MY MOTHER’S TEARS over John F. Kennedy’s assassination led me, decades later, to create Born to Run’s Isabel Diaz.
My late mother wasn’t American, and her taste of US life was sweetened by episodes of I Love Lucy and Hollywood movies. We lived in far-away Australia yet JFK was idolised here and, for this kid in short pants, her grief fired a spark: that American presidents matter.
I have often scratched my head at why the charisma genie has blessed so few of the nine US Presidents since, and why they’ve mostly been Democrats. Only Clinton and Obama approached Kennedy’s lustre, although Obama’s is sputtering as I write. Many say Reagan had the gift, but it didn’t seem like it at the time.
Before Kennedy’s day, revered Republicans weren’t as rare. Start with Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery, and the startling snippet of history that the Democrats were then the pro-slavery party.
Given recent history, it’s high time for an inspirational Republican to pop up so, impatient for a real one, I created my own.
In Born to Run, the world yearns for Isabel Diaz to become US president. She’s widely hailed as a saint yet, as the story’s dark side unfolds, we begin to dread she is a demon. Isabel Diaz is a woman born to run, yet she faces two big questions… can she win… and should she?
I’ve been researching this story implicitly for years, visiting the US so many times that I’ve chalked up visits to towns and cities in around half the 50 states, including Half Moon Bay, California where Isabel Diaz, as a 15-year-old runaway, first hobbles into the greasy diner that will seed her fortune and, of course, Washington, DC from where she aims to lead the nation.
I’ve also been addicted to US presidential elections since Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the race after he visited Australia, and NSW Premier Bob Askin notoriously spat out “Run over the bastards” when anti-Vietnam War demonstrators lay in front of the motorcade.
One of the story twists in Born to Run springs from a glitch I teased out of the US Constitution and a dusty 1898 Supreme Court ruling over it. For confirming I correctly interpreted the law, I thank James C. Ho—then Chief Counsel of the US Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, and now Solicitor General for Texas—and Todd Gaziano, Director of the Centre for Legal and Judicial Studies at Washington’s Heritage Foundation. (For the nit-picky, see Jim Ho’s article, “Unnatural Born Citizens and Acting Presidents,” (2000) 17 Constitutional Commentary 575.)
To develop my character Jax Mason’s cataclysmic subway shockwave model, I sat for many hours in both the New York Transit Museum and the London Transport Museum scouring books and historic resources for details of subway construction and history. But I owe my biggest debt for this to advanced analysis engineering guru Shane Donohoo. Shane works in a global engineering group devising “theoretical disasters” and testing their likely effects on complex structures such as oil rigs and dams. He shared not only his insights, but numerous technical papers that helped show me that while Jax’s model is indeed technically feasible, it has enough barriers, thankfully, for it to be a snack in fiction, but virtually impossible in real life.
For colour and detail on what Washington’s Capitol Police do during a president’s State of the Union Address, I am grateful to Capitol Police Public Information Officers, Michael Lauer and Contricia Sellers. For advice on nine-year-old Davey Loane’s likely strengths in lip-reading, I thank Professor Carol Padden, Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego whose work includes research on literacy in young deaf children. For details about the heart rates of grey wolves, thanks to Dr Terry J. Kreeger of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and Professor Peter D. Constable, head of the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences, Purdue University, Indiana. For insight into Hispanic and Andean languages, I consulted Dr Luis Fernando Restrepo, Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Latin American and Latino Studies, University of Arkansas.
If you believe something is factually wrong in the book, it is more likely because I intentionally voted for pace or story over accuracy than because I garbled my research or advice but, if it was inaccuracy, don’t blame the people above.