Celebrating President's Day 2026
Book Review: 'The President' by Drew Pearson
Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to celebrate President's Day by reviewing a vintage book that illuminates the drama inherent in holding the highest office in the land. For this President's Day 2026, we examine 'The President,' by Drew Pearson.
During the 1950s and 1960s Pearson (1897 - 1969) was a high-profile newspaper columnist covering the DC Beltway. According to a fawning, July 9, 2021 profile of Pearson, published by Washington Post book reviewer Matthew Pressman, in his day Pearson was '...arguably the most influential political columnist in U.S. history.' Pearson, raised as a Quaker, was a strident liberal and continuously inveighed against what he felt were the immoral behaviors of the American Right.
Pearson wrote two political potboilers, 'The Senator,' (1969), and 'The President' (1970), the latter published posthumously (Pearson died of a heart attack on September 1, 1969). This Avon Books paperback edition of 'The President' was published in January, 1972.
'President' is set in the mid-1970s, and is narrated by one Eddie Deever, the chief of staff to the eponymous protagonist, a former senator named Benjamin Bow Hannaford. Hannaford won his election with only 33 percent of the popular vote, thanks to some vote-splitting between two conservative GOP candidates. There also are suspicions on the part of Capitol Hill that Hannaford's campaign benefited from some less-than-legal maneuverings in counting ballots in California.
Despite the narrowness of his victory, Hannaford believes he has a mandate to implement his program of Social Justice.
And it's an unabashedly progressive program (one of course near and dear to the heart of author Pearson). Hannaford seeks to slash the Pentagon budget in half, and use the freed monies to advance the welfare of the 'Negro.' There are to be massive investments in 'ghetto communes' (?!), jobs programs, educational facilities, welfare payments, and health care resources.
Of course, the Right adamantly is opposed to such a redistribution of wealth, and the battle between Hannaford and the GOP-controlled House culminates in an effort by the latter to impeach the newly elected president. Will the right and its 'dirty tricks' triumph, and remove Hannaford from office ?
'The President' is the first political melodrama I've ever read, and likely will be the last (I never bothered to read 'Primary Colors,' Joe Klein's 1996 novel about the Clinton administration). Pearson is a skilled writer, but at 603 pages of small font, 'The President' is just too long and too lumbering. Too many speeches that go on for page, after page, after page......
Pearson's righteous indignation over the American political landscape as it stood in the late 1960s suffuses every page, and Hannaford and his team are portrayed as avatars of integrity and virtue engaged in a struggle for the soul of the nation. The problem is that Hannaford's nobility makes him a rather dull individual.
Indeed, the most interesting characters in 'The President' are the black activists who refuse to buy into Hannaford's White Savior mystique. My favorite 'Negro' is Kakamba Jones, the dashiki-wearing leader of the militant Afro Avengers organization. Jones has little use for white liberals or back conservatives (the latter reflexively are condemned as 'Uncle Toms'). When given a chance to berate the white power structure, Kakamba doesn't disappoint:
....Then I heard Kakamba's voice, challenging, insulting, hurling his defiance at the lawmen across the barbed wire.
"We are ready, whitey ! We got us the guns and grenades and the heavy stuff. Maybe you got more, but it won't stop us. We willin' to die, and take lots of you along, and make this place a great big pool of black and white blood. We got us a list of nonnegotiable demands and we want Mr. Number One, the pig governor himself, Whitey Fancourt, to talk with us, here, now and without no soldiers around him !"
At one point in the novel Deever attends a left-wing rally in Manhattan, hosted by Arvid Farbelman, a white, Jewish leftist who is Pearson's stand-in for Abbie Hoffman. When Deever pleads with Jones to take action to support Hannaford, Kakamba lets whitey know exactly what's up:
"Tell them, Kakamba !" Arvid Farbelman cried. "Tell them like it is !"
"Shut up, motherf---er," Jones grunted, over his shoulder. "When I wanna hear from white trash, I'll ask."
"He's right, he's right," Farbelman muttered to a mini-skirted white girl next to him on the stage - a millionaire dress manufacturer's daughter. "We're all guilty, and we all deserve his contempt."
"I say to hell with Hannaford and his Uncle Toms, to hell with his white boss's lying schemes. What is our President, but a lousy peckerwood with a rich wife ? A damn oil-drillin', cheatin', lyin' faker. Why his rotten brothers in the Senate didn't even trust him, and he had to be censured. And now he's President !"
"He stole it !" a black girl called.
"Yeah, robbed it !"
Also engaging is Mona Varnum: Soopa Soul Sistah and journalist, the object of adoration and dazed lust on the part of Eddie Deever. Mona, like Kakamba Jones, don't take no shit from whitey:
"To hell with all of them," Mona said. "I know what I look like. I know the effect I have on you uptight honkies. Well, I let you try it once, get a taste of it - and then, you can all go to hell, you can all slobber over it, and maybe take it out on your white broads."
I finished 'The President' thinking it would be a better novel had it been 200 pages shorter, and more focused on the antics of the black characters. As a political melodrama inevitably it is dated, and I doubt that anyone under 75 years of age will grasp the satirical portrayals of the Beltway elite and their machinations, as they were in the late 1960s. This novel is for Boomers only.
