It is relatively easy to understand why a former president whose daughter is kidnapped by terrorists might want to organize his own unauthorized paramilitary force to rescue her. But try explaining it to the current president.
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“Director Blair, he can’t be conducting military operations on his own,” President Pamela Barnes whines ineffectually to her F.B.I. director in “The President’s Daughter,” the second swaggering political thriller produced by the unlikely writing team of James Patterson and Bill Clinton. “You’ve got to send agents there and stop him.”
But “Director Blair” can no more stop the inexorable force that is former President Matthew Keating — a hard-living, no-guff ex-Navy SEAL who, as president, once motivated a naval commander during a kill operation by barking: “Now you squids body-bag that son of a bitch” — than Keating’s friends can resist his entreaties for help in his foolhardy plan.
