Robert Ludlum and the Election of 1988

Recently looking at Robert Ludlum's Trevayne earlier this year I read with a fair bit of interest the introduction to the 1988 edition, in which he remarked the writing of the older book--the product of the Watergate years and the wide public outrage over the revelations of arrogance, criminality and outright contempt for democracy in high places (which, I find it necessary to always repeat, went far beyond the planting of a few bugs to which most people seem to reduce the whole affair).

Of course, that more political Ludlum (whom we see in such books as The Matlock Paper and The Gemini Contenders, and especially Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript) soon gave way to the epic scale international chase-cum-shoot 'em up Ludlum, with The Holcroft Covenant a turning point in that direction, and the old political Ludlum all but vanished from view by the time of the book for which he has been best known for decades, The Bourne Identity (the political premise of which is slight and conventional, an excuse for Jason Bourne to run about getting into fights and shootouts). Afterward Ludlum did sometimes give a political theme more attention (most notably in The Aquitaine Progression), but all the same, his trajectory was set.

Still, in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal the political element was topical again, sufficiently so that it got explicit mention here-- as "a series of events so ludicrous they would have been a barrel of laughs but for their obscenity." The presidential election of 1988 only added to his ire—this, so far as he concerned, the occasion of "two of the most disgraceful, debasing, inept, disingenuous and insulting presidential campaigns that living admirers of our system can recall," serving up "packaged" candidates speaking "'sound bite' zingers" and elevating "image . . . over issues," down to "presidential debates that were neither presidential nor debates but canned Pavlovian 'responses' more often than not having little or nothing to do with the questions."

Ludlum refrains from naming the candidates in question, but anyone familiar with the election of 1988 knows full well that he is talking about George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, the two singularly unexciting candidates their respective parties intended to run in defiance of the mood of growing public dissatisfaction with, and anxiety about, where America stood in the twilight of the Reagan administration, when declinist fears made of Paul Kennedy's academic treatise on the rise and fall of great powers a 34-week New York Times hardcover bestseller--and the two parties, per usual, contemptuously dismissed those worries and the people who held them in favor of offering up more of the same. (Neoliberalism yesterday, neoliberalism today, neoliberalism tomorrow, neoliberalism forever! was and remains their slogan.) Indeed, reading Ludlum's more particular expressions of dislike I suspect that Ludlum was not impressed with the unintentional gag comedy of Michael Dukakis riding around in an Abrams tank, the dog-whistle Willie Horton ads, or the "Big Society"-ish drivel about a "thousand points of light."

I regard that distaste as very much to Ludlum's credit.

But as anyone looking back on all that from 2022 can only think when reading Ludlum's remarks, he hadn't seen anything yet. And I can only wonder what the Ludlum of the '70s would be writing today if he were still around, and still permitted to publish the kind of fiction he did back then by the self-appointed arbiters of American letters on Park Avenue--which, of course, he probably wouldn't be. Instead, were he still alive, and physically and mentally up to the rigors of finishing a novel, what we would probably be getting would be more Jason Bourne sequels cranked out by others under his name—just like we are getting now.