The Last Gerontocrats

A Review of The First Gentleman, the new blockbuster summer thriller by northern Westchester's Bill Clinton and James Patterson

When future archeologists dig through the rubble left by the baby boomers after they have finally—finally—passed on, they will hopefully find a copy of The First Gentleman, and save themselves a lot of time and effort piecing together what precipitated the collapse.

The third blockbuster presidential thriller from two of our rarefied region’s greatest potentates, Chappaqua’s Bill Clinton (former president of the United States) and Scarborough’s James Patterson (former CEO of J. Walter Thompson) involves, as the title suggests, the husband of a female U.S. president. It also involves the president, her staff, intrepid reporters, cops, assassins, international politics, the NFL and—as the publishers assure us, “all the twists and turns, and the authenticity, one expects from the #1 bestselling authors of The President Is Missing and The President’s Daughter.”

It also happens to be a nearly pure distillation of the past forty years of franchise commercial publishing and of the world-destroying boomer ethos that shaped it.

Here are two 78-year-old multi-millionaire suburbanites each receiving yet another seven-figure payday as they continue to ply their brands across the sea of their copaganda-loving readership.

“It’s the only political job I ever wanted that I couldn’t get,” says Clinton on CBS Sunday Morning, which industry insiders say is rivaled only by 60 Minutes for driving book sales and which also happens to be an employer of Rita Braver, wife of the authors’ de facto agent (the guy who strikes Patterson’s & Clinton’s deals with the publishing houses), attorney Bob Barnett, also age 78. (Braver, or her people, do not list her age, but our search engine’s A.I. speculates that she’s just 77.)

If you wonder why the program is so good at driving book sales, you only need consider the ads that run in it. Do you have leg pain? Restlessness? Coldness? Tingling? Unsteadiness?

The audience of Sunday morning TV news magazine programs, it turns out, are the same boomers and silents who will still pay to read pulp detective fiction. They are also the ones who elected Bill Clinton. And who bought us presents at Toys R Us, whose I’m-a-Toys-R-Us-kid line was authored by legendary branding genius Patterson.

The political job Clinton was speaking of is, of course—cue book title—first gentleman.

“I really thought Hillary should be president,” he goes on, perhaps ruing the marital imbalance of living with a mere madam secretary.

But if you’re looking for the inside scoop on what The Deplorinator and Slick Willie were planning for him as the first male-identifying spouse of a U.S. president (or for what that President would have done herself), you will be largely disappointed.

There a couple almost tantalizing lines like “They’re not a couple—they’re a damn criminal enterprise!” and “I finally convinced the Sierra Club to stop protesting against the Energy Department’s modular nuclear reactor program,” but there’s not much else there. And that’s probably for the best, since Patterson chapters seldom run more than three complete pages (if you ever encounter a coverless thriller novel, you can always determine whether it’s a Patterson by opening it ten times at random—if you only once encounter two pages completely covered in words . . . )—and the comfort-reading audience is doubtless relieved when the authors boil down what is described as a 40-minute speech to just the following, in which President Wright tells

. . . the entire country the truth about what is facing them and how they can turn it around, how they can save Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the economy with new revenues [involving a special tax on legal immigrants], new savings, and, if they don’t work, changes in the entitlement programs to extend the lives of their trust funds to thirty years out and keep them there while gradually lowering the national debt as a percentage of annual income.

Which is taxing enough.

Talking to CBS’s Tracy Smith in Patterson’s Scarborough back yard, the glorious Palisades in plain view and the walls of Sing Sing—just a couple miles north on the same side of the Tappan Zee—safely hidden by a promontory, the two authors amble across the grass with all the assuredness that seven decades of golf and top-shelf medical care can provide. The interviewer observes, “Sometimes their made-up White House looks almost like real life.”

The book also ticks all the Law & Order/CSI boxes with cutting-edge jargon and research to help the reader trust the authority of the authors. The presidential limo is “up-armored” and its doors each weigh eighty pounds. Blading is what it’s called when a police office stands sideways to a vehicle at a traffic stop. (Smaller profile for a potential shooter to hit.) And, for the de rigueur forensic pathologist scene, we learn the gender identity of a skeleton through its delicate glabella and light suborbital rims.

