Eugene Burdick (1918–1965)

This is an very tense nuclear stand-off thriller published and made into a film (which I have seen several times) at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s. In sum, there is a precautionary stationing of US aircraft at their Fail-Safe points in the world when an unidentified plane appears on radars. This turns out to be a commercial aircraft that had lost power. However, due to a technical failure when the aircraft are recalled, one small group of the planes flies past its Fail-Safe show more point towards Soviet territory, and cannot be recalled. Eventually, the President has to send fighter planes to try to shoot them down before they enter Soviet airspace in what would be seen as an act of war, and contact the Soviet leader to try to convince him this is a genuine accident. Interestingly, the Soviet leader is clearly identified as the real one of the time, Nikita Khrushchev, while the US President is not named even fictionally (played in the film by Henry Fonda as a very liberal President).

I don’t want to give precise spoilers here but the whole incident spirals out of control and results in a tragic conclusion for both the US and the Soviet Union, due to misunderstandings, with no malice intended by either side. It is a very powerful novel, and the second half, and especially the last few chapters, packs a real emotional punch and makes one think. The first half, on the other hand, was rather slow, with several lengthy digressions into the backstory of some of the characters, for example as they walk into a room for a meeting, which took me out of the narrative flow too much. It is probably this feature that makes me think that this is one of the fairly rare cases where the film is somewhat better than the book in terms of its flow. Sadly the film seems to have sunk without trace due to having been released at more or less the same time as the similarly themed Dr Strangelove. But both book and film are well worth seeking out. show less

Yes, a how-to, and how-not-to, manual for winning hearts and minds in the Cold War, but the important point is that it was a brilliant inspiration to present it as a series of fictional vignettes. A genuine manual, or a non-fiction analysis, might have sold a few thousand copies and gathered dust in university libraries; The Ugly American was a multi-million copy bestseller which apparently remains in print. It had significant impact on politicians at the time. A concrete example of its own show more pragmatic philosophy. Cleverly conceived and entertainingly written. No need to be an admirer of American Imperialism to appreciate the authors' strategic approach. show less

A connected collection of vignettes, all centered around the fictional Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan and the Americans stationed there by the US government. I honestly didn't think I'd enjoy this one at all, because war and politics are very much not my reading jam, generally. But these stories are so well told, the characters so well drawn, and the point of the authors so well made that, in fact, I loved it. I never would have picked it up had the book not been on the list of banned show more books I've been working through for ages. It was banned for political reasons, and it's not difficult to see why: Lederer and Burdick wrote the thing to draw attention to the ridiculous attitudes Americans had toward the people in SE Asia, their self-isolation once stationed there (all-US cocktail parties and only shopping at the commissaries and such), and the buffoonery of the official decisions and (in)actions that resulted. Very readable and still relevant. show less

This book is more than 50 years old, published in 1964 before ISBN numbers existed. I have a hardback copy purchased in 1968 for $1 and never read, until now. I pulled it off my basement shelf when I received a Christmas gift of Jill Lepore's 2020 If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. Jill Lepore's book has an entire chapter on Burdick and another describing The 480 with lots of background. Some of my review is based on info I learned reading If Then.

Eugene Burdick show more had two previous novels in the tradition of muckrakers like Sinclair Lewis. Both became run away best sellers and major motion pictures : The Ugly American starring Marlon Brando and Fail Safe starring Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau. While the movie rights for The 480 were quickly bought up and a film to be called The Candidate was actively worked on it was never made. Robert Redford's 1972 movie The Candidate is not The 480 even though it deals with similar material.

Like Burdick's previous works The 480 was his attempt to warn us of a major problem but to do it in the form of a novel. The villains we needed to be warned about were computers taking over politics. Burdick was a Rhodes scholar, Stanford educated political scientist, Berkeley professor and one of the first employees of Simulmatics. He was well aware that Simulmatics and Ithiel de sola Pool worked with John Kennedy's 1960 campaign, urging, among others, that Kennedy take on the religion question directly. Working on the side of the good guys was no problem but Burdick saw the possibility of the power of the computer and behavioral scientists being just as easily working for the dark side. As the 1964 election approached Burdick got to work. The plot was the Republicans looking for a sacrificial lamb to face the unbeatable incumbent. The assassination caused a rewrite but the basic message was still that scheming political pols could fill an empty vessel of a popular but apolitical candidate with ideas picked by the computer. Without existing ideals and philosophies to provide guardrails or restraints the computer guys would have free reign. Selling the soul to the new Satan seemed the slippery slope.

Burdick dreamed up a dream candidate, an engineer raised by missionaries overseas who faced down communists and terrorists. He skyrockets to popularity but would never consider politics unless drafted. Cleaver political pols, using the dastardly computer, engineer the draft in the good old days of deadlocked conventions. Of course he's drafted but that's as far as this goes, we never learn whether he wins. The arc is all Burdick needed for his message. Burdick knew that concentrating on the computer would lose the reader's attention. He briefly described where the name came from. The population of the U.S. was broken into 480 different demographic groups. Group #1 was Democrat, Eastern, Protestant, Rural. Professional & White Collar. Group #480 was Independent, Border states, No religion. The rest were all the permutations between the two. Burdick never explained what Simulmatics really did with those groups, that really wasn't the point. The point was here were seeds that evil types could cultivate.

So far so good. The 480 was a great human interest story combined with some reliance on new fangled computers. Once the screenwriters took over the human interest story came to the front and that difficult to understand computer got eliminated. Burdick cried foul and the standoff killed the movie and probably explains why I found a copy on the remainder table. As a young political scientist I bought the book but never read it until Jill Lepore pointed to Simulmatics and The 480. show less