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 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. ( )