But rest assured Latinate three-syllable words are just there for spice—they’re not in any way a mainstay of the production.

As ever, great care has been taken to keep readers in their comfort zones and nowhere is this more evident than with brand references, which have been scattered across the manuscript with as much regularity and pre-considered chemistry as fertilizer pellets in a Monsanto soybean field.

The media references are therefore largely print—The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and The Miami Herald—although CNN gets a little airtime. (Which is nice to see given the authors’ agent’s recent break with Jake Tapper.) And the musicians on the radio (no mention of streaming services) get as young as Jack White although most made their names in the 60s and 70s—Eric Clapton (80), Willie Nelson (92), Joe Cocker (would be 81), Simon (83) & Garfunkel (83), Queen (Freddie Mercury would now be 79), America (whose lead singer is now 73), Mason Williams (86), and even Billy Ward (would be 104) & the Dominoes. In terms of movies and movie-star handrails, we only noted Christopher Walken (82) and My Cousin Vinny (1992 release, little Ralphie Macchio is now 63).

Other psycho-emotional touchpoints include Hennessy, Guinness (the beer), Liberty Mutual, Fidelity Investments, Wheaties, Stolichnaya vodka, Audi, Chevrolet, L.L. Bean, Nikon, and a few that were established after 1980 including Pepcid and the iPhone.

Also in keeping with escapist thriller fiction norms, the good guys are attractive and are impressive both for income and pedigree—the President, the First Gentlemen, the narrator, as well as several members of the supporting cast, went to Dartmouth. MIT and Stanford get shout-outs as well. Our heroes are also fit—the closest we get to a romance scene involves our nation’s top power couple out jogging.

There’s some nod to diversity—the chief narrator is a black investigative reporter, but she makes clear early on that, while she’s race-conscious, she’s no woke-a-holic. At one point she soliloquizes,

Where were the First Gentleman’s running shoes made? Were the materials recyclable? Was the company ecofriendly? Did it provide humane working conditions? Did its management support the LGBTQIA+ communities? About a thousand civilians were killed by cops every year in this country, a lot of them after traffic stops. And many of them had my skin tone.

And perhaps there’s some latent hostility to the MAGA set. One scene that possibly resonates with Clintonian class-judgments has a civilian—in camo, naturally—rudely accosting a newspaper reporter and shouting “Fake news!” It’s not quite LOL, but it is good fun.

Far more amusing is to imagine lines such as the following coming from the pens of either Patterson or Clinton—

I always say you should hold a guitar like you hold a woman—gently, but like you mean it.

or

I have to admit, my neck hairs are prickling a bit.

or

Polyester never dies.

Yes, the old plutocrats still have it. And, if you don’t believe it, note that the book has a 4.6 star rating with Amazon’s shoppers, the same favorability rating that convenience-loving crowd has vouchsafed The Great Gatsby.

Our only real complaint with our north county authors’ execution involves a scene where an assassin kills a Gen Z grad student who gets mad at him for hiding in the bushes and interfering with his birdcall recording equipment. We found it to be less than cinematic to brush past so Tarantino a scene but they confine the incident to a single paragraph of recollection (as the killer walks to his car) and the reader doesn’t get to see, hear, touch, smell or taste a single drop of the old ultraviolence.

But perhaps this is in keeping with a comment made by the narrator’s boyfriend, and which is surely true of how the authors’ legions of still-living fans feel about the careers of these two titans—

Always leave them wanting more . . . Always.

At any rate, let’s hope our esteemed neighbors have at least another blockbusting potboiler in them, and let’s push back on any doubters. After all, our IRL President—who also owns property here in the north county—is also 78 right now, and he’s not slowing down. And the last guy was even older.

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Editor’s note—
This review has been published here on its own, and will ultimately be archived within the North County Book Report.