Fictional presidents often go missing
At the tail end of its 2003 review of Jimmy Carter’s novel The Hornet’s Nest, a family saga set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War, Publishers Weekly appended a prescient note: “Carter’s status as the only president to publish a novel may not last long, as it is rumored that Bill Clinton may be working on one as well.”
Took a while, but the prediction is finally coming true. If all goes according to plan, June 2018 will see the publication of The President Is Missing, a thriller to be co-authored by Clinton and novelist James Patterson. The collaboration is a natural. Clinton’s memoir My Life sold more than a million copies in its first week of release, and Patterson’s volumes typically arrive several to the year, with each spending many weeks on the best-seller lists.
It’s easy to make the next prediction: The President Is Missing will sell gazillions of copies and presumably launch a series as well. Patterson is quite capable of selling gazillions of copies on his own, but the participation of the former president will presumably lend a nice verisimilitude to their story.
Sounds like fun. I enjoy a good page-turner—I will admit that I have been multiple times through the entire Robert Ludlum oeuvre—and have no doubt that I will be reading The President Is Missing as soon as review copies are available. Still, the project does raise an intriguing question: Why does the president keep disappearing? Seriously.
In fiction, the president of the United States disappears all the time. On the big screen and the small, and on the printed page, the commander in chief is constantly vanishing. The bad guys take him hostage, or at least make a spirited effort to do so, usually thwarted by a hero working alone. Or the president vanishes for no apparent reason, and the “why” provides the entire mystery. So ubiquitous is the plot line that the first hurdle Clinton and Patterson must overcome is finding a new and interesting way to stage the disappearance.
The challenge facing every writer for screen or page who wants the president to vanish is that he is protected by the Secret Service, whose agents are quite good at their jobs. But on the screen the Secret Service is constantly shredded by clever terrorists who want the president in their grip. The apotheosis of this model was Wolfgang Petersen’s brilliant film Air Force One (1997), starring Harrison Ford as the commander in chief who must fight the baddies who have commandeered his plane.
The film has spawned any number of downmarket imitators (Olympus Has Fallen, White House Down, and the like). Another president was (more or less) taken hostage in the post-apocalyptic TV drama
The Last Ship. For that matter, Jack Bauer abducted a corrupt chief executive in the fifth season of 24, and
Ben Gates sort of did the same to a more upright chief executive in the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets. But Hollywood has been kidnapping presidents for, literally, a half century. Does anybody remember the creepy misogyny of 1967’s In Like Flint?
On the published page, the trope is more common still. The working title of the Clinton-Patterson collaboration, The President Is Missing, is immediately reminiscent of Robert Serling’s 1967 classic The President’s Plane is Missing, in which Air Force One crashes with the loss of all on board, but the body of the commander in chief is not found. More recently, Chapter 1 of Joel Rosenberg’s 2015 thriller The First Hostage actually begins “The president of the United States … is missing.”
Then there’s Charles Templeton’s 1975 potboiler The Kidnapping of the President, where a terrorist reaches out from a crowd and handcuffs himself to the chief executive, then threatens to blow them both up unless the Secret Service backs off. Bad guy and president wind up in Times Square, sitting in the back of an armored car wired with explosives, while a ransom is negotiated. And I vaguely remember two more minor thrillers from the same era. One posits a chief executive who disappears and turns out to have been hiding in various nooks and crannies of the White House while tripping on psychedelic drugs; the other concerns a president who is kidnapped while visiting a girlfriend and replaced by a double.
The progenitor of the genre is probably The President Vanishes, Rex Stout’s anonymously published 1934 yarn. A chief executive determined to keep the nation at the peace in the face of the gathering European storm struggles to face down a warmongering coalition that includes wicked armament manufacturers, propagandistic journalists, greedy bankers and fascist street brawlers. Suddenly he disappears, cause unknown, and a furious American public turns against the wealthy bad guys. (For once, the Secret Service comes off rather well.)
Why does this premise keep coming back? What national neurosis drives our fascination at the idea that the most tightly protected man in the world might be taken hostage or even vanish into thin air? Pick a reason: We like to see the mighty fall. We’re seeking catharsis for our fears that our government can’t protect us. We’re transfixed by the intricate details of getting past the Secret Service. Or it’s patriotism: We want to believe that even after taking a hard shot to the chin, the U.S. will come roaring swiftly back. Whatever the reason for our interest, publishers and producers return to the theme again and again.
Still, I have some advice for Clinton and Patterson, as their unique collaboration moves forward. Don’t rest on the magic of your names. Give us something new. Let your fictional president go missing in a way that those of us who consume this stuff haven’t seen before.