Scholars use a wonderful term: “counterfactuals” to describe what-if situations, useful exercises for strategizing and developing credible responses to possible military and political scenarios. Your tax dollars fund hundreds of such exercises each year at the Pentagon. In fact, there is a branch of long-term planning called “scenario analysis” which is based on developing complete chains of arguments and point / counterpoint and response analysis to conditions that could have plausibly occurred but did not occur or they could plausibly happen in the future, and we’d better be prepared for them by having given them a little foresight.

If this is too abstract, consider some examples cited by Jeff Greenfield in his magisterial 43-When Gore beat Bush, a political fable, recently released as a Kindle Single by Amazon. Greenfield, who is familiar to viewers as a commentator and calm, intelligent voice on network news shows, calls his work a chapter in “the house of Alternative History,” and leads us to a few rooms in that house:

“Jacqueline Kennedy doesn’t come to the door on a Sunday in December 1960,” Greenfield writes, “to fire her husband to go to church, so the suicide bomber stationed outside the Kennedy’s home fires his dynamite and John Kennedy is assassinated before taking office; and Lyndon Johnson, with his very different understanding of foreign policy and power diplomacy, is in command during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “

Here’s another gem Greenfield invented: “Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law walks into a Los Angeles hotel ballroom on the night of the 1968 primaries a few minutes earlier, and the same is true between Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan in the pantry at the kitchen, and Kennedy and his presidential campaign survive and triumph. “

One last: “At a key moment in the debate in 1976, President Gerald Ford realizes he spoke ill of the Soviet Union’s dominance of Poland and saves his campaign a crucial week of pain, thus changing the outcome. of the Carter-Ford election “.

There is a long tradition in fiction, Greenfield reminds us, going back centuries, of this kind of “what if” thinking. It’s a classic novelist’s tool for creating plots that deeply engage readers. Consider Philip Roth’s The plot against America, in which the aviator and national hero Charles Lindbergh runs for and wins the presidency, with disastrous results stemming from his seduction by Nazi engineering moguls. And another couple of novels written with somewhat similar basic plot frameworks, though not of the same literary quality as Roth’s: Robert Harris’s. Homeland and Philip K. Dick’s The man in the high castle both fictional accounts of Nazi victories in World War II, victories in which the entire world is sucked into a nightmarish Third Reich.

We are all prepared to believe that history is not deterministic. The world would surely have been different if Oswald had failed. The world would surely have been different if John Wilkes Booth had failed. And now Jeff Greenfield asks us, how would the world have been different if Gore had beaten Bush back in 2000?

Well, I bet it would have been a different place and a different story, and it came very close to that. I personally remember that battle and was deeply intrigued by Greenfield’s premise. Soon, he was glued to my Kindle reading his book. Here’s just a small sample from the Kindle site, to whet your appetite without revealing anything to spoil the story:

“At 5:00 pm on September 11, 2001, President Al Gore, his face ashen but serene, entered the East Room of the White House to deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former Presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as Texas Governor George W. Bush, flew to Washington from Dallas on a military jet, his first return visit to the capital after the close race that saw him lose the presidency just months earlier.

Isn’t that how you remember it?

Imagine if the 2000 presidential election had turned out differently and Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush to become the 43rd president of the United States. How could events have developed? Would Osama bin Laden have become so important? Would the September 11 attacks have been worse? Would we have invaded Iraq? Would the economy have plunged into a recession? “

Some readers will recall, in that pre-e-book era, that Jeff Greenfield wrote a master book Then Everything Changed, Impressive Alternate Histories Of American Politics, published by Putnam in 2011 using “dead tree technology” (ie it was a paper book where you had to turn the pages, remember that?). “Speculation is not history, but it is a trap for experts like Jeff Greenfield,” he wrote. Editor’s Weekly Out of that effort, a book that created a new side activity for the talented Greenfield to add to the daily work of analyzing real-time news on live television.

It is Greenfield’s work as a 30-year-old journalist, in fact, that gives his complex alternative stories plausibility. I imagine that in this genre, if readers don’t immediately get that sense of verisimilitude, all is lost, but it is precisely the genius of Greenfield’s plot that creates scenarios that seem true and I often found myself reading the current winner. of Greenfield. , 43-When Gore beat Bush, a political fable, that Greenfield’s version of the story actually seemed more plausible for me that the story that I personally remembered being awake and alive and watching television 13 years ago.

It would be unfair to both Greenfield and the potential readers of this little gem to say much more about the story. Just remember, Jeff Greenfield has been covering Beltline politics since the 1980s, and he’s a very cool, calm, collected, and analytical guy. He doesn’t have to ask you to “suspend your disbelief”, borrowing John Gardner’s term for that required act when you voluntarily enter someone else’s fictional world. Greenfield just gets you and you’re a believer. In fact, his fictional version of the story seems all too real.

43-When Gore beat Bush, a political fable It is available on the Amazon website. This is a short book, not a complete novel, maybe around 100 pages of “dead tree” material, to me that amounts to a very long one night reading where I burn the midnight oil, or a two night reading. . If I behave myself and turn off the lights at a reasonable time.

Jeff Greenfield, one of America’s most respected political analysts, has spent more than thirty years on network television, including as a commentator on CNN, ABC News, and CBS and currently as a presenter on PBS’s. I need to know. Winner of five Emmy Awards, he is a political columnist for Yahoo News and the author of more than a dozen books. He divides his time between New York and Santa Barbara.