The Unknown Zone

Has there ever been a film or a novel or story that portrayed an insane or deranged President of the United States?  There must have been, but it seems notable to me that I can't think of one.

Apart from dramatizing some moments late in Nixon's last days, there hasn't been a portrayal based on history.  But even in imaginative fiction, when many shocking things around the presidency have been portrayed, the President himself is usually a steady and sane character.

In the early 1960s, there were several provocative books and movies portraying insanity in Washington.  Seven Days in May (1962) dramatized the unthinkable possibility of a military coup in the US, in which a self-righteous and perhaps insane General comes very close to taking over the country.

 It was a taut suspense drama, with the main character based partly on a couple of real Generals, Edwin Walker and Curtis LeMay--LeMay was the Air Force Chief of Staff.  But the President himself is not insane--he's the victim of the plot.

President Kennedy read the novel and was said to believe such a coup could happen.  There were tensions with LeMay, especially around the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he and other generals were pushing for thermonuclear war.

By the time the movie came out in 1964, Kennedy had been assassinated, and the topic was even more sensitive.  If memory serves, Burt Lancaster played the character of the General as borderline insane.

Fail-Safe, another White House nuclear war crisis suspense drama, came out in those same years--the book in 1962, the movie in 1964. It, too had an unthinkable premise--a US bomber gets the order to bomb Moscow by mistake, and after efforts to recall it and even shoot it down, the President is left with the option of trading the destruction of Moscow by hydrogen bomb with the self-inflicted destruction of New York City, in order to avert a total thermonuclear exchange.

The situation, a product of the Mutually Assured Destruction policy (MAD), was an insane result of an insane policy held by both the US and the USSR for the decades of the Cold War.  Some of the characters--including a White House advisor--proceed so rationally on their abstract premises that they come to insane conclusions about what to do, which again involves unleashing thermonuclear war.  The insanity of it all (including the dependence on supposedly fail-safe technology that started it all by failing) is the point of the book and the movie.  But the President, played by Henry Fonda, is not crazy.

After the book but before the movie came out, was the 1964 movie everybody remembers: Dr. Strangelove.  The premise was basically the same as Fail-Safe but the movie was not: it was the definition of a black comedy.

 Nearly every character in it is despicable and in some sense insane (including George C. Scott's portrayal of an Air Force General also based on Curtis LeMay), except for two: a minor British officer and the President of the United States.  (Though the situation is so insane, even Peter Seller's President occasionally sounds crazy.  "You can't fight in here!  This is the war room!")

There may be other stories I'm forgetting, but in every movie I can think of, in which the President of the US is a character, that person may be many bad things, but not insane.

There is probably good reason.  Even though imaginative fiction has few boundaries, it does have rules.  The fictional premise has to be portrayed in a convincing way, and the situation has to be believable.

 It's difficult to know how to play a crazy President.  (I don't think Anthony Hopkins actually played Nixon as crazy in Oliver Stone's Nixon, but I may not be remembering that movie accurately.)

But in terms of the premise, the idea of a President suddenly showing signs of mental illness or instability shouldn't be outside the realm of the believable.  The drama would be how the other people in the White House and Congress realize it, and prevent it from becoming a catastrophe for the country and the world.

We don't know the extent, but at least a few Presidents (Wilson and Reagan come to mind) may have not been in full possession of their faculties towards the end of their presidencies, but others kept the system working.  So it would be believable that a mentally unstable President could be contained and if necessary, removed.

But the real reason, I believe, that we haven't seen a story about a crazy President is that it is too scary to even contemplate.  Not even in fiction.

But now we have one in fact.  We have a President who is not only psychologically unstable, with little control over his impulses and his temper, who seems to live in a world of delusions, prejudices and profound ignorance.  But he is increasingly surrounded, not by stable, thoughtful and knowledgeable people who can put the interests of country above political and personal consideration, but by mediocre sycophants.  Plus at least one who may be nearly as crazy as he is.

This would be the new National Security Advisor who is a combination of those far right Generals and super-rational MAD theorists of the 60s, and a hot-tempered psycho with impulse issues like his boss.  This is a dangerous situation beyond our collective imagination--even, it seems, in fiction.  (Though not all of us failed to imagine it.)

We are in uncharted territory, the unknown zone, and every day that brings some dramatic development--FBI, Syria most recently--brings up this awful thought from the depths of denial.  And in the short term we're pretty helpless.

But at least we can recognize the extraordinary moment this is.  And hope we get through it.