Tom Fool

''Yes, it was a crusade. But just what was it the people out there feared and hated so much? Not surely the candidate. He was a decent man. Or was that it?''

With Tom Fool (1962) David Stacton concluded a triptych of novels drawn from the history of America. For this final panel he turned his eye on politics. The titular protagonist is a fictional rendering of Wendell Wilkie, unlikely Republican challenger to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940. As ''Tom Fool'' endures an epic campaigning tour of thirty-one states - assisted (or dogged) by his political advisor ''Sideboard'' and husband-and-wife PR consultants the Pattersons - he finds himself uncomfortably reminded that America, in its vastness and contradictions, is more than one country, and a unique conundrum to one who would be President.