Christopher Buckley is the son of conservative patriarch William F. Buckley Jr. He is a smooth man in the same way that his father is a hairy, craggy man. Having been a speechwriter for President Bush the Elder, he knows the layout of the White House and the Washington form on how the game is played and who the players are. He is a former managing editor of Esquire, and his current day job is editor of Forbes FYI. His latest book (his eighth) is going to make a bang-up movie, a Washington satire better than “Wag the Dog.”

As they say in Hollywood, here’s the pitch. Before the titles roll, the film opens in medias res. The scene is the White House Lincoln bedroom. The President of the United States is conducting vigorous, headboard-banging “bilateral relations” with a Barbra Streisand type. How do we know it’s the President? Because she cannot resist inserting a “Mr. President” into the “Oh, baby, baby, baby”s. And because he orders her not to call him that “while Congress is in session.”

Pretty good start wouldn’t you say? I don’t know about you, but I like a little humor in the hay, a laugh or two with my lechery. Perhaps you sophisticates may be jaded by the spectacle of the president hosting horizontal happy hours in the White House. In this case, however, as we later learn, President Kenneth Kemble MacMann, although a former state governor like some of his predecessors, is a Vietnam War hero, not a draft-dodger. As the encounter reaches its climax, a pan of the camera to the portrait over the mantle of our great Civil War president might add a nice touch of irony.

It is after 2:00 a.m. when the President slips back into the First Bedroom. Elizabeth Tyler MacMann, the knockout First Lady (think Catherine Zeta-Jones) hears the click of the opening door. “She knew,” writes Buckley, “Knew instantly, even in the dark. No surer radar than a wife’s intuition has been invented.” She clicks on the lights. He reacts “like any creature of the night—raccoon, cockroach—suddenly bathed in unwelcome light.”

“Iraq,” sighs the President, rolling his eyes.

Go black. Roll titles.

Fade in. It is morning. A maid brings the First Couple their breakfast in bed. She says to the First Lady, softly but with alarm, that the president’s eyes and mouth are wide open and he is looking awfully still. He has a bump on his head is colder than a smelt. Track to a silver spittoon on its side in a corner of the room.

Well, enough of this screenplay stuff. I’m sure that Christopher Buckley will do a fine job of it himself. He is a splendid writer of dialogue. It can go on for a page or so without a “he said, she said,” and the reader is never in doubt as to the speaker. Believable, realistic dialogue with the fits, starts, and interjections of everyday conversation, was first introduced into the humorous novel, in the 18th century, by Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Buckley is a worthy descendant of Sterne, which for reasons known to him, I think he would take as a compliment.

Back to the narrative. As the evidence will later show, the lump on the president’s forehead bears the hallmark of Paul Revere, silversmith, who wrought the six-pound, ten-ounce heirloom spittoon that is lying nearby on the floor.

As the Secret Service guards will later testify, a boisterous argument had followed the president’s return to the bedroom.

The discovery of the cooled MacMann results in the Attorney General of the United States charging his wife with the capital crime of assassinating the president.

This, then, is the set-up. There have been real White House rumors of lamp-tossing and bumps on the head after choking on a pretzel, but here we have a situation in which the dénouement is actually fatal.

Mrs. MacMann, “Lady Bethmac” in the tabloids after her ruthless treatment of staff, is not a popular figure. It appears that the prosecution will have a slam-dunk case and that the First Lady is fated to get a pearl necklace—one fashioned into a noose like that which artfully decorates the dust jacket of Buckley’s book.

Not so fast. Enter counsel for the defense: Boyce “Shameless” Baylor, Beth’s dumped fiancé from their law school days twenty-five years ago. He is the highest paid lawyer in the country, first to bill $1000 an hour, and notorious for his win-at-any-cost, successful defenses of a number of scoundrels. Think of Jack Nicholson as a handsome David Boies.

Of Boies David Margolick has written, “To understand David, you have to understand that you may not understand him.” Buckley gets the irony down perfectly. “The last thing I want to know from my clients is did they do it,” says Baylor, adding later, “The truth has no place in a court of law.”

From here the book sparkles off to a riveting, often hilarious, courtroom drama. It is the “Trial of the Millenium,” one that enraptures more than a billion television viewers around the world. It features a cast of characters that will be readily identifiable to those with knowledge of the recent trials of merely the century and the gallery of pundits who provide the play-by-play.

There is the annoying assistant attorney general, a Marcia Clark type, who leads the prosecution. A few characters reappear from Buckley’s earlier novels. There is John O. Banion, syndicated columnist and figure on the Capital Bang television show, who first appeared in Little Green Men and spinmeister Nick Naylor who repped the tobacco industry in Thank You for Smoking. I am saddened to report, however, that one of my favorite Buckley characters, Karl Kuntmore, the techno-military thriller writer from Little Green Men does not make an appearance. This anomaly is more than offset, however, by the odious Alan Crudmore, lead counsel in the J.J. Bronco case, who “had gotten acquitted some of the most loathsome human beings on the planet,” and who tries to second-guess Boyce Baylor on this one. There will be no prizes for guessing who this is. Buckley does a great job of satirizing this legal figure who is well known for being a long way from hating himself, and frankly, deserves some sending up.

Some forty years ago Michael Flanders (At the Drop of a Hat) spotted satire squatting “hoof in mouth under every bush.” It was apparently so popular that Flanders and Swann would satirize satire itself. “The purpose of satire,” said Flanders, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth. And our job, as I see it, is to put it back in.”

Today there is a dearth of satire, which makes Buckley’s book so welcome. In the past some critics have accused him of being light on plot, but that is not the case in this novel. The conclusion is artful and the surprise ending well conceived. 
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