Overview
It is 1962 and there are children at play in the White House for the first time since the presidency of William Howard Taft. Richard Nixon, the vigorous 49-year-old president, has been in office less than two years, having won election by a razor-thin margin over Senator John Kennedy. In Moscow, the wildly unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev is looking forward to visiting his cherished revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro. Just 90 miles from American shores, Khrushchev will announce an audacious and dangerous nuclear stunt to abruptly shift the balance of power—a secretly-built network of missiles across Cuba that put American cities in the atomic crosshairs. But President Nixon has his own announcement planned. A U.S. spy plane has discovered the missiles being set up in Cuba and Nixon will soon address the nation to announce his response. Meanwhile, First Lady Pat Nixon is in California to look at a San Clemente house the first couple may purchase. Seeing shoppers crowd around a store-window television, Pat gets her first inkling of trouble. Dick has always insisted she not listen to the news and she is happy, for now, to return to her correspondence. In the coming days, the confrontation between the U.S. and its nuclear foe will escalate. The president will weigh his determination to overthrow Castro against the risk of all-out war as Pat struggles to reconcile her proper role as a wife with her estrangement from the man who thrust her into a public life she despises.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
If Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1960 instead of John F. Kennedy, how would Nixon have handled the Cuban missile crisis? Simon provides some provocative if predictable answers in his luridly fascinating first novel. After a chapter set shortly after the 1960 election, the action jumps to October 20, 1962, the day Nixon presents to his cabinet the evidence that the Soviets are installing missiles in Cuba. Over the week that follows, Simon credibly portrays Nixon as he maneuvers himself, the country, and the world to the brink of the nuclear nightmare that Kennedy avoided. The author is equally good at letting Pat Nixon tell the story of her disastrous marriage as well as showing Nikita Khrushchev as a man who wants peace at almost any cost, to the point of abandoning his Cuban allies to achieve it. The conclusion may not satisfy everyone, but alternative history fans will be rewarded. (Sept.)Publishers Weekly
"Fascinating."Russ Stover
Harvey Simon’s story of alternate history, The Madman Theory, brings up the provocative question of what would have happened if Nixon had won the 1960 presidential election instead of John Kennedy. ... The Madman Theory begins in those tense days of October 1962 just after Soviet nuclear missiles were discovered in Cuba with more on the way. ... Like the true events it mirrors, Mr. Simon takes readers behind the scenes and into the meetings, phone calls, and telexes, and further into the relationships between Nixon’s staff, White House departments—even between Nixon and his wife Pat. ... We know that Kennedy had the strength to stand up to his military advisors and understand that as president he could act beyond circumstance. What Mr. Simon’s The Madman Theory asks is would Nixon have had that same courage?—New York Journal of Books
Personal correspondence with the historian
A nuanced portrait, with the full range of Nixon, from the bizarre and terrifying to the comic figure he really was.(Stanley Kutler, leading Nixon historian)