Naked Presidents: An Alternate History

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Allen’s stories, and those of many other White House residence staff, are revealed in detail in a new book “The Residence,” by author Kate Andersen Brower. A quote attributed to Ben Franklin establishes the theme: "impeachment is the political equivalent of assassination. His term (or terms) might have played out very messily considering what time period he would have served in (would anyone really have wanted to be in the Oval Office in 1968? It is easy to nitpick Silver’s postulations, but they nonetheless offer an interesting commentary about the politics of the 1980s and 1990s. 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.

Kennedy was not murdered in Dallas, that Bill Clinton’s life was different, Impeachment, the Bay of Pigs, and an unforeseen President of the United States.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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’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.

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. The alternate timeline is not greatly different than our own, but different enough that it makes you think. In this quirky, yet fascinating book, James Silver turns History inside out to show what might have happened. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.