Scholars use a wonderful term: “counterfactuals” to describe hypothetical situations, useful exercises for thinking through strategies and developing credible responses to possible military and political scenarios. Your tax dollars fund hundreds of such exercises each year at the Pentagon. In fact, there is a branch of long-range planning called “scenario analysis” that is based on developing entire chains of arguments and point/counterpoint analysis and response to conditions that could plausibly have occurred but did not or did not. they could plausibly occur in the future, and we had better be prepared for them by having given them a bit of foresight.
If this is too abstract, consider some examples cited by Jeff Greenfield in his magisterial 43-When Gore defeated Bush, a political fable, recently released as a Kindle Single by Amazon. Greenfield, who is familiar to viewers as a calm, intelligent commentator and voice on network news shows, calls his work a chapter in “the house of Alternative History,” and takes us into a few rooms of that house:
“Jacqueline Kennedy fails to come to the door on a Sunday in December 1960,” Greenfield writes, “to see her husband off to church, so the suicide bomber stationed outside the Kennedy home shoots his dynamite and John Kennedy is assassinated before taking office; and Lyndon Johnson, with his very different understanding of foreign policy and power diplomacy, is in charge during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Here’s another gem Greenfield invented: “Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law walks into a Los Angeles hotel ballroom the night of the 1968 primary a few minutes earlier, and so does Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan in the pantry of the kitchen; and Kennedy and his presidential campaign survive and triumph”.
One last one: “At a key moment in the debate in 1976, President Gerald Ford realizes he bad-mouthed the Soviet Union’s domination of Poland and spares his campaign a crucial week of pain, thereby changing the outcome.” of the Carter-Ford election.
There is a long tradition in fiction, Greenfield reminds us, going back centuries, of this kind of “what if” thinking. It is a classic novelist’s tool for creating plots that deeply engage readers. Consider Philip Roth’s The plot against America, in which aviator and national hero Charles Lindbergh runs for and wins the presidency, with disastrous results stemming from his seduction by Nazi engineering magnates. And another couple of novels written with somewhat similar basic plot frameworks, although not of the same literary quality as Roth’s: Robert Harris’s. homeland and Philip K. Dick’s The man in the high castle both fictional accounts of Nazi victories in World War II, victories in which the entire world is sucked into a nightmarish Third Reich.
We are all prepared to believe that history is not deterministic. The world surely would have been different if Oswald had failed. The world surely would have been different if John Wilkes Booth had failed. And now Jeff Greenfield asks us, how would the world have been different if Gore had beaten Bush back in 2000?
Well, I bet it would have been a different place and a different story, and it was very close to that. I personally remember that battle and was deeply intrigued by the premise of Greenfield. Soon, I was glued to my Kindle reading his book. Here’s just a small sample from the Kindle site, to whet your appetite without revealing anything that spoils the story:
“At 5:00 p.m. on September 11, 2001, President Al Gore, ashen-faced but composed, entered the East Room of the White House to deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former Presidents Clinton and Bush, like Texas Governor George W. Bush, flew to Washington from Dallas on a military jet, his first visit to the capital since the close race that saw him lose the presidency just months earlier.
Isn’t that how you remember it?
Imagine if the 2000 presidential election had turned out differently and Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush to become the 43rd president of the United States. How could events have unfolded? Would Osama bin Laden have become so important? Would the 9/11 attacks have been worse? Would we have invaded Iraq? Would the economy have plunged into a recession?
Some readers will remember, in that pre-ebook era, that Jeff Greenfield wrote a masterful book Then Everything Changed, Awesome Alternate Histories of American Politics, published by Putnam in 2011 using “dead tree technology” (ie it was a paper book where you had to turn the pages, remember that?). “Speculation is not history, but it is a trap for experts like Jeff Greenfield,” he wrote. Publisher’s Weekly of that effort, a book that created a new sideline for the talented Greenfield to add to the daily work of analyzing real-time news on live television.
It is Greenfield’s work as a 30-year-old journalist, in fact, that lends plausibility to his complex alternate histories. I imagine that in this genre, if the readers do not immediately perceive that sense of plausibility, all is lost, but it is precisely the genius of Greenfield’s plot that creates scenarios that ring true and, often, when reading the current novel from Greenfield, I found myself. winner, 43-When Gore defeated Bush, a political fable, that Greenfield’s version of the story actually seemed plausible for me than the story I personally remembered from being awake and alive and watching television 13 years ago.
It would be unfair to both Greenfield and potential readers of this little gem to say much more about the story. Just remember, Jeff Greenfield has been covering Beltline politics since the 1980s, and he’s a very cool guy, calm, collected, and analytical. He doesn’t have to ask you to “suspend your disbelief,” borrowing John Gardner’s term for that required act when you willingly enter someone else’s fictional world. Greenfield just grabs you and you’re a believer. In fact, the fictional version of his story seems all too real.
43-When Gore defeated Bush, a political fable is available on the Amazon website. This is a short book, not a full novel, maybe around 100 pages of “dead tree” material, to me that equates to a very long one night read where I burn the midnight oil, or a two night read . if I behave myself and turn off the lights at a reasonable hour.
Jeff Greenfield, one of America’s most respected political analysts, has spent more than thirty years on network television, including as a commentator on CNN, ABC News and CBS and currently as an anchor on PBS’s I need to know. Winner of five Emmy Awards, he is a political columnist for Yahoo News and the author of more than a dozen books. He divides his time between New York and Santa Barbara.