Review: All The Presidents' Pets, by Mo Rocca

[erinptah]

Things I Did Not Know: former TDS correspondent Mo Rocca's compilation of fake information about White Houses, All The Presidents' Pets, is actual writing. It's not loosely organized bits of cleverness spiced up with graphics and font choices (in the vein of TDS writer Rob Kutner's Apocalypse Howe), nor even an almanac with encyclopedia entries broken up by charts (as in the Hodgman compendium of Complete World Knowledge). It's a narrative. It's a full fictional story, recounted in the first person.

It's also RPF.

Not just about the eponymous presidents, either. Mo's journey takes him to meet all sorts of contemporary pundits and newspeople, in deeply cracky incarnations. (Also surprisingly violent at points, so fair warning.) For instance, Wolf Blitzer:

The door opened and immediately the smile warmed me. In his dragon-patterned kimono, Wolf was the personification of peace.

"Mo-san," he sighed, opening the screen door with one arm, embracing me with the other, then ushering me inside in one gentle fluid motion. I'd forgotten the sensation of tatami under my feet. "Forgive my informal appearance," Wolf said. He was wearing the cotton yukata kimono, rather than the more formal silk one. "I've just come from a very hot bath."

It's not all gen, either, as we find out at a conference with press secretary Scott McClellan:

A gasp came from the back corner. Everyone turned and saw a red-faced Joe Klein (Time magazine) pulling away from Andrea Mitchell's grasp. Scott raised an eyebrow: "The President would like to advise the chairman of the Fed to spend less time watching the markets and more time watching his wife."

Later in the same scene:

After a few halfhearted questions about the President's forthcoming appearance on The Tonight Show--"Is the president afraid of getting 'Jay-walked'?"--Helen raised her hand. With the biggest sneer he could muster, Scott called on her: "Yes, Helen?"

"Why has the President refused to demand an explanation for Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf's acquiescence to continued incursions by Pakistani militants into Indian-controlled Kashmir?"

"Loser," coughed NPR's Nina Totenberg under her breath. Kate Snow cackled when David Gregory mimicked Helen from behind her.

That's the legendary Helen Thomas, naturally. She's the one who cues Mo into the big secret: how Presidential pets are the ones that have been secretly running the White House since the beginning. Her own heavily-censored report about how JFK's dogs averted the Cuban Missile Crisis starts Mo on his thorough investigation.

Although first he goes out to eat with Hannity, Colmes, Candy Crowley, and Ann Coulter. Coulter gets into a barfight with a waitress wearing a Kerry button. As you do.

Cue one of the weirder hurt/comfort scenes any fiction for these people has ever produced:

"Take a deep breath. You're hysterical," Helen said.

I'd made my way back to her lair; I'm not sure why. Something told me she'd give me perspective. But first I needed to be talked down. I was hyperventilating.

"And Ann was so angry and Candy had a gun and the waitress's flesh was burning and Colmes was just bleeding everywhere." My voice started to crack. "Oh, Helen--"

Helen pulled my head to her breast and dabbed it with a cold compress. "There, there, Colmes'll be fine. The truth is, he likes getting roughed up. That's his job." Helen was so motherly and I didn't want to reject her, but pressed up against her like that, my nose immediately began itching. Was there a cat somewhere? I backed off as I let out a big sneeze.

Of course Helen Thomas has a lair. (The entrance is through her desk, which is possibly also a TARDIS. This is where she keeps all her secret White House pet information.)

She eventually calms Mo down with an example of historical partisanship getting just as vicious. This particular example is a secret transcription of a session of eighteenth-century Crossfire, involving John Adams' bulldog and Thomas Jefferson's Briard sheepdog. Next she prepares him for an upcoming press conference on immigration...by giving a one-woman performance of a children's book about how Rutherford B. Hayes' Siamese cat inspired the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It involves dancing. And singing in Thai.

Mo's allergic reaction, by the way, is related to the way Helen was coughing up muskrat bones earlier:

It turns out she's a thunderbird.

...okay, it actually says she's a 200-year-old turkey buzzard. Who got to Washington by traveling with Sacagawea, and has been secretly documenting the influence of White House animals ever since. But at this point we're getting so Hodgmanesque that I'm pretty sure this is code for thunderbird.

"No, Mo. My story can never be told. In fact, no one can know the truth about me. It could endanger all of this." Again she indicated her archives. "You must keep this secret and anything else I tell you, at least for now. Right now just listen and learn. This story is big--bigger than a single President and his dog, cat, bobcat, or giraffe."

"Giraffe? Who had a giraffe?"

"Chet Arthur. It was just an overnight guest. He was a strange guy. But that's not my point. My point is, you must be careful."

Helen looked so scared. In such a short time we'd come so far. I instinctively reached out and grabbed her claw.

"Of course, Helen, your secret is safe with me."

Mo falls asleep in Helen's place.

The next morning, he has a conversation about the origin of the influence of Presidential pets...with Mr. Peabody, because apparently this is a Rocky & Bullwinkle crossover now.

