c.2024, Grand Central $35.00 368 pages

Uh-oh. You’re in hot water now.

Your plans have collapsed in a most spectacular way and everything has gone down the tubes faster than you could ever have imagined. Worse, it’s about to go public and there’s no room for an excuse, no wiggle-room to explain. Things could be way worse, though. As in the new book, “The Situation Room” by George Stephanopoulos, you could be the President of the United States.

Better yet, imagine being the one who must wake the President in case of a national emergency. Sometimes, says Stephanopoulos, monitoring threats to the U.S. government is a boring job and you can nap on a nearby cot. At wake-the-President times, “pandemonium” best describes the work. And that’s what this book is about: in a couple rooms within the White House, next to the mess hall, a nonpartisan staff watches, monitors, 24/7, to keep us safe.

Though surely all presidents monitored other governments during their tenures in office, Dwight Eisenhower was the first President to suggest setting up a central department for security’s sake, but he never followed through. John Kennedy did, out of frustration: eighty-seven days into his term, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved that major improvements in secure communications between government workers and the White House, and between foreign entities and the White House, were needed immediately.

Lyndon Johnson was obsessed with the Situation Room (so-named, thanks to a Kennedy staffer), and was there almost constantly. Nixon rarely visited the Situation Room, and staff learned not to call him because he was sometimes impaired during national emergencies. The Fords often “traipsed” through there on their way to the White House pool; Ford, says Stephanopoulos, didn’t “put on airs…” Jimmy Carter had anguished moments there; Alexander

Haig was “in charge” in the Situation Room, but he had an excuse. Bill Clinton’s White House sweated over Y2K there and when it was over, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Nothing happened. The world was going to be all right. “Or,” says Stephanopoulos, “so we thought.”

You go to bed each night with the implicit expectation that the planet won’t implode while you’re asleep. Still, count the national and international crises you’ve witnessed in your lifetime, and that’s rather startling. Now read “The Situation Room,” look the inside the nation’s nerve center, and learn how it’s saved our national bacon a time or two.

Taking you back nearly 70 years, author George Stephanopoulos alternately makes readers’ hearts pound, and then he delights us with a lively timeline and small heretofore-unknown insights to the government in action. Those peeks include the work ethics and attitudes of the guys in the White House, and that part of Stephanopoulos’ reporting is chest-clutching. Many times, we were a whisker from disaster, and we didn’t even know it. Sometimes, neither did a President. Hard gulp.

Historians will eat this book up, as will pop culture fans, political-watchers, and any American who follows international goings-on – even just a little bit. You’ll find “The Situation Room” to be a very cool book.