Power corrupts? Absolutely

Thriller writer David Baldacci’s case history offers plenty of solace for any struggling novelist. He may be one of the biggest selling authors on the planet (40 million and counting), and all his titles – including the current Simple Genius and forthcoming Stone Cold – offer masterclasses in brisk storytelling skill, strong characterisation and a pleasingly lean style – but success didn’t come easy.
The Virginia-born writer practised law near Washington DC for nine years while submitting short stories and screenplays without even a whiff of success. Having all but given up hope of ever being published, he spent three years writing his first novel, Absolute Power (1996), which then took another two to sell.
“I’d gotten so many rejections from so many different people, I thought about changing my name to ‘Rejection’ Baldacci,” the author chuckles, sipping coffee in the Merrion Hotel. “Seriously, I just thought, ‘It’s not gonna happen’. I got to the point in 1994 or ’95 where I had this script that everybody seemed to love and I thought it was going to sell for a lot of money, but in the end the studios passed on it, none of my short stories had sold, and I just thought, ‘Well, y’know, writing is just going to be a hobby for you’. And a year later I finished Absolute Power, which I’d been working on for several years, so my expectations were firmly on the ground. But I sent it out to some agents and the response was very positive, they loved the book.
“Absolute Power was set in a town I knew very well, in Washington – the White House was just a few blocks from my lawn. I really felt like I had a good handle on the subject matter, and I wanted the story to be something different, because typically Washington novels are all told from the insider’s point of view, like The West Wing – a great show, but it’s all about the people in power dictating everything. And I made my major protagonist a burglar, who is in the wrong place in the wrong time.”
Having had so many screenplays rejected, Baldacci found himself in the unlikely situation of his first novel being adapted for a Clint Eastwood vehicle by screenwriting legend William Goldman (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men, The Princess Bride).
“It was funny, he called me up one day and he said, ‘I’ve got some great news for you and I’ve got some bad news for you’,” Baldacci recalls. “And I asked him what the great news was, and he said, ‘The great news is Clint Eastwood, iconic filmaker, has just signed on to star in, produce and direct Absolute Power and the studio has greenlighted the project’. So I said, ‘That is fantastic, what’s the bad news?’ And he said, ‘The bad news is that legendary filmmaker Clint Eastwood has signed on to star in, produce and direct the movie. I’m afraid your book’s gone’.”
Well, if only a modicum of the novel survived to see the big screen, at least he got the courtesy call.
“That’s what I thought too. I never forgot that, and I’ve always held him in high esteem for it. He could’ve said, ‘Screw you, go, buy your own ticket and go see the movie’. It’s a vicious place, I don’t know how anything gets done out there.”
These days, Baldacci is a well connected man. He currently serves as a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and has established his own Wish You Well literacy foundation. His cousin John Baldacci is the Democrat governor of Maine. Bill Clinton, in the throes of Zippergate, selected The Simple Truth as his favourite book of 1999. Many of the novels, unsurprisingly, offer an insider’s view of the corridors of power; Baldacci cultivates contacts in the Secret Service, the National Security Agency and various branches of the military-industrial complex.
“I work that angle, those relationships, really hard,” he admits. “You would be hard put to name an agency I don’t know somebody in. But even more than that, a lot of the people have moved to other agencies or retired, and I found the people who are retired are more amenable to talk about some things. I’ve never asked them to give me classified information, and if they ever say, ‘I’ll tell you this but it can’t ever make it into the book’, it never does, but that’s why I like to do all the research myself, I like to interview one-on-one where I can read the body cues. Somebody can say something, and the words can mean one thing, but if you see the way they’re saying it, a whole story comes about. Sometimes the more arduously they will deny something, the more I know that it’s absolutely true. It’s just the mentality that they have. You have been indoctrinated, you’re a public servant and you can never reveal any of this, because you may be asked to do things that looked at from one context might seem inappropriate, but in the grand scheme of what your agency is trying to accomplish in protecting your country, it is appropriate.”
Chilling words. And certainly, a lot of those old warhorses put out to pasture make for powerful characters in dramas and documentaries. One thinks of former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in The Fog Of War, or the Donald Sutherland character in JFK. Such veterans share a need to make some sort of testimony and impart the terrible knowledge they’ve acquired.
“See, that’s the rub right there,” Baldacci says. “They do. I think every human being comes to a point where they think they recognise right and wrong, and the older you get the more you want some sort of peace with yourself, and at the end of your life it gets to the point where you think, ‘I want to tell people what I know, just to make it right with myself. My time is over’. And I find that a lot with people who have left the agencies and have done some things that they probably regret. This game is played for all it’s worth, the stakes couldn’t be higher. I’ve found out as a lawyer and as a writer that human beings, given the right circumstances, and the ends they want to achieve, can justify any action. Any action.”
One never knows whether conspiracy theorists believe too much or not enough.
“I know. When I was writing The Camel Club series, I started looking at a lot of conspiracy theories out there, many of which have been proven to be true. I know there was one guy who used to work at the Department of Defence back in the ’60s. Now he’s a regular dad, he has a kid at my kids’ school, they play sports together. And he would go out to Area 51 in New Mexico regularly, he knew all the stuff that was there. And they were always sworn to secrecy. And in the ’70s when the Air Force admitted that Area 51 did indeed exist, before they made a public announcement, they sent everybody who had ever been there, including my friend, a memo saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to make this public knowledge, you can talk about the fact that you’ve been to Area 51’. And my friend was like, ‘I’ve been telling people about this for decades! I just thought it was just too good!’ So you get people like that as well. But when you have a government that has millions of little components, nearly unlimited funds, and this goal of doing something, it’s absolutely amazing the stuff that goes on. You pass by places you think are little farms set in rural areas and if you try to get near the farm you’re gonna get shot, ’cos inside is a satellite electronic eavesdropping system that’s been there for 10 years.
“The book I’m working on for next year is about the military industrial complex. There’s half a trillion dollars a year spent on defence in the United States, more than every other country in the world combined, and the defence industry probably employs about 40 million people. The companies are very savvy about it, some of the delivery systems are built in all 50 states, so if anybody ever wanted to cancel one of them, every Congressman in all 50 states would say, ‘Hell no, this project provides 4,000 jobs in my State’. And they have these huge trade shows where all the Pentagon people come, and in the Superbowl or the World Cup or Cricket Championships you have jets flown over and everybody’s patriotic and it’s all great – and then these companies go out and they charge 12 million dollars for a toilet seat. It’s a great business to be in, because your customer will always overpay you for your product, you’re always going to be over budget, and you’re always going to be behind on schedule, and they’re going to keep employing you year after year. People come and people go, but it’s always there. The machine endures.”

Simple Genius is published by MacMillan. Stone Cold will be out in October.