An ex-president goes rogue in Clinton, Patterson novel
It is relatively easy to understand why a former president whose daughter is kidnapped by terrorists might want to organize his own unauthorized paramilitary force to rescue her. But try explaining it to the current president.
“Director Blair, he can’t be conducting military operations on his own,” President Pamela Barnes whines ineffectually to her FBI director in “The President’s Daughter,” the second swaggering political thriller produced by the unlikely writing team of James Patterson and Bill Clinton. “You’ve got to send agents there and stop him.”
But “Director Blair” can no more stop the inexorable force that is former President Matthew Keating — a hard-living, no-guffex-Navy SEAL who, as president, once motivated a naval commander during a kill operation by barking: “Now you squids body-bag that son of a bitch” — than Keating’s friends can resist his entreaties for help in his foolhardy plan.
“You got it,” responds Trask Floyd, an old military friend turned “wealthy actor and movie director,” when Keating asks for his support. “If I’m not going to be riding shotgun with you on wherever you’re going, I’ll still be behind you.”
Patterson is the author who has launched a thousand bestsellers, with an army of co-writers. Clinton is the ex-president whose other works include the memoir “My Life.” (At 1,056 pages, it is nearly 500 pages longer than this stillhefty new thriller.) Their first co-written novel, “The President Is Missing,” envisioned a scenario
in which the American president, facing a deadly cyberterrorist attack that threatens to disconnect the entire United States from the internet, slips incognito into a baseball stadium and tries to solve the problem by himself.
What to do for an encore?
Fans of the first book will be disappointed that its main character, President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan, doesn’t exist in this follow-up’s universe. Unlike, say, the cinematic “Taken” trilogy, in which a raddled ex-Green Beret and CIA officer played by Liam Neeson is continually called on to re-rescue his serially kidnapped daughter, “The President’s Daughter” has nothing to do with “The President Is Missing.” It has a new president, who has a new daughter and a new problem.
But like its predecessor, this novel offers tantalizing clues into the unconscious of Clinton, now 74. As before, the hero of this book becomes president not via Yale Law School and Oxford University, but through the messy man-of-the-people crucible of military service. As before, there is a disagreeable female politician — in this case, President Barnes, Keating’s erstwhile vice president, who treacherously ran against him.
“How do you feel about being the only president in American history to lose reelection to his vice president?” a reporter asks Keating. It’s a rude question, but then again, as one character observes, “most D.C. journalists are 27 years old, no real experience except for reporting on political campaigns, and they literally know nothing.”
Let us stipulate that we are not reading this book to gain valuable insights into the inner workings of U.S. foreign policy. No, we are reading for as many references to military hardware as possible, a formidable alphanumeric arsenal: the UH-60s, the AK-47s, the 7.62 mm Russian-made Tokarevs, the Chinesemade QSZ-92 9 mm’s, the M4 assault rifles with TAWS thermal sights. You get the picture.
It goes without saying that nothing in this silly but highly entertaining book will end well for the terrorists, or the Chinese, or Pamela Barnes and her creepy husband, Richard. It’s unclear whether, the rescue mission notwithstanding, it will even end well for America. The novel sends up a flare of distress.
“The real people are still there, with their problems and potential, hopes and dreams,” says Keating’s wife, a brilliant archaeologist and astute political blackmailer whose “tanned skin is flawless.”
“It’s just hard for them to make good decisions when their brains are filled, and their spirits broken, with so much crap.”