Allen Drury (1918–1998)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1556070.html

Another little reading project of mine: as well as reading the best-selling novels of 100 year ago, as I have done this year and last year, I decided to try the best-selling novel of 50 years ago, a political tale by a long-serving Washington journalist, which soon after (1962) became a film starring Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton (the latter's last role before he died).

The plot concerns the nomination of a new Secretary of State by an ailing show more President whose party controls both Senate and House; the nomination runs into difficulties because of the nominee's alleged Communist past. But the young Senator from Utah who is most responsible for holding up the process is himself concealing a wartime gay love affair. High drama ensues, with a memorable series of denouements of which the least spoilerish that I can reveal is a Soviet moon landing the week before the Americans would have got there.

I thought it was excellent. There are a number of well delineated characters - the Majority Leader, the ancient Senator from South Carolina, the Mormon with a past, the demagogue, the guy who wanted to be President, the President himself. The Senate is a microcosm of 100 people (99 men and one woman at that time), each with roles to play both officially and privately. Advise and Consent is an incisive description of how politics operates at that highest level, when personality as well as facts and ideology come into play. I found it difficult to put down.

It has its weaknesses. The reported vehemently pro-appeasement views of the nominee for Secretary of State - and indeed the public support he gets for them - seemed to me unrealistic, though I wasn't around in the 1960s so I may not know. It's possible that Drury was reversing the political reality, as he does with the Joe McCarthy character who is a left-winger rather than a right-winger. There are four ambassadors who are minor characters; it seemed peculiar to me that they get called together twice to give the key Senators their views of what the rest of the world thinks - normal practice, round here at any rate, would be to see them separately, but of course that doesn't work for a novel like this. Also they seem to be accredited to the UN as well as to Washington but that may have been normal in 1960.

But I was able to roll with the main flow and greatly enjoy the book. Apparently the Pulitzer Prize Committee in 1960 recommended that the award go to Henderson the Rain King; the main board, however, overruled them and gave it to Advise and Consent instead, and rightly so. show less

There are good parts of this book--it won a Pulitzer (overturning the committee, as it would 13 years later to deny Gravity's Rainbow, so, grain of salt), and some of the descriptions of pain and fatigue of the politickLing life are very evocative and telling.

Overall, though, politically it's detestable, and even if I agreed with it, its lionization of Senators Doing American Things with honor and dignity is incredibly stupid, especially considering the outcome--reasonable people disagree, show more but one senator, a shouting, unhinged lunatic, is without nuance and exists to be castigated by absolutely everyone, as does the mustache-twirling villain (?) of the piece. The others don't see real consequences of their actions--well, they do, and feel bad about it, which absolves them.

Overall it's a portrait of the special glory of American Politics, unironically, which is a joke considering that the President blackmails a principled Senator to death.

FOREIGN RELATIONS: This is a book about the dangers of being too soft on the Soviets, a bold and shocking position to take in 1959 (it wasn't), and the jeered strawman slogan is "I would rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an atom bomb!" Which....I would? We all should? Nuclear war isn't just killing people. It's total ecological devastation of all species and their futures, and the destruction of earth. I think being reasonable with the Russians--demonic beings that crave only America's total destruction--should have been a goal of foreign relations, not a derided plea from unreasonable cowards.

Of course, the foreign relations here aren't exactly nuanced. The British ambassador--the only Brit, as the other ambassadors are the only ones of their nationality--is a distant, quippy artistocrat, the Indian ambassador is a nosy, craven appeaser, the Russian ambassador is a hostile and shitty ambassador with no pretense of diplomacy with the US.

At the end of the day, the honorable men make honorable stands. I think the Senate has one woman, one Latino (maybe) and one Hawaiian guy, from Hawaii, but otherwise it's all men, all white, all paternalistic as hell. When the handsome, too-perfect young Senator has a crisis, his wife, to whom he has been emotionally distant for like a decade, is narratively chastised for being upset by his continued failure to open up to her, rather than supporting him unequivocally as he continues to lie to her in the face of anonymous threatening agents. Women exist as wives to support husbands. They may do so intelligently and compassionately, but men are at the forefront.

Overall there are no other people of color. There is surprising sympathy for a probably-gay man whose wartime affair is revealed, but not denounced (although it's in such oblique language it's a little "too awful to mention), although he isn't happy about the consequences.

