Mencius Moldbug recently cited Walter Millis‘s Road To War: America 1914-1917, which offhandedly refers to one Colonel House, a figure I don’t think I could make up:
Edward Mandell House (July 26, 1858–March 28, 1938) was an American diplomat, politician, and presidential advisor. Commonly known by the purely honorific title of Colonel House, although he had no military experience, he had enormous personal influence with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as his foreign policy advisor until Wilson removed him in 1919.
This is the especially good part:
In 1912, House published anonymously a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, in which the title character, Dru, leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, becoming the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms which resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.
So, Wilson’s foreign policy advisor was a colonel with no military experience, who wrote a novel about a progressive dictator saving America. Hmm…