Seven Days in May

Novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, 1962

Film directed by John Frankenheimer, 1964

Seven Days in May was a best-selling novel written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey. It was later adapted [Page 779]by Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame and made into a film directed by John Frankenheimer. The novel traces the unfolding of a military coup in the United States and remains an important document of the impact of the Cold War upon American society.

Seven Days in May centers upon Marine Corps Col. “Jiggs” Casey, director of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his discovery of a military coup plotted by the staff chairman, World War II hero Gen. James Matoon Scott, to whom Casey reports directly. The chairman and his fellow plotters among the senior military leadership intend to use the pretext of a major military exercise later that week to overthrow the president of the United States. The president is a liberal poised to wind down the Cold War significantly by concluding a sweeping arms control agreement with the Soviet Union—which the conspirators regard as based on a fatally over-optimistic view of Soviet intentions.

As director of the Joint Chiefs, Casey is in a position to see coded “back channel” messages circulating between the chairman and other officers involved in the coup. His suspicions being raised but lacking proof, he takes his concerns to the president. The president takes Casey's warning seriously but avoids precipitous action that might accelerate the coup rather than defuse it. Instead, he puts the colonel and a handful of his close associates to work obtaining hard evidence of the plot and carefully feeling out military commanders outside the plotters’ circle. Ultimately the president confronts General Scott with his knowledge of the coup and forces Scott and the three other disloyal members of the Joint Chiefs to resign on the spot. The president then orders the news quickly passed over military channels to make clear to the other plotters that the game is up. Fearing the disastrous precedent that even a failed coup might cast over future civil–military relations in a still-dangerous world, however, the president insists on keeping the entire affair a secret. Authors Knebel and Bailey were Washington journalists by trade. Prior to their foray into Cold War fiction, they had collaborated on award-winning reporting on the 1945 Potsdam Conference and produced a widely praised book on the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven Days in May director Frankenheimer was an up-and-coming filmmaker whose previous films included the 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate. When Seven Days in May appeared in bookstores in 1962, it sold briskly, topping the New York Times best-seller list on November 18—a date, it is worth noting, just weeks after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book remained a national bestseller for nearly a year. The film version of Seven Days in May was popular as well: it performed well at the box office in 1964 and was nominated for numerous awards, including two Academy Awards.

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