I got bogged down about halfway through and put the book aside. I'm a fairly tenacious reader but Wallace's writing has lots of long, arid stretches of exposition and in the end I got pushed out of the book.

A couple of weeks ago I picked it up again, and yesterday slogged on to the finish.

The Man, written in 1964, rests on a premise so improbable it almost reads like science fiction. As the book opens, both the President of the United States and the Speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse in West Germany. We learn that the country happens to be without a Vice President when this crisis occurs, the elected V.P. having recently died of a stroke (this was, of course, a few years before the 25th Amendment spelled out the rules for filling that particular vacancy).

Under this scenario, the Presidency falls not to the Secretary of State, as we might expect, but to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate -- Douglass Dilman, an undistinguished senator from New Hampshire. Dilman, we are told, was given the ceremonial Pro Tem post in order to appease northern liberals, although this is never really explained; traditionally the honor goes to the oldest, crustiest guy in the building.

Well, anyway. The kicker here is that Dilman is black, and because this is 1964, the country goes bonkers.

As soon as Dilman is ensconced in the White House the southern bigots and northern cynics begin laying plans to destroy him. Secretary of State Arthur Eaton feels the Presidency should have been his, and mint julepy Sen. Zeke Miller offers to help him to get Dillman out of the White House. Dilman, who'd spent his Senate career as a mealy-mouthed back-bencher, is expected to fold quickly, but rises to the occasion and shows his enemies that he's got the right stuff to be President.

Sprawled out over 800+ pages, Wallace's brand of lackluster melodrama wears thin. But The Man did spawn a decent little TV movie in 1972, with James Earl Jones portraying Dilman as a smart but somewhat melancholy guy who's been thrust into a world of trouble. Burgess Meredith played the Zeke Miller character with oily gusto, and he got one of the best lines in the Rod Serling-penned screenplay: The White House ain't near white enough for me tonight.

Wallace tried valiantly to imagine a black man leading the country, but his imagination failed him at times. The truth is that anyone placed in the Oval Office by such bizarre circumstances would be politically hamstrung right out of the gate. Make that person a black man in 1964 and the problems would be magnified a hundredfold.

The impeachment subplot tried to project the Senate trial of Andrew Johnson into the 20th century, and the result was essentially a courtroom drama, with teary-eyed witnesses trying to sway a jury of 100 Senators. As the Nixon impeachment hearings (and the Clinton impeachment trial) showed, dramatic emotional appeals were few and far between.

Rather, the task of the impeachment managers was not only to convince members of the House and Senate that their charges reached the threshold of "high crimes and misdemeanors" as specified in the Constitution, but that failing to remove the President left the Republic itself in grave danger.