Instead of a ticking time-bomb for the hero to defuse, The President Is Missing offers a ticking computer virus, code-named Dark Ages, that threatens to wipe out the nation’s infrastructure. This is the work of a group of bad guys known as Sons of Jihad—who, despite their name, we are assured are not Islamic terrorists, but rather some kind of “secular extreme nationalist” group that “opposes the influence of the West in central and southeastern Europe.” It is all vague enough to make clear that the Sons of Jihad are like SPECTRE in the Bond movies—generic bad guys, not a comment on actual world politics. And they meet the fate reserved for bad guys in this kind of book. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that, in the end, the virus is disarmed with seconds to spare, and the hero emerges covered in glory.
The difference is that the hero in this story is not a secret agent like James Bond or Jack Ryan, but the president of the United States himself. To say that this president, Jonathan Duncan, is based on Bill Clinton would be putting it mildly. Clintonologists will recognize many details of his life story in Duncan’s, with a few desultory changes: Duncan was raised by a hardworking single mother in North Carolina, rather than Arkansas; he meets his idealistic, no-nonsense soulmate at UNC, rather than Yale Law School. [...]
Whatever Clinton’s precise role in the writing of the book, he agreed to put his name on it—it is an authorized product. And I read The President Is Missing with the sense that he relished the opportunity that fiction provides to give the public a perfected version of himself. For Jonathan Duncan is the president Bill Clinton seems to wish he had been, or that he believes the public wanted him to be, or both. Thus Clinton, who famously avoided the draft in Vietnam, supplies his alter-ego with a heroic military record that seems to be based on John McCain’s: Duncan is an Army Ranger who was taken prisoner in Iraq and refused to crack under torture. (For good measure, he was also a semi-pro baseball player.) And in what reads like an embarrassing instance of wish-fulfillment, Rachel Carson, the Hillary figure, is safely dead, leaving Duncan footloose and free to enjoy the world’s sympathy.
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