Advise and Consent

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, 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Pulitzer winner, thoroughly covers the machinations of the Senate confirmation process as that august body deliberates the nomination of a controversial figure for the post of Secretary of State. Although long and sometimes exhausting, Drury’s landmark novel is a rewarding book for the patient reader.

At over 600 dense pages, this is not a quick read. The first 100 pages seem especially slow as the characters are introduced and the stage set. This behind-the-scenes look at the Senate may have been more interesting before 50 years of televised politics in general and C-SPAN in particular leached any tantalizing mystery out of Senate subcommittee hearings.

Once the story builds up steam, however, show more it powers right along. The candidate under consideration, peacenik Bob Leffingwell, has his avid supporters, including the somewhat Machiavellian President who nominated him. But he faces stiff opposition from those who think he will be unable to protect America on the brink of a nuclearized Cold War with an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union determined to send men to the moon to claim it as Soviet territory. While the details of the controversy seem anachronistic now, the underlying issue of diplomacy versus military might is as pertinent today as it was 50 years ago.

What is most interesting is that Drury keeps party politics out of it. He does not name either party, and the battle over Leffingwell’s nomination is all within the President’s own liberal party that holds the majority in the Senate. The minority, presumably conservative, party is relegated to the sidelines.

In the end, Leffingwell’s confirmation comes down to character issues as much as his political opinions. The heart of Drury’s story is that, when an unsavory part of Leffingwell’s past arises, instead of having the Senate’s decision turn on the underlying facts, the controversy centers on how Leffingwell and his supporters, including the President, deal with the facts, and what their conduct reveals about their essential worthiness as national leaders. Again, the details of the scandals involved seem quaint now, but the principal debate over what weight to give to politicians’ personal lives still rages.

Stylistically, Drury follows formal conventions, with third-party narration, traditional dialog format, discretion in all things sexual, and one particularly distracting gimmick in that many characters share the same first names. For instance, the nominee and the Senate Majority leader are both names Robert and both go by Bob. Context usually makes clear which one is under discussion, but it seems odd that no one ever mentions that they have the same name. There are also two Hals, two Toms, and two Johns (but no Mikes, Marks, or Daves). Maybe it is more like real life to duplicate names, but some literary customs are there for a reason.

The writing is a little stuffy, but the tone suits the subject matter and helps raise it above a run-of-the-mill political thriller. A sample passage demonstrates Drury’s intricate style as well as his purpose of thoroughly presenting the Congressional system:

The system had its problems, and it wasn’t exactly perfect, and there was at times much to be desired, and yet – on balance, admitting all its bad points and assessing all the good, there was a vigor and a vitality and a strength that nothing, he suspected, could ever quite overcome, however evil and crafty it might be. There was in this system the enormous vitality of free men, running their own government in their own way. If they were weak at times, it was because they had the freedom to be weak; if they were strong, upon occasion, it was because they had the freedom to be strong; if they were indomitable, when the chips were down, it was because freedom made them so.

Although it takes some endurance to get through such a thicket of prose, the effort is worthwhile, which is why Advise and Consent remains the most popular, perceptive study of Congressional American politics on the shelves.

Also posted on Rose City Reader. show less

This is the 1960 Pulitzer award winning book and I read this while in Florida because it was available here in the library. This book is over 600 pages and it took be a long time to engage with the story but then I did and the last couple sections went by much faster. The fact that this book was published in 1959 during the cold war following WWII made the book even more significant to me. The story is about the process of approving a presidential recommendation for Secretary of State by the Senate. The president's candidate is smooth and avoids responding to any question with anything at all that can inform anyone of what he represents or how he will conduct himself. In the course, something is found, and what is found is significant show more in that it shows that the man has not been honest, that he has willfully lied during his hearings. The knowledge leads to a crisis for one man who is unable to survive the process and other senators who also played a part of in the destruction of their own colleague. The president is unhealthy and there is suspicions of his health, the vice president is painted as weak. The president is also culpable in the event that occurs because he put his desires before treating people decently and respectfully. The Russians are antagonistic and in this book, they are the first country to land on the moon. Interesting in that no one has yet landed on the moon when this book was written. The final chapters of the book had me nearly in tears, it was such a good, good ending. I come away from the book with a better understanding of political process and a renewed desire to know more in spite of the dirty, horrible political climate that is currently apart of normal operations. I do feel that the book was too long, that the author could have shortened it up a bit without losing any of the important parts of the story but I am so glad that I read it. show less

Without a doubt, the worst book that I read in 2010 was Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959); how this thing won a Pulitzer for Best Fiction is beyond me.

