There are several examples in recent memory, running the gamut from satire and action to drama. Actor Chris Rock played a black president in Head of State, a movie that focused largely on ghetto culture and humor. Dennis Haysbert played a tough-guy black President Palmer in the action series 24. And Morgan Freeman rode his regal bearing to the box office as the black president in the film Deep Impact about a meteor hurtling towards the earth.
All of these only offered superficial insights into what it would mean for America to have a black president. Decades earlier, the author Irving Wallace dug far deeper into the psyche of America and wrote 766 fictional pages about what could happen to us under a black president in his best-selling novel from 1964, The Man. I found out that the book was turned into a Hollywood movie starring James Earl Jones as President Dilman, but I’m sure the book is better, as is usually the case. It should be noted that 1964 was the year that Congress passed the watershed Civil Rights Act that still shapes most of the laws on equality in place to this day. Curiously, few “pundits” are talking about this story that still has so much relevance today, as we stand on the cusp of Obama’s potential inauguration in January. That is really too bad. The only reason I even heard of The Man myself was because my father read the novel and was fascinated by it as a medical school student in 1960’s India, well before he had ever been to America: an early globalization story for you. It is revealing that people like my father have opinions about Obama’s candidacy that were largely shaped by this novel that was read in a third-world country a long time ago.
The Man is still interesting to read because it clearly renders both what is the same about America today, and also how much things have changed since 1963, when the novel was mostly drafted. The president in Wallace’s novel, Douglass Dilman, came to power by freak accident, when a building collapsed in Europe and killed the well-loved WASP president and several of his advisors, as well as the House Speaker. The Vice-President had died of natural causes and was buried just 10 days before that. So the presidency, by default, fell to Mr. Douglass Dilman, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, installed by his party to be the black poster boy for a supposedly high-minded legislative body.
In many ways, 1963 America was a very different place from 2008 America. Obviously, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated that year, and the parallel to the President who was killed in the opening chapters of The Man could be easily drawn. In reality as in fiction, the nation went through shock at the death of a beloved leader, and begrudgingly accepted the reality of a sudden replacement. However Douglass Dilman was no LBJ, who himself had run for President, let alone a Barack Obama who is chomping at the presidential bit. Dilman only accepted the presidency unwillingly because he was clearly next in the line of succession as written in the Constitution, and the very thought of being President gave him nothing but terror throughout the book. Contrast that with Obama, who many accuse of near-delusional ambitions far exceeding his Washington experience, and that despite a young age, he did not “wait his turn” as called for by the code of party machine politics.
It became clear as the book went on why Dilman was such a deliberately hesitant leader. His very ascension in itself was inadvertently dangerous to the country. When Dilman became president, violent race-fueled riots became the norm. Whites rioted because there was an inferior “nigger” in power over them, who they felt could not be intelligent enough to lead, who they feared would embrace African nations to the peril of US national security, who would ram through a black-focused policy agenda, and would install a black cabinet after sacking the WASP friends of the previous president. Members of Congress and the mainstream media openly decried the outrage of allowing a black man to rule. Meanwhile, radical black groups chafed because Dilman was not “black enough:” he didn’t support militant tactics or left-wing black culture. Every move and decision that Dilman ever made as the president was partly shaped by his noble desire to mitigate civil unrest in the splintering nation. Still, his meek manner and constant double-guessing made me feel like impatiently slapping him at numerous junctures in the novel.
I doubt we will see riots when Obama is nominated, or as a response to his policy positions. But sadly, a more watered-down version of the 1963 racial narrative still exists in America today. Some whites feel Obama simply isn’t fit to be president because he is dark-skinned. The difference today, 45 years later than The Man’s time, is that it isn’t socially acceptable to be openly racist in most parts. On the other hand, some blacks today think Obama just isn’t black enough to speak for them- especially the older cabal of civil rights leaders represented by the would-be nut-cutter Jesse Jackson. An older black man I know calls Obama an “Uncle Tom,” that insulting reference reserved for the lowliest form of minority political ladder-climber, who uses his skin color rather than merit to advance in a whitewashed establishment. This moniker has been applied to other blacks prominent in government, including former General and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Secretary of State Condi Rice. In my opinion, the label does not apply to Obama, who did not openly play the race card to advance himself. On the other hand, polls seem to show more Americans are wary of electing someone of McCain’s age than they are of a black, which may turn out to be a bigger problem than the racial pressures on Obama from the fringe blacks and whites combined.
Luckily, Obama will not have to jump through the hoops that Dilman did. Dilman had a romantic relationship with a half-black lady that he was forced to keep top-secret for political reasons, simply because of her mixed blood. He had a light-skinned daughter who disowned the family, changed her identity, and pretended to be white in a horribly undercover life. Even more tellingly, Dilman was averse to the concept of having even one black musician among many performing at his first official White House state dinner for fear that it would be construed as the beginnings of a black takeover of government. Although his feelings on these matters angered me, both would come to be viewed by bigoted whites exactly as Dilman feared. His secret relationship, and the black entertainers who innocently played at his first state dinner, were both used against him later in an impeachment trial. I hope these reactions would be unimaginable today, although it would certainly politically behoove President Obama not to engage all black hip-hop acts for the entertainment at his inauguration. That message would not be well-received.
