The Talk Of The Town

In “Seven Days in May,” a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States, whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

- Jeffrey Toobin

The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in “Fail Safe,” and of civilization, in “Strangelove”—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart.

The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published “The Threat,” a book about his tenure at the F.B.I., which ended with a brief, tumultuous period as its acting director. The focus of his narrative is not seven but eight days in May of 2017, between President Trump’s firing of James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., and the appointment of Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy.