An Unpolitical Political Novel

...There is no attempt to relate the central issue of the novel to actual social, political and intellectual conditions in this country, or to confront the real problems which divide men of good will, both liberal and conservative, when they debate methods of checking Communist imperialism, liberating the Communist satellite countries, improving our relations with non-Communist nations, and reducing the threat of war...

...Leffingwell is a cold, arrogant, ambitious man, with some obvious resemblances to Alger Hiss...

...Just as the boy's book aspect of the novel can give readers the sense of being on the right side of a political fight without having to do any political thinking themselves, the description of the means which the President and majority leader feel forced to adopt can give the readers the sense that they now have a mature understanding of the moral price that the exercise of power inevitably exacts...

...The novel ends happily with the triumph of the anti-Leffingwell, anti-appeasement cause...

...The Vice President, an amiable fellow whom no one, including himself, had taken very seriously before, rises magnificently to his new responsibilities, and shows that he is going to be even tougher with the Russians than his predecessor...

...Worse than that, though he himself seems quite unconscious of what he is doing, he has either written a gross libel on the men who run this country, or he is demonstrating that American leaders are as ruthless and immoral in their methods as their chief international foes, the Communists...

...The novel is told almost completely in dialogue, and Drury, after years of listening to Senators, takes obvious delight in writing their speeches for them, and letting them tell each other off...

...Drury himself, however, leaves these two aspects blithely unreconciled...

...Nixon...

...It covers just a few days in the life of the Senate and Presidency, but manages to include nearly every imaginable excitement from the death of the President to the landing on the moon by both the Americans and the Russians...

...Strauss and so many others have figured...

...The chief obstacle to Leffingwell's appointment is the immovable chairman of the subcommittee holding hearings on the nomination...

...He has concentrated and even exaggerated them at the same time that he has depoliticalized them...

...It is a boy's book in which an abstractly patriotic cause which everyone can be for triumphs despite the machinations of a pack of villains and fools: the coldly prevaricating Leffingwell, the whining, threatening Van Ackerman, the scowling, arrogant Russians, the hypocritical Justice of the Supreme Court...

...Allen Drury has nothing to say about American politics...

...Truman...

...It shows how undefined and unstructured American politics has become in this exceedingly difficult period of international tensions...

...Some of the Senatorial dialogue is done well, but the social conversation, especially that of the French and English ambassadors and their wives, comes straight out of Ouida...

...He is Brigham Anderson of Utah, a thoroughly likable, intelligent, patriotic young Senator who had had, however, a homosexual experience during the war...

...And yet for all the drama and intensity, it is quite clear by the end that except for a few sentimental and inconsistent common-places...

...Advise and Consent is a profoundly uneducative novel...

...Although Leffingwell has already thrown away any bargaining power he might have as Secretary, the presumably shrewd, tough President continues to press for his acceptance...

...Advise and Consent is so unpolitical that it is not even possible to tell which party is Democratic and which Republican...

...This is an insight which Drury might well have learned from liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...Van Ackerman is on the Leffingwell side...

...His heroes, of course, stand up very well under attack, reply smoothly, astutely, blandly...

...Roosevelt...

...By a most unlikely series of accidents, a photograph suggesting the nature of this relationship falls into the hands of a meddling liberal Justice of the Supreme Court, who gives it to the majority leader of the Senate, who gives it to the President, who gives it to a snarling, bullying demagogue named Van Ackerman...

...In fact, the word "blandly" occurs on nearly every page...

...Drury, admiring two of them, is impressed that they are strong enough to use and rise above whatever means the achievement of their purposes requires them to use...

...He is incapable of taking any reasoned attitude toward his material, of giving it meaning or finding meaning in it...

...In his first statements before the Senate subcommittee, Leffingwell declares his readiness to yield to the Russians with an explicitness which would be unthinkable for a man in his position and with his supposed astuteness, whatever his ultimate intentions...

...Hopkins...

...The accusations—which are true—simply prove to them that the opposition to Leffingwell is thoroughly reactionary in nature...

...When Leffingwell is accused of having belonged to a Communist cell when teaching at a university, the liberals redouble their efforts in his behalf...

...The popular success of Advise and Consent is doubly indicative...

...At the same time he can speak sentimentally of America as a "good-hearted nation that is fundamentally too decent to know how to deal with the sharpies who encircle her, some with the faces of enemies, and some with the faces of friends...

...Clearly Advise and Consent is not a political novel at all...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English Literature, Columbia University ADVISE AND CONSENT is a continuously exciting and intricately plotted novel of grand design, written by a successful reporter who has observed American politics in Washington for 15 years...

...And all the readers can rejoice, for everyone except the naive liberals has seen from the beginning what should and must be done...

...All the liberals, however, appeasers of Communism at heart, flock to Leffingwell's banner—especially the political reporters and conductors of Sunday TV panel programs, apparently a specially naive group...

...If so, he could never acknowledge it, for it is incompatible with the naivete he contemptuously attributes to liberals throughout the novel...

...What does it imply when such a novel becomes a best seller and receives, on the whole, favorable reviews...

...Though most characters are plain villains or heroes politically, Drury has tried to show, in the characters of the President, the majority leader of the Senate, and one or two other national leaders whom he admires, the ambiguities, the compromises, the resort to evil means for presumably good ends which seem inseparable from the conquest and exercise of power...

...It is an entertaining one because Drury has presented with considerable enthusiasm the kinds of dramatic confrontations which have been provided in great abundance in the last quarter-century—confrontations in which Hiss...

...McCarthy...

...The Supreme Court Justice, the majority leader and the President destroy in the dirtiest possible personal way a man who is opposing them on grounds of political principle...

...And it shows how easily the doctrine that an absolutist morality is impossible in politics can become an unthinking or unresisting acceptance of particular immortal practices...

...Drury lays it on this way so that his readers will know that they are supposed to be against Leffingwell...

...Though Van Ackerman's manners and tactics are those of the late Senator McCarthy, his relations to the Communists are much like those of Henry Wallace in the Progressive campaign of 1948...

...The central action in Advise and Consent is the attempt to win Senate approval for the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell as Secretary of State...

...Having discovered that crowds, worried about an atomic war with Russia, will cheer when he says that he would rather go on his knees to Moscow than die under a hydrogen bomb, he has been speaking with success at large meetings obviously organized by the Communists...

...Advise and Consent has another significant aspect...

...The President, with equally obvious resemblances to Roosevelt, has chosen Leffingwell, a white knight of liberalism, because he wants a Secretary of State who will be more "flexible" in his dealings with the Russians...

...When young Senator Anderson, under intolerable pressure, commits suicide, the Senate, in a wave of moral revulsion, votes down the Leffingwell appointment...

...The President dies, but just before his death he redeems himself by reacting strongly to a Russian threat...