A few touchy subjects arise from the pressures described above in President Dilman’s day. The fictional Turnerite group, roughly equivalent to the Black Panthers, was jilted because he refused to help them out of legal trouble when they were accused of violent criminal acts including the kidnapping and murder of a Southern judge who ruled against them in a controversial court case. A splinter Turnerite member who rejected the group’s directive to lay low, attempted a bold assassination attempt in the White House Rose Garden which very nearly succeeded. Making matters worse for President Dilman was that his son was a clandestine member of the Turnerites, which the group tried to use as political leverage. Ironically, the assassination attempt was directly connected to the disgruntlement of the Secret Service’s top agent, a decorated war veteran who was passed up for a deserved promotion by a less-qualified black agent, a move made by the Chief of Secret Service to curry favor with the boss. The white agent, Otto Beggs, had been lured into taking the day off by the would-be assassin’s pretty young sister. The expectation was of a sexual affair for its own sake, and once he found out the seduction was a trap to remove him from the President’s side, Beggs rushed to the White House just in time to kill the assassin and take the bullet meant to slay the President. Contrast this with today’s headlines in 2008: the Secret Service, which has been tasked with protecting both Obama and McCain, is under fire after 10 black agents have filed an EEO class action, on the very basis of violations of Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Black agents are claiming they are being passed over for promotions which they clearly deserved in favor of white candidates. This is quite a story considering that the bar to the Presidency may be made even lower for blacks than the alleged bar for certain Secret Service promotions.
For Dilman the impeachment trial later commenced behind massive public support, with bigoted Southern white Congressmen leading the charge. The catalyst was Congressman Zeke Miller, who also was a media magnate who ran a bigoted right-wing propaganda machine, with characters who walked and talked exactly like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. When FOX anchors call Obama’s innocent fist-bump with his wife a “terrorist” gesture, or falsely claim that Obama attended a madrassa school, it bears shocking resemblance to the fictional Zeke Miller’s reporters writing that Dilman was having an affair with a communist spy, or that he was an alcoholic, which people found feasible largely because of his skin color.
The articles of impeachment were a thinly veiled attempt to charge Dilman for the crime of being black. Of course, there isn’t a chance in Hell that such an action could take place in the Congress of today. America’s tolerance on race has changed measurably for the better; if Congress attempted to commence an impeachment with even a minor allusion to race, the public would create a huge backlash against it. In fact, we have seen this reality in play at a trial before: race is a big reason why O.J. Simpson was able to walk free in 1994; people injected the race card into the proceedings. That too, in the same town that was still healing from the Rodney King race riots. Many commentators have even written that whites vote for Obama out of “white guilt”- the concept that the persecution blacks suffered under our ancestors such as the despicable white characters in The Man could be undone by supporting a minority candidacy.
Another similarity between Dilman and Obama is the suspicion of their conduct in foreign policy, although for different reasons. People accused Dilman of favoritism toward Africa, especially embodied in his decision to send American troops to protect a fictional African country named Baraza against a USSR-supported insurgent army. The military chafed under his commands to mobilize an all-white elite force in an all-black continent. But Dilman’s objective was to secure a U.S. ally in the Cold War, not to prop up a regime just because it was black. Obama faces exactly the same problem today: although there is no Cold War, there is a War on Terror, and with a Muslim middle name Hussein, some Americans fear that Obama will play favorites in the Middle East, to the detriment of US security. This is just as absurd as the charges against Dilman in relation to Africa. Such sentiments display a blatant ignorance of Obama’s views on foreign policy, and the complexities of Islam in the Middle East. One can be against the invasion of Iraq without being sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism, especially because the two issues aren’t exactly the same. What this exposes is Obama’s challenge on two fronts due to his minority status: he must overcome anti-black sentiment as well as anti-Islamic sentiment, though his agenda is neither geared specifically towards blacks or Muslims. Luckily for him, it is almost exactly the same small bigoted minority of Americans who would not vote for him because he’s black, who would also not do so if they thought he was Muslim.
Ultimately the story of how much America has changed since Irving Wallace wrote The Man over 40 years ago is an uplifting one. With a few exceptions, the country has changed for the better in most ways when it comes to the treatment of minorities. The passage and enforcement by our government of the Civil Rights Act deserves much of the credit for this. In many ways, Obama’s viability is a reflection of how far we have come. It is quite apparent that Obama’s star will rise or fall not on the color of his skin, but on the content of his character. And that is all Martin Luther King, Jr. asked for, and that is all we should ask for as Americans of our next president.