Advise and Consent is a door-stopper of a "novel" (760 pages in the mass market paperback edition that I read) that is concerned with the U.S. Senate's role to advise the President on and give consent to his cabinet appointments; the main plot involves the tortuous process of confirming a highly divisive figure, Robert A. Leffingwell, as Secretary of State, while the main subplot involves shocking revelations of the past of the young senior senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson.

While I mostly enjoyed the 1962 Otto Preminger movie (in which Henry Fonda played Leffingwell and Don show more Murray played Anderson; it also starred Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres and Gene Tierney), which was based on the play that was based on the book, despite some reservations that mostly arise from the time in which it was made, the book -- the book! -- is a windy, prolix, flat, dull, singularly unconvincing bloviation on the glories of the U.S.Senate that is occasionally enlivened by scenes of interest (chiefly some of the political skulduggery, but also how the President is so abrasive, manipulative and double-dealing that he manages to alienate a substantial number of the senators from his own party). No one's political party is ever identified, and the President is never named -- he remains simply "The President" throughout the entire book -- but one can make educated guesses as to the major characters' party affiliation. (Given the time in which it was written and set, the party in majority is doubtless the Republican Party, while the opposition party, led by a wily Southern cliché named Seab [pronounced "Seb"; it's short for "Seabright"] Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in the film, is the Democratic Party, still strong in the South.)

Drury was a former journalist, and one can see how he must've felt as though he was on a busman's holiday, albeit free of the strict limitations to his word count, with Advise and Consent; for the novel to remain readable, however, an editor should've taken him firmly in hand and slashed his manuscript by at least a couple hundred pages. The character development is notable by its absence, the female characters are nearly non-existent and offensive to a modern reader when present, the ethnic stereotypes are so close to racist tropes that there's not a hair's difference between them, and Drury's abuse of the adverb nearly converted me to Graham Greene's abhorrence for same. That the conclusion is so obviously meant to be uplifting is farcical, utterly risible. In short, The West Wing it ain't.

Wikipedia's entry for Advise and Consent reports: "The story is loosely based on the Hiss-Chambers and David Lilienthal controversies, and, according to comments by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Joseph T. Kelliher, on the Leland Olds nomination battle;" Drury also threw in a minor, though significant, character to stand in for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, although, in the best Red-baiting fashion (Drury was a rabid anti-Communist who favored military confrontation of the Soviet Union), he makes this character's weltanschauung the polar opposite of McCarthy's. (SPOILER ALERT: don't jump to Wikipedia's article if you want the story elements of Advise and Consent to remain a surprise, as it starts making with the spoilers in the very next paragraph.)

Drury published five, count 'em, five sequels to Advise and Consent (two of which -- Come Nineveh, Come Tyre [1973] and The Promise of Joy [1975] -- are alternate endings: two different outcomes spun off from the ambiguous cliffhanger of 1968's Preserve and Protect); I'm happy to report that, contrary to my usual book hoarding practice, I own none of them, and I plan to read none of them. (I do, however, own a copy of Drury's novel about Akhenaten, A God Against the Gods (1976), which I bought before I bought Advise and Consent; it's gonna be a looooong while before I pick that one up, I'm afraid.) show less

The inside flap to Advise and Consent states it is "...a story so sweeping and complex in its conception that each segment alone would make an enthralling book." Right. I'm sure that's why the entire story is over 600 pages long. Drury has crafted five segments: Bob Munson's book, Seab Cooley's book, Brigham Anderson's book, Orrin Knox's book and Advise and Consent.
Advise and Consent opens with the announcement of the President of the United State's controversial appointment of Bob Leffingwell as Secretary of State. Right away Drury's language is witty and mischievous as if there is a twinkle in the eye of the storyteller. If you have ever watched "House of Cards" then you know how deviously politics can be played out. Advise and show more Consent is no different. show less