The Man

Irving Wallace published The Man in 1964, and the premise was almost shocking at the time. The president dies. The vice president dies. The Speaker of the House is too old to serve. The presidency falls to the Senate’s president pro tempore, who happens to be a Black senator from Mississippi. Wallace then spends the rest of the book asking what happens next.

It’s a long book. Wallace was never a tight writer. There are subplots, briefings, dinner conversations, a major impeachment thread, and a lot of room for political backroom dealings.

Reading it sixty years later, parts feel prescient and parts feel like a white liberal author writing carefully about race in the early 1960s. Both are accurate.

It was made into a film in 1972 with James Earl Jones, which is also worth tracking down once you’re done with the book.