DRIFT

About the Book

A Cautionary Note Ron Means, the author of DRIFT, advises his readers to turn to his new book: ON the Way to a Coup d´Etat: The Shock of President Millwright. This new novel is a more tensely dramatic, faster moving story than DRIFT. DRIFT is narrated from the point of view of a 22nd Century British historian. It is an experiment in fictional history. It is told as an historian would tell it: in chronological order, with references to sources, with an analytic stress on context. The underlying story in On the Way to a Coup d´Etat....is partly the same as in DRIFT, but it has been transmuted into a gripping reader friendly novel. The historian narrator is banished; the blatantly obvious experiment in fictional history is put aside: the story is cut, abridged, rewritten, and enlarged with fresh characters and several surprising events. Most readers will prefer On the Way to a Coup d´Etat....to DRIFT. DRIFT Described James Smith, complex, energetic, and ambitious, has been shaped by his upbringing in a tightly knit, culturally rich, lower middle class family on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He meets Ann Price, his future First Lady, at Michigan State. She helps him reconcile his love of the humanities, particularly history, with his determination to become a successful corporate manager. They marry and raise a family. In spite of his physical limitations and idiosyncrasies James Smith proves to be an exceptionally capable and creative executive. He becomes a CEO. He turns two companies around. Meanwhile, Ann teaches English in a public high school; earns her Ph.D.; becomes a teacher of teachers, a writer, and a controversial leader in education. Smith is drafted by a newly elected President to turn around a cabinet department in hopeless disarray. An ingenious domestic nutcase plants explosives that destroy the President and everyone in the line of succession down to little James Smith. He is propelled into the Presidency and into the national hysteria precipitated by that murderous event. Determined not to turn the country over to the newly chosen, unscrupulous, Speaker of the House, Smith refuses to resign in spite of excruciating pressures from the Speaker, a generally hostile Media, and a badly frightened public. Deeply shaken, depressed, and plagued by uncertainties, President Smith forges ahead to put his administration in place. After awhile, in a strange epiphany, he recognizes his independence, his freedom to be himself, his extraordinary opportunity. He moves ahead with determination to fight for a visionary agenda that addresses the diseased political culture which surrounds him, and which seeks to move his country into a more promising future. Meanwhile, he tries hard to act Presidential to overcome his lack of charisma, his high squeaky voice, his peculiar mannerisms, and other limitations. Woven through his proposals for change is the living reality of his Presidency: the Speaker’s nefarious plotting to get rid of him; the reactions to what he says and does of writers, commentators, historians, cartoonists, and ordinary citizens. Ann Price Smith, the spirited First Lady, is tall and attractive, in sharp contrast to her husband. A natural leader in her own right she is Smith´s closest friend, loyal advocate, and a partner in a lifelong conversation which is both whimsical and serious. Smith describes her in his Memoirs: My wife is a volatile personality, but she is and always has been even tempered and predictable in her relations with me, with our children, and with everyone else who has known her well. But in spite of her helpful patience with her family, her students, and her colleagues, she hates hypocrisy and deceit. When lied to, condescended to, or otherwise confronted by such aggravations, she gets angry fast. Though her reddish hair doesn’t really stand on end as some of our critics have claimed, she can lower

About the Author

Ron Means built the Michigan Council for the Humanities from the ground up, guiding the development of its numerous programs. For 25 years he served as the Council’s Executive Director. Meeting frequently with members of Congress and those in other Federal agencies, over many years, “left me with a thick catalogue of impressions, regarding the local fauna.” He is a lifelong observer of American culture, politics, and economic policies. As his protagonist, James Millwright says, “I would chuck every label if I could and drive a stake into the heart of every ideology.”