James Nicoll Reviews

Edward McGhee’s 1980 The Last Caesar is the second (and as far as I know, final) book in the series that began with The Chinese Ultimatum.

1986: a reunited Germany is still purging disloyal East German officers and assimilating its fraction of conquered Poland. Soviet attention is divided between a nuclear stand-off with Germany and China’s Siberian territorial ambitions. Canada is distracted by its on-going low-grade civil war. The Middle East is safely under Israeli control. Latin America is finally in position to resist US influence¹.

The American President believes the US global standing is safe for the moment. Now is the time focus on domestic matters. 

The recent mid-term elections saw massive victories for liberal-leaning politicians over their obstructionist reactionary rivals. Therefore, the President believes there is a window of opportunity to rationalize the US economy, bringing to a dramatic end to the economic and social woes that have plagued it. 

The President’s bold scheme (or rather, that of his advisor, Hungarian businessman turned visionary Istvan Esterhazy) leaves almost no aspect of American life untouched. Massive death levies will end inherited wealth. Marginal tax rates on high incomes will be nigh-confiscatory, the money to be used in massive public works that will employ the armies of unemployed. The American population will be homogenized through forced migration². Economic activity will come under the authority of the federal government³.

Perhaps most importantly for the plot, the military budget will be slashed, allowing the funds freed to be directed to more profitable activities. Aware that this will not be popular with career officers, the President fires those foolish enough to disagree publicly, starting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also orders a comprehensive purge of career officers, replacing them with loyal officers whose competence may be unestablished but whose credentials as yes-men is impeccable. 

This program is not entirely popular, particularly with the rich and with senior officers. It’s not only that the officers don’t want to be forcibly retired; they fear what may happen to America at the hands of its many foes once the President’s loyalists secure control. Hence Admiral William Christman and businessman Ralph Cooley seek out like-minded allies — all good conservatives determined to steer America towards righteousness, many of them firm believers of the stabbed-in-the-back explanation as to why the US lost in Vietnam — form the Committee for the Preservation of the Republic. Together they prepare a coup.

Although aware that Christman and Cooley are up to something, the President and his allies, men like General Doyle, don’t have the evidence needed to arrest him. This changes when a Soviet agent dies in a traffic mishap. The agent has a mole within the plotters circle and the spy’s documents of the plot are recovered from his car. Finally, there is cause to act!

What there is a shortage of is time. Scarcely does the White House team gain the information they need when Christman’s faction strikes. Although the Committee’s resources are limited, they are strategically applied. Key centers fall to the Committee’s forces. The President himself, supremely confident in his authority, storms out to confront the soldiers coming to arrest him and is promptly gunned down.

The Committee has won! Or so it seems. In reality, their resources are more limited than they admit. Worse, by killing the President, they have elevated Vice President Harrington to the Presidency. While his dead predecessor was a bloodless intellectual, Harrington is charismatic. If Harrington gets the ear of America, the balance of power will swiftly favour him and the coup will collapse. 

One problem: the Committee controls communications. How then to convince the Committee to provide Harrington with the means to defeat them? 

~oOo~

Even if the US slashed its defense budget by a third, it would still be pretty impressive. Perhaps just a smidgen of self-interest was involved in the hawk position. 

The President is unnamed, as is his party (as far as I can tell) but it seems reasonable to suppose that he is a Democrat rather than a Republican. In this setting it seems that the Democratic Party has controlled the Oval Office since 1976, which is the very same period in which the US economy has nosedived. Managing to pin that on the other party must have been an impressive achievement. Too bad it happens before the book begins. 

To be honest, it seems unlikely that anyone inclined to the President’s program would ever be nominated to the presidential candidacy by either US party. It also seems remarkable that a President and his staff who knew a presidential election was coming in two years would attempt to completely rewrite American society as the President does, even if they suppose that they are facing a now-or-never situation. 

The essential conflict in the story is between: 

A) a ruling class that is completely disconnected with reality as well as with the society that they (mis)govern. This has been evident ever since the rulers decided that upper-class kids were too precious to send to Vietnam; poor kids could go in their place; 

B) an alliance that the author helpfully identifies as fascists. 

The author seems convinced that the US is too complicated for democracy. The only question is whether the US will be governed by a competent dictator or by self-deluding fools (who might trigger WWIII). Expect brutal purges either way. Only one of the purges will leave a stable nation-state in its wake. 

This book is not a classic. There’s a reason why it’s been out of print for decades. The plot, large portions of which appear to have been lifted from Seven Days in May, keeps getting derailed by extensive flashbacks, which, in combination with the usual Disco Era incessant sex scenes and many pages of exposition, mean that the actual coup doesn’t get under way until well towards the end of the novel. 

At least it’s interesting as a snapshot of a certain political tendency at the end of the 1970s⁴. And at least the author’s 1980s was vividly imagined, if not especially convincing. 

The Last Caesar is out of print. 

1: A lot happened in The Chinese Ultimatum. I didn’t even get to the looming Yugoslavian civil war thanks to Serbian consolidation of power following Tito’s death. Note that Tito was still alive when the book was published … for about a month. I am tempted to reread The Chinese Ultimatum to see if it could have influenced Twilight 2000…

2: Yeah, so the kindest thing I can say about the narrative’s treatment of minorities is ​“has not aged well.” Blacks, Chicanos, and other groups are essentially scary Others who need to be appeased, lest they riot in the streets. The forced migrations are a bid to forcibly assimilate them. 

3: The computerized centralization of the economy is reminiscent of Chile’s Project Cybersyn, which encountered implementation issues and shut down before it could be rigorously tested. I wonder if the parallels are deliberate? 

4: Could the tendency be called ​“a plague on both your houses”?