The R Document (1976), by Irving Wallace, is a novel in the genres of the political thriller and the legal thriller, which recounts the secret coup d’état by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to void the Bill of Rights, and so assume power in the United States. Plot summary Setting The R Document occurs during a future time in the United States when crime, especially violent crime, has become so extreme a problem that FBI Director Vernon T. Tynan is promoting an especially drastic solution: a Thirty-Fifth Article Of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that would allow the Bill of Rights to be suspended in favor of its provisions during a national domestic crisis. Tynan, who had joined the Bureau during J. Edgar Hoover's tenure as its Director, had resigned after Hoover had died (saying that "once you had worked for the Old Man...you were spoiled for anyone else" to Ishmael Young, whom he has extorted into ghost-writing his autobiography) rather than work under any of Hoover's successors. (Wallace, indeed, had initially modeled Tynan on Hoover.) Background The protagonist of the novel is Attorney General Christopher Collins, whom Wallace modeled on Ramsey Clark, who, while in that office, became one of Hoover's bitterest enemies. At the time when the novel begins, his predecessor, former United States Army Colonel Noah Baxter, is ill, and indeed dying, from a stroke he had suffered. Tynan, the novel's primary antagonist, is responsible for having proposed the 35th Amendment and sold it to Andrew Wadsworth, President of the United States, and the Congress. Moreover, he has secretly formed a two-stage plan to supplement and implement the 35th upon its ratification—that plan going under the code name of "The R Document." (The "R" stands for "reconstruction," specifically that of the United States, so "The R Document" is really "The Reconstruction Document.") Baxter, who had suffered his stroke during a meeting with Tynan and Associate Deputy FBI Director Harry Adcock (modeled by Wallace on Clyde Tolson, complete to the rumors of a homosexual relationship between the two) several months before the events in the novel, tries to reveal to Collins the truth about The R Document and its two "pages," but Baxter dies before he can pass on to Collins what he knows. A Catholic, Baxter had made a deathbed confession to a priest in which he had mentioned The