vibrant, charismatic leader of MacVeagh's party and the nation. When Hollenbach begins taking MacVeagh into his confidence, the young senator knows that his star is on the rise. But then Hollenbach starts summoning MacVeagh in the middle of the night to Camp David. There, the president sits in the dark and rants about his enemies, unfurling insane theories about all the people he says are conspiring against him. They would do anything, President Hollenbach tells the stunned senator, to stop him from setting in motion the grand, unprecedented plans he has to make America a great world power once again. MacVeagh comes away from these meetings increasingly convinced that the man he once admired has lost his mind. But what can he do? Who can he tell? From a review found on-line: The coal-black front cover of the new edition is unadorned apart from one line, in white block letters: "What would happen if the president of the USA went stark-raving mad?" The book plunges into the quandary faced by Jim MacVeagh, a junior senator from Iowa when he realizes, based on private midnight conversations at the Maryland country retreat of the title, that the president, an otherwise heroic Democrat, has grown dangerously paranoid and hatched unhinged ideas about remaking the international order. The prospect of a commander-in-chief who has lost command of reality is terrifying to MacVeagh, and to a select group of high-level governmental officials who eventually are brought into the know. Written by the late journalist Fletcher Knebel - "the grandfather of the modern political thriller", in the appraisal of critic Terry Teachout - Night of Camp David was originally published in the stream of Washington suspense novels that surged after the Cuban missile crisis. Many of those books - Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, Advise and Consent and The President's Plane Is Missing - became movies that still populate lists of the best cold war thrillers. Night of Camp David was not made into a film at the time, perhaps because the book's basic premise - "Wouldn't it be scary if one of the fallible humans in charge of nuclear war went insane?" - had exploded on to the big screen just one year prior, in Doctor Strangelove.