So then there's a whole plot about Bush's dog Barney having rickets, a rumor which gets spread when Bob Novak prints it in his column after hearing it from an unnamed source. And Barney tries to sneak some information to Mo during a press dinner. After learning of a possible conspiracy involving Clinton's various dogs and cat, Mo corners Clinton adviser Dick Morris at a spa to interrogate him in a mud bath.

Naturally, this tactic of approaching humans doesn't get him very far; it's up to Helen and Mr. Peabody to provide Mo with a firsthand (firstpaw?) memoir of the era by Socks the cat to fill him in. (Mo and Peabody have developed a weird rivalry for Helen's favor by this point.) Then things begin to fall into place with more information about FDR's dog, Fala:

"I want you to have something [said Helen]. No one--not even Mr. Peabody--knows I possess it. There is something known as the Fala Grail. There are three parts. The first is Fala's dog bowl."

"Is that what Socks was referring to in his book?"

"That's right. The second is Fala's dog collar. We don't know where that is." Then she moved over to the Houdon bust of herself. "The third is his favorite chew toy."

Helen carefully lifted the bust and pulled out a chewed-up plastic Pinocchio toy. She placed it in my hand.

[...]

"Those radicals around the President--those who oppose the humane counsel of the 'sacred animal'--believe that if they can obtain all three parts, they can once and for all assume the power and confidence that Fala had."

Not long after this, Mo stumbles upon a secret arcane Da-Vinci-Code-esque ceremony involving Scott McClellan, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and Ari Fleischer, and Fala's bowl and dog collar. McClellan ends up drinking from the bowl and wearing the collar. (This isn't supposed to be kinkfic...I think....)

Our hero flees, looking to his other friends for protection. Sadly, by this point he's gotten so weird in the press room that they've all abandoned him. In particular, Wolf Blitzer has decided to abandon Mo as a kendo student and take on Anderson Cooper instead.

Mo stumbles through Washington, dodging Condi Rice (doing her early-morning rappel down the Washington Monument) and Ann Coulter (hiking homeward, barefoot, with Hannity and Colmes following behind her carrying her high heels). He finds comfort and solace in the Lincoln Memorial...where the statue starts talking, gives Mo some spiritual advice (with the help of his own pets, a pair of goats), and then gets taken over by the shade of Richard Nixon with the help of his pets, then gets knocked into the Reflecting Pool for someone to steal the mystical chew toy....

Finally Mo runs back to Helen, which he really should have done in the first place.

Turns out Helen has a dark secret (aside from, you know, being a giant talking bird) which is keeping her from going public herself about the conspiracy against presidential pets in general, and Barney in particular. Mo drags her to the WHCD, in the hopes that they can find someone to help spread the word. (The dinner entertainment is a revue, involving Fox newsanchors doing epic chorus numbers in sparky sequins.)

There's a big throwdown. There's a shocking betrayal. Someone on FOX turns out to be a cyborg. Wolf Blitzer takes out his attackers with roundhouse kicks. A sinkhole opens in the ground and swallows Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden. Condi Rice sets up barricades, breaks out the shoulder-mounted missiles, and battles the cyborg Matrix-style in a trenchcoat and sunglasses.

Then it stopped. The violence was over.

Only the cries of the injured and dying continued--along to the sweet strains of Mandy Moore's spontaneous cover of "There's Got To Be A Morning After."

CNN's Sanjay Gupta was doing all he could to administer to the wounded. (Those at the Christian Science Monitor table politely refused treatment.)

"--eeeeeeeeeet," finished screaming Dick Morris. Out of breath, he simply whimpered.

His bald head beaded with sweat, James Carville just muttered. "The horror. The horror."

In the end it's Barney who blows the conspiracy out of the water by hopping up to the WHCD microphone and explaining that pets have major influence in the White House (and, you know, can talk in the first place), and are in need of public awareness and protection.

I was not actually tracking this carefully enough to know if all the plot points were resolved, or even remembered. But that's not the point. The point is, everyone who didn't die in the battle lives happily ever after. The end!

Since this is the paperback edition, it was published after the people involved had a chance to react to the hardcover. I can't think of any better way to end this post than with some choice quotes from the afterword:

As you've read in these pages, Alan Colmes barely recovered from a violent attack at a D.C.-area Outback Steakhouse--before appearing with Sean Hannity, both in tramp outfits, and performing the "Couple of Swells" number from MGM's Easter Parade. After All The Presidents' Pets was published, I appeared on their show and yukked it up.

It was almost as if they hadn't read my book.

[...]

I ran into Helen at the 2004 Republican National Convention. (My author title had lent me the gravitas necessary for covering both conventions for Larry King Live.) I had sent Helen an early copy of the book. Considering her role in it, I just knew she was going to devour it, or at the very least pick through it. (That's not a turkey buzzard joke.)

I had never met Helen before, so I was quite nervous. I introduced myself: "I'm Mo Rocca and I'm so honored to meet you."

She looked at me almost blankly. And then she nodded.

"Oh yes," she said. "You're the guy on I Love the 80's."