The Red President
Gross, Martin
I n November 1943, when an 18-year- 1 old Martin Gross was in training to become a flight officer in the Army Air Corps, Winston Churchill was at the Teheran Conference with Roosevelt and Stalin....
...Among, several fade-outs to Moscow, one scene has Orlov modestly demurring at the effusive praise of the Politburo and insisting that the credit belongs to America, no other nation being "so anxious to distort and scourge itself...
...But the low-calibre, high-velocity, tumbling bullet of the nasty M-16 does not behave so properly when it meets human flesh...
...To expose the conspiracy, Withers had first tried Granick, but now Davidson is his only hope...
...Withers's upper arm would have been shredded and Withers himself thrown into shock...
...The character, a rotund conservative columnist named Jack Granick, is trying frantically to get Doug McDowell, a liberal newscaster, to look at evidence Granick has acquired regarding the sinister political connections of a Democratic candidate for President...
...But in the flashback, he reminisces about his pre-law undergraduate days in the 1960s, when he discovered Radical Politics and Purpose and all that...
...Gross should kick his Doubleday editor for not spotting the indiscretion—all he had to do was make the Red President a decade older...
...Meanwhile our hero has emerged: John "the Baptist" Davidson, a 68year-old retired CIA operative and self-described liberal (albeit .of the more polished Acheson-Rusk variety), whose favorite admonition is "keep up your paranoia...
...Following the tradition of The Manchurian Candidate The Spike The Hills of Summer, and suchlike novels, The Red President is message by melodrama...
...One chapter in the second half of the novel has our Red President reminiscing in a lengthy flashback...
...Well—maybe, if the Marine's rifle had been a gentlemanly M-1 Garand of the sort Gross hefted during World War II...
...Q ome engaging characters appear in la The Red President—at least those few to whom Gross pays serious attention...
...THE RED PRESIDENT Martin Gross/Doubleday/$17.95 John R. Dunlap o 1=INNIN=WINWI 11111^11^11M SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB CHANNEL 3, CHATTANOOGA TENNESSEE• KTVN CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WTTS 92.3 FM BLOOMINGTON INDIANA WGTC 1370 AM...
...Yet among several dozen characters, most of whom are important strictly to the plot mechanics, there is not a single figure of depth...
...Lev Andreievich Orlov, head of the Active Measures unit in the American Section of the KGB...
...For the price of The Red President, you get two books in one: a rip-snorting political thriller and a realistic sketch of American lassitude amid Soviet designs...
...BLOOM 'JGTON %DIANA WAJI 931 FM ' CORPORATE OFFICE 'N' - 474LI 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 In one scene, for example, Sam Withers is wounded by a Marine guard wielding an M-16 rifle...
...What the hell, one can be dashing and progressive at age 49, can't one...
...But the Soviets hedge their bets, fully expecting that the tenure of America's Red President will last no more than six months before the traitor is either assassinated or impeached...
...By this time—eight months, 46 chapters (of 104), and many subplots later—the truth is that America has a Communist for a new President...
...He does, however, get a mite careless here and there...
...Ergo, at the earliest our Red President was born in 1957...
...Okay, try this...
...We already know that this dashing young progressive is only 39 years of age...
...Just ask Gary Hart—or is he 50...
...The real problem now is Russia...
...they have to work fast if they hope to neutralize America permanently with operation STAND DOWN...
...I can't get the Americans to see it...
...Skip the academic cavils, break out the peanuts, and open yourself a Coors...
...SALOON/MYSAK...
...McDowell is a rising young media star, and he is not about to let his career be jeopardized by putting up with a Commie-baiter like Granick, whom he kicks out of his Washington office...
...Davidson and Withers are both superbly competent and resourceful, as is Peter Semanski—a captain in the Polish SB, whom the KGB uses as their principal contact in the Oval Red operation after Semanski (alias Tom Ward, documentary film writer) worms (and murders) his way into a position of confidence with the Red President...
...Almost all of them are on the make, driven in some fashion or other, the most admirable evincing some patriotism, but largely driven bynothing more elevated than high professional standards...
...And there is Fenton, a wondrously creepy former Berkeley Weatherman who, under Soviet auspices, has taken many years tutoring the man who will be the Red President, grooming the dolt for power...
...Gross belongs to an interesting generation in the real-life melodrama of twentieth-century American history...
...p ut shortly thereafter, Granick's body is dragged from the Potomac, and McDowell is unsettled by news of the mysterious murder (mysterious to McDowell: the reader knows that the KGB did it, dramatic irony beJohn R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University ing the crucial device in the plot...
...It would make a terrific television miniseries...
...It is five months before the next presidential election: probably 1996—the date is vague, but it can't be earlier, as we'll see...
...Outside of the action scenes—which are frequent and deftly crafted—the dialogue is often forced, and no one says anything that isn't banal or coy or, at best, superficially shrewd...
...F or the most part, Gross delivers the goods one expects in this sort of novel: scrupulous plotting, with a great mass of technical detail mixed into the narrative to give it an authentic flavor...
...Near the end of the conference, Churchill muttered to his aide Harold Macmillan: "Germany is finished, though it may take some time to clean up the mess...
...Half a century later, Martin Gross—a teacher, editor, and prolific freelancer for most of his 62 years—has the same complaint, which he mutters in the style of a practiced muckraker...
...The file, we soon learn, concerns a Soviet operation code-named Oval Red, the brainchild of Col...
...Eventually McDowell is, in Irving Kristol's tired formula, "mugged by reality"--literally: he is manhandled and kidnapped by a couple of KGB thugs when he gets too close to the truth...
...To judge from his novel, he seems to fit the political pattern for that generation, which is to say his instincts are of the crusty Truman-Johnson variety, indifferent to what Terry Teachout calls the "conservative iconography," but contemptuous of what a character in The Red President calls "head-up-yourass liberalism...
...And I'm not being picky...
...Since he is attracted to Marxism, he cannot be extremely bright—so we may suppose he could not have been in college before he was 13...
...At fairly close range, the bullet is said to sink "into the fleshy part of his left upper arm," inconveniencing Withers with a classic cinematic wound that slows him down a bit...
...and, since we have also been told of at least one two-term Republican presidency after Reagan's, the first year of the Communist presidency cannot be earlier than 1997...
...the gaffe is grotesquely obvious, breaking the spell of an otherwise taut narrative...
...Picky...
...And Davidson must work fast, through a web of contacts and favors owed, to find out exactly what STAND DOWN is about and to try to put the skids on it...
...Davidson is apprised of the situation by Agent Sam Withers, a renegade on the run from his own (compromised) CIA as well as from the KGB after he had gathered a file on the presidential candidate by following up on some freelance intelligence work...
...But now I am getting picky...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
