Jake Tapper imagines what would happen if Evel Knievel ran for president
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This is 1977 — or at least, as Jake Tapper presents it in his new novel, “All the Demons Are Here.” The first two thrillers by CNN’s lead Washington anchor, “The Hellfire Club” and “The Devil May Dance,” followed a young politician, Charlie Marder, and his zoologist wife, Margaret, through the 1950s and ’60s, their paths crossing with the Rat Pack and presidents alike.
This latest book is about the next generation of Marders: Ike, a veteran of a botched military operation in Lebanon, has lit out to Montana to join the crew of daredevil stunt performer Evel Knievel. Meanwhile, Ike’s sister Lucy has started working at an upstart, right-leaning Washington tabloid, reporting on a string of murders — and starting to suspect that the family that owns the paper is not all that it seems. These plotlines eventually converge, offering a warped-mirror vision of American politics today: “Call it a cautionary tale,” one character says.
I spoke to Tapper about playing with history in his fiction, balancing the novelist and journalist in him, and more. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: I read that you initially wanted to skip past the 1970s in these novels. Why was that? What turned you off about that decade, and what got you interested in it again?
A: I actually lived through the ’70s, as opposed to the ’50s and ’60s, which I wrote about in my first books. And look, I was a kid — I was born in ’69 — but what I remember from the ’70s was gas lines and the hostage crisis and malaise and Elvis dying. I was fine as a kid — I was playing superheroes and reading comic books and watching baseball. But I just didn’t remember it as all that exciting of a decade. It is kind of a bummer. That was the word used at the time.
Some older friends, people who had lived through it as adults, told me I was all wrong. And I looked into it, and they were right. There was a lot more going on than what I remembered. There were discothèques and a lot of excitement in a lot of ways, some bad — like the “Summer of Sam,” which I don’t remember at all because I guess my parents hid that from me. And there were some other things going on in the world that seemed really resonant and relevant to today.
Q: Some writers, when they approach historical fiction, want it to seem as strange and fresh as possible — but in this novel, and your previous ones, you embrace people drawing parallels between then and now. How do you balance drawing on the resonances that you’re noting, between that period and now, and staying true to the period?
A: Oh, yeah. I don’t just embrace it. I wrap my arms fully around it and squeeze. That’s one of the things that’s interesting about spelunking in these caves of history: It’s seeing, “Oh, we went through this before.”
I realized this with the first book, when I was studying Joe McCarthy and about all these Republicans terrified to take him on because they were afraid of angering his base. So, yeah, I mean, the malaise that we’re in right now, the Democratic president who’s not particularly popular, the Republican Party trying to figure out how or whether to move on from the previous Republican president, all of that — it’s been said that history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. But there’s a lot of rhyming. And as a novelist, it’s fun to play with.
Evel Knievel did not actually ever run for president, as he does in this novel — but one thinks that if he had lived in an era of social media, maybe he would’ve. Evel Knievel is a precursor to Trump, in the sense that he had this real sense of showmanship and salesmanship, of being able to get media attention and being able to capture the imagination of millions of Americans. That’s real, too.
There is a quintessentially American tradition of this kind of character, whether it’s P.T. Barnum or Donald Trump or Evel Knievel. It’s just a fact, and I got to play with it.
Q: When you’re writing your novels, do you ever worry about straying, or being perceived to stray, into editorializing? Do you feel like you have to keep the journalist and novelist sides of yourself in check?
A: Well, I mean, I’m not saying Evel Knievel is Donald Trump. You know, I am telling a fictitious tale about Evel Knievel that might have some echoes with 2023. But it’s not the same thing. They’re not the same person.
Q: And you’re not saying the fictional Evel Knievel’s political platform is bad, or that his policy ideas are bad.
A: Honestly, because I think it makes better fiction, I tried to bend over backward to make Evel Knievel human. The people that follow Evel Knievel, his adherents — in some instances, they’re some of the most sympathetic people in the book; I gave some real grievances for this mob to have.
And in creating this Rupert Murdoch-esque character, Max Lyon — it’s not fun to have him twirling his mustache and just pure evil. He needs to be charming. He needs to have a point of view about why tabloid journalism is thriving that makes sense to the reader. And I think it’s important to understand that.
Q: Lucy is trying to break into the newspaper business at such an interesting moment for the D.C. press — it’s after Watergate, which has become our shorthand, our gold standard, for what political reporting can accomplish. So she’s very idealistic, but at the same time, she’s trying to make a career for herself — so she falls in with these seedy elements.
A: In a man’s world. She’s being treated like garbage, her scoops get stolen.
Q: What ideas were you trying to explore with this character?
A: So, I know more about the character of Lucy as a type than about any other character I’ve ever written about. I’m not a World War II hero. I’m not a Marine. I’m not a zoologist. Lucy is a young, aspiring journalist who wants to do good, so I really identified with her character. But at the same time, I wanted to illustrate some of the difficulties in journalism, the push and pull between wanting to succeed and wanting to learn and pay your dues, wanting to get readers, while also at the same time wanting to do serious and impactful journalism, and wanting to have good relationships with your bosses and also to not get screwed over by your bosses.
Q: In the acknowledgments, you thanked one of your editors, Christina Kovac, for helping with Lucy’s character and voice. What were the most challenging things about writing Lucy?
A: Christina was an amazing editor and also helped me credibly write a 22-year-old woman in 1977. It’s not easy for me to write a woman character — not to mention, this was the first time I’d ever written a book in first-person. There was one line in particular that she added that I thought was great, about Lucy comparing herself to her brother and saying she could do everything he could do and look better, wearing cute boots. That’s something that never would have even occurred to me, you know? Cute boots.
She offered lots of other tips having nothing to do with gender, and I don’t want that to get lost. But I’m just a big believer in: the more eyes on a product, the better. I’ve learned that the hard way as a journalist and as an author.
Q: Now that you’ve published this third novel, what do you think you’ve gotten better at, in terms of craft? And what’s remained challenging?
A: Cutting. “Killing your darlings,” as I think Faulkner once called it.
Q: It’s still hard, or it’s gotten easier?
A: It’s still hard, but it’s also necessary. There was a time where when I was writing my second book, which has Charlie and Margaret going to Hollywood to investigate the Rat Pack. Charlie is a former soldier serving under General Eisenhower, and later a fan of President Eisenhower.
As it happened, Eisenhower moved into Rancho Mirage, around where Sinatra lived, in 1962. There were all these articles from the time about how it was decorated and this and that. So I had a whole chapter of Charlie and Margaret going to the Eisenhowers’ house and talking — and then I read it and I was just like, “There is literally nothing that happens in this chapter.”
I remembered David Mamet’s rules on writing screenplays: “Who wants what? What happens if they don’t get it? And why now?” So I killed the whole chapter. And that’s painful to do because that’s like a week’s worth of work and research. But I hope that as a novelist, I have come to put the priority on the reader even more with each successive book. It’s more and more and more about the reader and bringing them pleasure, and less and less and less about whatever I’m doing.
Q: What can you tell us about the next book?
A: As of right now, I’ve written about a third to a half of the fourth one, which takes place in 1984 during the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. It takes place on a fancy cruise to Normandy where all these World War II heroes are being celebrated among paying customers and fancy captains of industry and the like. On the first night, one of the main characters, one of the figures from World War II, disappears.
Q: That’s very Agatha Christie — put everyone in one place and see what happens to them.
A: Yeah. Instead of “Death on the Nile,” it’s “Death on the Atlantic.”
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