She stoops to conquer

Christopher Buckley is, to borrow Major Bagstock’s self-assessment in Charles Dickens’ “Dombey and Son,” a devilishly intelligent fellow. In his bestseller “Thank You for Smoking,” Buckley mocked the pieties of political correctness. Now, in his novel “No Way to Treat a First Lady,” Buckley has surpassed himself. He has become a presidential historian. The result isn’t humorous; it’s hilarious.

The Clinton presidency might seem beyond parody. But Buckley offers something even wackier: a parallel universe in which Hillary Rodham Clinton is fondly remembered as a meek tea-serving first lady. It is First Lady Elizabeth Tyler MacMann who is loathed for her grasping ambition by a public only too ready to believe the worst of her. The trial of the century results when she is accused of using a historic Paul Revere spittoon to assassinate her philandering husband, President Ken MacMann. Our story opens with President MacMann in the Lincoln Bedroom, grunting and wheezing on top of his favorite mistress, Babette Van Anka, Hollywood starlet, singer and activist. Afterward, after immersing the presidential member -- still raring to go, thanks to a solution of Viagra -- in an ice-cold carafe of water, MacMann returns to his own bedroom, but his dissimulatory efforts are most unavailing. Beth is not fooled; an argument ensues; next morning, the president is found dead.

“Beth,” as the first lady is known, has no choice but to turn to her jilted lover and the country’s leading trial attorney, Boyce “Shameless” Baylor. A canny self-promoter, Baylor leaks the news of their first meeting so that hundreds of TV cameras and reporters can film him outside his Manhattan office waiting to meet her: “[M]aybe -- just maybe -- to make his revenge perfect, he would deliberately lose this one. But so subtly that even the Harvard Law bow-tie brigade would hem and haw and say that no one, really, could have won this one, not even Shameless Baylor.”

But as he falls in love again with Beth, Baylor throws himself into the trial. No fewer than three connecting suites at Washington’s tony Jefferson Hotel were, Buckley reports, transformed into a command post; a television studio so that Boyce can comment live at a moment’s notice; a fitness and meditation center complete with oxygen tank; and, most important, a ground zero room that is immune to bugging. For Boyce’s audacious thesis isn’t simply that Beth is innocent. It’s that a vengeful Secret Service and FBI agent found the president dead and embossed his forehead with the fateful Paul Revere mark to inculpate Lady Beth Mac, as she was known among the White House staff.

Although the narrative starts to careen out of control once Buckley has Baylor impregnating the first lady and getting mixed up with shady Central Americans, Buckley’s sheer verve makes up for such lapses. In one courtroom scene, an FBI agent testifies that he discovered Beth vomiting in the bathroom after her husband’s death. “The TV commentary that night,” Buckley writes, “featured detailed analysis by criminologists, gastroenterologists and psychologists on the subject of vomiting in general and whether doing it in the presence of law enforcement is a reliable indicator of guilt.” Buckley sews up the narrative by letting Beth go free because--no, it would be wrong to give away the ending. Suffice to say, President MacMann’s poor vice president, Harold Farkey, loses the election to an opponent whose first piece of legislation is the Lincoln Bedroom Protection Act.

Unlike Henry Adams, whose “Democracy” created the genre of the Washington novel, Buckley does not seek to evoke consternation about the fall of the American republic. On the contrary, “No Way to Treat a First Lady” is really a nostalgic paean to the antics of the Clinton administration. No scolding moralist intent on discovering broader lessons in the president’s indiscretions, Buckley revels in the buzz and spin control efforts of the president’s janizaries and lawyers, reproducing them word for word with uncanny fidelity.

No doubt Clinton’s legacy will continue to be debated, with the revisionists arguing that he was really, as Joe Klein put it in his book, “a natural.” If Clinton was hardly the most successful of presidents, he was surely one of the most entertaining. Perhaps Buckley, in his bemusement at both right and left with the media and lawyers in between, has written the most discerning social history of the Clinton era that will ever appear. It is a feat that will be difficult to replicate. So let us declare: a memorial Paul Revere spittoon to be awarded, whenever appropriate, to the presidential historian who strives to match this heroic and pioneering effort.