The Gathering Norm

NIGHT OF CAMP DAVID by Fletcher Knebel. 336 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Having dissolved his bestselling co-authorship with Charles W. Bailey II (Seven Days in May, Convention), in this novel Author Knebel sets out alone into the well-trampled shrubbery of Washington. That way lies, literally, madness. President Mark Hollenbach, after three brilliant years in the White House, begins to develop some peculiar ideas. Convinced that a mysterious "they" are out to get him, he wants to throw an F.B.I, wiretap on every single telephone conversation in the U.S., to be taped and stored in computers, so he can spot conspiracies against himself. He conceives of a grand union of the U.S. with Canada and Scandinavia, whose first President will be, of course, Hollenbach, who will then seize the rest of Europe by force.

In two weird night sessions at Camp David, the President discloses his grand design to his choice for running mate in the next election, Hero Jim MacVeagh, the junior Senator from Iowa. MacVeagh realizes the President is mad. Trouble is, in the light of day the President seems as normal as the next man, and thereby hangs MacVeagh's dilemma--and Knebel's tale. How to convince anybody else in official Washington of so horrendous a truth? As a Pentagon general remarks: "Nobody --but nobody--in this country can tell a President of the United States that his mind is sick." The result is melo drama at its best and worst: once begun, hard to put down; once finished, easily forgotten.

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