Naked Presidents: An Alternate History

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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. 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.

The alternate timeline is not greatly different than our own, but different enough that it makes you think. Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. Skip Allen was new to being a White House usher for President Ronald Reagan when it fell to him to deliver a top-secret document to the commander in chief in the private residence. The shocking surprise ending will leave the reader wondering what is reality and what is fantasy after all. But again, the story was not improved by long drawn out descriptions of the characters' sexual activity.They were a little on the indecisive side as to what they wanted and how they wanted it, and they had to switch around a couple of times before they got things the way they liked it,” Allen said. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The result is a thought experiment that largely succeeds in altering the way we think about presidential legacies: Clinton as the heroic figure that JFK became in our reality. Its backbone is our nation's modern political history, but the author's playful hand realizes it in a completely oblique manner, much to my entertainment. Kennedy does not face an assassination attempt in Dallas, but goes on to a successful reelection, only to face impeachment when his affair with Judith Campbell is revealed. 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?Silver’s focus is on recounting events in his alternate timeline; because of this, his development of his novel’s characters is much weaker. 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. 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. 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. Keep in mind that anyone can view public collections - they may also appear in recommendations and other places.

The Vietnam era generation (of which I am not) and those longing for the success of the 90's will appreciate the intertwining of worlds both invented, inverted, and completely true--as JFK survives Dallas, Clinton is a whistle blower, Sinatra lives the latter part of his life sans tongue--while sex permeates the novel just enough to make it as slick as the real and reinvented presidents who play the lead roles. 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 Silver's world, JFK's infidelities become public knowledge thanks to enemies like Hoover, and spark the nation's first independent counsel investigation and impeachment trial, whereas Bill Clinton is shot and killed by an ex-Marine named McVeigh in revenge for the Waco tragedy. They have their public face and their private face, and when we were around, it was the public face. A quote attributed to Ben Franklin establishes the theme: "impeachment is the political equivalent of assassination.Kennedy was not murdered in Dallas and in the book not murdered at all, and secondly, the book does contain some sexual content that may not be appropriate for all, especially if you are fond of the character. Other authors have made such an effort in nonfiction works, so Silver’s novel is a change of pace in that regard. 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. In most respects, his speculation of a post-Dallas presidency is the more interesting of the two sections, particularly when postulating Frank Sinatra’s renewed friendship with the Kennedy family.