Naked Presidents: An Alternate History

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So, I walked into the bedroom, and the president's just coming out of his dressing room in his underwear,” Allen said. First lady Nancy Reagan, who was already in bed, gave Allen permission to enter the room after knocking. What if Kennedy was the President who was impeached because of a sex scandal, and what if Clinton was the one struck down after only a thousand days in the White House?

I find it a bit of a hard stretch on the career Air Force thing (not that he was cowardly, I just think he would have transitioned into the private sector/ political arena sooner). More than a work of fiction, Naked Presidents is a wild romp through an alternate universe, where conventional wisdom is overthrown and some of our most cherished myths are destroyed. In this quirky, yet fascinating book, James Silver turns History inside out to show what might have happened. I could have done without the cutesy attempts at humor -- a few sentences on legalizing marijuana would have been interesting without pulling a character from Animal House. By contrast, his allohistorical path with Clinton is more tortured, as Silver makes him a general in the 1980s so that he can stop the Iran-Contra affair (which, as he points out in an insightful aside, would have been perceived as more scandalous without Watergate to compare it to) before entering electoral politics.Silver clearly knows his history: the most important single episode that informs this narrative is not the JFK impeachment or the Clinton assassination but the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he details in his prologue. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

It was refreshing to see a novel that didn't make a "Kennedy survives his assasination" plot into the second coming for America. While the document was designated "for the President's eyes only," Allen would end up seeing more than he bargained for that day in 1981: a naked president. Perhaps stating the obvious, the plot itself goes a long way toward achieving that in this novel-as-thought-experiment, although the characters of JFK and Clinton ultimately remain two dimensional men; we get to see very little of their thoughts aside from their shared sexual obsession, and interestingly it is the two leading women in this saga, Judith Exner (in the JFK section) and Hillary Clinton, who become fully realized human beings.Conservatives will find much of the plot twists pushing, if not puncturing the envelope of credibility (e. A quote attributed to Ben Franklin establishes the theme: "impeachment is the political equivalent of assassination. Both Republicans and Democrats would at least agree that our near-miss with nuclear annihilation in 1962 was The Event to define the character of any presidency.

The evolution of this alternate timeline without the JFK assassination: Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Space Program, all are changed. What if Kennedy had been the President impeached, and Clinton the one struck down after a thousand days in the White House? com, the Sell on Etsy app, and the Etsy app, as well as the electricity that powers Etsy’s global offices and employees working remotely from home in the US.

It’s premised on a reversal of historical fate, which allows him to show how differently historical reputations might have evolved for two men with similar problems. Some of the technologies we use are necessary for critical functions like security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and to make the site work correctly for browsing and transactions.