The red president.

The Red President

by Martin Gross(Doubleday, 397 pp., $17.95)

ATHRILLER WITH a title like The RedPresident can hardly miss. It doesn't need Dostoyevskian or even Dickensian characters, Jamesian subtleties, Joycean pyrotechnics, though some reviewers (of whom more later) are already complaining of the absence of such elements, which would only impede the main proceedings. Those who thus carp are guilty of ingratitude for what the title intimates, and Martin Gross delivers: whiplash plotting. If you can put this book down, you could probably doze off in the middle of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Our story opens in the Californiadesert. Tom Ward picks up a hitchhiker, chats with him, pulls off the road, forces him to strip, murders him. He incinerates the body and vomits. Cut to: Maryland, where a veteran CIA agent, Sam Withers, has picked up an odd scent. Acting in a highly unauthorized manner, he takes his evidence to a newspaper columnist, Jack Granick, who is impressed: One of the seven candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination is a Kremlin plant. Which one? Granick appeals to Douglas McDowell, a young network newscaster of liberal persuasion, to help discover and expose the culprit. McDowell throws him out, cursing him --and begins to have second thoughts that night, when Granick is reported dead.

And they're off! Moscow knowssomeone knows something, and soon bodies are dropping all over the page. Implausible, if you stop to think about it, but you won't. Gross doesn't give you time. He cuts from one shbplot to another, each chapter peaking, as the forces of Light and Darkness converge on the White House, the latter ahead by several lengths, until . . .

Did I say implausible? Let me qualifythat. The situation is unlikely, but a novel is entitled to its premise. And given this premise--that Moscow could engineer a shot at the White House for its man--the plot gains plausibility from a key component of the prevailing structure of taboos, namely, the prohibition against calling people, even Communist people, Communists. The good guys are up against the institutionalized liberal perception that Communism is never a serious threat. Say "nuclear threat' and they'll nod in agreement. "Soviet threat' they jeer at.

So if Moscow contrived a Presidencyfor us, anyone who had an inkling of it would face just the inhibitions Gross limns here. The CIA can't act. Granick gets the bum's rush. McDowell has so internalized the taboo that he hardly dares to entertain the thought even when he has to. It's of course the tried-and-true thriller dilemma: If the hero says what he knows, he's less likely to be believed than to be condemned by the very people he's trying to save. Gross links this ancient plot device to the current liberal etiquette. A "Red President'! Indeed!

We learn fairly early which candidateis fronting for the Soviets: a young, hip pol who falls somewhere in Hart-Kennedy territory and knows how to exploit the same set of progressive catchwords and taboos that frustrates the opposition. He grasps that the liberal idiom elides conveniently into Communist purposes, a point also grasped in real life by Georgi Arbatov and Alexander Cockburn. The very extremities of the plot illustrate the possible range of liberal hypocrisy. James Burnham used to say that the difference between a liberal and a Communist is that the Communist knows what he's doing. Gross gives us a "liberal' who knows what he's doing, bridging the gap.

This, along with Gross's intimacywith the topography of Washington, gives the headlong story a quick verisimilitude. The reader feels a horrified tang of recognition when the villain deplores "the militarization of space,' and his Soviet counterpart emits an answering coo about a "bold move toward peace.' Events revolve around the cynical invocation of "peace,' "peace and freedom,' "partnership for peace,' until the very word that serves to camouflage meaning for most of the characters clangs the alarm for the reader. Liberal values are rudely trans-valued.

Which gives The Red President anodd dimension: It can be read as an allegory whose real subject is itself. Liberal reviewers are giving the book the brush-off, with a grudging nod to its entertainment value. It must discomfit them to find the villain of a spy thriller speaking their dialect so smoothly, taking in all the saps with glib aplomb.

You have to admire the nerve of anauthor who makes bad guys of the people best situated to control his book's access to the reading public. Of course Allen Drury has been doing this for years; so did Ayn Rand. The trick is to write a reviewer-proof book, with enough essential oomph to trample over critical preciosities. A title like The Red President helps: The most hostile attention can't avoid conveying some of the plot's excitement. It's a fairly inflexible rule of book reviewing that you have to tell the book's title, and no panning will be quite plausible if you don't give a few additional details. What's more, Gross has ensured that even hostile reviewers will be a little self-conscious about sounding like the book's more dubious characters. It's embarrassing when the tools of your trade are seen as criminal weapons.