How a 1965 political novel seems eerily timely today

Night of Camp David debated how U.S. should respond if president were incapacitated

A president who rages in private about conspiracies against him by the press and his political opponents. A controversial alliance with a ruthless Russian leader. A key Supreme Court justice named Kavanaugh.

Well, in Night of Camp David the justice’s name is spelled Cavanaugh, but close enough.

The political thriller, a bestseller when it was published in 1965 but long out of print, has enough eerie parallels with today’s political debate that it has gained new attention from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and others. Vintage Books is reissuing the novel as an ebook, an audiobook and a paperback.

The story by the late journalist Fletcher Knebel wrestles with a long-standing debate, never fully resolved, over how the U.S. political system can and should respond if there are suspicions that a commander-in-chief has become mentally incapacitated.

The 25th Amendment, which established a procedure that relies on the initiative of the vice-president and the cabinet, was passed by Congress that year and was being debated by the states at the time; it was adopted in 1967.

The book is dated in its portrayal of women — the only two given a role are a stereotypical silly wife and sultry mistress — and its jokes about race. Beyond that, it does strike chords that seem remarkably current.

Here are three of them: 1. The president and Russia

The crisis at the heart of the story is sparked when President Mark Hollenbach announces a summit with his Soviet counterpart, Premier Zuchek.

“Who knew what fantastic secret agreement might emerge from such a meeting?” the protagonist, Iowa Sen. Jim MacVeagh, worries. Zuchek was capable, MacVeagh fears, of taking advan- tage of Hollenbach.

The fictional president is willing to spurn traditional U.S. alliances with Great Britain (“effete, jaded”), France (“flighty and defensive”) and Germany (“arrogant and domineering”) in favour of forging a new coalition with Moscow. 2. Fake news and the press Long before Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the invention of the internet, the novel broaches today’s debate over #FakeNews. When an activist accuses MacVeagh of being “ignorant of the true facts,” he rebukes her.

“Facts are facts, Mrs. Byerson,” he says. “There are no such things as true facts, because then we’d have to have false facts, wouldn’t we?”

Hollenbach seethes about the skeptical questions and snide commentary by the White House press corps. For one particularly annoying columnist, the president vows to cut off his sources, though not to pull his credentials.

“He’s trying to belittle the presidency and drag it down to his own smart-aleck level,” he rails, then calls for something like decorum. “Freedom of the press is one thing, but unbridled licence to degrade and ridicule officials who devote their lives to this country is something else again.” 3. Seeing conspiracies everywhere In the privacy of the White House, the fictional president rages against critics, even within his own party. He views every comment and controversy as an attack on him. That’s similar to the portrait painted by some books that depict the Trump White House as dystopian, including Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff and Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House by Omarosa Manigault Newman.

When the fictional vice-president is ensnared in a minor-league scandal, Hollenbach accuses him of doing it “for the express purpose of embarrassing me in an election year.” Increasingly paranoid, he eventually accuses MacVeagh of being in league with the vice-president “and the rest of that cabal” who are fashioning “the plot to discredit me and disgrace the administration.”