Jonathan Freedland Meet the Author

The journalist and writer Jonathan Freedland talks

to Jim Naughtie about his book, To Kill The President.

On the cover of Sam Bourne's latest thriller, To Kill The President,

it says this: "The unthinkable has happened.

"The United States has elected a volatile demagogue as president."

Well, readers may suspect that they know what's coming,

but of course, we don't know who he is.

Just that there's enough danger for some of those around him to have

Well, Sam Bourne is the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland.

He has long since outed himself as the author.

Some of your readers may find the setup in this

Does that make it easier or harder to write?

Well, in some ways harder, because this is meant to be

But of course the reader is going to have recent and current

So you have to sort of ride that and use that to your advantage,

and yet also insert things that will be wholly unfamiliar,

so the heroine of the story, the character called Maggie Costello

who has appeared in a couple of earlier Sam Bourne novels,

Irish-born, very idealistic, principled woman who worked

for the previous president, who was this widely admired figure

around the world, and now has held on, working for this much more

So she is at the centre of it, she is a wholly fictional character.

But the universe around her, I'm aware that people

are going to be bringing things to it that they know

Well, you know perfectly well what they're going to bring to it.

They're going to say this is Donald Trump.

Now, I mean, is it Donald Trump, or is it not Donald Trump?

And I think that's important, because you wouldn't be able to set

So, you know, for example, at the centre of the story are these

two lieutenants to the president, loyal partisans for their party,

who find themselves frankly appalled by the man they are serving,

have come to the conclusion that he's a menace not only

And those people, the backgrounds they have, in this novel,

they're the defence secretary, they're the chief of staff.

They don't map onto the real defence secretary, the real chief of staff.

So what you're doing is creating this alternative universe,

But at the centre of it obviously are going to be things that

We don't want to give away the whole plot,

and the central moral dilemma that unfolds as the story goes on.

But you can set the scene for us at the beginning, I think,

Yes, so the book opens with the president launching

a nuclear strike against North Korea.

Remember I wrote this book many months ago,

before any of the current events had happened, but that is

He launches a nuclear strike against North Korea and China

after a war of words with the North Korean leader,

and that is narrowly averted really by the ingenious intervention

of quite a low-level person who narrowly averts that strike.

It's a fascinating moment, because it gets us into the whole

question of whether there's a machine that is

irrevocable once it starts, or whether it can be stopped.

One of the fascinating things of parts of the research I did

for this book was about the nuclear authority of the president.

It turns out it's the least checked power of all the powers

The right to, or the power, to launch a nuclear assault,

one that could end civilisation and the human race,

Once he or she decides to do it, they simply have this aide,

this quite low-level military aide who walks around with a briefcase

manacled to the wrist which has the nuclear codes in it.

He gets the codes from the aide, calls up a number in

the Pentagon war room, simply confirms his identity

using those codes, and then he can give the order.

The defence secretary is not there, the head of the army is not there,

the chairman of the joint chiefs is not there.

He's a nuclear monarch with this power, and that is

what sets this plot, this story, in motion.

But what the plot then explores is whether the military mind

and the political mind has the flexibility to say

in those circumstances, we must do something.

Even if it is something morally as difficult

and dangerous as the launching of a nuclear strike itself.

At the heart of this book, I hope, are a series of these kind of moral

The president himself is actually more or less offstage

It's about the people who serve him, and the dilemmas they wrestle with.

And there's one right at the very beginning,

But from then on, the even larger dilemma, which confronts the two

people who work for him, and which is discovered

by our heroine, Maggie Costello, is that they begin to conclude

that the man that they have taken an oath to serve

And there they begin to wrestle with, where does your responsibility

As a good patriot, is it your duty to serve the commander-in-chief,

or should you, if you really have concluded he's a danger

And of course they explore the legal avenues first.

In a sense, we've been there before in the Nixon presidency,

because although what was at stake was simply the clinging on to power,

it wasn't the possibility of a nuclear strike or anything

like that, at least as far as we know.

But there was a question raised among some of those around him

as to whether his travails and horror of the position

And if it had, was there anything anyone could do about it?

And I'm glad you mention it, partly because the characters

themselves refer to Nixon and the so-called madman strategy.

This is where he deputed his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger,

to go round the world saying to world leaders, Nixon's

Which Nixon encouraged this strategy, because he believed it

would make them fear him more, and therefore accommodate him

with peace in Vietnam and that kind of thing.

But I'm particularly glad you mentioned Nixon,

partly just because it comes from that era of the early '70s

where not only was Nixon and Watergate going on,

but it spawned the conspiracy political thriller.

And, you know, I had no role in this, but one thing I love

And the cover is absolutely a '70s-era sort of cover design.

It could be Day Of The Jackal or Three Days Of The Condor,

which were thrillers I grew up with and loved.

And the Nixon era really incubated an atmosphere where people

were ready to believe that the president was somehow

a danger, and therefore buy into those kinds of scenarios.

Some people will think either looking at this book,

just looking at the cover, or reading it, that

You can't bear Donald Trump, so you've written a book

portraying him, albeit through an unnamed president

in these pages, as somebody who is about to blow up the world.

And they say, come on, if you believe that, write it,

put your name on it and answer questions, rather than suggesting

Well, Jonathan Freedland is denouncing Trump regularly

in the column I write as a newspaper journalist, I'm sort

This was a different issue that I wanted to wrestle with,

which was this question, the what if question.

You know, I think all thriller writers will say, the two most

You take what's going on in the real world,

and then you knock it on a stage, and you think, what if

And the what if for me was, what if you served somebody

like that, and you yourself, not a hostile Guardian journalist,

but you yourself, a loyal member of the President's party who had

sworn the oath to serve him, you yourself came to

That's what I wanted to explore, and I think, you know,

The Day Of The Jackal, and I've been very pleased a couple

of critics have compared it to that, was about a named president

Jeffrey Archer wrote Shall We Tell The President?,

in which Teddy Kennedy was imagined in an assassination scenario.

So I think there is a kind of sub-genre that does this.

But to me, the reality and this novel are separate.

They may be separate, but the key to a novel like this,

you mentioned Day Of The Jackal, you mentioned Three Days

Of The Condor, the key is that the reader has to believe

that this is not fantasy, that it could come to this.

If they don't believe that, they'd probably give

Yeah, I think there is something in that.

And I think one of the things that's interesting getting

the reader reaction so far, and it's not been very long,

is this idea that this seems plausible, that the danger,

the sort of stakes that are in their mind as a reader,

are because they look at the real world, and they think,

a scenario not the same as this, not identical to this, is plausible.

And I think one of the things that the big surprises that have

confronted you and me as journalists this year is they've made all kinds

of scenarios that would once have seemed fantastical

And therefore I think it makes readers able to regard a story

like this as plausible, because the real world itself

is throwing up fantastical things all the time.

Jonathan Freedland, Sam Bourne, author of To Kill The President,

It feels like the weather is stuck in a rut at the moment, nothing is

changing quickly, the Windies light with nothing to move the