It strikes me that the hero of the final stretch of the book--a tart, straight-talking Illinois senator who is the President's old rival--denounces the current state of America. You know, the golden age we're supposed to hearken back to?

Do you want a war, Senator?” Of course he didn’t want a war; he just wanted an end to this flabby damned mushy nothingness that his country had turned herself into. And he particularly wanted an end to the sort of flabby damned thinking that the nominee and his kind represented—the kind of thinking, growing out of the secret inner knowledge that a given plan of action is of course completely empty and completely futile, which forces those who embark upon it to tell themselves brightly that maybe if the enemy will just be reasonable the world will become paradise overnight and everything will be hunky-dory. It was quite obvious to Senator Knox that the enemy would never be reasonable until the day he could dictate the terms of American surrender, and it was with an almost desperate determination that he returned again and again to the task of trying to make this clear to his countrymen. It was doubly frustrating because it was quite obvious that his countrymen knew it. They knew it, but they didn’t want to admit they knew it, because that would impose upon them the obligation of doing something about it, and that might bother them, and they didn’t want that."

COME ON. show less

Re-reading Advise and Consent(and watching the 1962 Otto Preminger movie by the same name), after a span of several years, I am reminded of my original reading and seeing the film version in the late 1960s. Drury followed up this first novel with a handful of sequels and over a dozen other books, but none of them came close to the popularity of the 1959 hit — ninety-three weeks on the best-seller list, a play, a movie and a Pulitzer (the Pulitzer Board overriding their committee’s show more recommendation of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King). In many ways, Advise and Consent would be a fine reading in Cold War history courses or in courses that seek to explain the nature of Cold War politics. As an insight, though, into the nature of the appointments process as currently practiced, it remains locked in its time.
The novel tells the story of the nomination of peace-loving diplomat Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State. Unfolding in “books” from four senators, the story proceeds quickly and in rich, complex detail, aided no doubt by Drury’s intimate knowledge of how the Senate worked based on his experiences as a Washington political reporter. The first edition of Advise and Consent numbered 616 pages and the level of exegesis and dialogue is deep and broad. All layers of the advice and consent process are covered—from gripping hearing testimony to vitriolic floor debates, from the machinations of the White House to the cloakroom deals in the Senate.
Not only does Advise and Consent access the political dynamics of the Senate’s advice and consent to presidential nominations, the novel also delves deeply into the personal stories of the characters who must manage and judge this process. One widowed senator, the majority leader, is intimately involved with a Washington socialite and there is the past of the nominee, who flirted with communism while teaching in Chicago and is forced to confront this aspect of his personal history to secure confirmation. Another senator, a married Mormon from Utah, is blackmailed by a colleague who has discovered the senator’s intimate, sexual relationship with another man while in the army during World War II.

The narrative depth and the richness of the story’s details make it a fascinating read. It provides a panoramic view of Cold War Washington. It is a story that brings together strands of different actual events and real characters to create a composite vision of the U.S. Senate and its workings in the area of advice and consent. The novel was followed by Drury's A Shade of Difference in 1962 and four additional sequels. While Drury's Advise and Consent is arguably the best of its kind (and may have defined the genre) I have enjoyed others like O'Connor's The Last Hurrah and, more recently, Primary Colors. show less

This is Drury's 1966 follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Advise and Consent. The first was an in-depth look at the workings of the Senate and the presidency. Drury's right-wing politics poked through a little, but mostly he concentrated on the story line and characters, and the book was (and I think still is) well worth reading. But in this sequel, which follows many of the same characters as the first, Drury's political views get full play, to the detriment of the book. I don't show more say this just because I disagree with those politics, but because Drury's outlook is so weighted. Basically, all liberals are wrong-headed; they are gullible, deluded and/or phonies.

The action moves mostly from Washington down to New York City, to take us inside the workings of the U.N. and a cynical attack on American prestige and cultural values is underway. Oh, and by the way, anybody who, in 1966, was impatient about the rate of improvement of civil rights for blacks was just unrealistic and probably anti-American. The NAACP, for example, is recast in the book as DEFY.

The storytelling was still decent, but barely allowed to breath for the heavy-handed political message. Drury wrote six books in this series all told. After reading Advise and Consent, I'd intended to read the whole bunch, but my mind's been changed about that, boy howdy. show less