he year is 2055 and the United States of America is fighting a losing war against China and Russia. The seeds of the conflict were sown during the Clinton administration, and as the U.S. braces for an invasion, a desperate Defense Department begins to wonder: What if the choices of that administration had been different? More importantly, what if they could be changed?
Among the roster of secret projects abandoned by the government is a time-travel experiment. Exhuming this mothballed project, an operative using the name of James Carville assembles a small team of experts. His plan, naturally, is to travel into the past and intervene in the early life of the president. One of his recruits for this team is most unwilling to be drafted, though: Sal Hayden is Clinton's official biographer, an avowed civilian who knows everything about the president she calls "BC" but who sees all too clearly the difficulties involved in tinkering with
history: often the obvious dark moments of a given period are tied inextricably to good ones.
Carville leaves Hayden with few alternatives, though, and before she knows what is happening the biographer has been yanked out of her comfortable, studious routine and dumped in the 1960s.
Chaperoned by a buff brunette named Virginia whose job description includes everything from seducing Clinton to committing temporal assassinations, Sal must find a way to make herself heard in the face of her superior officer's intransigence. The fate of nations rides on the mission's success or failure: The trouble is knowing how to pull the strings of time without unraveling the entire future.
Humor shines amid a confused story
Philip E. Baruth's The X President is a peculiar work, even for a genre that offers great scope for strangeness. Slow to start and hampered by a flimsy plot and strained satirical tone, this book will alienate many readers before its story ever gets rolling. At the same time, it has qualities that make it likable: the store of facts and trivia on the Clinton era, for example, and the infinite versatility of the assassin-temptress Virginia. Its appeal lies in the idea of tinkering with such recent historical events. Classic time-travel tales speculate about removing Adolf Hitler from the 20th century timeline. The X President updates the issue: What would happen if someone killed Timothy McVeigh before the Oklahoma City bombing?
The book's weakest element is its narrator and protagonist, Sal Hayden. Recruited as the uncontested U.S. expert on Clinton, Sal never gets to bring her knowledge into play. Carville brings along another operative who knows nearly as much as Sal; then he adds insult to injury by ignoring them both. In lieu of actually contributing to the mission, Sal is left to complicate
it ... getting herself into unconvincing scrapes and demonstrating her plucky resistance to the military regime by breaking orders and behaving like a sullen teenage boy.
The X President's attempt to come to grips with the Clinton era is ambitious, and it is also somewhat winning. The rapport between Virginia and Sal rings true and provides much-needed lightness. If the author's sly, humorous approach doesn't always ring true, it does occasionally
provoke laughs. And as in many time-travel novels, Baruth's recreation of familiar historical events draws on the powerful emotional reservoirs created by those moments in the first place.
Anyone wishing to relive the history of the Clinton presidency—and seeing it twisted into new shapes—will want to catch The X President.
