Donald Westlake was a prolific and acclaimed American novelist best known for his crime fiction and comedic capers, including the Dortmunder series and novels written under the pseudonym Richard Stark. He won multiple Edgar Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. He contributed a piece to The Weekly Standard in 2002 reflecting on presidential reading habits.
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is only secondarily a person. Primarily, he is a symbol of what America thinks about itself, what it wants, and what it believes. In retrospect, we can see that for some time what America wanted was an end to responsibility. So the more recent two presidents were…