No Way to Treat a First Lady
Christopher Buckley writes some of the best satire being published these days. Thank You for Smoking explored advertising and Little Green Men dealt with UFOs and TV's talking heads. In No Way to Treat a First Lady, Buckley's targets lawyers and the legal system and scores a bull's eye.
Controversial First Lady Elizabeth Tyler MacMann (picture Hilary Clinton as a knockout) shares the White House with her philandering war hero husband, President Ken MacMann (think Bill Clinton and John McCain). One night the President slips back into his bedroom after a few hours of bliss with an actress who is staying in the Lincoln bedroom. The First Lady knows the 'raccoon' look on her husband's face and, in her fury, hurls a Paul Revere spittoon at him. Though the spittoon strikes the Presidential skull, he seems OK and climbs into bed. The next morning the President is found dead in bed with a bruised forehead. The First Lady-now Lady BethMac in the tabloids-is accused of murder and the 'trial of the millennium' is set to go.
To defend her, Beth MacMann hires the best trial lawyer in America, Boyce 'Shameless' Baylor, to whom she had been engaged when they were both law students at Georgetown. When Beth MacMann says! she just wants to tell the truth during her trial, Baylor replies that 'The truth has no place in a court of law.' What follows is a tale with more twists than a Chubby Checker song. Buckley brings in the FBI, the Secret Service, the National Security Agency, White House staff, Latin American revolutionaries, and a spy for the Chinese. Even John Oliver Banion, the hero of Little Green Men, makes a cameo appearance.
It's often easy to figure out the people on whom Buckley's characters are based. There is talk, for instance, in the novel about a case in which lawyers Alan Crudman, Barry Strutt, and Lee Vermann defend a famous client named J. J. Bronco. If this doesn't remind you of a real murder trial in which lawyers Alan Dershowitz, Barry Scheck, and F. Lee Bailey defended a client also known by his first two initials, who took a ride in an SUV (get it? Bronco?)--close the book.No Way to Treat a First Lady is a funny, often times racy, tour de force.