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Ehrlichman, alas, serves up a minibiography as each minor character appears ("His age was hard to peg," etc.). He is afflicted by compulsive total recall of menus (at CIA headquarters dessert is austere "melon and cookies"; the G Street Club offers "a perfect, soft Brie"). But his prose, often better than serviceable, is sometimes very cutting indeed. (The political career of a Democratic Vice President is summed up as "a lackluster, snail creep to seniority.") By the time the reader gets to President No. 3, Richard Monckton, he is meant to accept Ehrlichman's jungle view of life in the nation's capital. U.S. Presidents generally, one is encouraged to assume, should be placed only a few points to the right of pit vipers on the lovability scale. In such a context, Richard Monckton's somber and tormented meanness, his attempts to subvert the FBI and the CIA and demolish all political enemies seem par for the presidential curse—and almost human.
A roman à clef was once a cosy affair. But one touch of TV makes the whole world kin. Readers will have no difficulty in making out the shaggy outlines of Presidents J.F.K., L.B.J., R.M.N., not to mention Henry Kissinger (Carl Tessler in the book), J. Edgar Hoover (Elmer Morse) and others, including, eventually, E. Howard Hunt (Lars Haglund), who (yes, indeed) is planted on President Monckton by the CIA.
Part of the admittedly partisan fun here is observing just how harsh a fictional portrait of his old boss Ehrlichman permits himself. Ehrlichman's Monckton is capable of deep concentration but prey to near collapse from sporadic bouts of depression and drink. He regularly invokes national security as a cover for dirty politics and runs on about "those fags at State." Once in office he sets the plumbers in motion.
Damp Handshake. He campaigns with an awkward, mechanical passion. "Monckton never thought of handshaking as a personal contact with the electors," Ehrlichman writes. "He was doing all that crap on autopilot." At one point the politically smiling candidate escapes from a crowd at the Waldorf by retreating to an elevator filled with his own staff. Once inside, "his face changed as though he had suddenly broken out of a trance; his smile collapsed, his eyes darkened as if a light had been extinguished."