THE REPUBLIC
THEY SAID IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN. NOT IN AMERICA. THEY WERE WRONG. When political parties view each other as evil, when compromise becomes impossible, the republic dies, and the Constitution dies with it. My father, my hero, was going to lead our nation with moral character and West Point inspired standards. When “inspired” became literal, and all opposition was destroyed, I had to chronicle what really happened or the world would never know the truth. My father’s entire life in the United States Army was predicated on one man giving an order and everyone else following it. He wasn’t a “threat to democracy”—he was an enigmatic fact. And he needed to be stopped.
FROM THE AUTHOR | DAVID MCKENNA
I’ve often been fascinated by dictators. Not the sordid murderous actions they take, but who these men are as people and how they rise to such astounding heights. Their personalities, their motivations, their commitment to their purpose, their decision making—it’s all so strangely intriguing to me as a writer.
Five years ago, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. I took vociferous notes in the margins of my copy, hoping to someday pen a limited series on it. Not long after, I read the dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. In it Lewis depicts a fictionalized U.S. in 1936, wherein a fascist dictator becomes President. That’s when the lightbulb went off in my head. With all the craziness happening in today’s America (and the world for that matter), I felt compelled to write my first novel.
It did not come easy for me. Screenplays and books are two totally different animals. However, I stayed the course knowing that I had an important story to tell, and that on the other side of this daunting task would be a sense of achievement I had never experienced. When you write a screenplay, very few people ever read your work. At most, it’s a few hundred people—and that only happens if the script gets produced! What excited me most about writing a book was the notion that The Republic could potentially be read and enjoyed by everyone.