Academics use a wonderful term: “counterfactuals” to describe what-if scenarios, useful exercises in thinking about 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-term planning called “scenario analysis” which is based on the development of entire chains of arguments and point/counterpoint analysis and response to conditions that plausibly could have occurred but did not or did not occur. they could plausibly occur in the future, and we had better be prepared for them by having given them some foresight.
If this is too abstract, consider some examples cited by Jeff Greenfield in his keynote 43-When Gore beat Bush, a political fable, recently released as a Kindle Single by Amazon. Greenfield, who is familiar to viewers as a commentator and calm, intelligent voice on network news shows, calls his work a chapter in “the house of Alternative History,” and takes us into some rooms of that house:
“Jacqueline Kennedy doesn’t show up at the door on a Sunday in December 1960,” Greenfield writes, “to see her husband off for church, so the suicide bomber parked outside the Kennedy home fires 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 command during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Here’s another gem Greenfield invented: “Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law walks into a Los Angeles hotel ballroom on the night of the 1968 primaries a few minutes before, and so does Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan in the pantry of kitchen; and Kennedy and his presidential campaign survive and triumph”.
One last: “At a key moment in the debate in 1976, President Gerald Ford realizes he badmouthed the Soviet Union’s dominance of Poland and spares his campaign a crucial week of pain, thus flipping the outcome.” of the Carter-Ford election”.
There’s a long tradition in fiction, Greenfield reminds us, going back centuries, of this kind of “what if” thinking. It’s 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 would surely 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 Greenfield’s premise. 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 giving away anything that spoils the story:
“At 5:00 pm 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, as well as Texas Gov. George W. Bush, flew to Washington from Dallas on a military jet, his first return visit to the capital after the close race that lost him the presidency just months before.
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 Alternative 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 job 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 alternative histories. I imagine that in this genre, if readers don’t immediately get 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 Greenfield’s current novel Greenfield, I found myself. winner, 43-When Gore beat Bush, a political fable, that Greenfield’s version of the story actually seemed plausible to me that the story I personally remembered from being awake and alive and watching TV 13 years ago.
It would be unfair to both Greenfield and potential readers of this little gem to say too much about the story. Just remember, Jeff Greenfield has been covering Beltline politics since the 1980s, and he’s a very cool, calm, collected, analytical guy. He doesn’t have to ask you to “suspend your disbelief,” to borrow John Gardner’s term for that required act when you voluntarily enter another person’s fictional world. Greenfield just gets you and you are a believer. In fact, the fictional version of his story seems all too real.
43-When Gore beat Bush, a political fable is available on the Amazon website. This is a short book, not a full novel, maybe about 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 a host 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 splits his time between New York and Santa Barbara.